The Cinematic Experience of Spielberg'sJurassic Park

The creators of Jurassic Park carefully designed and constructed their filmic dinosaurs to be the most "accurate" representation of these prehistoric animals to date. Consideration of them as animals is important, because Steven Spielberg and his production artists internalized recent scientific theory arguing that dinosaurs were in fact animals and not monsters like Godzilla or other early 20th Century film monsters.

Spielberg's production teams researched the scaly skin and bones of large contemporary animals, such as elephants, and tried to imagine how considerably heavier dinosaurs carried themselves with similar camouflage and amplified weight. Given what we know about large animals with which we coexist in the contemporary world, how to extrapolate a dinosaur became a design problem. Too, by thinking of dinosaurs as animals, Spielberg could construct a cautionary tale of technology, of the dangers of genetic engineering by dramatizing the failure of a command over nature which is not as simple as the replication of an ancient organism, abstractly and theoretically.

We know that Jurassic Park may function as a corrective to Baconian control over Nature, because Jeff Goldbloom's character, the chaos mathematician states that a complex system cannot be ultimately controlled. The production artists of Jurassic share this belief, for they have empirically observed animal behavior and have synthesized a prehistoric animal as image. The production artists' careful study translates animal biological complexities, so that, despite the animators' top-down control, the experience of its dinosaurs magnifies audience viceral reaction, as Jurassic's box office receipts will attest.

Robert Baird argues in his article on the cognitive activation of threat scenarios in the film, that audience members experience contemporary cinema viscerally, and cannot help but complete the filmic illusion with their reactions -- especially when animated dinosaurs take up only eight minutes of the finished film. Jurassic dinosaurs also suggest this reaction through off-screen presence, and pass it on to viewers. We experience contemporary or even early cinema as a "brothel without walls", in the McLuhan sense, a window to another world. However, with the tradition of counter-cinema and modernist film, we know that every seamless narrative is on the threshold of being revealed as an artifact of filmmaking, with a reconfiguration of our viewing goals.

Jurassic Park creates its cinematic experience through making, not a more realistic dinosaur, but a structurally more robust dinosaur. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are walking signifiers for structural, scientific research arguing for a particular way of representing prehistoric animals. It is interesting to think of the innovation not as one of realism, but as one of structure.

To do this, we must reconsider how to read images: Could realism and abstraction be two sides of a reduction process? In other words, actors create models which include and exclude, and the inclusion of realistically lighted and shaded dinosaurs activates the sense of environment that we feel with spatial cues. For a moment, our bodies read the dinosaurs as if they emerge from the film screen, birthed like the genetic organisms that the film narrates.

Nevertheless, we become ready to decode realistic images, and in doing so, we find that they combine the visceral and the cognitive. The appearance of "real" dinosaurs, relies on many decisions made by filmmakers in constructing prehistoric players as animals, first, and then as an off-screen presence. But the animated images of dinosaurs and off-screen suggestion work together to produce highly differentiated relations, a pool or network of relations that both construct a realistic image of dinosaurs and tell how this image in fact relies on research, textual knowledge and a significant component of invisibility. The effect of this copious research of animal behavior and intense psychological as well as visual realism is that it destroys the realistic image through the visceral cognition of the film viewer, where disbelieving is seeing, and where without research, there would be no cinematic experience.

In an article on the relationship between Spielberg's Jurassic Park, and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, both films that use digital technology, Ronit Schwartz argues that Park is a seamless narrative working with spatial cues to bring the viewer into a world as if he or she were there in the space of the film, whereas Greenaway's film disrupts continuity and also gravitates towards inhibiting reading or understanding of the narrative. This shows us the presence of the invisible in the orchestration of the visible of film. Nevertheless, the research, textuality, and cognitive functions of Prospero's Books, Greenaway visualizes, dismantling the notion of a realistic or continuous narrative as the container or vehicle for the invisible: the world out there is experienced purely through verisimilitude underlied by structure.

The cinematic experience of Prospero's Books in relation to Jurassic Park shows us that, as Schwartz remarks, its filmmakers can be understood to use any means possible to achieve effects (for aesthetic purposes), balanced on a scale of verisimilitude versus disruptive tactics. This scale is also one of the visible and the invisible, the visual and the textual. Jurassic Park's dinosaurs are contained within a continuous narrative that does not prevent them from being read as an artifact of cinema -- or more importantly as an effect, as a direct signifier of technology, the traditional Marxist "base" that causes a change within our material conditions through new applications of techné.

The contribution of technology to visualization and narrative then, can be removed from the ultimate consideration of it as a solely visceral phenomenon. The interested viewer, the engaged viewer can also be a thinking viewer, even if he or she does think as rapidly as his or her emotive response, to the play of images. Jurassic Park's viewing subject is torn between disbelieving and believing, between either buying into the conventions of realism (which is really a structural gesture) or reminding him or herself of the material provenance of the image on the screen. At once frightened by the resurrection of prehistoric animals, animals that act just like forty ton indigenous creatures, and also suspending belief to suspend disbelief, the viewing subject of Jurrassic makes meaning in a highly complex way, homologous to the film's production.