(NOTE: Jurassic Park is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. Over the next eight or nine weeks I’ll be running a strikingly unbalanced review of the four films, because I’m a big fan of parts 1 & 3, while distinctly unenthusiastic over parts 2 & 4.)
In 1952 Steven Spielberg saw his first film and was he disappointed! He thought his dad was taking him to see the circus. Instead, they saw a movie about a circus! What a letdown!
The film that Spielberg saw was Cecil Be DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, a thoroughly forgettable spectacle that I also saw way back in 1952. But there’s one scene that I’m absolutely sure that Stevo tucked away in his mind: after the circus train is struck by another train in a spectacular collision engineered by some evil gangsters (is there any other kind?) we watch the effects of the collision work their way through the train, cars buckling, careening, and crashing in a seemingly endless cacophony until, finally, out of their shattered cages come the big cats! We entertained you? Well, now, you’re going to entertain us! As protein!1
There’s a similar, though far more powerful moment in Jurassic Park when the T. Rex, of whom we’ve only had brief glimpses, breaks through the fence that surrounds his paddock and steps down on the roadway to roar his defiance at those who would cage him, for all the world like a screen monster climbing down from the screen and stepping out into the audience. You came here for thrill and chills? Well, here they are! I’m your worst nightmare, come to life!
Spielberg, like many film directors, appears to be far more interested in film than life—interested in film, and interested in audiences, and how to move them through film. His fiercest desire is the largest possible audience, which competes fiercely with his second-fiercest desire, the longing to hit his audiences right over the head, to hit them harder than they’ve ever been hit before, and, not so incidentally, harder than they want to be hit.2 Show folk live in fear of offending the ignorant masses, the flyover folks, the ticket-buyers, the great unwashed. Wouldn’t it be fun for once to turn the tables, to make them suffer as we have? In the Jurassic Park franchise—four films in twenty-odd years, with a fifth on the way—Spielberg has been able to eat his cake and have it too, entertain and terrify, satirize both himself and his audiences, while sucking up grosses that run in the billions. Because great box office is the best revenge.
We’re all familiar with Sweet Steven, who labored to make ET just the sweetest, and most profitable, little fucker who ever came down the pike, who gave us more schmaltzy aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and gave the Holocaust a happy ending in Schindler’s List.3 But Stevo first made his bones with Jaws, a classic example of the great American scream machine, a film that, with its naked chick in danger, severed foot, and eyeball hangin’ out of the socket, took middle America further out of its comfort zone than any film since The Exorcist.4 And Jaws would have been much more brutal than it was if the suits would have let Stevo have both his way and a PG rating. As it was, in his opinion he had to settle for subtlety rather than gore. But he got his own back with the “melting Nazis” conclusion of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), thrusting middle America deep into EC Comics territory.5Raiders and its sequel,Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), along with Poltergeist (1982), created the PG-13 rating, meaning, more or less, “this is a terrible movie and if you send your kids to it it’s your own fault.”
It really isn’t necessary to analyze Spielberg (although I did that in my review of Catch Me If You Can), because Stevo does it for us:
“Poltergeist is the darker side of my nature, it’s me when I was scaring my younger sisters half to death. In Poltergeist, I wanted to terrify and I also wanted to amuse—I tried to mix the laughs and screams together.”
By the time Spielberg came to make Jurassic Park (1993), he was beginning to come to terms with at least one of his childhood demons—being a Jew—because he had started work on another film at the same time, Schindler’s List. Whether or not this had an effect, Jurassic Park is not quite up there in the shock department with some of Spielberg’s earlier thrillers, but as for chicks, Stevie still had a lot of doubts, though he worked hard to overcome them.
- In fact, the big cats aren’t much of a plot point in The Greatest Show on Earth. They get herded back in their cages (somehow) without eating or even biting a soul. TGSOE is a time capsule of the most dubious nature, to be sampled only by the most valorous. It is, in its own way, a remarkably meta film (as well as being remarkably bad). In the early fifties both the circus and the movies were being threatened by an extraordinary electromagnetic menace—television—and then legendary film director Cecil B. DeMille went to the extraordinary length of recording a stentorian prologue that both celebrates the circus, bringing thrills and laughter to children of all ages, and reminds us that it is also a “ruthless machine that runs over anything and everything that gets in its path!”—sort of like CB himself. The “message”—that the guys with sawdust—or celluloid—in their blood always come through in the clutch proved to be so much wishful thinking. By 1957, the cathode tube was king. ↩︎
- The T. Rex’s descent bears a fascinating resemblance to another classic proscenium-breaking sequence in film, the shower murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In Jurassic Park, the dinosaur steps down from the screen to attack the audience. In Psycho, the audience lunges into the screen to attack Janet Leigh—“an impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film,” as Hitchcock put it in a note for the shooting script. It would be interesting to know what Spielberg thought of Psycho, particularly if he saw it when it first came out. ↩︎
- Many Jews naturally resented seeing Spielberg make millions off of “their” Holocaust. As a non-Jew I found most of Schindler’s List to be impressive, though it did slide hard into the kitsch in the last fifteen minutes. ↩︎
- The R-rated Exorcist was far harsher than Jaws and is (probably) the most brutal general audience film ever made. The enormous success of the book, which, to my mind, was mostly written to allow ordinary Americans to read about anal sex with a good conscience, helped “legitimize” the subject matter of the film. Author William Peter Blatty helped as well, by insisting that the book was “really” about being a good Christian, as opposed to a vomit-spewing demon. ↩︎
- Once legendary, EC Comics are probably fading from public consciousness, as the generation who grew up on them fades into senility and the grave. Steven King lovingly recalls their decaying corpse/dismembered body parts ethos in his memoir Danse Macabre. Highbrow film critic Robert Warshow wrote an unwittingly entertaining “real time” takedown of EC in his essay “Paul and the Comics,” which can be found in his collection The Immediate Experience. Graybeards like myself can remember the “panic” over horror comics in the early fifties that left EC publisher William Gaines with only one title in his stable—Mad. Guess what? He didn’t worry. ↩︎
