Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part one

This is the first of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie Jurassic World. The whole series of posts in order is the following:

1. An extended look at the role played by clothing in depicting personal transformation in the movie.
2. An expansion of our analysis, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.
3. An examination of survival, evolution, rationality, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.
4. An epilogue defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.

I haven’t blogged for a regrettably long time, so I figured I would mark my return to the scene by reflecting on a movie that hasn’t done too badly for itself this summer: Jurassic World. Given my obsession with dinosaurs (par for the course for anyone who saw Spielberg’s original miracle), this experience was particularly fun for me.

I suppose it needs no spoiler warning to say that Jurassic World is about (yet another) dinosaur going crazy on a theme-park island, with lots of humans dying gruesomely while the protagonists make it through with all body parts intact and with an increase in their wisdom. But what struck me even while watching the movie was that it very artfully sets up a number of structural polarities, only to dissolve some of them—but not all!—into an even more complex jumble. Postmodern neopaleontology? Bring it on!

What I will do now is look at a few motifs that are repeated throughout the film, creating striking parallels and generating resonances.
(Please bear in mind, gentle reader, that I’ve only seen this movie once, so I am working off my memory here!) The ones that immediately come to mind:

1. Clothing
2. Enclosure
3. Control and hierarchy
4. Familial relations
5. Conjugal relations
6. Nature, evolution, and human “fiddling”
7. Virtual versus real
8. Corporations

I realize there is a good amount of overlap in some of these themes, and that some of them are much broader than others, but this is more than enough to start with.

1. Clothing

“Clothes make the [wo]man”, and Jurassic World pays great attention to this. Among the many clothing-related incidents that I can think of, it is really Bryce Dallas Howard whose role is most pronounced. Indeed, with her we see a whole sequence of sartorial transformations that are clearly meant to indicate her personal transformations through the course of the movie.

• She starts in an immaculate white suit with crazy heels, showing us what a powerhouse corporate hotshot she is.
• When she first goes to talk to Chris Pratt, she isn’t wearing her blazer, but rather has it wrapped about her, almost like a protective shell. And further, her not wearing the blazer perhaps suggests that she is not fully in her business element here (this is a mosquito-infested swamp-like area, after all).
• When she and Pratt decide to chase after the missing boys and Pratt makes fun of her heels, she huffs and untucks her shirt, tying its tails together in the manner of the typical female jungle explorer. The theatricality of this moment is palpable, and it is immediately apparent to Pratt (and to us) that she does this because she decides to don this new mask instead.
• When she and Pratt flee into the trees to avoid the escaping pterosaurs, her white clothes stand out distinctly amidst the greenery (although this does not seem to make her a target for the winged reptiles).
• Only when she finally secures the boys inside the truck and gets into the driver’s seat does she finally discard her (by-then tattered) shirt. This is also when she begins to show her genuine emotions for the boys (assuring them that she will protect them) and comes to acknowledge her attraction to Pratt (who is off playing the hero). Her top is purplish, similar to (but darker than) Irrfan Khan’s shirt.
• Finally, at the end of the movie, she is wrapped in a grey shawl or blanket of some sort. She is now safe from harm.
• And of course, the constant through this are her heels! The meaning of that, at least, should be clear: heels represent and enhance female power by allowing women to negate men’s height advantage over them, while simultaneously changing their own posture so as to emphasize their physical characteristics. And contrary to Pratt’s warnings (and our own expectations), BDH’s heels don’t actually hinder her during her flight: she does not have to sacrifice her femininity to survive or to succeed. Thus, the focus on BDH’s heels struck me not as an objectification or a criticism of her incompetence, but rather as a way for us to challenge our own preconceptions of what femininity can mean and accomplish.

The transformation of BDH’s clothes occurs in two dimensions: style and color. Each of these tells us something different about her. Her color sequence is spotless white to dirty stained white to purple to grey; her style sequence is powersuit to stylized jungle explorer to survival-oriented to recovering disaster victim. 

