Jurassic Park is Basically Just Frankenstein (feat. The Morbid Zoo)

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]On April 12th, 2026, the richest man in the world posted this on his personal social media website. Jurassic Park was legit an epic idea by Crichton. I really hope we can have one in the future. Got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

[00:00:16]And to that I say, do it Elon.

[00:00:19][ __ ] do it. Oh, no. Don't watch the movies, man. They're old and boring anyway. And you know, they weren't even shot on vertical. So, yeah, basically unwatchable. Don't worry. Things always worked out great for the CEOs at the end.

[00:00:34]>> [screaming] >> In all seriousness, I'm not that worried about Elon Musk cloning dinosaurs. The man can barely build a tunnel. But it says a lot about the shocking lack of responsibility possessed by the man children shoving our society headlong into techno feudal dystopia that this limp dick bond villain would threaten this even in jest. What makes this deliciously ironic is of course that Jurassic Park is all about the imbecility and shortsightedness of men just like Elon Musk. And that's not some kind of anachronistic presentist read.

[00:01:08]The film speaks directly [music] to the anxieties of hyper capitalism in the digital age, which was well underway in 1993. It's profoundly concerned about technology advancing faster than ethics, about our machines and creations alienating us from our labor, our humanity, and our connection to nature.

[00:01:27]This new program's incredible.

[00:01:30]Two more years development and we won't even have to dig anymore. And Jurassic Park isn't just about technology. The film itself is a landmark of cinematic innovation. Famously, the visual effects team of the first movie broke new ground by bringing dinosaurs to life using CGI rather than stop motion for certain shots. A decision which revolutionized big budget filmmaking and cemented these charismatic animals in the imagination of a generation. Today, when we think of dinosaurs, we think of Spielberg's monsters. This incredible [ __ ] movie and its underrated sequel, The Lost World, we won't talk about the third one, were staples of my childhood as I'm sure they were of yours. And for my money, they've only gotten more relevant in the years since.

[00:02:14]But at the same time, there's definitely something timeless about the story that Spielberg and I guess Crichton, too, blah are telling here. Stop me if you've heard this one. A brilliant but self-involved man discovers the key to the creation of artificial life.

[00:02:29]>> [music] >> Heedless of the consequences, he animates a monster which he quickly discovers he cannot control. The monster, an uncanny synthetic being with no place in the natural order, turns on its creator, taking away everything he holds dear and leaving a path of death and destruction in its wake. Here's a quote from the 1818 novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by friend of the channel Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

[00:02:57]In this scene, Victor Frankenstein is a precocious young kid at university in Ingolstadt burning with an ambition to make great discoveries and change the world. And the person talking is his chemistry professor. "The ancient teachers of this science promised impossibilities and performed nothing.

[00:03:16]The modern masters promise very little.

[00:03:18]But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places."

[00:03:35]>> [music] >> And here's a clip from Jurassic Park.

[00:03:38]You know the one. The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here uh staggers me. Oh, what's so great about discovery? It's a violent penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery.

[00:03:53]I call the rape of the natural world.

[00:03:55]It's kind of beautiful that the entire genres of horror and science fiction came downstream of an angsty and insecure teenage girl who was like 10 times smarter than you or I. And meanwhile her laudanum addicted insufferably atheist vegan husband is over there on the other side of the bed casually revolutionizing English language poetry.

[00:04:14]Like Jesus Christ, you know, why do we even bother? Yes, Jurassic Park is obviously just Frankenstein with dinosaurs. In [music] fact, I would argue that it is the most definitive culturally significant modern Frankenstein adaptation.

[00:04:29]Way more so than white boy summer over here. I think Spielberg captures something about Mary Shelley's novel that few iterations of the story have really narrowed in on.

[00:04:39]The contentious relationship between human and non-human natures. Jurassic Park and The Lost World came at a great time to explore this theme. In the 1980s and 1990s, the character of the American environmentalist movement transformed from the insular rural cowboy [music] machismo of figures like Edward Abbey and into a much more urban middle-class intersectional tofu-munching anarchism.

