Last night, I had a dream. A marquee glowed orange-tungsten. Large black letters: JURASSIC PARK. I was there with my son Aphid. We were in the auditorium. An enormous, tiered spectacle. A thousand red velvet chairs, all plush. The place felt bustling and empty. The film began. It was not exactly as I remembered. I had not, for instance, remembered that Jurassic Park was a film directed by Werner Herzog. I had also not remembered that Jurassic Park featured Klaus Kinski in the leading role. I had also not remembered that John Hammond — the obsessive impresario of Jurassic Park — was the film’s protagonist. The film followed an irregular pattern. It was here and there. Klaus Kinski with teeth bared, smiling madly, then raging at his staff. It is his dream to bring back the dinosaurs. In order to do this, he has engineered a theme park — not yet containing any dinosaurs — to raise the necessary funds. He intends to fool a paying audience into attending a totally empty park; a speculative gamble. But not the children — the children go free. Always. In the midst of his grand folly is a Velociraptor carved of ice. Werner Herzog himself appears, in the Ian Malcolm role. He delivers his Burden of Dreams speech to a bemused and incredulous Kinski. “Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” Hammond’s scheme swiftly unravels. The park is rejected; the idea ridiculed; the ice melts. His ambitions crumble into nothing. But in the final scene, he is lost in reveries. He gavottes around his empty, doomed park, peering into the various exhibitions. He is in fits of awe, amazement, and ecstatic happiness. There — he sees them. There in the cages, in the exhibits. So close he could touch them. He clambers over one of the grand fences he had erected to cage the Tyrannosaurus. Through the bars, into reality. We watch as he vanishes into the greenery. Here the film ends. Myself and my son, Aphid, rise to applause. This was not the way I remembered Jurassic Park ending.
It is a sorry thing to wake up after such dreams. Into my head flood the realities. We do not attend films in opera houses. Werner Herzog did not direct a film called Jurassic Park, and it did not feature Klaus Kinski in the leading role. And I do not have a son called Aphid. But in these dreams is a knot of reality. For as false as these many premises prove, in them is the kernel of the actual Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg, in which Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond plays a secondary role. Hammond is, in Jurassic Park, a great deal more significant than a nominally antagonistic figure, there to represent untrammeled ambition and a hubristic danger to human life. These themes work through him, as they do the whole of the film, but Hammond is treated by Spielberg with a lighter touch. We might even call it sympathetic. Because in John Hammond we also find Spielberg himself. We find an artist striving ever more toward immersion; a showman who wants to elicit an authentic joy in his patrons. But at once we meet the limitation of this obsession; we find the point at which art is incapable of meeting reality; we find that every lunge toward total authenticity proves yet more the implacable distance between reality and artistic reflection. An unbridgeable chasm. The machinery built to attempt this bridge is equally disappointing: Hammond’s seemingly capitalistic impulse — merchandising, ticket sales, the commercial theme park — mirrors the Hollywood system, by which artists will subject themselves to any degree of commercial labor in order to create their works at the scale they require. Jurassic Park scowls at John Hammond’s mass-produced lunchboxes, while Universal itself sells those same lunchboxes to its audience. Spielberg dooms John Hammond, but at once Spielberg is John Hammond. It is a telling and beautiful irony that Spielberg himself is the voice of the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios. In his adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel (in a screenplay written by Crichton, then overwritten by David Koepp), Spielberg inserts himself and then defeats himself. Why does he do it?
It is first essential to distinguish Jurassic Park, the film, from Jurassic Park, the novel. In most obvious respects, Jurassic Park is an extremely faithful adaptation of its source material. The premise and plot are followed with close attention; the characters are embellished but fulfill the same archetypes, and the general thematic line is unaltered. Both film and novel are cautionary tales against the rootless ambitions of science; against playing God. Spielberg does not engage in irony. He means exactly what he says. Jurassic Park is by no means a good idea ruined by bad management; it is, by definition, a folly. However, Spielberg makes an exception to this accurate precis of Crichton’s novel. John Hammond, in Crichton’s novel, is the embodiment of capitalist greed. He, at one point, says it directly: “We must never forget the ultimate objective of [Jurassic Park] — to make money. Lots and lots of money.” He goes on to express his intention in cutting corners on cost so as to maximize profits. His character is motivated only by margins and franchise dreams. He speaks of his intentions to open a Jurassic Park Europe and a Jurassic Park Japan. He brings his grandchildren to the island, not because he thinks they’d enjoy it, but as a smokescreen to stop his investors from pulling out. His interest in dinosaurs appears feigned; a means to an end. Jurassic Park is the grandest profit mechanism ever conceived. Crichton, therefore, metes out a fair punishment. Toward the end of the book, Hammond is humiliated — he trips and falls in the mud, twists his ankle, and drags himself up a hill. The effort is a metonym for the park. He slips down the hill, whereat he is accosted by a pack of Compsognathus. These creatures deck this disastered monarch in bites, before eating him alive. The mustache-twirling capitalist is eaten by the wages of his sin. Man creates dinosaur; dinosaur eats man.