We can contrast each of these with the appearance of other people throughout the film, which tells us a great deal about them and about BDH: 

• Irrfan Khan is also immaculately dressed throughout the film, in a perfectly tailored grey suit and silken mauve shirt. His power suit reflects, of course, his position as CEO of a huge corporation, just like BDH. His inner shirt is roughly similar to BDH’s too, and both of them reveal this layer of clothing by taking off their outer layers just as they both climb into the driver’s seat of different modes of transport. This again illustrates a resonance between them: they have concealed emotional depths and moral principles that encourages them to take charge in situations. But there are also two differences between IK and BDH: 
• The first is that IK hands over his immaculate grey jacket to his assistant before getting into the helicopter, whereas BDH drops hers onto the ground. Now, of course, this can certainly be attributed to the fact that IK is still in charge of a functioning organization (and indeed is its head), whereas BDH is an exhausted survivor of a broken ragtag group. But it also tells us something else: IK still values such things as not getting his jacket wrinkled, while all BDH cares about is saving her nephews and herself. BDH has learned to become other-centered in a way that IK doesn’t quite seem to be.
• The second is of course the color of their jackets: IK’s is grey, BDH’s is white (although her shawl at the end of the movie is also grey). What this may mean will be clarified presently.
• B.D. Wong, the chief scientist of the operation, is dressed all in black, and indeed in what I vaguely recall as being a Steve-Jobs-esque turtleneck. He is the chief designer of the Indominus rex that plagues the park, and is a bit of a caricature: the scientist who is more interested in his research problem than in the broader ethical issues. Actually, I take that back: BDW has in fact thought through his actions, but has gone through with them anyway. He understands exactly what it is that he has designed, and has no doubts in the matter. And this gives us a clue to understanding the monochrome color sequence:
• Black, worn only by BDW, is the color of clarity. This may seem strange: why not of evil? Because its contrast, white, is not obviously the color of good. And because BDW is not the only person who does evil in the movie. (And because Jeff Goldblum wears black in the first movie and isn’t exactly evil either!) It is the color of clarity because BDW knows exactly what he is doing, and why he is doing.
• If this is true, then white must be the color of obfuscation. So long as BDH is wearing white, she is concealing something—perhaps even to her own self. She does not understand what she has become in her quest to be the best corporate drone possible, and thus obscures herself from even herself. And of course, there is one other entity that is intrinsically white: Indominus rex itself: but does that make it obfuscation personified? And what about the fact that its camouflage allows it to melt into the shadows and totally obscure itself? Here is where Indominus rex is different from BDH even though both have white coats.
• Grey then is what lies between black and white. It is what allows IK to lie to himself about the real monstrosity of Jurassic Park while still retaining enough humanity to want to retain his morals in the process. BDH’s transformation from white to grey then suggests that she has acquired greater clarity over the course of the film. Too much clarity, then, is blinding.
• The control-room guy who wears the original Jurassic Park shirt throughout the movie also offers a different kind of contrast to BDH. (Indeed, he actually plays a very significant role in the movie in terms of serving as the opposite pole for a number of polarities.) Most obviously, his wearing the shirt is meant to foreshadow the events of the movie: what happened twenty years ago in Jurassic Park is guaranteed to repeat itself. But there are other aspects of his clothing that may be significant too:
• Unlike both IK and BDH, he goes through no jacket-removal scene. There is no metamorphosis for him into a butterfly—or hero, in this case. This additionally means that the Jurassic Park shirt remains half-concealed all the time: just like the old wreckage of the park remains scattered and buried amidst the new constructions. The past does not go away, but it is often overgrown by moss and half-eaten by entropy.
• Again unlike both IK and BDH, his clothing is distinctly non-professional, even hipsterish. He is clearly no corporate power-broker, just small fry that sees the truth when the biggies can’t, or won’t.
• The real foil for the control-room guy is, of course, Chris Pratt. Their domains are the polar opposites of each other (control room versus the wild outdoors), as are their physical appearance. But what they both share is a sartorial naturalness that stands in stark contrast to the affected power suit of BDH. Both of these men are comfortable in their skin, and in their unfashionable (and in the case of Pratt, smelly) T-shirts. Pratt also does not go through a jacket-removal, but that’s because he doesn’t need to: he is already the hero, he is the already-hero, he is the hero-ready-for-all. He is also no corporate jockey, but unlike the control-room guy, whose domain is dominated by the suits, his domain is the wilderness, which is dominated by Indominus rex. 

One last point about color: the raptors (which, contrary to the movie’s nomenclature, were actually modeled on Deinonychus and not on velociraptors, which were much smaller!) were all named after letters in the NATO alphabet (“Charlie”, “Delta”, “Echo”), except for the one called “Blue”. That is the only dinosaur named after a color in the movie that I can think of. And blue (a very light shade) is also the color of Chris Pratt’s shirt for a good part of the movie, thus illustrating their connection.

I have a lot more to say about Jurassic World, but this post has already gone on for far too long. I suppose that means this post calls for a sequel.