[00:05:03]This new generation was extremely militant and not at all squeamish about breaking the law. They burned ski chalets that intruded into wilderness areas, broke animals out of fur farms and vivisection labs, tore down fences blocking wildlife crossings and more.

[00:05:19]Though emphatically non-violent, sabotage in defense of the environment has to this day not resulted in a single credibly recorded injury or death in the United States. These actions resulted in millions upon millions of dollars in losses for planet-killing corporations and their enablers. And weirdly, at the time the first two Jurassic Park films were getting made, the general public was kind of on the activists' side. And you see this in media at the time. In The Voyage Home, the best Star Trek film ever made, and I don't want to hear a goddamn word saying otherwise, the crew of the Enterprise sabotages an aircraft carrier and runs a foul of the FBI in their mission to save humpback whales from extinction. James Cameron wrote the first Avatar movie, which is of course all about resistance against ecosidal capitalism in 1995. Only reason he didn't make it then was that technology hadn't quite caught up to his vision.

[00:06:12]And in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Vince Vaughn's character is literally and canonically a saboteur from the radical environmentalist group Earth First.

[00:06:21]>> I know you.

[00:06:23]Still that Earth First bastard, huh? The heroes of this blockbuster Steven Spielberg film perform acts which the screenplay explicitly wants us to sympathize with, yet would be regarded by our real-world law enforcement agencies as extremist terrorism.

[00:06:44]I do think it's absolutely hilarious that Vince Vaughn in this movie is like a super macho dude who joined Greenpeace for the chicks and is always confronting people and going like, "You want to go?

[00:06:55]You want to [ __ ] go, man?"

[00:06:58]I know a lot of environmental activists and uh yeah, no. He He should be a highly neurotic they/them in a battle jacket who's always recommending you books of theory and uh can't talk to people. Are you looking for a problem?

[00:07:11]And I found you, didn't I?

[00:07:13]This wasn't to last, of course. After 9/11 and the Patriot Act, the FBI cracked down hard against ecotage.

[00:07:20]Environmental and animal rights activists who had damaged property and in some cases had simply caused corporations a perceived loss of revenue due to entirely legal above-ground protests got slapped with terrorism charges and spent years in federal prison. In 2004, John Lewis, the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, called {quote} "eco-terrorism and the animal rights movement America's number one domestic terrorism threat. Meanwhile, during the three years prior, anti-abortion fundamentalists had carried out 24 assaults, eight arsons, seven attempted arsons, 48 bomb threats, 24 anthrax threats, and 24 death threats against healthcare workers.

[00:08:03]None of these crimes are recorded by the FBI as terrorist acts. And the first two Jurassic Park movies exhibited kind of environmental politics that was very specific to that late 20th century milieu, a preservationist mindset that essentially argued that the processes of nature tend toward balance, and that over the course of history humans had completely extricated themselves from the process of natural selection. For the late 20th century environmentalist, there is a fundamental division between human and non-human nature, and the best thing that humans can do for non-humans is to leave them alone completely. These creatures require our absence to survive, not our help.

[00:08:47]And if [music] we could only step aside and trust in nature, life will find a way. Now, I won't go too much into this because ColdCrashPictures already made an excellent video about Jurassic Park and conservation that goes into how the preservationist mindset of the first two movies contrasts with the interventionist environmental politics of the reboots, while also touching on Michael Crichton's climate change denial and his hilarious book where a comical stereotype of an eco-terrorist cell kills like 50 billion people or something.

[00:09:24]Mike, if you can hear me from beyond the grave, I truly wish environmental activists were the super soldiers you imagined them to be. While this understanding of ecology is somewhat dated, the binary it creates between the natural and the unnatural pops up again and again in Frankenstein. In the feature-length video I made about the novel last year, I argued that the world of Mary Shelley's story is pervaded by a kind of dark, edgy nature mysticism.

[00:09:51]Victor's experiments are a profound insult to Mother Nature, who is sanctified, almost deified as raw, elemental, feminine power.

