This is the third 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:
In the previous installations of this series, I first wrote about the hugely significant role clothing plays in understanding the transformations of individuals in Jurassic World. I then expanded on the idea of clothing to enclosures in general, which led naturally to relations of power and dominance, which were then contrasted with relations of trust and understanding (familial relations) and with relations of unification for survival (conjugal relations). It is now time to naturally move from conjugal relations to the theme of evolution, which of course underpins the entire Jurassic Park franchise.
6. Nature, Evolution, and Nurture
The whole Jurassic Park franchise is full of talk about evolution and natural selection and genes and whatnot. The root cause of all this is a hubristic zillionaire called John Hammond who has a vision to bring dinosaurs back from extinction using dino-DNA from their blood trapped in mosquitoes fossilized in amber. This, of course, should be old hat to anyone who knows anything about the franchise.
There is also a lot of scientifically incorrect talk about evolution somehow perfecting dinosaurs for killing, so that velociraptors can be militarized and be sent off—like a pack of über-wolves—hunting terrorists. Again, it is important to recognize that evolution does not perfect anything; to look at evolution teleologically is to miss its random luck-of-the-draw nature. Velociraptors were presumably very well adapted to their environments, but that does not in itself make them the perfect killing machine. If anything, it is humans who can kill on a scale far greater than any creature, and who have found ways to kill in environments far beyond anything imaginable to prior generations of humans. Thus, the desire to control raptors and turn them into hunter-killers is in itself an illustration of why humans are such dangerous killers.
But in all this talk of evolution and perfection, one important point is often overlooked: there is in fact no way to bring back dinosaurs. They are dead and gone and they’re not coming back—and the characters in the movie understand this. Instead, the dinosaurs in the parks are actually created in the lab by splicing together genes from other creatures found on earth today (cuttlefish and tree frogs being two examples cited in the movie). The Indominus rex is an exception only in the sense that there were no original fossils from which its DNA was extracted; in other ways, though, it was designed and raised just as every other dinosaur genus in the park was. What is monstrous here is not the Indominus rex, but the human hubris in attempting a task as brazen as Prometheus’s stealing fire from the gods—we stole the right to design creatures from nature.
But even if we had somehow managed to bring dinosaurs back exactly as they were, Jurassic Park would still have had a problem on its hands: the environment in which they were housed was far from the environment in which dinosaurs themselves had evolved. Thus, even if velociraptors were perfected killing machines, they were perfected for killing in the late Cretaceous period in the region that is now Inner Mongolia. That does not automatically make them perfected killers in our times on a tropical island—or in the mountains of Afghanistan, where the military wanted to take them.
The climactic battle between the T. rex and the Indominus rex is thus not a battle between nature and nurture at all: both creatures are a product of complex genetic splicing, and the difference between them is one of degree, not of kind. (There was never any dinosaur that looked like Indominus rex, but while there was a dinosaur that looked like the park’s T. rex, it was genetically and socially substantially different from it.) The difference between the two creatures, and presumably the reason we should cheer for the T. rex over the Indominus rex, is that it knows its place and has been properly socialized.
7. The Real and the Virtual
Insofar as every creature on the island is a product of crazy-complicated genetic engineering, we would be tempted to describe them all as fake, or as non-real in some sense. This intuition is partially correct: what these creatures are, properly speaking, is simulacra in the sense of Baudrillard: they are physically existent creatures that are not dinosaurs brought back to life but entirely new orders of creation.
This applies to the park as a whole as well: stegosaurs did not wander the plains along with pachycephalosaurs and triceratops. Indeed, the stegosaur is more distant in time from the triceratops than we are from the triceratops! Jurassic Park thus collapses a huge range of geological time (180-odd million years) and a huge span of geographic space (the whole world over 180-odd million years) into one tiny island at the same point of time.
And even within such a park we come across further simulacra: the dinosaur holograms which people are able to walk through, such as the hologram of the dilophosaur that scares off a rampaging velociraptor for a few seconds. Here we have one simulacrum engaging in combat with the simulation of yet another simulacrum: it is enough to drive us crazy!
But simulacra or not, the dinosaurs in the park are real: if you prick them (with an armor-piercing bullet of large enough caliber), do they not bleed? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you set an Indominus rex wild among them, do they not get slaughtered like real creatures? The dinosaurs feed and breed like all other living creatures, because they are living creatures, just not long-extinct dinosaurs. There are four ways, however, in which their living nature is disregarded by different individuals:
So although all these dinosaurs are simulacra and Jurassic Park a mere simulation of a pseudo-Mesozoic environment, all of these things are real. But there are also things which are fake in the movie—dissimulations, if you will.
