The opening draws the battle lines of the class warfare clearly: an obscenely wealthy British family, drinking champagne, reading the Financial Times and having their yacht crew prepare prawns for lunch, Spielberg does everything but put the father in a top hat and monocle. Family is, of course, key to Spielberg’s work, so the filthy-rich family picnicking on the shore of Isla Sorna must be an unhappy family, with a bored, distracted father and a worry-wart mother and a child who wishes only to break away from her parents’ suffocating world. As it happens, her instinct to wander from the family unit lands her in a nest of little dinosaurs, which incites the plot of The Lost World.

Spielberg puts a mock-shock-cut from the screaming mother to a yawning Ian Malcolm, who is our protagonist this time around. Ian, in contrast to the wealthy family on the beach, is scruffy and unkempt and schlepping through the subways of New York. After contrasting Ian with the wealthy family, in case we didn’t get the point Spielberg then contrasts him with another wealthy family, depositing Ian at the door of John Hammond’s sterile, baroque mansion. There, Ian meets Bad Guy Peter Ludlow, a capitalist so cold and heartless he makes the foolish John Hammond seem like a jolly bumbler in comparison. Ludlow has ruined Ian’s career, taken away his “rock-star” status, by painting him as a loon in the media, exercising his perogative as a capitalist to ruin the lives of those who get in his way. When Ian asks Peter what his uncle John thinks of his cruelty, Peter says that he does not answer to Hammond, he answers to the Ingen board. This lays out the argument of The Lost World perfectly: in this world, capitalism doesn’t just destroy worlds, it destroys families, emphasizing profit over blood.

(Ian is, by the way, I think, Spielberg’s first Jewish protagonist. Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford don’t count, they’re playing goyim. Ian is presented as an almost stereotypical New York Jew — uncomfortable in nature, dressed wrong for the work, intellectual, sardonic and cowardly. He’s practically Woody Allen, who, come to think of it, twenty years earlier, would have been great in the part. Of course, Spielberg was in the middle of casting Woody Allen in another action-adventure movie while shooting The Lost World, but that is, of course, another story.)

Ian goes to meet with John, who has lost control of his company to Peter. What follows is one of Spielberg’s better expository scenes. While cinematically unremarkable, the writing of this scene is full of humor, surprises and twists as the situation slowly is revealed to Ian, and anyone in the business of writing expository scenes for science-fiction thrillers would be wise to check it out. We learn, in it, that the attack of the little dinosaurs on the wealthy British girl has provoked a lawsuit against Ingen and brought a whole host of corporate problems to the foreground, and Hammond wants Ian to go to Isla Sorna to help document the dinosaurs there before word gets out and the public demands them to be destroyed. Another reversal from the first movie, where Hammond was the capitalist, now he is an environmentalist, and, as such, is powerless in the face of the imperatives of business. Ian, who barely made it off the island alive last time, is extremely reluctant to go study dinosaurs; Hammond must tell him that his girlfriend Sarah is already on the island, acting as a paleontological Dian Fossey, before Ian will be convinced to go.

Ian then reports to the staging ground of his expedition, where we meet his other two crew members, techie Eddie and video documentarian Nick. Eddie, short and bald, has “expendable” written all over him, while Nick, with his wily opportunism and leering boyishness, seems to be there to stand as a counterpart to Ian’s goofiness and, later, Sarah’s earnestness. Spielberg doesn’t want us to think that all environmentalists are stick-in-the-mud idealists.

Then there is Ian’s daughter Kelly, who poses an entirely different problem, or at least she did for audiences at the time. For some reason, people were angry and upset that Ian, who is played by Jeff Goldblum, should have a daughter who is black. Some people couldn’t get past the incongruity, others thought she was arbitrarily inserted into the narrative, others saw an affirmative-action agenda being pushed. To me, the choice was obvious and kind of inarguable. Ian Malcolm has a black daughter because Steven Spielberg has a black daughter.

And so Ian is, kind of out of the blue, a father, and, in the tradition of Spielberg fathers, an inattentive father. Again, Spielberg takes the accepted notion and stands it on its head: ordinarily, a Spielberg “bad father” is obsessed with work and can’t be bothered with family; here, the father is chastised for being to liberal, and responds by wanting to leave the kid at home in order to protect her from the dangers he knows are out in the world. Ian spends a lot of time in The Lost World trying to figure out what it means to be a good husband (or boyfriend anyway) and father, and the dinosaurs generously respond by providing their own behavior as examples. And I’m guessing Ian is a different kind of Spielberg father because Spielberg was, at the time, becoming a different kind of Spielberg father. Just as Oskar Schindler renounces his dreams of fortune and glory in order to become a good husband to his wife and a good father to his “children,” Ian seems to want to get out of the dinosaur business as quickly as possible to save his patchwork family. And Ian’s fretfulness about parenting echoes the larger argument of the movie. Who, the narrative asks, is a better “parent” for the world? If the dinosaurs represent “nature,” who is a better steward for them, a patchwork team of do-gooders or a well-organized army of expensively-outfitted capitalists?

Ian, Eddie and Nick arrive on the island and find Sarah photographing some Stegosauruses. Ian wants to grab her and get her the hell off the island, but here Spielberg stands yet another Spielbergism on its head — here, it’s Sarah who’s the one too obsessed with work to care about the feelings of her loved ones. Sarah doesn’t want to leave the island until she’s proven that dinosaurs are good parents, which reflects the movies larger concerns of who will be good parents for the dinosaurs. They come back to camp and find Kelly there; she has stowed away in order to be with her father. A family argument ensues between Kelly, Ian and Sarah, in the makeshift “home” of their trailer-science lab.

Their argument is interrupted by the beginning of Act II, which Spielberg announces with the arrival of the hunters. Bad Peter has brought his army of mercenaries to the Lost World, to trap and subdue the dinosaurs and take them back to San Diego to put in a zoo, to save his company and make his shareholders happy. The contrast between the gee-whiz attitudes of the scientists and the smash-and-grab tactics of the capitalists couldn’t be more sharply drawn.

We meet Roland, the big game hunter who wants only to kill a Tyrannosaurus, and Dieter, his second-in-command, who we know is going to get it because he’s played by the psycho from Fargo. Roland’s plan for bagging his T-Rex buck is to kidnap a T-Rex baby, cripple it, and leave it staked out in a clearing — again, an assault on the family from the forces of capitalism.

(Oddly enough, I was watching Syriana last night, another movie that draws an explicit connection between the forces of capitalism and the destruction of families. But I digress.)

Once Peter has rounded up his catch and got them into cages, he sets up a satellite link to broadcast a pitch meeting to the Ingen board, where he explains his Bad Guy Plot. His intent is to sell his board on the profit potential of caged dinosaurs, but the “Gatherers” team sneak in and perform a little hippie-style civil disobedience, freeing the giant reptiles and turning the pitch meeting into a disaster scene. Their actions free the dinosaurs, but set another series of problems into motion, as we will see.

Nick finds and frees the crippled T-Rex baby and takes it back to the Gatherers’ camp. This sets into motion what, up to this point, is the longest sustained suspense-action setpiece in the Spielberg canon, a rather incredible 20-minute sequence of rain, mud, dinosaurs and vehicles, a literal cliff-hanger that only slightly plays fast-and-loose with the laws of physics.

At the end of this sequence, the two teams, the Hunters and Gatherers, are brought together, united in their mutual predicament: they are lost in the lost world, facing the problems of parenthood in a house where the kids have outgrown the parents and the parents no longer have their tools of authority.

Again, my timecodes are keyed to the DVD’s format — so, starting with “side two” of the DVD…

13:00 -15:03: The final act of Schindler’s List, like the acts preceding it, begins with a roll call: another list of names, another recitation by Germans. The difference here is that where there was once a sea of faces, a panoply of “humanity,” now there are only a handful, and by this point we recognize almost everyone’s faces, and this roll call, instead of announcing the names of the doomed, is announcing the names of the saved (Act V of Schindler’s List is structured, in many ways, almost as a mirror of Act I, as we will see). There’s the kid in the cap, somehow alive after being rejected from the latrine during the last selektion, there’s the little girl in the glasses, now with her mother, there’s Helen Hirsch, and there’s even Goldberg, the “Bad Jew” from the ghetto who turned into a policeman when the going got rough. His inclusion on the list I find intriguing and hopeful: Spielberg seems to be saying that, in spite of his behavior, Goldberg, as a Jew in Cracow, is more sinned against than sinning, as it were, and thus deserves to be saved along with the people he betrayed. It’s a small moment but it keeps registering with me. The last boy named is a one we haven’t met before, a gawky, bespectacled kid named Edward Hillman, who bears a startling resemblance to a teenaged Spielberg: it seems he felt a need to include himself on the list of the saved.