[00:10:11]And I think this speaks to one of the most common emotions people feel when they watch these movies, a deep sense of wonder. One of my favorite parts of Jurassic Park is that cut between Laura Dern standing up in the Jeep to the towering CGI Brontosaurus.

[00:10:38]There's something about that slow tilt up, and of course that note in the Williams cue that that hits at just the right instant.

[00:10:45]Brings me to tears almost every time.

[00:10:47]And John Williams has said that he wanted to add a religious undercurrent in the main theme. You really hear it when the choir comes in.

[00:10:55]>> [music] [music] [music] >> And that final cadence is so reminiscent of a hallelujah.

[00:11:14]>> [music] >> There's a piece of divinity in these animals and the ecological power they represent. Speaking of the score, there's so many great little themes in there other than the main one that never get any [ __ ] love or recognition.

[00:11:28]Nobody talks about the raptor theme, which is [ __ ] awesome.

[00:11:37]And the way he plays around with it in the third act is just so inventive.

[00:12:01]It's kind of like how the main theme of Jaws is so overdone and overplayed, but the barrel chase theme slaps so much harder.

[00:12:17]Anyway, I seem to have gotten sidetracked slightly. This pantheistic nature mysticism was very much in the air in the summer of 1816 when Mary came up with the idea for Frankenstein. She and her partner, Percy Shelley, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, were spending a lot of time at Villa Diodati with Lord Byron and John Polidori, sightseeing around the Alps and Lake Geneva, taking in all this breathtaking natural beauty, reading Rousseau, and, you know, doing drugs and having sex with each other.

[00:12:46]Except, of course, for Polidori, who basically spent [music] the entire summer getting bullied by Byron and romantically rejected by Mary.

[00:12:54]Poor Polidori. I do want to preface this little section by saying that just because Percy's art and politics undoubtedly inspired Mary creatively, he did not actually write Frankenstein.

[00:13:05]Believe it or not, there are people in my [ __ ] comment section who insist that he did. But look, we can talk about sexism in Romantic era historiography another time. Dinosaurs eat man.

[00:13:18]Woman inherits the Earth. Byron wrote the third canto of [music] Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that summer, and you can really see that mysticism pop up in some of those [music] verses. Not vainly did the early Persian make his altar the high places and the peak of earth or gazing mountains, and thus take a fit and unwalled temple [music] there to seek the spirit in whose honor shrines are weak upreared of human hands. Come and compare columns and idle dwellings, Goth or Greek, with nature's realms of worship, earth and air, nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy prayer. Yeah, damn, that sister [ __ ] could write. Percy, who I'm just going to call Shelley because that's what everyone called him, even his wife, was always very into that hippy dippy stuff.

[00:14:08]He was a staunch atheist, but had a very poetic Carl Sagan-esque appreciation for the beauty of a chaotic universe. And as a utopian socialist, there was a sense of anti-authoritarian justice to the ungovernability that wilderness and wild nature represent. There's a great part of his 1813 poem Queen Mab, where the fairy queen shows an unborn spirit the entire universe in this very vibrant psychedelic scene. There, far as remotest line that bounds imagination's flight, countless and unending orbs in mazy motion intermingled, yet still fulfilled immutably eternal nature's law. Above, below, around, the circling systems formed a wilderness of harmony.

[00:14:57]Each with undeviating aim, in eloquent silence through the depths of space pursued its wondrous way. I love that phrase, a wilderness of harmony. For Shelley, there's wisdom to nature despite its chaos, which we should bring ourselves into equilibrium with. When humans pursue power, we warp that harmony into something unnatural, something synthetic and mechanical, like the inner workings of the horrific textile factories springing up all around England during the Romantic period. But, if we can take an axe to the root of the poison tree of domination and empire, that natural harmony will return and grow a garden in its place. Humans are a part of nature and so naturally virtuous, but power pollutes everything it touches. Kings, priests, and moguls are pathetic creatures who dwell in a gilded prison of their own making. The drive for dominion, quote, "makes slaves of men and of the human frame a mechanized automation." Are these characters auto erotica? In Frankenstein, Mary adds to that idea by showing that when we try to bend nature to our will, when we penetrate into her hiding places, nature naturally won't cooperate.

