Dinosaur Family Values: The Real Monsters in Jurassic Park :: essays papers

Dinosaur Family Values: The Real Monsters in Jurassic Park "The striking moral exhibited in this story, is the fatal consequence of that presumption which attempts to penetrate, beyond prescribed depths, into the mysteries of nature." Playbill for the first stage production of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein(1826) In a recent PBS special about the possibility of cloning dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park, Steven Speilberg reveals that he felt his film version of Michael Crichton's novel had been a success because "There's such a reality to it."Later, one of the scientists interviewed during the show admits that the idea of resurrecting dinosaurs is so imaginatively compelling because every paleontologist "wants to see the real thing."In fact, throughout the PBS documentary the criteria used to evaluate all possible schemes for cloning dinosaurs is always framed as a question: How "real" would the resulting dinosaurs be?The most scientifically credible method discussed would involve injecting dinosaur DNA into bird eggs with the hope that several generations later the birds would become "dinosaur like."Yet every one of the scientists interviewed evidences a clear lack of enthusiasm toward this method because, as one of the paleontologists puts it, "of course, it wouldn't be a real dinosaur."Meaning, we can only conclude, that only a dinosaur born of dinosaur parents can be a "real" dinosaur.The program ends with two quotes, one from the novel's author, Michael Crichton, and the other from actor Jeff Goldblum, who plays scientist Ian Malcolm in the film.First Crichton informs us that Jurassic Park is, above and beyond all else, a "cautionary tale about the hazards of genetic engineering"; and secondly, Goldblum ends the program by expanding on Crichton's warning and advising us that we are "better off marveling at the past rather than tampering with the future." The PBS program very tidily echoes and summarizes the central ideology of both the Jurassic Park films (Jurassic Park and The Lost World), which seems to me to be an obsession with the difference between natural and unnatural breeding practices, and how natural breeding results in and from traditional parenting, and unnatural breeding results in and from non-traditional and therefore unsound or inpure or, to put it as simply as possible, unnatural parenting. In other words, I beieve both of these films make basically the same argument: that there is a difference between natural and unnatural parents, and thus natural and unnatural families.The metaphor the films use as a cinematic stand-in for this quite conservative take on parenting is science, or rather natural vs unnatural science.