15:03-17:00: Welcome to Brinnlitz! The trains out of Cracow arrive in Schindler’s home town — at least the trains carrying the men. The Nazi officer in charge of overseeing Schindler’s new factory is anxious to make a good impression with the millionaire industrialist, but let’s face it, he’s no Goth, he’s an ordertaker, and Schindler baffles him — another point where Act V reverses the actions of Act I, the Nazi officer tries to ingratiate himself with Schindler instead of the other way around.

17:00-30:13: The train carrying the women from Cracow arrives not in Brinnlitz but in Auschwitz. In a movie bristling with striking, powerful sequences of human suffering and evil, Spielberg here seeks to get to the kernel of the Holocaust, a look into the mouth of the beast. He puts the women of the story (the same ones who, an act or two earlier, were shown talking themselves out of the possibility of the existence of Auschwitz) through the most degrading and horrifying ordeal imaginable — and then, oddly, pulls his punch. Not that we want the women to all die, quite far from it. But the sequence, for all its power, and as unblinking as it is visually, for me somehow sits uncomfortably in the rest of the narrative. As we see the women stripped down, shaved and degraded, I can’t help but be reminded by Mamet’s comment that holocaust movies are a form of pornography, a fantasy of absolute power and absolute submission. If that notion is true, this sequence comes close to literalizing it, and, with its desire to show but not show, to take us to the edge of mass death and then back off, feels like a kind of a tease. Spielberg seems all too aware of the moral quandaries involved in making an entertainment about this kind of atrocity at all, and the viewer is implicated in that quandary several times in Schindler’s List: we want to see, we want to know, we want the experience, but at the same time the notion of consuming these kinds of images is, or should be, deeply troubling. Maybe that’s why Spielberg takes us all the way to the brink of the realityof the Holocaust but then spares us the ultimate truth — there are some places he simply can’t bring his camera to look. (Kubrick said that Schindler’s List isn’t a “holocaust movie”, because holocaust movies are about the six million Jews who died, and Schindler’s List is about the 1100 who lived, and the Auschwitz sequence boils that notion down to 13 minutes.)

(It’s my understanding that the Auschwitz sequence is not part of the historical record or the novel on which Schindler’s List is based. This does not affect my appreciation of the sequence, but it does raise questions about why it was included. It seems as though Spielberg, understanding that his would be considered some kind of “definitive” Holocaust movie, felt that it must include a glimpse of Auschwitz in order to feel comprehensive. This is also troubling, as it implies that a movie-going audience would walk out of the theater griping “What kind of a Holocaust movie was that? He didn’t even show us Auschwitz! What a rip!”)

In another inversion of a scene in Act I, Schindler, in his pursuit of getting the women freed from Auschwitz, goes to a Nazi officer and makes the same deal he made to Itzak Stern: in the coming months, “portable wealth” is the only kind that will mean anything. He bribes the officer with a pouch of diamonds, and officer dyspeptically admits that the trouble of clearing “his” Jews is largely one of troublesome paperwork.

30:13-31:36: The women and children, now rescued from Auschwitz, arrive in Brinnlitz. In a kind of echo to Goth’s Act II speech to his soldiers, Schindler lectures the Nazi guards as to what he considers proper behavior in his camp. The shoe is definitely on the other foot in Act V, and yet Schindler, still the good-time Charlie, follows his veiled threats with a welcome-basket of beer.

32:50-33:15: In yet another inversion, Schindler tracks down his wife and assures her of her place in his life. In his shedding of his identity as a businessman, he seems intent on acquring a new identity as a mensch.

33:15-34:40: Stern asks Schindler about the nature of this new business. Again, this is an inversion of Schindler’s Act I dealings with Stern: then, he was the grinning smoothie who understood nothing about running things and Stern was the man with all the secrets, now Stern is the confused accountant and Schindler is the man with the secret. Here, the secret is revealed: Schindler’s new business is designed not to make money but to shed it, and to shed it in great quantities. Stern worries that the plan might attract the attention of the authorities, which Schindler answers with yet more money — it seems like he won’t be happy until all his money is gone.

34:40-36:44: Schindler reminds Rabbi Levertov of his duties. The factory shuts down on a Friday sunset and sabbath is observed again. The candles used in the scene bloom into color, linking them to the candles of the title sequence, symbolizing the renewal of hope.

36:44-37:15: In a few brief minutes, and after an explanatory title card, Schindler’s impulse for Act V is fulfilled: he is broke, worse off than he was at the beginning of Act I.

37:15-38:00: Just in time, the war ends.

38:00-47:28: Schindler assembles the cast in his factory and delivers a speech, outlining the ironies of the current situation. Once a prosperous businessman, the end of the war has turned him into a war criminal. This is quite a bit worse than where he began his journey. A lot of people lose their patience with Schindler with this scene, with its grandstanding tone and sanctimony, and it bugged me for a while too, but now it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie. At the end of a long movie filled with intense conflicts and extensive degradation, Schindler here brings the story to a place of universal truths (and, not coincidentally, a place where Spielbergis very comfortable): the family. Schindler has worked to bring families back together, and he enjoins the Germans in the room to go back to their families as well, while they still posess shreds of their humanity.

Out in the railyard, Stern, the “good Jew”, Schindler’s Jiminy Cricket, gives him a ring, forged from the gold tooth of one of his workers (an echo of an Act III scene). The ring’s enscription reads “He who saves one life saves the world entire.” For years I thought this beat was simply too much, all we need, dramatically, is for Stern to approve of Schindler, to say, essentially, “That’ll do, pig,” it seemed a little over the top that Stern would present Schindler with a ring like a high-school quarterback after winning the big game. Then I found out that this is, apparently, exaclty what happened. So go figure.

In any case, Stern’s climactic approval of Schindler gives Schindler the exact opposite of comfort. Instead, the man who was once obsessed with making a fortune in business is reduced to a quivering mass of sorrow and regret as he realizes how much more he could have achieved by giving more away. His suit, his car, and finally that Nazi pin, the pin we first saw him put on in his introdutory scene in Act I, all could have been traded in for more lives. The “things vs lives” motif, developed from the beginning of the movie, is here focused down to a literal pinpoint.

47:28-end: Schindler, whom we met as he was getting dressed up in his nice suit to go impress the Nazis, we now leave as he sheds his suit and puts on the clothes of a prisoner. “His” Jews are left behind in the rail yard: why they don’t wait inside the factory I’m not sure. In any case, they are greeted, one morning soon after I suppose, by a Russian soldier come to “liberate” them. Their liberation is short-lived, as the Russian soldier (who, I’ve learned, was also a Jew) informs them that there’s no place in the area they are welcome.

Then comes the curtain call, which, I’m not ashamed to say, just floors me every time. I know it’s manipulative, I know it pushes the boundaries of taste, but something about seeing the movie’s cast members standing next to the people they’re playing as they file past Schindler’s grave just gets to me every time, brings the narrative into the “real world” in a way that I’ve rarely seen replicated (until, of course, Saving Private Ryan).

1:55:45-1:58:35 — Act IV of Schindler’s List begins with two oddly-placed, quiet little scenes.

First, we see Schindler at a party, where a Jewish woman and girl present him with a cake, apparently baked by Jewish prisoners at Plaszow (although the script doesn’t specify). He kisses the girl on the cheek and the woman on the lips, as the Germans in the room glare and the woman herself freezes in horror. So here, at the top of Act IV, Schindler, we see, is still a little clueless and still addicted to his passions: he kisses the Jewish woman in spite of the fact that he’s endangering her life by doing so. The scene works well enough as a character beat, but it’s real significance doesn’t get answered for another fifteen minutes or so.

Second, we see a group of Jewish women in a Plaszow barracks, gossiping about “what they’ve heard” about Auschwitz. This scene is a rough parallel to a similar scene at the top of Act II, where we see Jews amongst themselves instead of as in relation to Schindler. The scene in Act II gives us a glimpse of life inside the ghetto before it is liquidated; here, of course, there is a dark foreboding at work.

(Throughout Act IV the question keeps arising, who knows what about Auschwitz when? Goth seems to know so much about it that he’s sloppy about who he tells, which indicates that everyone in his circle knows about it. Schindler seems to know about it, or enough to know it’s a bad thing, but needs to find out that all his workers will be moved there before he is moved to act on their behalf.)

1:58:35 – 2:06: 44 — Act IV proper begins with the excruciating “Selektion” sequence. There is a “new shipment” of workers coming in to the camp, and Goth needs to winnow out the deadwood from Plaszow. He could be a manager at any large factory, faced with redundancy and needing to cut staff. The only difference is that instead of laying off redundant workers, he’s sending them off to Auschwitz to be murdered.

As with the previous three acts, this one begins with another roll call, another row of folding tables, another list of names. The “list of names” motif becomes a kind of incantation, each name a life. As we begin to associate names with faces the enormity of the tragedy begins to form in our minds.

