Jurassic Park Again

From
Date
Reply-To
I think deconstructing cultural items like Jurassic Park is a valuable
exercise for both professional paleontologists and for high school
students. Jurassic Park was a movie carefully designed to entertain, not a
documentary whose primary purpose was to inform. Yes, Crichton, Speilberg &
Co. made some efforts to be accurate, but the errors we've already listed
demonstrate that this sentiment wasn't allowed to get in the way of the
director's and producer's vision. I too was very bothered by the way
paleontologists were portrayed in the film; as sterotypic nerdish, computer
illiterate people focused on their own research to the exclusion of
everything else in life, willing to use their knowledge to score cheap
points in arguments with little kids, and (most distressingly) willing to
do almost anything (e.g., break camp and follow complete strangers to the
ends of the earth to provide obviously bogus commercial endorsements) so
long as someone waves a fistfull of dollar bills in our face. Not a very
complimentary image. Then again, Jurassic Park seemed to me to be a special
effects movie, pure and simple. As one newspaper reviewer put it, the plot
(of the movie, not the book) can be summed up in a single line; "attractive
people running away from hungry animals." Given that the emphasis was on
the dinos (as opposed to character development or plot) from the start,
"nitpicking" the movie can provide important information as to how
dinosaurs are seen by the general public.

For example, the gratuitous increase in size of the Velociraptors was used
(by the production team's own admission) to make them appear more
"sinister." Personally, I feel that even a single normal-sized Velociraptor
(much less a pair, much less a group) would be a pretty formidable animal.
I don't buy the idea that the Velociraptors needed to be scaled up in this
way for the purpose of the plot. The production team had lots of expert
advice on this movie (e.g., Jack Horner) and they did make some changes. I
read that they tried to film the sequence of the Tyrannosaurus using his
tongue in the Land Rover attack, but the tongue just looked silly on film.
Even more interestingly, I understand that The movie team originally gave
the Velociraptors forked tongues (Crichton makes no explicit mention of
tounge shape in the book), but deleted them when Jack pointed out that
there is no evidence for the presence of Jacobson's organs in any dino
skull. It is interesting to ponder why the moviemakers felt the forked
tongues were an inaccuracy they could afford to correct, whereas the gross
exaggeration of Velociraptor size was deemed indispensable. As
paleontologists, we are the ones who provide society with much of its image
of the past. Critical looks at movies like Jurassic Park provide us with
important feedback as to how the culture is responding to the images we
send them.

To move the conversation along on a different tack, I'd also like to pick
up on Rich Lane's question of whether Jurassic Park was a net plus or minus
for paleontology. It certainly did wonders for museum attendance. On the
other hand, paleontology is more than dinosaur studies. Even though a
paleobotanist figured prominently in the book and the movie, I haven't
detected any change in the public's awareness of paleobotany. My guess is
that once you get away from the money made on commercial spinoffs from the
movie (very little of which found it's way back into our coffers), Jurassic
Park was pretty much irrelevant. However, there is a new book (The Lost
World) and a new Speilberg movie in pre-production. Perhaps what we need to
discuss is how we can do a better job promoting paleontology and reaping
some tangible benefits during the second coming of the Hollywood dinosaurs.


Norm MacLeod

PS in my previous post on this topic I erroneously attributed the book
"Darwin's Dangerous Idea" to Daniel Demming. The author's name is Daniel
Dennett. Demming writes books on entirely different subjects. NM






----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman MacLeod
Senior Scientific Officer
N.MacLeod@nhm.ac.uk (Internet)
N.MacLeod@uk.ac.nhm (Janet)

Address: Dept. of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum,
         Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD

Office Phone: 0171-938-9006
Dept. FAX:  0171-938-9277
----------------------------------------------------------------------------