Chief among these is the Indominus rex itself. It demonstrates a capacity for indirection that allows it to escape from its enclosure by creating a distraction. Its powers of camouflage and of thermal regulation allow it to become invisible to human eyes. And when it cuts out its own implant, it effectively drops off the control room’s radar. From the financial perspective and from the control perspective, it has ceased to exist—and that is exactly when it begins to live life on its own distorted terms.
The cell-phone screens and video cameras also provide us with a new perspective on enclosures. An enclosure seals off direct contact from the individuals inside that domain, so that any other interactions have to be mediated through some channel. Tools like video cameras allow the control-room to gain mediated access to individuals inside the enclosure.
The trouble with this, of course, is that mediated access is not the same as real access:
Conclusion (sort of)
I fear I really have gone on for far too long now, but I want to finally tie all these thoughts together, using the insight of the real and the virtual that we have gradually built to. The reason Indominus rex was designed was because people had grown too used to all the other dinosaurs in the park, and so executives wanted to up the ante once again. Notice that the people who show genuine awe at most things in the part are children, who still retain a sense of wonder; adults—and even teenagers—are much too jaded to care. The lesson here is clear: when we grow accustomed to the virtual as real, the real ceases to register to us as anything other than virtual.
And this is the real kicker: this analysis of Jurassic World the theme park can be lifted to a meta-analysis of Jurassic World the movie. We as an audience have grown jaded with dinosaurs on-screen, and want bigger and badder lizards all the time. The alpha creature at this level of analysis is the Hollywood studio system that has metastasized over time, generating one colossal movie after another designed precisely to extract more money from people’s pockets by giving them more bang—literally!—for their buck. The Indominus rex, the rogue Frankenstein’s monster, may well be the whole surfeit of giant-reptile movies and super-hero movies that have taken off in the last few years. Jurassic World the movie is the T. rex, the tried-and-tested favorite that has reptiles and heroes who finally succeed, and which has now become the alpha at the global box office.
And of course in both cases the amoral corporation survives, and even profits from the battle! Notice that the corporation in the movie is clearly multinational: a brown CEO with a vaguely Islamic-ish last name, an Asian-American chief scientist, a velociraptor trainer from what sounded to my ears like Francophone Africa. And of course the Hollywood system itself has gone global these days, designing its films to be as globally appealing as possible.
Still, did I get enough bang for my buck with Jurassic World? For sure. Bring on the sequel!
- An extended look at the role played by clothing in depicting personal transformation in the movie.
- An expansion of our analysis, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.
- An examination of survival, evolution, rationality, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.
- An epilogue defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.
In the previous installations of this series, I first wrote about the hugely significant role clothing plays in understanding the transformations of individuals in Jurassic World. I then expanded on the idea of clothing to enclosures in general, which led naturally to relations of power and dominance, which were then contrasted with relations of trust and understanding (familial relations) and with relations of unification for survival (conjugal relations). It is now time to naturally move from conjugal relations to the theme of evolution, which of course underpins the entire Jurassic Park franchise.
6. Nature, Evolution, and Nurture
The whole Jurassic Park franchise is full of talk about evolution and natural selection and genes and whatnot. The root cause of all this is a hubristic zillionaire called John Hammond who has a vision to bring dinosaurs back from extinction using dino-DNA from their blood trapped in mosquitoes fossilized in amber. This, of course, should be old hat to anyone who knows anything about the franchise.
There is also a lot of scientifically incorrect talk about evolution somehow perfecting dinosaurs for killing, so that velociraptors can be militarized and be sent off—like a pack of über-wolves—hunting terrorists. Again, it is important to recognize that evolution does not perfect anything; to look at evolution teleologically is to miss its random luck-of-the-draw nature. Velociraptors were presumably very well adapted to their environments, but that does not in itself make them the perfect killing machine. If anything, it is humans who can kill on a scale far greater than any creature, and who have found ways to kill in environments far beyond anything imaginable to prior generations of humans. Thus, the desire to control raptors and turn them into hunter-killers is in itself an illustration of why humans are such dangerous killers.
But in all this talk of evolution and perfection, one important point is often overlooked: there is in fact no way to bring back dinosaurs. They are dead and gone and they’re not coming back—and the characters in the movie understand this. Instead, the dinosaurs in the parks are actually created in the lab by splicing together genes from other creatures found on earth today (cuttlefish and tree frogs being two examples cited in the movie). The Indominus rex is an exception only in the sense that there were no original fossils from which its DNA was extracted; in other ways, though, it was designed and raised just as every other dinosaur genus in the park was. What is monstrous here is not the Indominus rex, but the human hubris in attempting a task as brazen as Prometheus’s stealing fire from the gods—we stole the right to design creatures from nature.