But Spielberg entirely reshapes the character. Rather than a fiendish capitalist, Spielberg envisions the man as a fabulist of the old style. A kindly figure, who specifically rebukes the overwhelming profit-motive the park might represent. Gennaro — a composite character representing, broadly, the business arm of Jurassic Park — at one point explodes with enthusiasm: “We can charge anything we want to and people will pay it, and then there’s the merchandising.” But Hammond is swift to cut him off: “This park was not built to cater only for the super-rich. Everyone in the world has the right to enjoy these animals.” And where the Hammond of the novel is defined by his compulsion to cut costs, Spielberg gives him a converse motto: “Spared no expense.” Hammond’s dedication expands into the sentimental: he attends the birth of every dinosaur in the park, so they imprint on him as their parent, their creator. In these details, Spielberg has not only altered the characterization of Hammond — as he does in some respect to all the characters carried from the book — but has posed him as a diametric opposite. Here is a man we can admire, even in his overreach. In the novel, we might chafe as Hammond dismisses his critics as “accountants,” given his obviously suspicious intentions and ambitions. But in the film, when we see two paleontologists almost immediately turn on a dream realized, we feel a sudden impulse of sympathy with the old man. He who dreamt of resurrecting the dinosaur; he who succeeded in it; and he who wants to give it to the world. Those who might be most amazed seem immediately to be the most critical. Hammond finds himself defended only by the lawyer — for whom he has the least respect. For Spielberg’s Hammond, the money is not the end; rather, it is the means. This fundamental inversion informs not merely the nature of the character, but the subtheme of the film generally: it is the point at which the identities of Hammond and Spielberg begin to overlap in earnest.
This connection is best expressed in a scene shared by both novel and film, though in each accented differently: the ice cream scene, it might be called. In the novel — around halfway, after the park has begun its tailspin — Hammond meets Dr. Wu in his bungalow. These two characters, both of whom represented the hubristic axis of the narrative, here appear at odds. Hammond, perhaps intuiting the doom of his ambition, orders himself and Wu some ice cream. He brags of its provenance — ginger from the east of the island — and even of the woman serving it: Haitian, apparently. The scene is absurd for its removal from reality. Here, at the point of total collapse, Hammond slurps on his luxury ice cream and pontificates about his planned expansion of the Jurassic Park franchise. Wu must awkwardly listen, and obey, as his master patters on about impossible dreams. We find this man wretched, and deluded. He ought to crumble. He has lost control of his park, and he has, therefore, lost his money. He has lost his life. Crichton’s implication is bald and obvious: the edifice has cracked.
But let us then examine Spielberg’s equivalent. The scene begins with a dolly-shot passing a rack of Jurassic Park-branded toys and lunchboxes. Then it cuts to a similar image — branded books and water bottles, the camera sliding to reveal John Hammond, slumped at a cafeteria table. In front of him are several large tubs of ice cream, which he eats alone. Sattler sits across from him; he justifies himself simply: “They were all melting.” Already the nature of the scene is transformed. Where Crichton’s ice cream scene is Nero fiddling athwart the burning Rome, Spielberg shifts the emphasis. Hammond is not eating the ice cream in haughty disregard for the fate of the park, but in a kind of panicked duty; if he doesn’t eat it now, it’ll all melt away to nothing. It’s a fine enough metaphor for Jurassic Park in itself, but also for a man who, in his moment of defeat, persists on. We find him here a sad, desperate figure. The opening of this scene itself contains a dialectic and a kind of contradiction. We contrast branded, mass-produced, plastic tat with a man who seems to represent real, earnest feeling. How can one and the other co-exist? Is it that Hammond is, in fact, a fraud; that his true impulse is to marketeering, to merchandising, to all those other grim resorts of the salesman? Or is it in fact a series of images that exists specifically because of their contrasting tendency? We must encounter the economics of art. It is here that Hammond’s Jurassic Park and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park become equivalent works. In the case of Hammond: his dream of resurrecting the dinosaur is only possible in the context of a significant business enterprise. The thing must turn a profit; it must generate interest; it must be branded, tagged, and remembered. It must contain rides and amusements; cafeterias; ice cream. It cannot just be the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs themselves — however wonderful, however incredible, however substantial — can only be maintained if they are in some way monetized, and transformed into a show. It is this people will pay for. Without the merchandizing, Jurassic Park would be more authentic, yes; and without the merchandizing, Jurassic Park could not exist. The place is therefore doomed by definition.