As Nazi doctors inspect the teeth and muscles of the naked Jews on the camp assembly ground, another doctor examines Goth up on the back porch of his house. It’s as though Goth is saying “See? I have to undergo this process too, I’m no better than you.” Goth’s girlfriend, who was so appalled to see him shooting Jews from this same porch back in Act III, here comes out in her silk pajamas to adore Goth and his bloated, doughy physique. Later, Goth puts on a shirt (but not the rest of his uniform) to go oversee his workers work. At first it looks like he’s merely a stickler for details, but as his activities come into focus we realize that he’s separating the Schindler Jews from the ones doomed to Auschwitz. In his mind, he’s just upholding his end of his corrupt kickback scheme with Schindler — he doesn’t think any of these people are going to survive the war.

On the list of redundant workers are, apparently, all the children in the camp, and surely one of the most arresting sequences in this movie of arresting sequences is a kind of “liquidation in miniature” as we follow a boy in a cap, who we’ve only glimpsed before in Act I, as he tries to find a hiding place somewhere in the camp. As Spielberg indulges in a dependable emotional sucker-punch, mothers separated from their children, the boy tries to hide in a half-dozen places before finally ending up under a barracks latrine, chest-deep in human waste — only to find the space already occupied by a half-dozen other children, the “girl in glasses” among them. Like the scene with Levertov in the previous act, the “boy in the cap” sequence is so unbelievable that I’m inclined to believe it. The movie is asking us to believe that these escaped children ran from guards, hid, and then somehow escaped detection until they were able to get out of the camp? And yet, they do.

2:06:44-2:10:19 — Schindler stops by the camp, for reasons unrevealed, apparently to hang out with his Nazi pals while the redundant workers are loaded onto train cars bound for Auschwitz. He asks Goth to hose down the train cars, so that the Jews inside might have some water to drink on their way. Goth laughs at the suggestion but goes along with it, saying that Schindler is showing true cruelty by giving the doomed hope. In any case, we see here an incremental shift in Schindler’s attitude, and a desire to do something that will not directly benefit himself. (On the “Holocaust awareness” front, this scene indicates to me that Goth certainly knows at this point that the workers are doomed, and it almost indicates that Schindler knows.)

2:10:19-2:15:00 — The Gestapo arrest Schindler for kissing the Jewish girl at the top of the act. Goth, trying to protect Schindler in order to protect his kickbacks, defends Schindler as a free-range womanizer to the unsmiling Nazi officers in charge of the case. When that fails, he falls back on his standard argument: Jewish women are she-devils who lure good Germans with their evil magic. In the previous act, Schindler made the almost-fatal mistake of confusing his morality with Goth’s. Here, Goth returns the favor, presenting his own feelings about Jews as a defense for Schindler’s actions. This gets him into even more trouble, which he tries to get out of by bribing the official — again, bringing the whole narrative back to the level of “business.”

My DVD of Schindler’s List breaks the movie in two at this point, just as the Nazi official in charge of Schindler’s case informs him, in his euphemistic way, that exterminating Jews “is policy now.” Which is, I’m guessing, the first time Schindler has this eventuality made clear to him. In any case, my timecode, of necessity, starts over here.

0:00-2:30 — Next thing we know, Schindler is walking down the street and is disturbed to find ash falling down out of the sky. The war is pressing on, and the Nazis, feeling the pressure, have ordered Goth to exhume the bodies of the people he had killed during Act II and burned in a gigantic pyre. Goth handles this task the way a harried middle-manager would handle any cockamamie scheme dictated from above: he sighs and cavils and gets on with it as best he can.

The spectacle of the exhumation, and the emotional sucker-punch of Schindler noticing the dead body of the “girl in the red coat”, are both so strong that it’s easy to miss the expository point to the scene: the Nazis are shutting down Plaszow and shipping all the Jews to Auschwitz. To Schindler this means that his factory is shutting down again, to Goth it means that the gravy train he shares with Schindler is pulling out of the station without him. “The party’s over, Oskar,” sighs Goth, “They’re shutting us down.”

2:30-4:40 — Schindler goes to Stern, in another parallel to their Act I meeting, to dissolve the business and discuss further plans. Schindler has decided to quit while he’s ahead and take his money back to Germany. Stern asks him about the business, and Schindler, paraphrasing Scrooge, tells him “You were my business.” If that’s the case, it seems to only be occurring to Schindler now — it was only an act ago that Schindler was outraged that Stern was smuggling invalids into the factory. This admission seems to be enough for Stern, who finally acquiesces to his offer of a drink. Stern approves of Schindler now, so we do too.

4:40-5:54 — Schindler, at this point, could take his war-profiteering millions and head for the hills, but the next thing we see is him in his luxury apartment (the one commandeered from the Jewish family on the day of the liquidation) with his naked mistress-of-the-day asleep in his bed, packed and ready to go, his trunks full of Reichmarks filling the dining room. Looking around at all this (and with Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” playing on the radio) Schindler comes to a decision.

5:54-7:20 — Schindler goes to Goth, in a parallel to a scene from Act III, to set up another business venture. He’s going to open a munitions factory in Czechoslovakia, and he’s going to buy “his” workers from Goth to staff it. Goth can’t wrap his head around the idea: he can’t see the profit in the situation.

7:20-11:30 — In the movie’s signature scene, Schindler and Stern compose “the list” of names of the Jews who will be removed from Plaszow and taken to Czechoslovakia (intercut with scenes of Schindler trying, and failing, to persuade other industrialists to do likewise). The weight of all those earlier roll-call scenes is brought to bear upon this one. It is both a clever “reversal” of those scenes (roll is called in the earlier scenes to find who will die, here it is called to find who will live) and a distillation of the movie’s theme: business vs. lives. Schindler is taking all the money he made through his business and exchanging it for lives, just as, in Act III, he exchanged things for lives. Stern focuses the theme down to a pinpoint at the end of the sequence: holding up the papers like Moses holding the tablets, he says “The list is life.”

(And again, there is a meta-quality to this sequence as well. For, just as Schindler is, late in his career, forfeiting his wealth, in a crisis of conscience, to “save Jews,” Spielberg could be seen as doing the same. He could go on making Jaws and Jurassic Park for the rest of his career, but he has chosen, after 20 years in movies, to risk it all on a desperately un-commercial project, shot in a hugely un-commercial manner. To “save Jews”? Perhaps, but more likely to save his own soul as an artist. The fact that Schindler’s List went on to become a huge moneymaker obviously gnawed at Spielberg: it’s one thing to create a searing vision of the Holocaust, it’s another thing entirely to have that vision make a ton of money.)

11:30-13:00 — Schindler takes a suitcase full of money to bribe Goth to transport his workers to Czechoslovakia, and plays him a hand of 21 to get Helen away from him as well. (Goth, in what surely must be his weakest moment, anemically protests against Schindler taking Helen, and spins a fantasy of taking her “back home to Vienna” to grow old with him, a fantasy so absurd that he seems to recognize it for what it is the moment it leaves his lips.)

Act III of Schindler’s List, I find, is a little more difficult to define than the first two acts. It’s a transitional act and has a lot more on its mind. The main thrust of the act is to show how, in this new war-time economy, “things” can be used to barter in exchange for “lives”. Spielberg takes a substantial amount of screen-time to get this idea across visually instead of just having someone tell us about it. In addition, the act burrows deep into the mind of Goth, to see if perhaps there is any humanity there. One could even say that Schindler’s List spends more time trying to save Goth than it does trying to save any other individual — a salvation Goth considers and then refuses.

1:13:41-1:17:14 — Act III opens with Goth on his balcony on a fine sunny morning, shirtless, watching over his labor camp. Schindler’s business may have just failed, but Goth’s is off to a swell start and he’s feeling his oats. Everyone we “know” is lined up for roll call — another roll call, another list of names. Spielberg begins each act of Schindler’s List with a scene like this, as though re-introducing us to the cast, catching us up on who’s alive and who is not, reciting their names over and over.

Goth, anxious to make his authority clear, decides to shoot a few workers from his balcony. This wakes up the blond in his bed, who is appalled at his behavior. It becomes clear that, for Goth, the gun is a penis substitute — when he’s finished shooting Jews, he goes into the bedroom and “discharges his shell” onto the blond’s naked breasts, then goes to urinate in the bathroom.

1:17:14-1:21:30 — Schindler comes to Plaszow to re-close the deal. He meets with some of his Nazi friends. Helen Hirsch, who will figure significantly in the act, is there serving. Schindler, livid about his business closing, nevertheless plays politics and jokes with the Nazis — they are his clients, after all, there’s no point in making them angry.

Once he gets alone with Goth, however, Schindler’s true feelings come out. In a parallel scene to one in Act I with Stern, Schindler cuts a deal with Goth to re-start his business. Instead of cajoling Stern, however, here he schools Goth, insisting that his business concerns trump whatever Goth’s objectives are in Krakow.

(Which raises the question: what are Goth’s objectives in Krakow? Yes, he’s a Nazi, we know that — but what does Goth want? Because Goth has the burden of standing in for “all Nazis”, the temptation is to say that Goth wants “to kill all the Jews.” Which is an over-simplification. Which is not to say that Goth does not want “to kill all the Jews,” but only to say that that is not his stated objective in Krakow. Goth’s stated objective is to run his work camp efficiently and thus gain favor from his superiors. His murder of random workers is, in his mind anyway, subservient to his goal of running his work camp efficiently. Plaszow was certainly a horrible place, but it was not a death camp — extermination was someone else’s job.)