But even if we had somehow managed to bring dinosaurs back exactly as they were, Jurassic Park would still have had a problem on its hands: the environment in which they were housed was far from the environment in which dinosaurs themselves had evolved. Thus, even if velociraptors were perfected killing machines, they were perfected for killing in the late Cretaceous period in the region that is now Inner Mongolia. That does not automatically make them perfected killers in our times on a tropical island—or in the mountains of Afghanistan, where the military wanted to take them.
The climactic battle between the T. rex and the Indominus rex is thus not a battle between nature and nurture at all: both creatures are a product of complex genetic splicing, and the difference between them is one of degree, not of kind. (There was never any dinosaur that looked like Indominus rex, but while there was a dinosaur that looked like the park’s T. rex, it was genetically and socially substantially different from it.) The difference between the two creatures, and presumably the reason we should cheer for the T. rex over the Indominus rex, is that it knows its place and has been properly socialized.
7. The Real and the Virtual
Insofar as every creature on the island is a product of crazy-complicated genetic engineering, we would be tempted to describe them all as fake, or as non-real in some sense. This intuition is partially correct: what these creatures are, properly speaking, is simulacra in the sense of Baudrillard: they are physically existent creatures that are not dinosaurs brought back to life but entirely new orders of creation.
This applies to the park as a whole as well: stegosaurs did not wander the plains along with pachycephalosaurs and triceratops. Indeed, the stegosaur is more distant in time from the triceratops than we are from the triceratops! Jurassic Park thus collapses a huge range of geological time (180-odd million years) and a huge span of geographic space (the whole world over 180-odd million years) into one tiny island at the same point of time.
And even within such a park we come across further simulacra: the dinosaur holograms which people are able to walk through, such as the hologram of the dilophosaur that scares off a rampaging velociraptor for a few seconds. Here we have one simulacrum engaging in combat with the simulation of yet another simulacrum: it is enough to drive us crazy!
But simulacra or not, the dinosaurs in the park are real: if you prick them (with an armor-piercing bullet of large enough caliber), do they not bleed? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you set an Indominus rex wild among them, do they not get slaughtered like real creatures? The dinosaurs feed and breed like all other living creatures, because they are living creatures, just not long-extinct dinosaurs. There are four ways, however, in which their living nature is disregarded by different individuals:
- For BDH at the beginning of the movie, the dinosaurs are financial assets, no different from a roller-coaster ride at a different theme park. Each takes a certain amount of capital to finance, each draws a certain revenue stream into the park, and the value of a dino-asset is determined entirely by its net present value. Her conversion—or metamorphosis, keeping in mind the clothing and enclosure metaphors—begins when she touches a dying sauropod and realizes that it is a living creature, not an asset.
- For the control-room, each dinosaur is a point on the map, nothing more, nothing less. They can see its physical location in the park and its biosigns, and that’s really all that they are interested in. (Indeed, for the control-room, this is true for the containment units as well! Each of them has a camera so the control-room can see through their perspective, and we also get a live update on their biosigns. There isn’t a huge distinction in their eyes between the dinosaurs and the containment units. Note also the enclosure metaphor in the name of the containment units.)
- For Vincent d'Onofrio, each dinosaur is a potential combat unit. This is exaggerated to an almost comical extent: he doesn’t recognize the velociraptors’ names, and doesn’t know anything about their biology or behavior. All he can see is that they can be trained to obey human commands.
- For the Indominus rex, each dinosaur is something that needs to be physically dominated: those that obey, survive; those that either disobey or refuse to engage, die. But note that this is not actually all that different from the control-room’s perspective on the dinosaurs!
So although all these dinosaurs are simulacra and Jurassic Park a mere simulation of a pseudo-Mesozoic environment, all of these things are real. But there are also things which are fake in the movie—dissimulations, if you will.
Chief among these is the Indominus rex itself. It demonstrates a capacity for indirection that allows it to escape from its enclosure by creating a distraction. Its powers of camouflage and of thermal regulation allow it to become invisible to human eyes. And when it cuts out its own implant, it effectively drops off the control room’s radar. From the financial perspective and from the control perspective, it has ceased to exist—and that is exactly when it begins to live life on its own distorted terms.
The cell-phone screens and video cameras also provide us with a new perspective on enclosures. An enclosure seals off direct contact from the individuals inside that domain, so that any other interactions have to be mediated through some channel. Tools like video cameras allow the control-room to gain mediated access to individuals inside the enclosure.
