Evolutionary Narratives in Jurassic Park

Although CGI may have helped move the stop-motion animation used in the film to possible extinction, Jurassic Park’s (1993) narrative demonstrates how community and, perhaps, family, might help us survive. Even though most critics see the film’s focus on family as diluting the ethical argument against genetic experimentation, we see this focus as moving the narrative beyond bio-ethics toward a comic view of evolution, an evolutionary narrative which might, as Leslie Paul Thiele suggests in “Evolutionary Narratives and Ecological Ethics,” “inform moral reasoning and facilitate the cultivation of certain moral sentiments [and] might legitimate an ecological ethic” (7-8). Thiele explains, “The point, as Daniel Dennett says of his own work, is not to deliver human behavior over to a ‘Darwinian science’ but to make sure of ‘merely philosophical realizations’ that can be gleaned from the ‘transfer’ of certain biological concepts to humanistic concerns. In the end, we do not so much discover values in nature as read values into nature” (8). 

From this perspective, Jurassic Park follows two evolutionary narrative patterns. The first is driven by a critique of genetic engineering and sees humans as only exploiters of the natural world, a theme many critics find diluted in the translation from novel to film. Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and, to a certain extent, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) initiate and push forward this narrative during the first act of the film. The second, however, which comes into play when John Hammond’s grandchildren visit the park, builds toward a comic view of evolution that sees family, accommodation, and adaptation as better responses to nonhuman nature. The last two acts of the film illustrate this narrative: In the second act Dr. Alan Grant transforms from child hater to father figure and protector. In the third act, the family unit is reunited, but nature’s life cycle, not human retaliation, ensures their survival.

Tragic and comic evolutionary narratives and their roots in organismic, chaotic, and economic approaches to ecology are broached as the film introduces each of the characters in relation to the film’s conflicts. Jurassic Park begins and ends on Isla Nublar, an island near Costa Rica where John Hammond has built his dinosaur theme park. Characters that will modify the tragic narrative on display there, however, are introduced with the first conflict of the film: a raptor kills a worker and the company lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) hears about it while inspecting an amber mine in the Dominican Republic. Wishing to protect the park’s assets, he tells Hammond, “If two experts sign off on the island, the insurance group’ll back off” to halt a $20 million lawsuit. 

Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler are hired as the experts who will join Dr. Ian Malcolm and provide the credibility the theme park needs. Malcolm’s role as a chaotician, here aligned with chaotic approaches to ecology, and Grant’s disdain for children and relationship with Sattler, pointing toward interdependence and an organismic approach to ecology, are introduced almost immediately, as well. The scientists represent comic narratives, then, either rooted in chaotic or organismic approaches to ecology. The park and its owner, however, embrace a tragic evolutionary narrative rooted in economic approaches to ecology that, according to the film’s narrative, are doomed to failure.

A second conflict that catalyzes the disruption of Hammond’s tragic evolutionary narrative is broached in a café in San Jose, Costa Rica, where Dennis Nedry agrees to sell fifteen species’ embryos from Jurassic Park for $1.5 million. Nedry’s decision has catastrophic results, but it also makes possible the movement from a narrative focused on a critique of genetic experimentation to a comic evolutionary narrative focused on community.

Dr. Malcolm provides an argument against Hammond’s genetic experimentation early in the scientists’ tour of the island and its visitors’ center. According to a film they view, all of the plants and dinosaurs they have seen result from cloning based on DNA found in blood samples extracted from pre-historic mosquitoes preserved in amber—petrified tree sap. According to Hammond they plan to maintain control by breeding only females in a lab and imprinting new hatchlings to humans, especially Hammond himself. Malcolm opposes Hammond’s mission as a blow to evolutionary narratives: “John, the kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even… dangerously, but… well, there it is.”Ellie agrees, arguing, “When people try to control things that are out of their power... It’s anti-nature.” Hammond’s attempts to control nature are also rooted in a tragic evolutionary narrative.Malcolm even disdains the work Hammond has accomplished at Jurassic Park because of its lack of creativity. According to Malcolm, the park and its creatures “didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a lunchbox, and now, you’re selling it.” When Hammond argues that he’s preserving species, Malcolm counters, “Hold on—this is no species that was obliterated by deforestation or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot. Nature selected them for extinction. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

            

Malcolm offers multiple arguments against the experimentation Hammond has put into play, all resting on Hammond’s disruption of a comic evolutionary narrative. Hammond disrupts that narrative first by attempting to control nature, exploiting it for his own gain, an exploitation resting on tragic visions of evolution that see humans as pioneer species “dedicating themselves to survival through the destruction of all our competitors and to achieving effective dominance over other forms of life” (Meeker 162). Malcolm also notes that Hammond has disrupted the narrative further by cloning animals nature had selected for extinction, since, as Meeker explains, “the welfare of individuals is generally subordinated to the welfare of the group” (162). Dinosaurs’ extinction, then, can be seen as a means to sustain the welfare of other species, so their return disrupts the evolutionary narrative in play.