(Of course, in practice Goth’s objective is to use his position of power, as camp commander, to terrify and kill — a psychological goal unrelated to gaining promotion.  One of Schindler’s blunders is to confuse Goth’s stated objective with his real objective, to confuse a monster with a human being.)

Schindler demands his workers back from Goth. Is he concerned for them personally, or is he primarily concerned about profit? I would say that profit is still his primary goal here. Polish workers, we have learned, cost more than Jewish workers (probably more so, now that Jewish workers don’t exist in Krakow anymore). Plus, if he re-staffed his factory he’d have to re-train everyone and incur all the start-up costs associated with that. The first half of Schindler’s List takes great care to show that Schindler isn’t some kind of Jew-lover — if anything, it repeatedly shows him to be a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist who treats everyone equally — that is, in terms of how they can benefit his agenda. He goes to the Krakow ghetto looking for investors in Act I because he knows that these people are in a bind and will be looking to turn their currency into things, not because he loves Jews or hates them. (And, as we shall see, he will soon be the one turning things into lives.)

Goth agrees to let Schindler have his workers back — at a price, the price being regular kickbacks and gratuities. Goth, we see, is not just a black-hearted Jew-hating Nazi: he’s also a corrupt businessman. Goth’s corruption slid right by me in my first few viewings of Schindler’s List, but it makes perfect sense when you view the character as a reflection of Schindler — they’re both pragmatic businessmen who owe their very careers to wartime excess, running factories, only with different attitudes toward their workers.

1:21:30-1:23:04 – The workers come back to work at Schindler’s enamelware factory and he is back in business. The difference is, Stern now cooks the books for Goth instead of for Schindler — Schindler is, if I understand the situation correctly, re-defining his position as a contractor by sub-contracting under Goth’s command. The enamelware factory is now Goth’s, and Goth is letting Schindler keep some (most, actually) of the profits.

1:23:04-1:26:10 – There’s a big party at Goth’s house — to celebrate Goth’s new deal with Schindler? Schindler is there, drinking and womanizing right alongside Goth. He takes time to go talk to Stern, as Stern will not be allowed back to the enamelware factory. Stern tries to tell Schindler all the things he needs to attend to in order to keep the business running smoothly, but Schindler can’t keep it all straight. “It gives me a headache!” he whines — Schindler’s unwillingness to master a few business concepts (like “bookkeeping”) take precedence over Stern’s predicament — if the business goes poorly, Schindler may have to go back to Germany but Stern will most likely be executed. Nevertheless, Schindler is developing a soft spot for Stern in his situation and gives him some delicacies from the party — delicacies Stern most likely created the capital to Schindler to buy them with. Stern, noting the change in Schindler’s attitude, almost thanks him for the gesture.

(Don’t forget, Stern is our “moral compass” for the movie — until Stern approves of Schindler, we cannot approve of him either.)

1:26:10-1:38:30 — This middle chunk of the act is all about setting up the notion of trading things for lives. It’s a series of short stories, really, telling us an anecdote about one worker, then another, then another, and then showing how that worker gained a position, through Stern, at Schindler’s factory.

The first story we see is about Levertov. Levertov works in the metalworks at Plaszow, and Goth, looking to make some labor cuts, picks a gripe with Levertov’s output. He drags him out back (with a trainyard looming ominously in the background) and tries to shoot him in the head. His gun will not fire, and the guns of his underlings refuse to fire as well. (Goth, of course, has no legitimate complaint against Levertov — he’s addicted to murdering people and he’s been put in a position where he may do so freely, and so he will find any excuse he can in order to do so. Ifan excuse does not exist, he will make one up. If one cannot be made up, he’ll do it anyway.) The sudden dysfunctional-gun epidemic is played as a kind of dark comedy, and plays up Goth’s impotence. It’s one thing if Goth must use a gun to take the place of his penis, but how doubly frustrating it must be for him to not be able to shoot a gun as well. The scene is so patently absurd that I have to assume that it actually happened.

The next thing we know, Schindler delivers a plush new saddle to Goth as a kickback and gives a valuable lighter to Stern. Stern gives the lighter to Goldberg (the “bad Jew” from Act I), Goldberg puts Levertov’s name on “the good list” and Levertov is transferred to Schindler’s factory.

The next story is about the boy we saw in Act II, protecting the girl in glasses during the liquidation sequence (the boy who knows how to put them in “the good line”). A chicken has been stolen, and Goth shoots a man at random, threatening to keep shooting until someone confesses. The boy steps forward and tearfully confesses that the dead man is, in fact, the one who stole the chicken. For this act of bravery/chutzpah, Schindler gives Stern a cigarette case, the cigarette case goes to Goldberg, and Goldberg puts the boy on the rolls of Schindler’s factory.

The third story, which is a little more complicated, involves a woman who got out of the ghetto before liquidation and has been hiding in the suburbs of Krakow. Her parents are in Plaszow and she wants them to be transferred to Schindler’s factory. She comes to see Schindler at his factory, and Schindler refuses to see her. She comes back again done up as a slut, and gains admittance. She pleads her case to Schindler, telling him that she’s heard that no one dies in his factory. Schindler is appalled by this news — while it’s true that he doesn’t murder workers at random, he apparently has no idea that he’s being played by Stern as a Jew-lover. Either that, or he’s aware he’s being played to some extent but he’s concerned that the woman is a German spy being sent to entrap him.

In either case, Schindler goes to Stern and explodes. He’s livid that Stern has put him in such an uncomfortable position, and even tells him that he needs to look at the situation from Goth’s point of view. Schindler, apparently, at this mid-way point of the movie, still sees Goth as a not-that-bad variation on himself — he doesn’t see that Goth is a sociopath who’s been let off the leash by a fiat of history, he sees him as an essentially good man who’s been put into a difficult situation. In any case, he gives his watch to Stern, who gives it to Goldberg, and the woman’s parents are sent to Schindler’s factory.

Schindler, in this trio of sequences, has made an incremental change in his outlook. He seems to think now that, at some level, he is responsible for the lives of his workers. Those lives, he sees, can be exchanged for things, if one is willing to work within the corrupt system that controls the whole situation.

1:38:30-1:55:45 – This final chunk of the act has two objectives — to tell the story of Helen Hirsch, the woman Goth has selected to be his housekeeper, and to give Goth a “last chance” to redeem himself. It begins and ends in Goth’s basement, with mirrored scenes of Schindler and his nemesis Goth interrogating Helen, and has a little mini-movie in the middle concerning Schindler’s attempt to rehabilitate Goth.

During yet another party at Goth’s, Schindler comes down to the basement to chat up Helen. At first we think he’s merely trying to get a leg over, but it seems that Schindler is turning over a new leaf — he’s become interested in people as people and he asks Helen to tell him her story. Once she does so, Schindler gives her a kind of benediction. This, to me, looks like Schindler’s on his own little power trip; he’s discovered that he, like Goth, has acquired the power of life and death, but he has decided to use his power for good and not evil.

His conversation with Helen leads him to go talk to Goth about the nature of the power they both share. He tries, in his best Qui-gon style, to bring Goth over to the light side and Goth, in a totally wasted state, seems willing to give it a try. He doesn’t kill his houseboy when he leaves the expensive saddle lying on the ground, he shrugs off the offense of a shirking worker, and he almost lets his houseboy off the hook when he uses the wrong cleaner in his bathtub. Then, upon reflection (literally — Goth makes the decision while looking in a mirror), Goth decides that mercy doesn’t really suit him and murders the houseboy.

Then, as though Goth has suspected all along that this narrative digression began with Helen, he storms down to the basement and confronts her. Goth’s problem with Helen, of course, is that he wants to screw her — for all we know, he’s in love with her, whatever that means to him. He can’t screw her because it goes against everything he stands for as a Nazi. Instead, he interrogates her, supplying all her answers for her, in a bizarre, self-serving monologue that reveals nothing of Helen but tunnels deep into his own brain, showing the tortured mental convolutions he must undergo in order to justify his true objective, the murder of innocent people.

This dark, psycho-sexual nightmare is intercut against a wholesome wedding scene in one of the Jewish barracks, and also a scene of Schindler enjoying “the good life” out in a nightclub. Schindler, it seems, even past the half-way point of the narrative, is trying to maintain a sense of order. While his workers run the risk of a bullet to the head on their way to work, Schindler has no trouble treating himself to a night of wine and song.

0:00-1:37 — An unidentified Jewish family in an unidentified kitchen sings as sabbath candles burn on the table. As the candles burn down, the color drains from the picture until the candle flames are the only color left. The impression is that the sequence begins in the present and then, as the candles die, we head further back into the past. When the flames die, the color is removed completely.

