Dinosaurs Eat Man

...Women, and nerds, inherit the Earth in Jurassic Park

I still remember the day I learned the word ‘craze.’ It was the spring of 1993 and a hand-written letter arrived from Colorado via airmail (remember those envelopes with the red and blue striped borders?) addressed to me! It was from my mother’s childhood friend, Denise, who sent it along with a cute pair of shorts. Among other news, she told me about the latest ‘craze’ sweeping the US. It was a movie called Jurassic Park and she said it was sure to hit Ireland too. Perhaps she was aware I was already obsessed with all things related to dinosaurs, or perhaps she just assumed that, like most nine-year-olds in 1993, I would be dying to see the dinosaur blockbuster. I remember nothing else of the letter except that I had to ask to my mother what the word craze meant. She dutifully explained the concept of a pop-culture trend or phenomena.

It would take another few months for the Spielberg blockbuster to make it across the ocean. By the time it did, every Irish kid I knew was dying to see it. With the release of Jurassic World: Dominion last summer it could be fair to say that the Jurassic Park ‘craze’ has lasted almost 30 years!

Jurassic Park is a 1993 block-buster directed by Stephen Spielberg, where the scientists working at John Hammond’s (Richard Attenborough) theme park have succeeded in bringing dinosaurs back from the dead through the extraction of fossilised DNA from amber. After a worker is killed at the park by a Velociraptor, Hammond approaches three scientists, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbloom) a chaotician, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) a paleo-botanist and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Niell) a palaeontologist, to visit the park with a view to providing an endorsement. Accompanied by Hammond’s grandchildren, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), they begin a tour the park. Chaos does, indeed, ensue when a tropical storm coincides with a power outage caused by attempted corporate sabotage. The dinosaurs break free of their enclosures and terrorise Hammond’s guests and staff.

Nerding Out on Dinosaurs

As eager as I was to throw myself into the craze, my dinosaur obsession had begun long before Jurassic Park. Like many other 80s kids I gasped and cried through Little Foot’s search for a tree-star in the Don Bluth animated, post-apocolyptic, dinosaur tale The Land Before Time. By the time Jurassic Park came along I was primed and ready to take this obsession to a new level.

The summer it was released Dublin Zoo had a dinosaur exhibition where you could see life-size, plastic replicas of dinosaurs in what might have been their ‘natural habitat.’ I demanded a dinosaur, rather than Barbie, birthday cake for my 9th birthday and drew a rather wonky T-Rex onto the mural in my bedroom to accompany Dorothy along the yellow brick road. I read dinosaur magazines, collected their glow-in-the-dark skeletons, watched dinosaur-themed palaeontology documentaries on BBC and went fossil hunting on the shores of Ireland’s beaches.

The film and the exhibitions provided a delightful form of wish fulfilment, allowing me to see and touch what dinosaurs might have looked like from a safe distance and imagine a world where we might coexist.

Jurassic Park became a regular demand for video rentals on Saturday nights and I remember my friends in high school – when we were still young enough to give ourselves over to playacting – recreating the iconic scene where the velociraptor stalked the children around the kitchen. At the time I was slightly mortified by our enduring immaturity, when most of my peers were getting wasted at the local disco. Twenty years later, however, I can appreciate the enduring power of play and imagination in a group of girls who were so eager, on one hand, to grow up and so reluctant, on the other, to leave behind the relative safety and joy of childhood.

The obsession came full circle when, living in Bolivia in 2006, I went on a tour to track fossilised dinosaur footprints. Then, in 2010, I discovered the craze for amber containing fossilised insects had well and truly taken hold in the Mexican city of San Cristobal de las Casas, an old colonial town in the Chiapaneco highlands adjacent to amber mines. Locals, however, were quick to tell you that if you do find a piece of amber with a scorpion or mosquito inside, it’s more than likely a fake.

Like many of my favourite movies, I had abandoned Jurassic Park by my late teens, writing it off as an insubstantial, frivolous spectacle of special effects. I craved so desperately to be taken seriously and sought out the serious movies I thought would win me more ‘cred’ among my high-minded peers.

But, I came back to Jurassic Park in 2021 on a whim during lockdown and was surprised to see how, nearly 30 years later, the simple story, the animatronics and the ethical dilemma of reintroducing an extinct species into the modern world still stands up. In fact, Jurassic Park could be read as a searing critique of colonial exploitation and arrogance and, as such, feeds into one of my abiding adult obsessions: unpicking the complexities of colonial history.

