Like a Rainy Day's Earth Won't Sit Still, Sliding on Down a Hill

Cropped screen capture of Jurassic Park (1993)

Christmas television isn't what it was in my day! I remember the terrestrial premières of blockbusters on BBC1 being a focal point of the day. In 1996 the film of the evening was Jurassic Park, an all time favourite as a consequence of being the first non-animation I can recall seeing as a child in the cinema. Now it's all Dreamworks computer-animations that have those annoying angular graphics that make it look like Pixar on the cheap. Bah. Humbug. Well thank the Lord for ITV2, as not a day goes by without them broadcasting Jurassic Park or Back to the Future. Actually, make that six days. I noticed they broadcast the exact same double bill (JP, The Bourne Identity) at the exact same time not a week later. I've well and truly lost count of how many times I've seen said dinosaur film, though some would say clearly too much as I did a special Christmas Day live one-man overdub of almost the entirety of the film (and got told to shut up). The fact that I know the film so well as to quote entire exchanges of dialogue made me aware of ITV2's clunky editing.

Frequently a scene would end prematurely, rapidly fade to black, and cut to the next scene. Fair enough cutting short Gennaro's death (sorry, twenty year spoiler) - it was years before I was even aware of that cut away having only seen it projected once - but actually de-contextualising scenes to cram another advert break in was more than a bit annoying. I could live with Dr Arnold's fate being left out after just telling someone to wait a few scenes to find out, but actually damaging what I think is the story's real message is on another level. Why does Ian Malcolm just start talking with Ellie about Chaos Theory after leaving the Tyrannosaur paddock? Unless you know off by heart, you'd have no idea he describes the T-Rex's failure to parade itself for the tour as an example of unpredictability and the lack of control the park really has over its attractions (ie, chaos). Thus the line about further unpredictability when Alan jumps out the car to see the Triceratops.

With those lines of dialogue missing, my attention was drawn to the film and book's perceived status as cautionary tales of the 'man was not meant to...' cliché variety. While Malcolm does invoke a moral argument against the park - "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think if they should!" - the actual reason he is the initial sceptic is to bring Chaos Theory into the fold. Whether or not mathematically accurate, it is there to state, as Malcolm does in the film, that the initial conditions "vastly affect the outcome" and, as in the book, without even knowing their means of checking the animal population were compromised from the very start, the whole venture has run far outside the control of the operators. Hence Ellie retorts that Hammond has been running yet another flea circus, that their grand statements about denying hormones and engineering females have all fallen apart under the illusion of control.

That the dinosaurs spontaneously found a means of breeding against their genetic programming by Hammond's InGen corporation was not random. "Life found a way" arguably because of creator oversight, but absolute control over a complex system like that was never possible to begin with. Had they not let the specimens out of their sight, maybe then they could have kept tabs on everything, but the act of hubris was to believe they had the power of God over the psuedo-natural habitat - not one of acting as God. It's a subtle distinction. Frankenstein is attaining the power of creation; but Jurassic Park, while there is also the element of creation (or rather, resurrection), is about the mistaken belief of attaining omniscience. It's often thought of as a redressing of Michael Chrichton's 1973 film Westworld - also set in an amusement park when things go wrong. Funnily enough, The Simpsons episode 'Itchy & Scratchy Land' is a combined parody of the two - which is how I came across it.

Westworld depicts an advanced theme park populated by androids which permit high-paying tourists to indulge their fantasies outwith the consequences of real life. The robots succumb to some unspecified problem and begin to break their programming resulting in uncontrolled behaviour that eventually kills all but one of the visitors. I think the two are distinct, though. Westworld can be thought of as a runaway train careening along until it hits something, whereas Jurassic Park is more a case of the train breaking free of the iron path laid out.

The only question that remains is, what were the fractals in the book about? I resorted to a search to see if anyone had cracked this, but all I found were pages showing how to make a Heighway Dragon aka 'The Jurassic Park fractal'. Near as I can tell, as someone who hated maths and had to suffer through a double period of it first thing on a Monday morning for a year, it's a demonstration of the rapid emergence of an organised structure from simple building blocks. In the context of the story it could perhaps be understood as representing the blooming ecosystem that arises from the openings overlooked by the geneticists of InGen. I have to admit I only got as far as the train analogy whilst lying in bed struggling to fall asleep with this cold.

As a little aside, I was trying to figure out what to use as an illustration and just went with the above shot of Laura Dern as Dr Ellie Sattler. In pondering what was my earliest crush on a fictional character I think it may have been her. I like an intelligent woman who also owns a pair of those round-framed glasses that Dana Scully used to wear in The X-Files when typing her reports at the end of an episode.

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