1:37-3:25 — The smoke from the extinguished candles cuts to the smoke billowing out of a locomotive’s smokestack as a train pulls into the station in Krakow. Obviously, smoke and trains will figure significantly in narrative to follow. The action of the scene is that Jews, forced by the Germans after the fall of Poland to re-locate to cities, are arriving in Krakow by the thousands to register with the German officials. The dramatization of the moment is a series of shots of Jews, liningup at folding tables, to recite their names for the German clerks, who type them up into lists. Smoke, trains, lines of Jews at folding tables in open spaces, Germans keeping careful track of the Jews’ names (“Name?” is actually the first line of dialog in the movie), and the list of names itself — all these motifs will be repeated in evolving contexts throughout the movie and they’re all here in the first scene.

The narrative of Schindler’s List is told mostly from Schindler’s point of view. It’s his gradual change from businessman to samaritan that the movie is concerned with. Therefore, the “plight of the Jews” in these early scenes is given relatively little importance. It is, dramatically speaking, “the weather,” the situation the protagonist is entering into. That is, Spielberg pares the information back to all we absolutely need to know to understand the protagonist’s pursuit. We don’t need to see Claudius plotting to kill Hamlet’s father, we only need to know that Hamlet is pissed off that his father is dead.

3:25-4:28 — A man gets ready for a night on the town. We see him select his tie, loot his wardrobe for spare cash, and pin his Nazi Party pin to his lapel.

4:28-5:17 — The man enters a nightclub. He heavily tips the maitre-d for a good table. The man, like Spielberg, is a manipulator of image — he wants to frame himself a certain way, present a certain impression.

5:17- 10:15 — The man scans the nightclub, looking resplendent and predatory. What is his prey? Well, here comes a comely blond lass. The man takes a drag on his cigarette (smoke again) and stares lustfully at the woman as she passes. And while we will soon find out that the man is a notorious womanizer, Spielberg here pulls a typically Spielbergian stunt — he “stands the idea on its head” and makes it that the man is not staring at the woman at all, he’s staring at the Nazi she walked in with. He didn’t come to this nightclub to seduce women but to seduce Nazis.

(Spielberg’s friend Brian DePalma put it thus in Scarface: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.”)

And so the man, who is eventually identified as Oskar Schindler, pursues his agenda of “buying the friendship of local Nazis.” He watches each influential officer, notes his predilections, and caters to them, providing women, wine and song and receiving their patronage in return.

But of course we don’t know that yet.

Now think about this sequence for a moment. Here’s what is not shown: Oskar Schindler at home in Germany, bursts in the door and says to his wife “Honey, I’ve got a great idea! You know that old enamelware factory in Krakow? Well, now that the Nazis have conquered Poland, I have a unique opportunity to buy that factory and make mess kits for the German army. We’ll be rich! Rich, I tell you!” And Mrs. Schindler says “But Oskar, however will you do it? We don’t have that kind of money.” And Schindler says “It’s wartime, babe, all the rules go out the window in wartime.” And Mrs. Schindler says “I don’t know, Oskar, it sounds mighty risky.” And Schindler says “Aw babe, don’t you get it, this is my big chance, I can finally make something of myself and impress your father.” And Mrs. Schindler says “Oh Oskar, you know I can’t resist you when you have some crazy, pie-in-the-sky moneymaking scheme. Just promise me that when you’re in Krakow, no running around with the local ladies, okay?” And Schindler saying “I love you, Mrs. Schindler. Kiss me.”

That scene would be in any other bio-pic, mostly because for most movies, there’s always someone at the beginning of the movie-making process who says “But we don’t know what the protagonist wants, we need his big ‘I want’ scene so we can root for him.” But as we’ve seen with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, the fact that the characters simply pursue their goals without explaining themselves is always much more dramatically interesting.

(That, and, of course, Spielberg doesn’t want us to “root” for Schindler exactly, not at this point of the narrative anyway.)

As Schindler discusses wine with the nightclub’s sommelier, we hear a couple of Nazis griping about the matter of governing Poland. This subtle, background exchange is the thin edge of a wedge that will become more prominent later: that for the Nazis of Schindler’s List, their activities are, essentially, “just business.” The Nazi officers in Schindler’s List talk about their occupation of Krakow and their treatment of the Jews primarily in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, rarely in terms of hatred. (The hatred gets revealed in other ways, as we will see.)

10:15-14:45 — Spielberg cuts from Schindler leading the Nazis in a cabaret sing-along to German soldiers in the city singing a martial song. We get a little more “weather” as we see Germans harassing Jews as Schindler walks through the streets.

(There are those who complain that Schindler’s List does Jews a disservice by making them minor characters in the movie. And it’s true that the movie largely centers on Schindler’s story and tends to tell the story of “the Jews” as just that — a relatively undifferentiated mass of humanity, and helpless without a powerful, sympathetic friend to “save” them. What I see is Spielberg approaching the Holocaust the same way he approaches any other subject: by asking “how do we stand the idea on its head?” In this case, he’s decided to make a “Holocaust movie” about a German businessman who’s just trying to make a little money off the war. His impulse is the same for Schindler’s List as it is for Close Encounters or Hook: “how do I make people see this story in a way they’ve never seen it before?” And in that regard, the commercial returns of Schindler’s List speak for themselves.)

We still don’t yet know what Schindler’s game is. He enters the Judenrat, a kind of Jewish community center, where relocated Jews can air their grievances and sort out legal problems. Hundreds of Jews are lined up to get into the Judenrat, in a line that stretches down the block, but Schindler, a German and a badge-wearing member of the Nazi Party, strides to the front of the line and heads inside.

The small glimpses of life on the streets of Krakow and inside the Judenrat give real weight and perspective to the scene that follows. It’s hard for us to imagine an entire population uprooted at the whim of an invading army and forced to relocate, and Spielberg imagines the practical scenes of daily life of this situation with a detail and precision he hasn’t reached since the community scenes of Jaws and Close Encounters.

Schindler has come to the Judenrat to find an accountant named Itzak Stern. Why Stern we are not told, apparently Schindler got his name from someone as someone who can get things done in the Krakow Jewish community.

Stern is presented as a, well, stern, solemn, “pure” man. (His first line of dialog is “I am.”) He functions as a kind of Jiminy Cricket to Schindler’s Pinocchio. As Schindler outlines his business scheme to Stern, Stern can barely contain his disapproval of Schindler and everything he represents. The drama of Schindler’s List largely hinges on Stern’s gradual approval of, friendship with, and eventual lionization of Schindler. This drama is characterized chiefly by Sterns unwillingness to share a drink with Schindler, and this scene is the first to bring up this motif.

In what I consider a pretty incredible scene, Schindler presents his scheme, which comes down to: I have the contacts, you know how to run a business and you know investors, lets all get rich off this crazy war thing. If Schindler is aware of the implications of the Nazi occupation of Krakow, he doesn’t show it. His attitude seems to be, this is the situation, we can suffer from it or we can profit from it — I, being a German member of the Nazi party, stand to profit from it much more greatly than you, but that’s the way things are, you want in or not?

The capitalist imperative is presented as purely amoral in the least perjorative sense of the word — what does it matter what the situation is, as long as we can make some money off it? Schindler will get his money, the Germans will get field kits, the Jewish investors will be able to trade pots and pans on the black market, “everybody’s happy,” it’s a win-win situation. Schindler, at this point in the narrative, is not a “bad” man, not an anti-semite, merely an opportunist. It’s his opportunism that suggested he join the Nazi party, it’s his opportunism that allows him to pursue his scheme of opening an enamelware factory in Krakow when he has virtually no capital, later it will be the same opportunism that will allow him to hire Jews instead of Poles to work at the factory.

14:55-17:32 — Jewish black-marketeers gather in the local Catholic church to conduct their business. We meet Pfefferberg and Goldberg, who will enter into the narrative later on as a kind of “Good Jew/Bad Jew” team — Pfefferberg will prefer to retain his honor and live as a prisoner, whereas Goldberg will gladly turn policeman for its opportunities for graft and kickbacks.

For a moment, it looks like the narrative is branching off into a new direction, but we’re with Pfefferberg and Goldberg for only a couple of minutes before Schindler enters the scene. He’s been at the church the whole time, apparently, scoping out the joint, looking for Jews exactly like Pfefferberg to acquire luxury goods on the black market — he needs “good things” to present to his Nazi contacts, to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy and get him his enamelware factory.

17:32-21:53 — The Jews enter the Krakow ghetto. As the mass of humanity flows through the streets, Spielberg takes care to show us a few faces that will become important later. He casts a boy with a winsome face and a little girl with round, horn-rim spectacles, knowing that we’ll remember those details and follow along with their stories. There is another scene of Jews standing in line to talk to Germans with clipboards sitting at folding tables in an open-air space, and another recital of names. Goldberg is now a policeman, Pfefferberg and his fiancee sneer and make fun of him.

