Thoughts on The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Caveat: I am a very rough-draftish and stream-of-consciousness blogger, so please bear with me.

In my ongoing research for a paper I plan to present at ASLE 2011 in Bloomington, I have been thinking a lot about the Jurassic Park films, especially the second one, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997, dir. Spielberg).  While both of the first two JP films invoke themes of technology vs. nature, seeming to posit that whether or not the “nature” we humans encounter is in fact naturally occurring or human-made, it lies (dangerously) beyond our ability to control it, it is that second film that really haunts me.  The main reason for this, besides its decidedly darker tone than the first JP, is that The Lost World features multiple characters whose investments are explicitly environmental.

First, there is John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who since the first Jurassic Park film has changed his exploitative ways to become a staunch defender of the right-to-isolation of the dinosaurs he created: as the film’s protagonist, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) puts it, Hammond has “gone from capitalist to naturalist in just four years.”  Hammond’s preservationist attitude is ultimately valorized by the film — he is a “good guy” this time — while simultaneously (and subtly) undermined by The Lost World‘s plot: a young girl is injured by dinos on the beach in the first scene, and a T-Rex escapes the island and invades San Diego in the third act, showing (I think) that true separation of humans from dinosaurs (given the world the JP films posit) is not possible.

Another key character is the new CEO of InGen, Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), who (similarly to Hammond in the first film) wants to exploit the dinosaur creations on Isla Sorna’s “Site B” for profit.  He is shown to be totally irredeemable and ends the film as lunch for the captive T-Rex and its baby.  Through his treatment and horrific demise the film seems to posit that exploitation of natural phenomena for profit is bad, period.

Conversely, all of the film’s heroes –  a ragtag band led by Malcolm — feel great pain upon seeing the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna rounded up and caged in an early sequence, a feeling the audience is encouraged to share via multiple shots of the suffering dinos being wrangled, intercut with indignant, pathos-laden reaction shots from the principals.  When one of Malcolm’s sidekicks, an Earth Firster played by Vince Vaughan, decides to set all the dinos free again by cutting the locks on their cages, the other protagonists readily agree, and the subsequent sequence where the dinos run amok, destroying Ludlow’s camp and equipment, is presented by the film as a victory for the humane treatment of other species — note the close-ups of the faces of the stegosaurus and trike in that cage-breaking sequence to see how the film encourages us to empathize with the dinos and their liberators.

Lastly but perhaps most importantly, there is Roland (Pete Postlethwaite), the big game hunter who leads Ludlow’s expeditionary force.  He is the character I have the hardest time accounting for.  He has a very different relationship to the dinos than the liberal, environmentalist heroes of Malcom’s group, yet he is not presented as particularly evil, nor out for profit in quite the same way as Ludlow.  I would like to know more about ecocritical interpretations of big game hunting (and hunters) before I venture to say too much about Roland’s place in The Lost World‘s proceedings.  I only know he is important, and his presence interests and vexes me.

Of course, many of these plot points and melodramatic plays for pathos are bound up in generic considerations: The Lost World is a monster movie, and one of the key strategies of virtually all monster movies is to elicit viewer sympathy for the monster(s) and those human characters who would defend or protect them.  Further, one of the generic pleasures of monster movies is getting to see monsters destroy human cities and civilization — like most horror films, monster films revel in the destructive power of the return of the cultural repressed.  One of the key arguments of my paper (and it is not a new one) is that monster films (like their slightly higher-class cousins, the disaster films) are particularly potent vehicles for environmental messages, precisely because so many cinematic monsters, from King Kong to the giant ants in Them! (1954) to the dinos of the Jurassic Park trilogy, serve as thinly veiled substitutes for real-life animal populations, happily living their lives until they are rendered monstrous due to the incursion of humans into their world. However, these generalities aside, I am especially interested in The Lost World: Jurassic Park because of its specifically environmentalist (and anti-environmentalist) discourses and its plethora of stock characters we would expect to see involved in environmentalist debates: scientists, Earth First activists, big game hunters, and unscrupulous big business CEOS.  Now I just need to sort out what this all means.

(In this connection, I am grateful to Steve for pointing out that there is present-day tourism occurring at the old shooting locations for Jurassic Park.)