            

Ultimately both Sattler and Grant agree that Hammond can have no real control over either the plants or animals he has cloned. Sattler argues against Hammond’s ability to control plant life he has cloned, saying, “you have plants right here in this building, for example, that are poisonous. You picked them because they look pretty, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they’re living in and will defend themselves. Violently, if necessary.”And Grant agrees, asserting, “Dinosaurs and man—two species separated by 65 millions years of evolution—have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we have the faintest idea of what to expect.” As Malcolm contends, Hammond’s “scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The mayhem that erupts on the island when Nedry shuts down security around the island demonstrates the dangerous consequences Hammond and the others face because he disrupted the comic evolutionary narrative.

These consequences, however, also provide the catalyst for the second evolutionary narrative, a comic narrative that provides a space for humanity to accommodate and adapt in order to survive as part of the natural world. As Ellie Sattler asserts when faced with the destructive force of unfettered dinosaurs, “I was overwhelmed by this place, but I made a mistake, too. I didn’t have enough respect for that power, and it’s out now. The only thing that matters now are the things we love: Alan and Lex and Tim. John [Hammond], they’re out there where people are dying.” Alan Grant, however, must learn that lesson before the family unit is forged. His transformation parallels a comic evolutionary narrative where heroes succeed only through collaboration.     

The distance Grant must travel to gain this knowledge is illustrated by multiple scenes, in which he shows disdain for familial connections. In one scene early in the film, Grant even threatens violence when a child scoffs at a Velociraptor, calling it a “six-foot turkey.” Grant grabs the boy and demonstrates the raptor’s hunting prowess with a six-inch retractable razor-like claw, while telling him: “He slashes at you here… or here… or maybe across the belly, splitting your intestines. The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know, try to show a little respect.” By the end of Grant’s demonstration, the boy is nearly in tears, but Grant shows no remorse. That distaste for children continues when Hammond’s grandchildren arrive and are ushered into jeeps for the park tour. In an exchange with Sattler, Grant exclaims, “Kids! You want to have one of those?” and points toward Hammond’s grandchildren. And when Sattler says she thinks one of their offspring “could be intriguing,” Grant disagrees: “they’re noisy; they’re messy; they’re expensive…. They smell…. Some of them smell…. Babies smell!”

Grant’s attitude changes, however, when Nedry’s plan disables all electric barriers, leading to an attack on Grant, Gennaro, Malcolm, and the children, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello). While Malcolm is injured and Gennaro is dead, Grant saves the children, willing to sacrifice himself to do so. While they all huddle together in a tree waiting for dawn, for example, Grant seems to have been adopted into Lex and Tim’s family. Now seeing Grant as “Dad,” Lex nestles up next to him, and Tim tells him dinosaur jokes. When Lex asks Grant, “What if the dinosaur comes back when we’re all asleep?” Grant answers, “I’ll stay awake.” Lex is skeptical: “All night?” she asks, and Grant agrees, “All night.” Most importantly, he lets a claw like the raptor claw he’d used to threaten the boy at his dig fall to the ground, explicitly illustrating his change of attitude toward family. 

The next day, while Grant leads Lex and Tim over a fence and toward the safety of the visitors’ center, Ellie Sattler volunteers to turn the power back on manually when the system responds slowly to a “reboot,” so Grant and the children can climb the electrified fence without injury. They all succeed because of their community efforts. Sattler is able to turn on the power manually because Park Ranger Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) fends off raptors on the hunt. Tim is able to jump from the electrified fence because Lex and Grant cheer him on, and Grant catches Tim and revives him, so they can enter the park’s visitors’ center. Later Lex and Tim work together, as well, escaping from raptors hunting them in the park’s cafeteria. They escape into the kitchen and trap one raptor in a freezer before racing out to find Sattler and Grant. Once they are reunited, they all work together to survive. When Sattler cannot reboot the system to secure the doors and fences, Lex, a computer “hacker,” intervenes, rebooting the system and locking the raptors out of the control room. Lex’s hacking repairs the security system, and the phone rings to confirm her success. Ultimately, Sattler, Grant, Lex, and Tim become a family and, along with Malcolm and Hammond, escape the island by helicopter. The message of Jurassic Park is explicit here: By building community—adapting and accommodating—they have survived, so a comic evolutionary narrative can continue.