We pay close attention to a wealthy Jewish family being uprooted from their luxury digs and herded into the street by Nazi soldiers. Why this family? Spielberg keeps us waiting for the answer. The father of the family, a framed picture under one arm, pries the mezzuzza off his front door and heads out to join the parade of Jews headed for the ghetto. No sooner are the family led away and pelted with mud by Polish onlookers then Schindler pulls up in his car and is squired about the apartment by a Nazi officer. So Spielberg does take moments to tell us of what’s happening to “the Jews” but he doesn’t want the story to get away from him — he makes sure that everyone he shows has a direct relation to his protagonist. He cuts between the wealthy Jewish family entering the deplorable conditions of the ghetto and Schindler relaxing, pleased as punch with his swanky new digs. Again, if Schindler understands that he’s taking over an apartment which was, only moments earlier, the property of someone else, he doesn’t show it — it’s all just more good stuff for the opportunist.

21:53-23:37 — The Jews have all moved into the ghetto. Stern introduces Schindler to the investors he knows. Again, it’s a scene about business — the investors try to negotiate with Schindler, but Schindler knows he’s got the upper hand and refuses to cave. Again, he’s not an anti-semite, he’s just pursuing his goal of making a ton of money and the local situation puts his business partners at a disadvantage. This scene also features Schindler’s second attempt to get Stern to share a drink with him.

23:37-24:30 — The capital secured, the enamelware factory starts production. Schindler hires Jews from the ghetto not because he intends to “save” them, but because they cost him less money (and he pays them through the Nazi bureaucracy, which benefits his business). They are, literally, “worth less.” Money and life present themselves in stark terms when one can literally say that one kind of person is worth less than another kind, and Schindler, the opportunist, is happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom.

24:30-29:00 — Stern, now in place to run Schindler’s enamelware factory, canvases the ghetto looking for likely prospects. As the Jews are being sorted into categories by the Nazis (so many scenes of sorting people out in this movie) Stern sees that everyone who isn’t working at the factory is in danger of being put on the wrong list and pulls a number of ruses and schemes to get teachers and historians and musicians jobs at the factory. This is one of the few times we leave Schindler to see what Stern is doing behind his back, and we see that Stern is something of a canny opportunist himself — he’s hiring friends and aesthetes for jobs in a metalworking plant.

29:00-30:45 — We get a moment of character development and comic relief as Schindler auditions women to be his secretary. He plays close attention to the pretty young things who hunt and peck their way through the typing test and sits bored as a middle-aged batte-axe efficiently chugs along, easily besting them. So we also learn that Schindler has an eye for the ladies and is, in fact, a thoroughly shallow man, his knowledge of French wines and cognac notwithstanding. At the end of the brief sequence, Stern tells Schindler “you have to choose.” He’s talking about picking a secretary, but, as with many things Stern says to Schindler, the line carries a double meaning. You can’t, he implies, sit on the fence through this war, making your money and chuckling at your cleverness, you have to pick a side. Schindler, however, is still an opportunist and decides to hire all the auditioners — except, of course, the battle-axe.

30:45-33:00 — Schindler promotes his newly-opened enamelware factory. He’s almost to his goal — he’s made the contacts, raised the capital and staffed his factory, now he just needs to close the deal and get his lucrative army contracts. This he accomplishes by throwing banquets for his Nazi friends and sending baskets of luxury food items to all the officers we saw earlier in the nightclub sequence. The sequence ends with a series of shots of Nazi hands placing their official stamps on Schindler’s contracts — the bureaucracy again, the “business” of the Nazis showing its hand.

His goal achieved, there is a brief scene where Schindler calls Stern to his office and makes a third attempt to get him to drink with him. This time, Stern lifts the glass (on command) but still refuses to drink. Schindler’s moment of self-congratulation is soured and Schindler brusquely throws Stern out of his office. You can see that Stern is gettng to Schindler, you can see Schindler thinking “Christ, what is it with this guy? I give him a job, I give all his friends jobs, I make his rich friends’ lives easier, what does he want from me?” This question ends the act and points the way forward for the narrative.

Act III begins at 1:00:00 on the dot with, as I’ve noted before, a perfect ten-minute action-suspense set-piece, easily as good as the opening of Raiders in its construction and execution. The orchestration of the mayhem in this sequence could not be improved, and Spielberg is so sure-handed in his work that he even foregos musical accompaniment.

The set piece is, of course, deeply thematic in its plot-points. The T-Rex escapes from its high-tech paddock because the power is off, the lawyer flees one piece of technology (the car) and scampers across the jungle to another piece of technology (the rest room), neither of which succeed in saving him. (Life, in this case a twenty-foot lizard, “finds a way” to devour him.) In the lawyer’s pursuit of survival, he abandons Hammond’s grandchildren, which forces Alan into the position of reluctant caregiver. The children are trapped inside their piece of technology, forcing Alan to abandon his, Ian uses yet another piece of technology (a flare) to lure the T-Rex away from Alan and the kids. The T-Rex, shoving the car around on the roadway, forces Alan and the kids over the retaining wall — the humans are now in the zoo, the beast is now free.

This set-piece is followed immediately by another, Dennis’s death at the hands of the dilophasaurus. Again, we’ve got a man (life), who’s got a bunch of embryos (life) smuggled in a high-tech can of shaving cream (technology) using technology (a jeep) to get through the jungle (life) during a storm (nature), his glasses (technology) fogging (due to the heat coming off his body in his excited state), causing him to crash, which leads to him using his winch (technology) wrapped around a tree (life) to try to get him out of his situation, all of which is interrupted by the dilophasaurus (life), who spits in Dennis’s eyes, which is his vulnerable spot due to him losing his glasses (technology failing again), which paralyzes him, allowing the dilophasaurus to eat Dennis inside his car. Dennis’s escape craft becomes his tomb, and his can of shaving cream tumbles into the mud, swallowed up, seemingly, by nature.

As if to make up for lost time, we then have a third wonderful action-suspense set-piece, involving a car (technology) in a tree (life), endangering the life of a boy who Alan promised to not abandon. These scenes are, obviously, where Spielberg lives, and they serve the plot (escape the dinosaurs!), the theme (life finds a way) and the character (Alan must protect the children) all at once.

Had enough? The movie isn’t ready to slow down yet. After the car in the tree, there is a fourth masterful action-suspense scene as Ellie and Muldoon show up at the T-Rex paddock looking for their friends and find only Ian and the remains of the lawyer, then are forced to high-tail it out of there with a T-Rex chasing them.

Finally, after 21 minutes of non-stop thrills, the movie is ready to slow down a little, as Alan gets the kids safely up into another tree. A sense of wonder returns as the A-team beholds a herd of brachiosaurs, and yet Alan is clearly through with his dinosaur obsession. When the kids cling to him for comfort, he feels, literally, a pain in his ass, which turns out to be the raptor claw he previously used to ruin a child’s day. Trading childcare for obsession, he tosses the claw out of the tree.

At 1:24:00, we have the end-of-Act-III-low-point, as Ellie sits down with Hammond in the designed-to-look-like-nature restaurant at HQ. Hammond has — horrors — a “death of my kitten” speech, wherein he tells a story about his early days as a young charlatan. Ellie picks up his story and, presto, turns it around to suggest that, for all Hammond’s new sophistication, he’s still a charlatan for thinking he could control nature. The act, and the narrative, is then honed to a point when it is announced that getting the children back safely is “the only thing that matters now.” Because “ideas” about science and technology and nature and morality are all well and good, but movies thrive on plot and motion. You can’t really make a movie about an idea — you can write a novel about an idea, and you can even have a play about an idea, but a movie needs a plot with a physically obtainable goal. And “get the children back home safe” is about as basic and compelling as that sort of thing gets.

Act IV begins with a quiet beat as the sun comes up and Alan and the kids are visited by a brachiosaur. Alan, still, cannot help but be in awe of these magnificent creatures, even though they are, literally, sick of this island.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the plot for the first half of the act is announced: “let’s shut down the system,” so that we might then re-start it and save the children. This applies to the immediate physical situation and, I suppose, to the larger metaphor at work, ie: “the system” the establishment has at present is flawed, and we must “shut it down” and re-start it, in an uncorrupted state, in order to preserve the future.

America’s greatest actor Samuel L. Jackson then steps forward for his time in the limelight of Jurassic Park, to deliver what has to be the most opaquely expository speech in a movie full of opaque expository speeches, as he explains: THE LYSINE CONTINGENCY (so sad that Robert Ludlam did not think to use that for a title). Jackson delivers the speech beautifully, but I, for the life of me, cannot figure out what THE LYSINE CONTINGENCY has to do with the plot of the movie, ie “getting the children back home safe.” Dramatically, it highlights Hammond’s affection for the dinosaurs, which he considers his “children” almost as much as his biological grandchildren, but Jackson, unless I am mistaken, is talking about a plan that would kill off the dinosaurs eventually, not right now, so I’m still mystified as to why it’s in the movie, much less why it’s shot and acted with such skill.