White Man’s Burden

From the opening scenes Hammond is positioned as an aging colonist who, dressed all in white, could have just walked off a plantation in Zimbabwe or Uganda. Or, in this case, his other theme park in Kenya, which we can presume is some kind of safari adventure. The imported game keeper, Muldoon (Bob Peck), is only missing a pith helmet to complete his ‘Out of Africa’ ensemble.

Hammond is the smiling, benevolent face of the colonial enterprise. The one who ‘means well’, who defends his actions through morality, law and, above-all, science. The fact that Hammond is played by Richard Attenborough, brother to the famous wildlife documentarian David, means he fits seamlessly into this world. Both brothers, on screen and in real life, have promoted conservationist efforts that drive indigenous people off their lands.

Central American governments are not known for their oversight of foreign investors. The fact that Hammond has leased a whole island off the coast of Costa Rica which he has been allowed to populate with dinosaurs speaks to a long history of colonists turning native lands into their personal playgrounds at the expense of the original inhabitants. Hammond has scores of nameless Costa Ricans working in the park, putting their lives at risk for, presumably, very low wages.  

Hammond’s geniality belies an arrogance, a belief he can control the animals he has created, the island he has privatised and evolution itself with the intention of commercialising and profiting from these ventures. He already has the Jurassic Park lunchboxes stacked on shelves of the theme park gift-shop.

The Illusion of Control

The scientists’ awe on encountering the dinosaurs is short lived. They see flaws in both the science and the ethics which Hammond, blinded by the power he is wielding, he has never stopped to consider:

Sattler : Well, the question is, how can you know anything about an extinct ecosystem? And therefore, how could you ever assume that you can control it? I mean, you have plants in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in, and they'll defend themselves, violently if necessary.

Hammond : Dr. Grant, if there's one person here who could appreciate what I'm trying to do...

Grant : The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look... Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?

It’s Malcolm, however, who really gets to the heart of the problems at the dinosaur theme park. Beyond concerns regarding ecosystems and evolution, he questions the very ethics of Hammond’s use of science for the pursuit of personal profit and his arrogance in toying with creation:

Malcolm : Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun (…) You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now, you're selling it, you wanna sell it.

Such arguments would not be out of place in the ethical considerations for many research projects. But, Malcom goes even further, taking Hammond to task for the distinctly western presumption that anything is ripe for exploitation and profit, destroying the value-neutral myth of European ‘discovery’ and exposing the long legacy of social and natural sciences in advancing the imperial enterprise:   

Hammond : How can we stand in the light of discovery, and not act?

Malcolm: What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world (…) your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

In the end, Hammond’s creations break free, unleashing their awesome force on the unprepared humans. After a night of trying to outrun a T-rex, escape raptors on the hunt and restore power to the theme park, the nerds - the chaotician, paleanthologists and the hacker, Lex -  save the day. The would-be colonists are the real villains of Jurassic Park, but in Spielberg’s world they lose and the dinosaurs do, in fact, inherit the island.

Abiding Obsessions

One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is having one or more ‘special interests’, which can be a transient or enduring fixation on a subject or activity. Dinosaurs are a common ‘special interest’ among autistics and could have been considered one of my many ‘special interests’ as a child. The fact that my obsession was shared by my brothers, and most Irish pre-teens, probably meant that the intensity of my interest slid under the radar as an expected product of the cultural zeitgeist.

But, honestly, I, along with many other autistics, hate the term ‘special interest.’ For most of my life I didn’t consider my interests to be in any way special, unique or worthy of note for a medical diagnosis. Absorbing passions, yes. All-consuming obsessions, also. “Interest” feels superficial and “special” condescending or even pathologising.

While my interest in dinosaurs could meet the criteria of ‘special,’ I prefer to think of it as just another of the many instances throughout my life when I have let my curiosity and imagination loose on a subject which, for what ever reason, captured my attention. Meanwhile, my abiding obsession with (post)colonial narratives allowed me to find new meaning as an adult in one of my favourite childhood movies.

And as much as I still enjoy Jurassic Park, the ADHD part of my brain craves novelty and my childhood obsession proved to be rather transient. It was supplanted a year or two later by all things marine life, particularly anything related to sharks. By the time I entered secondary school Jaws, another suspense-filled, animatronic epic from Spielberg, had replaced Jurassic Park my favourite movie.

So join me next week when we board The ORCA along with three of the most iconic outcasts in cinematic history.