Jurassic Park

If I ever teach a class in screenwriting, I will assign Jurassic Park for the day we discuss “Theme.”

A studio executive once said to me “Well, Jurassic Park is all well and good, but you know, in the end it’s not really about character.” And I nodded sagely as if I understood what she said and thought “No, it’s about dinosaurs.”

All of Spielberg’s films are strong on Theme, but usually there’s a lot more plot and character and incident and shape to them, so we don’t think about it so much. A lot of that is pared back to minimal levels in Jurassic Park, leaving Theme and Action to dominate.

Luckily, both Theme and Action in Jurassic Park are done pretty darn freaking well.

What is the Theme of Jurassic Park? Well, it’s not a secret. The Theme of Jurassic Park is Nature Vs. Technology (for those of you playing along, the theme of Lost World is Hunters Vs. Gatherers).

Every scene, almost every beat of every scene, practically every line of dialogue hits this theme over and over again. Sam Neill touches a computer screen and it flickers. “What’d I do?” he exclaims. “You touched it,” says Laura Dern. It plays as a spontaneous exchange but it’s subtly reinforcing the theme.

Every time someone or something tries to contain life, life breaks through and, more likely than not, goes on a rampage, with much blood and gnashing of teeth. Other times, life is cornered and killed (or nearly) with technology, as when the little boy is caught on the electric fence and zapped within an inch of his life.

On the way to the park, the helicopter plunges straight down into a canyon, and we spend about a minute watching the actors jostle and buckle their seatbelts. Why is the scene there? It contains no dinosaurs and no real suspense. No, the scene is there for one moment, when Sam Neill can’t find his seat belt buckle and has to figure out a way to strap himself in. Life, as Jeff Goldblum notes later, finds a way.

Soon afterward, the gang are locked into an amusement park ride, and respond by breaking the ride and going off on their own. Sam Neill gets out of a moving car as Jeff Goldblum notes, shocked, “Who could have predicted that?”

Even tiny little things, like when Samuel L. Jackson sits down at Wayne Knight’s desk and says “Ugh! Look at this workstation!” as he brushes a week’s worth of candy wrappers and soda cans to the floor. Wayne Knight may be a computer genius, but he’s also still a big fat slob and he will pollute his environment. (of course, the same scene features a not-so-subtle closeup of a photo of Oppenheimer, who knew a thing or two about the hazards of harnessing nature.) And while Jackson is trying to make sense of Knight’s desk, Knight is off in his Jeep (technology), being overwhelmed by a thunderstorm (nature), wiping the fog (nature) off his glasses (technology), with his hi-tech dinosaur-egg (nature) smuggling maguffin (technology) in his pocket.

See? And every scene is like that. When the gang first arrives on Jurassic Park, a shiny new Jeep pulls up with a big shiny dinosaur logo on the side. At the end, a similar Jeep pulls up to the visitor’s center, but now the logo is splattered with mud. Nature has won this battle.

Of course, the dinosaurs themselves are products of hugely sophisticated technology themselves, and the movie is a triumph of technology on its own level too.

And I have silverfish in my screening room.