Out in the field, Alan and the kids encounter a T-Rex again, but this time the T-Rex has other things on its mind. This time, Alan and the kids are merely witnesses to the glory and terror of nature, as they realize that, if anyone, they are the ones who don’t belong here. All this works to emphasize that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are not monsters or even villains, they are animals with their own agendas, unpredictable but not unknowable.

There then follows a masterful suspense sequence as Hammond and Ian guide Ellie and Muldoon through the steps of re-booting the power as Alan and the kids negotiate atall electrified fence. Spielberg, again, keeps almost every aspect of this sequence soaking in theme as he wrings every conceivable drop of suspense from the situation, adding typically Spielbergian touches of grim humor to punctuate the tension.

The power comes back on, Muldoon gets eaten, and the second half of Act IV begins. Now everybody is back at home base and the only objective is “let’s get out of here.” Alan and Ellie go off to figure out how to do that while the kids get attacked by velociraptors in the kitchen, the sixth masterful sequence in the movie.

At 1:53:00 everyone meets up in the control room as the velociraptors attack. The movie’s only real eye-rolling moment comes as Hammond’s pre-teen granddaughter easily decodes Nedry’s so-fiendishly-complex-system-that-only-he-can-understand-it system while dinosaurs attack, not six feet away. This moment, thankfully, gives way to a pulse-pounding out-and-out chase scene, through the building’s ceiling space and out into the lobby. The chase leads to the climax, where Alan, Ellie and the kids are cornered by — oh no! Two velociraptors! How are we ever going to survive? We’re cornered by two velociraptors! Thankfully, unseen by anyone, the twenty-foot T-Rex sneaks into the lobby and saves the day, on tiptoe I’m guessing, although how he fit through the lobby door is another mystery.

The movie’s exclamation point, pictured above, where the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!” banner comes fluttering down as the T-Rex gives a triumphal roar, still makes me laugh and cheer. The image perfectly sums up the movie’s argument and stance — the dinosaurs time has come and gone, yet here, at this moment, someone apparently forgot to tell the dinosaurs. The image acknowledges that, in spite of all the warnings in the narrative, the idea of dinosaurs returning is still an insanely powerful one, which can be proven by the fact that you’ve just watched this movie.

In the movie’s closing moments, Alan comes to the conclusion that his obsession isn’t so cool after all, that there is life beyond obsession. His “purpose” in life has shifted, he’s more interested in life and less interested in the study of long-dead creatures. As he flees Jurassic Park with Ellie, Ian, Hammond and the kids, he sees a flock of pelicans skimming the surface of the water, reminding him that dinosaurs, of course, are actually still here.  “Life found a way,” the way life generally does — it evolved, as Alan senses he must now evolve as well, and that, for all of science’s inquiry into the possible, “the way things are” is probably the best of all possible worlds.

John Hammond is a much more likely protagonist — it’s his park, after all — but he’s even more passive than Alan. He spends most of the movie fretting at headquarters while the others cavort about the island. Ellie is clearly “the girlfriend,” that most depressing of female leads, Ian is injured at the top of Act III and remains reactive for the rest of the movie.

We could, perhaps, say that the movie has multiple protagonists, but really all of their through-lines are weak and Alan’s is definitely presented as the “a-story.” And yet his “arc” — his gradual acceptance of children — has little or nothing to do with the “big ideas” of the movie (cloning, the limits of technology to control nature, the inevitable evil of capitalism, etc).

And yet, the movie is hugely effective, for which one must gives props to Spielberg. He took a script with a reactive protagonist with no clear through-line and turned it into a terrific thriller and one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time. The “ideas” of Jurassic Park were ones the audience were, apparently, ready to receive, and they are given center stage through the whole first half of the movie.

(This is also why Theme is so prominent in the movie. In fact, we could say that Theme is, in fact, the “star” of Jurassic Park.)

So where were we? Paleontologist Alan Grant has been lured by super-science capitalist John Hammond to Jurassic Park. Hammond has exploited Alan’s life-long fascination of dinosaurs to ensure his park’s success in the face of possible lawsuits and, while Alan has some doubts about the project, he cannot stop swooning like a little kid when faced with the prospect of a live dinosaur.

Moving forward into Act II:

24:00: Hammond shows the team a video presentation that explains the science behind the park. This is a scene of dense exposition, exposition without which we would not understand the action. Spielberg makes it tolerable (on a first viewing, anyway) by presenting it as a pitch-perfect send-up of grade-school science movies like Frank Capra’s Wonders of Life series. He also makes the scene thematically relevant by having the video’s audience break out of their mechanical restraints to get at the reality behind the image.

27:50: Alan gets to hold a baby velociraptor in his hands (although its egg is snatched away by a robot hand) and chaotician Ian Malcolm delivers a stern warning about the dangers of Hammond’s enterprise.

32:50: The velociraptors are presented but not shown, in order to keep their mystery and terror at a maximum. Muldoon, the big-game hunter who’s in charge of keeping the velociraptors in line, is here charged with delivering another long expository scene about the nature of velociraptors.

34:28: The principles dine while strangely old-fashioned slide shows play on the walls of the restaurant. In another remarkably long expository scene, they argue about the morality of Hammond’s enterprise.

38:00 The kids arrive, and Alan does his best to avoid them — and fails. They look at him as a rock star as he grows visibly uncomfortable.

We learn that not only is Dennis Nedry involved in a nefarious plot to steal dinosaur embryos, he is the only IT guy employed by Ingen. Yes, at a theme park designed to cater to tens of thousands of visitors a year, with a museum and a restaurant and a motorized tour and a sophisticated audio-visual setup and dozens of laboratories staffed by scores of Ph-D-level scientists, with a heliport and pilots and boats and a dock and drivers and office staff and cooks and caterers and waitstaff and god knows what else, there is one IT guy, without whom Jurassic Park would founder.

The tour gets underway, and Ian delivers yet another long expository speech, this one about chaos theory. Now, I read the novel Jurassic Park and I’ve seen the movie many times and I’ve read The Lost World and seen its movie many times as well, and it’s still unclear to me why Ian Malcolm needs to be on these trips. First, it’s unclear to me why Hammond’s board demands that, of the three experts brought to the island for the tour, one is a paleontologist , one is a paleobotanist and the third is a chaotician. What board member suggested that? What Ingen board member stood his ground and said “unless we get the approval of an expert in chaos theory, this park will not open!”? What does chaos theory really have to do with what happens in Jurassic Park? I don’t mean in terms of “ideas” that the author wishes to discuss, I mean in narrative terms. There is, as far as I can see, nothing that happens in the narrative that requires the application of chaos theory. There’s a T-Rex chasing your jeep, your understanding of chaos isn’t really going to change anything. Ian’s actions in Jurassic Park, as I see them, are: he complains about what Hammond has done here, he makes a pass at Ellie, he delivers a speech that has nothing to do with anything, he gets attacked by a dinosaur, and he helps Ellie negotiate the power shed. Strangely, he is the only one asked back for the sequel, which calls for his expertise even less.

We meet a sick triceratops, and Ellie gets her moment to shine, if by “shining” you mean handling a detective scene about what’s bugging the triceratops. Significant screen-time is devoted to Ellie’s expertise in botany and animal diseases, and yet the mystery of the sick triceratops is left unsolved and unmentioned again. I understand that, at the root of the narrative, there is an argument being made about capitalist-driven science pressing ahead into areas it doesn’t understand, and how a simple decision at the inception of a project leads to all sorts of unintended consequences down the road (which is what Ian is doing there), but as the narrative of Jurassic Park develops, the sick dinosaurs (which turn up later as well) and the discussion of chaos theory become window dressing that add little to the narrative, except as fuel to feed the tensions between the scientists and Hammond. But let’s face it: a movie that involves people being chased by dinosaurs doesn’t also need lessons in mathematics to help “sell” the drama of science-vs-capital or technology-vs-nature.

52:00 — A storm is coming in, and everyone leaves the island. What? Come again? There is a storm coming, severe enough to force the entire park staff to leave the island, yet Hammond is still going to let his crucial, all-important park tour continue?

54:00 — Ellie splits off from the group to go look for triceratops clues, while Ian chats with Alan about family. Ian, it seems, has many families, many ex-wives and children, and seems perfectly comfortable with that reality. Alan, on the other hand, still can’t quite stomach the notion of children at all. His life is his work — or, more properly, his obsession.

It’s worth noting that, while the movie supposes that technology fails in the face of the power of nature, it is, in fact, not “technology” that fails at Jurassic Park — it’s Dennis Nedry. For all the narratives high-minded notions of chaos theory and the complexities of ecosystems, the failure of the park comes down to a fat guy shutting down the system so that he can swipe some embryos.