[00:16:16]Uncanny severe weather is a persistent motif in Frankenstein. Victor famously brings the creature to life on a dreary night of November in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm. We see it in Jurassic Park, too, in the hurricane that strikes Isla Nublar and ruins all of Hammond's carefully laid plans. It's divine retribution, Mother Nature performing her own little bit of ecotage to empty the dinosaurs' cages and foil the designs of power-hungry men. Not to mention that the dinosaurs actively resist their own enslavement. When Hammond dispatches the other characters on the park tour, the animals refuse to appear to entertain them.

[00:16:55]Because, [music] you know, they're living beings with their own instincts and priorities, not [ __ ] tourist attractions. In Jaws, Spielberg shot his killer shark like a Melvillean monster, not just malevolent, but borderline supernatural, an enemy of mankind who urgently needed to be hunted and destroyed. But, in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs are largely portrayed as sympathetic. Some of them could even reasonably be described as characters whose choices drive the narrative. Don't the monsters come over here?

[00:17:24]>> Not monsters, Lex. They're just animals, and these are herbivores. Like Frankenstein's creature, these animals are chimeras. They're not actually really dinosaurs. They're a conjoining of the DNA of multiple species into something that has never actually existed before. I could go on about this, but I think it'd be a lot more fun if I tapped in somebody who's made her name talking about monsters and why we love to hate them. Here's Mariana from The Morbid Zoo.

[00:17:49]And if you're not watching The Morbid Zoo, what are you doing? Like, what the [ __ ] are you doing with YOUR LIFE, YOU [ __ ] IDIOT?

[00:18:00]>> YEAH, what the [ __ ] are you doing? Look at you, sitting there like you just can't afford one more grouchy leftist in your media diet. On first glance, it seems like the dinosaurs could comfortably be divided into nice dinosaurs that aren't monsters and mean dinosaurs that are. But no, not all monsters constitute a physical threat.

[00:18:18]Our darling Frankenstein doesn't want to kill anybody at first. He didn't ask to be born, Dad. All that's required for monstrosity is an inability for the creature at hand to comply with preconceptions of how the world is ordered. And all of the dinosaurs in this world do that. Let's consider the herbivores. They mind their own business. You can pet them. They're overall total sweeties. But though they're generally peaceful, they are still irreconcilably out of place in this world in a way that's a little grotesque. There is something misshapen about this leviathan creature that's both supremely physically powerful, but also frail in the face of the environment it's found itself in. One of the first conflicts we're introduced to in this movie is that something is making the herbivores extremely ill. And this is never resolved. In the book and at least one version of the script, it's explained that they're eating poison berries when they swallow stones to help them digest, but that's not in the final version of the movie. The story of this sick triceratops is just completely unseated by the storm and the escape of the carnivores, which are more pressing matters to both the humans and the herbivores, to be fair. Still, I'm struck by how easily Spielberg abandons this sick triceratops when the carnivores arrive. It's an interesting creative choice, one that kind of re-centers the themes of the movie away from anything controllable or even understandable. What's happening with the herbivores is no longer important because the humans are now just as vulnerable, exposed, and out of place as the sick triceratops in the face of the carnivores who arrive with the storm like minor gods sent to punish the hubris of InGen by reminding everybody that the drive to consume rules all.

[00:20:01]It's raining pretty hard here, by the way, so I hope we can forgive any rumblees in my audio. One hopes that there's a wealthy industrialist out there just being chased down by his unholy creations. InGen created these creatures for the purpose of extracting money from people, and now they're being extracted from in kind. Yum. The movie tells you explicitly that these creatures are animals, not monsters.

[00:20:24]>> Not monsters, Nick. They're just animals.