Consider Spielberg’s film in light of this. Spielberg was especially attracted to Crichton’s work as it appeared an attempt to render genuine, lifelike dinosaurs. In the form of a text, this ambition is fundamentally limited. Crichton supplies some description, but he essentially — in the manner of every written description of a dinosaur — wants his reader to imagine the spectacle of it. To envision what it might have been like. But film can expand this premise broadly. It does not merely imply, by close description, the experience of seeing a dinosaur. It renders it as a genuine spectacle. We can see, hear, experience the magnitude. It is here that Jurassic Park so clearly fits the screen better than it does the page. The premise allows Spielberg, with the ranked millions of Universal backing, to do as Hammond wished: to bring back the dinosaur from extinction. But there is, as with Hammond, a catch. Nobody wants to watch a two-hour movie about a dinosaur theme park with no hitches; no one wants to watch a version of Titanic where the boat doesn’t sink. Hollywood audiences demand drama; catastrophe; tension. Something must go wrong. So in order for Spielberg to create his virtual Jurassic Park, he must destroy it. In order to secure funding, in order to render these creatures with the full armory of Hollywood filmmaking, he must promise to show these same creatures both in and causing jeopardy. He must pull down his own castle, for all to see. Jurassic Park — in the narrative — and Jurassic Park — as the narrative — both require their own destruction. John Hammond and Steven Spielberg necessarily build their parks in such a way that they must destroy themselves; without this promise, they could never be built at all. Again, it is a representation of the means and the ends in reverse. Hammond gives you a theme park so he can give the world dinosaurs; Spielberg gives you a Hollywood movie so he can do the same thing. Perhaps both share a sadness in seeing their creations destroyed.
But we must return to the ice cream. Hammond’s dialogue in this scene is the single largest addition to Crichton in the entire film. Hammond tells Sattler about his first attraction: a flea circus called Petticoat Lane. A host of mechanized amusements — a total fabrication — but nonetheless, children would say they could see the fleas. “Clown fleas, high-wire fleas, fleas on parade…” Some might say a flea circus is the oldest grift in the book; an early fleecing by a man who will do anything for a buck. But we see in Attenborough’s performance — and we should count it significant that Spielberg cast a fellow filmmaker in this role — a genuine wonder; a certain awe in giving to these people the illusion they wanted to see. There were no fleas, but the people believed there were. In this is the artistic effect: to convince a person, on some level, of a thing that is not literally present. Whether this is extrinsic — seeing the fleas on the seesaw — or intrinsic — feeling some kind of wonder at the notion of invisible fleas on the seesaw — is the detail of approach. But for Hammond, this flea circus was inadequate. Jurassic Park was to be “something that wasn’t an illusion, something that was real, something that they could… see, and touch.” To take that same notion of amazement, and to build it on reality, or as close as possible.
This is the same impulse Spielberg has followed his whole career. If the flea circus mirrors his childhood home movies — primitive, promising juvenilia — then his later cinema is a movement toward ever-more-real, ever-more-convincing images. Spielberg once said he wanted Jurassic Park to be “Jaws on land,” but Jurassic Park is itself much more sophisticated, and appears — in its superficial character — more “real.” And yet, despite these advancements in image acuity and technology, we can say confidently that Jaws and Jurassic Park are equally unreal. We can go on to say that Spielberg’s home movies belong in the same category. Sattler retorts with the same idea: “It’s still a flea circus! It’s all an illusion!” And here is the defeat of immersive art. Hammond says, in revived delusion: “Creation is an act of sheer will.” Such is the obsessive pursuit of his aim; not merely to imitate, or replicate, creation, but to himself partake in it. But the artist cannot truly take on the measure of creator. The artist must always reshape that which already exists; they must always work within the constraints of their world. Attempts at total replication, as with Hammond, as with Spielberg, can only pretend at the things they presume to represent. No matter the technology, the ambition, the nobility of aim: both Spielberg and Hammond must contend with this unbridgeable gap. However close they come to the total immersion — the Total Cinema — they are always on the other side, always dreaming of that next attempt. But the artist must finally concede: he can fool an audience, he can master the illusion, but go no further.
And so, we might understand Spielberg sparing Hammond from his gruesome Crichton-death. In the final scene, Hammond hobbles toward the edge of the helipad, and gazes out into his kingdom one last time. We see him finally, hunched over in the helicopter, peering into the tungsten-amber that makes up the handle of his cane. Within it, frozen in time, a mosquito. In that creature, that kernel, is the whole of authentic creation. Hammond — Spielberg — can only borrow from its luster. The film will then find its final image: a flock of pelicans flying out to sea. The wonder of nature, as art can only imitate.
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