(There is, pointedly, a photo of Oppenheimer stuck to Dennis’s monitor. I noticed it and understood its implication from the first time I saw the movie, but it wasn’t until this time around that I noticed the post-it attached to the photo, a note that reads “Beginning of the Baby Boom.” That is, the birth of the atomic bomb, to the unnamed post-it author, was a sort of biological Big Bang, a technological explosion that led, somehow, to a biological explosion. Which also ties in to Ian’s theories, but still does not explain his narrative purpose.)

And now let me pause here, half-way through the movie, to address the latest episode of Venture Bros, and pick this up later.

ACT I (0:00-24:00) Act I of Jurassic Park is “let’s get everybody to the island.” The Problem arises in the first scene — a worker is attacked by a velociraptor, which leads to the unseen Investors getting panicked about the titular park, which leads to them hiring an oily lawyer to pressure island-owner and dinosaur-breeder John Hammond into making certain assurances, which leads to Hammond contacting a trio of scientists, including protagonist Alan Grant, and bribing them into coming to his island to give it their okay and calm down the investors so that the park can open and make everybody a fortune. There is a subplot introduced regarding disgruntled employee Dennis, who plans to smuggle dinosaur embryos off the island to sell to a rival company. The act climaxes when Grant sees the dinosaurs live in the flesh for the first time, and in that moment looks ready to follow antagonist Hammond to the ends of the earth.

ACT II (24:00-1:00:00) Grant, his girlfriend Ellie, chaotician Ian, the oily lawyer and two of Hammond’s grandchildren are led on a tour through the park. Nothing goes right and great emphasis is placed on the limits of technology. There are several long, expository scenes, some of them necessary to understanding the plot, some, mysteriously, not. Alan, although still clearly fascinated by the prospect of live dinosaurs, admits to having some qualms about the scientific value of bringing ancient life into the modern world. Dennis’s plot to smuggle embryos is set into motion. We learn that his plot involves shutting down the power for the entire island, a decision that leaves Alan, Ian, the lawyer and the kids stranded next to the T. Rex paddock, at night, in a rainstorm.

ACT III (1:00:00-1:28:00) Act III begins at the one-hour mark, on the dot, with one of the all-time greatest action-suspense scenes ever created, ten minutes of superbly-orchestrated brilliance, and we’re off to the races. From here on out, the concerns of Jurassic Park become largely mechanical and situational — and substantially more entertaining. After the attack of the T-Rex, we cut to another part of the island for Dennis’s death at the hands of a Dilophasaurus, then come back to Alan, who is stuck on the wrong side of civilization with the children, whom he will guide and guard for the remainder of the movie. At 1:14:00 we have another wonderful action-suspense scene involving an SUV in a tree, at 1:18:00 we have Ellie and Ian chased by a T-Rex. There is a respite as Alan finds a place to rest with the kids, and an end-of-third-act low point where Ellie and Hammond have a little heart-to-heart, complete with a death-of-my-kitten speech from Hammond.

ACT IV (1:28:00-2:00:00) The sun comes up and Alan and the kids are still alive in their resting place. Alan’s fascination with dinosaurs remains, in spite of everything. Meanwhile, Team B tries to figure out how to get reboot the island’s power supply. There’s another superb suspense scene where we crosscut between Alan trying to get the kids over an electric fence as Team B restarts the island’s generator. The velociraptors attack the park headquarters as Alan and the kids arrive safely. As Alan and Ellie see about getting off the island, the kids are attacked by velociraptors in the movie’s fourth or fifth virtuoso action-suspense scene. Alan and Ellie come back for the kids and are all attacked by the velociraptors again. The T-Rex becomes a sudden, unlikely ally in a moment of crisis and the group flees the island. Alan, we see, has had his obsession for dinosaurs dulled by his experience of the past 24 hours, and as he contemplates Hammond’s grandchildren he reflects that it’s probably just as well that his dream remains a dream.

SOME THOUGHTS:

0:00 – 3:28: The theme is stated visually in the very first scene. A bunch of workers (in their snappy Jurassic Park-brand hardhats) hold guns and peer nervously off into the distance at something scary coming through the bushes.What is it coming through the bushes? Is it a dinosaur? No, it’s just a forklift. A forklift carrying a dinosaur in a crate, but a forklift nonetheless. Dinosaurs, this scene says, are not the problem — the problem is the technology intruding into nature. Here, not only is the forklift shown knocking over trees to get through the jungle, but we see that it’s carrying that velociraptor in that box — and what do you know, the velociraptor finds a way to, if not get out of the box, at least exact some revenge on the men who put it there. Technology (men with guns, with corporate logo) in nature, face off not with nature but with another piece of technology (the forklift and box), which contains Life (the cranky velociraptor), which Finds A Way to get around the technology trying to control it.

5:30: Alan digs for velociraptor bones in the Badlands — with the help of the latest dinosaur-hunting technology. Which he doesn’t understand, and which seems to fail due to his merest touch. Alan, we see, is mistrustful of technology — he’s told that soon, due to technological advances, paleontologists won’t even have to dig for bones, to which he replies “Where’s the fun in that?” Alan sees that if technology advances far enough, life won’t have a chance — and yet he’s devoted his life to getting close to these creatures that obsess him.

9:08: The movie’s first expository scene, where Alan explains to a child why a velociraptor is scary, as though we might have a hard time believing it, given the evidence. The scene also serves to express Alan’s dislike of children — he pointedly terrorizes the kid as Ellie rolls her eyes. In the following scene he goes to absurd lengths to list the reasons he doesn’t want children, which Ellie, apparently, does.

I’ll admit I have a hard time connecting Alan’s growing affection for children to the theme of the movie. At the end of Act III, Alan pointedly gives up his dinosaur obsession in favor of protecting his unsolicited charges, but that speaks more to Alan’s Spielbergian obsession and less to the subject at hand. It’s almost as though the protagonist’s desire in Jurassic Park is more of a sub-plot, the “A-plot” being the technical explanation of how the dinosaurs came to be and why these folks are on the island.

10:30: Hammond appears, the jolly capitalist. He’s got lots of money and he’s going to make a lot more of it. Hammond is interesting to me as the kind of capitalist who thinks he’s really hit on something that isn’t evil, that somehow he’s managed to circumvent the age-old rule of capitalism, that business must be based on plunder and rape. He really thinks his park is a positive good and that he’s thought of every possible contingency. “Spared no expense” is his motto, catchphrase and sacred vow: he’s not just out to make a quick buck, he sees himself as a kind of Medici, bringing great works to a benighted world.

13:45: We meet Dennis Nedry and hear a little about his plan to abscond with the embryos. Wayne Knight’s performance is so broad and bizarre that it seems like it belongs in a different movie. I’ve seen Jurassic Park many times and I still have trouble assimilating it into the whole. I wonder if Spielberg saw some kind of problem with the role and felt that it had to be played this way in order for the movie to maintain the specific tone he was looking for, that perhaps if Dennis Nedry’s scheme was played straight the narrative might become too ponderous. Recently Spielberg has mentioned his affection for Dennis Weaver’s gonzo performance in Touch of Evil; I wonder if perhaps he was hoping to create his own Weaver-esque performance with Knight. Or maybe Knight just amused Spielberg with his delivery and Spielberg, on the set, simply pushed him to be bigger.

17:11: The “Jurassic Park” logo is on everything — helmets and jeeps and gates and signs and doors. This is a brilliant touch, because thevillain of the piece isn’t really technology but capitalism. Capitalism wishes to turn everything into a product, and the point of the narrative is that Hammond has attempted to put a logo on life itself. He’s much worse than Dr. Frankenstein: he doesn’t just want to create life, he also wants to market it as well, with all the trappings. Hammond knows that the world is fascinated by dinosaurs and he’s going to cater to that fascination, even though it’s clearly the wrong thing to do. Not coincidentally, the movie also knows that the world is fascinated by dinosaurs and plans to cater to that same fascination, and tell us it’s wrong, and reveal the disaster awaiting, and make tons of money off it anyway, partly through ticket sales and partly through, yes, slapping a “Jurassic Park” logo on everything conceivable.

20:24: Alan and Ellie see the Brachiosaurus. I love this scene. Sam Neill and Laura Dern play it perfectly. It’s not just that they are paleontologists being presented with the object of their fascination, its that Hammond has, somehow, managed to reach deep down inside their cerebral cortices and give them nothing less than their childhood dreams come true. And it, quite rightfully, staggers them. I certainly know how I feel when I see the scene — the gentle brachiosaur lumbering up the hill in the afternoon sun is exactly what I have imagined a living dinosaur would look like ever since I was a child, but far more poetic. The scene is crucial in setting up the protagonist’s dilemma, such as it is: we really want to see this, as much as the protagonist does. Good lord, who would not? When we see the brachiosaur, we, like Alan, are ready to do whatever it takes to see more. Spielberg is well aware of this, which is why he stages the scene with maximum beauty and emotional punch, then withholds the dinosaurs, for the most part, for the next 38 minutes of exposition and argument. He has our attention and he’s going to tease us until we can barely take it any more, and then he’s going to give us what we want in a way we absolutely don’t want it.

Which brings us to the end of Act I. More later.