[00:20:26]>> But there is clearly a degree to which an animal can become monstrous in human perception that the movie is drawing upon. The carnivores become representative of a violence that transcends biology and enters the realm of meaning. It's a similar theme Spielberg is working with in Jaws. It seems like there's a point in the human psyche where any normal animal can become a monster. There are certain creatures that activate our imaginations in ways others just don't. In his book Monster of God, David Quammen makes the point that it's not enough for an animal to kill a human to qualify as a monstrosity. Elephants, hippos, even dogs kill people fairly regularly, but they just don't command the same kind of panic that makes people persecute animals they specifically think might want to eat them. What I'm asking you to contemplate are the psychological, mythic, and spiritual dimensions, as well as the ecological implications of a particular sort of relationship, the predator-prey showdown between one dangerous flesh-eating animal and one human victim. That relationship, I believe, has played a crucial role in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world. The kind of primal meaning Spielberg was tapping into in Jaws was one the American society he grew up in sort of imagined itself as having moved past. By the 1970s, the world had shrunk. The wilderness had either been tamed or destroyed as far as the country was concerned, and with that wilderness went any real concern for the possibility of becoming meat for something lurking in the grass or stalking you down a remote mountain path. Shark attacks are so unbelievably rare that of think it didn't even really occur to most people that sharks ought to be included in this category until Jaws, after which we discovered a new monster to vanquish.

[00:22:14]But of course, sharks are not monsters just because they can eat us if they want. They're animals. This is a core difference between Jaws and Jurassic Park. Sharks are real. They can be slandered and harmed, but dinosaurs are extinct. We can't do any damage to them, so what humans think about them, whether within the world of Jurassic Park or without, says much more about us than it does about dinosaurs. This is important, I think. Jurassic Park reads very much to me as a sort of answer to Jaws, an expression of what Spielberg was trying to do in that movie that he couldn't quite succeed in due to sharks being real. It's just too easy in Jaws to blame sharks for how the movie made you feel about sharks, to project a human artifice onto an animal completely unjustly and in doing so completely missed the artistic point of the movie, which is a very simply to have a good fun spook show time. Spielberg has been very open about how much he regrets Jaws effect on the world. The cratering of shark populations that followed that movie was not something he either foresaw or condoned. In a BBC interview in 2022, he said, "That's one of the things I still fear. Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975. I truly and to this day regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. Human creations take a life of their own. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park might be science-coded, but both in form and function they are made to be works of entertainment.

[00:23:52]>> We've made living biological attractions so astounding that they've captured the imagination of the entire planet.

[00:24:00]They're a product of craftsmanship as much as any work of art and like the effect of Spielberg's previous work on the world's ecosystems, these dinosaurs metastasize into the park in a way that was difficult to see from the position of just making a fun spectacle. In filmmaking terms, he's largely just doing Jaws again in Jurassic Park.

[00:24:21]There's a degree in these movies to which he seems unsettled by the desire to make the dinosaurs scary and impressive without reducing them to objects and as importantly without making them into something that could make the real world measurably worse off. Counter-intuitively, I think it's the tension between these two desires that makes Jurassic Park such a successful movie. The suspense is so good because the contradiction between whether the dinosaurs are good or bad never reaches any kind of resolution.

[00:24:52]But I also think this is secretly kind of a triangular tension. Two of the prongs are the relative goodness and badness of the dinosaurs, and the third prong is Spielberg's personal desire to be himself a good artist and person. In the movie, Hammond is kind of a Walt Disney figure. He's affable and optimistic, a visionary. Unlike the book version of Hammond, this Hammond is the sort of benevolent capitalist we had come to expect industrial tycoons to be in the '90s, not unlike Spielberg himself, who is one of like five people total to become Disney's equal in developing American culture as a product that could be packaged and exported abroad. He has seen the result of this work and doesn't entirely like it, but he also seems to have a hard time reconciling this fact about himself. In Jurassic Park Oh my god. In Jurassic Park, Hammond ends the movie duly chastened, but then he reappears in The Lost World as a strange sort of environmentalist benefactor to the protagonist sent back to the island to save the dinosaurs. What makes this strange is that his concern for the dinosaurs seems to expand beyond what the dinosaurs actually are. You've seen the clip, but let's roll it again. These creatures require our absence to survive, not our help.