The trouble with this, of course, is that mediated access is not the same as real access:
- Seeing the world through a velociraptor’s eyes is not the same as being a velociraptor. (Cue Wittgenstein: “If a velociraptor could speak, we couldn’t understand him.” Except that CP doesn’t need Blue to speak to understand her, and the control-room can’t understand even other humans who don’t speak bureaucratese!)
- Similarly, seeing what their containment units are up to does not help the control room protect them from getting slaughtered in any way.
- Once the Indominus rex removes its own implant, it becomes effectively invisible to the control room.
- BDH realizes, when she touches the dying sauropod, that her treating the dinosaurs as financial assets had blinded her to the reality of their being living creatures.
- The boys too are blind to the dinosaurs’ true nature: the elder is fixated on his phone, while the younger sees them through the lens of facts and figures. Only when their enclosure is penetrated do they come directly face to face with the reality of the dangerous creatures they have been watching.
By blinding individuals to the real nature of other individuals, mediated access also impairs people’s decision-making. The clearest example of this is of course, the creation of the Indominus rex itself. It appears to be a total rational decision to create this new sort of neodinosaur from a financial perspective (it ups the spectacle value), and once this is given the go-ahead, a number of other decisions become rational as well: using cuttlefish DNA to help it grow rapidly, using tree frog DNA to let it adjust to the climate, using velociraptor DNA to make it smart, keeping it isolated and thus protected from harm as it grows up, and so on. Only when the blinders imposed by mediated access are removed (by CP, who sees the creature for what it really is) does the insanity of this entire decision-making process reveal itself.
Factors such as fear can also have a deeply distorting effect on perception, and hence on decisions. This comes out most clearly in the decisions by two people to open doors at different points in the story:
- The obese security guard trapped inside the Indominus rex enclosure manually opens its gate as a way to flee from the creature. Before the control-room can shut it down remotely (another case of mediated access harming decisive action), Indominus rex busts out of its enclosure, with predictably unpleasant consequences for the security guard (and others).
- BDH gets the control-room to open Paddock 9 to release the T. rex, the only creature that might conceivably be able to fight the Indominus rex. She then uses a flare to draw attention to herself, and gets the T. rex to chase her into a confrontation with the Indominus rex.
Aside from all the structural contrasts (man opens door to flee away from creature while control tries and fails to shut the door; woman convinces control to open door to get creature to flee towards her), the major difference between these two scenarios is the following: the security guard is so concerned with his personal safety that he makes the locally questionable but globally disastrous decision to open the enclosure gate. He is literally unable to see outside his own perspective on the world. BDH, on the other hand, risks her own life in order to get the T. rex to battle the Indominus rex and thus save the lives of her nephews. She, who had earlier screamed over the phone to get the control room to shut the Indominus enclosure gate, now makes the locally foolish but globally pragmatic decision to open the gates. And here, she convinces the control room through her personal connection with Control-Room Guy and her direct unmediated presence before Paddock 9 that her sacrifice will be worth it in the end.
Conclusion (sort of)
I fear I really have gone on for far too long now, but I want to finally tie all these thoughts together, using the insight of the real and the virtual that we have gradually built to. The reason Indominus rex was designed was because people had grown too used to all the other dinosaurs in the park, and so executives wanted to up the ante once again. Notice that the people who show genuine awe at most things in the part are children, who still retain a sense of wonder; adults—and even teenagers—are much too jaded to care. The lesson here is clear: when we grow accustomed to the virtual as real, the real ceases to register to us as anything other than virtual.
And this is the real kicker: this analysis of Jurassic World the theme park can be lifted to a meta-analysis of Jurassic World the movie. We as an audience have grown jaded with dinosaurs on-screen, and want bigger and badder lizards all the time. The alpha creature at this level of analysis is the Hollywood studio system that has metastasized over time, generating one colossal movie after another designed precisely to extract more money from people’s pockets by giving them more bang—literally!—for their buck. The Indominus rex, the rogue Frankenstein’s monster, may well be the whole surfeit of giant-reptile movies and super-hero movies that have taken off in the last few years. Jurassic World the movie is the T. rex, the tried-and-tested favorite that has reptiles and heroes who finally succeed, and which has now become the alpha at the global box office.
And of course in both cases the amoral corporation survives, and even profits from the battle! Notice that the corporation in the movie is clearly multinational: a brown CEO with a vaguely Islamic-ish last name, an Asian-American chief scientist, a velociraptor trainer from what sounded to my ears like Francophone Africa. And of course the Hollywood system itself has gone global these days, designing its films to be as globally appealing as possible.
Still, did I get enough bang for my buck with Jurassic World? For sure. Bring on the sequel!
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