[00:26:13]And if we could only [music] step aside and trust in nature, life will find a way. Hey, what are you talking about? The dinosaurs aren't nature. You literally made them. You did that. They're suffering because of you.

[00:26:33]They're not even real dinosaurs. The problem with talking about dinosaurs as monsters in Jurassic Park and The Lost World is the same ambiguity that makes them monsters to begin with. Despite his obvious love and respect for the natural world, despite this movie telling you in no uncertain terms that you are to be sympathetic to the dinosaurs as animals.

[00:26:53]Spielberg just can't stop himself from shooting them like slasher villains.

[00:26:58]These techniques he's using, the jump scares, the doors slowly opening, the nighttime chase sequences, the discoveries of dismembered bodies and instant overwhelming violence. These are horror techniques, obviously. Steven Spielberg did after all begin as a horror director and clearly delights in finding the best way to make you feel as much dread as possible in the face of the thing that wants to eat you. By another token, maybe the way we shoot slashers has something about it of the way we interpret the nature of predation as something with motives completely foreign to our own. Antagonists like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees wordlessly barging into their victims' lives as an unpredictable calamity, what we often call a force of nature. Steven Spielberg is kind of imprisoned by his own talent in this way. He wants to say something specific about nature and its intrinsic value, but the artistic tools that come most naturally to him are really only capable of spectacle. In director and writer Julie Taymor's words, a spectacle is something that has no value beyond the moment, which is essentially what underpins most of American culture in the 20th century.

[00:28:09]It's the reason Steven Spielberg was so perfectly positioned as an artist to define American filmmaking techniques for so long. This doesn't have to be a bad thing. Spielberg makes great movies, but it's good to be aware of the social contexts that allow Spielberg's movies to be great. Taymor was talking about the ephemeral nature of theater in that quote, but spectacle works differently in a medium like film where the spectacular can be repeated as many times as the spectator wants. We have a word for a permanent spectacle. It's called a fetish. It becomes an item of anxious fixation, a locus to package all your unresolvable complications into.

[00:28:48]Spectacle kind of can't help but imply a certain kind of violence or chaos in this way. There's the pre-9/11 disaster porn, but also the giant synchronized dance numbers described in Krakauer's mass ornament. These shifting designs we construct seemingly for the purpose of watching them dissolve into something else or into nothing at all. The audience is always a step removed from that chaos. This is the job of spectacle to replicate the sensation of a shattering earth minus any actual danger. This can make for pretty fertile philosophical soil. The freakiest thing about the world Jurassic Park creates, at least when Spielberg does it, is that our conjuring of these beasts also changes who we are in turn. To the herbivores, we become a figure of torment and cruelty. Since a predator at least still needs to eat, to the carnivores, we become calories. Neither are how we'd like to see ourselves.

[00:29:43]Perhaps, we're the monster.

[00:29:47]I'm so sorry. The problem Spielberg seems sort of ill-equipped to realize in these movies is that our inability to control nature is not the same thing as nature being chaos. In certain other cultures, this would seem completely intuitive, but not ours. The resultant tailspin Spielberg seems to go into is a dynamic that comes out of a storytelling tradition that just doesn't know what to do with features of the world that aren't expressly for us. But also, you know how movies used to be good? Like you movies would come out and you'd go see them and they'd be fun, you'd have a fun time. The Steven Spielberg style that defined so much of American filmmaking in the 20th century relies on these frayed edges, these internal contradictions that allow the audience to leave with actual thoughts in their head and feelings in their bodies, even if they're not completely sure how to articulate them. Spielberg tacks on these incomplete endings. The first ever digital native who speaks computer and saves the day, the wealthy industrialist who offers sage advice about the problem he himself created because Spielberg just isn't really interested in where the story ends up. He's interested in looking at big lizards and thinking about how cool they are and also about how they would toss you back like a handful of Cheez-Its if they got the chance. As is the case in any horror story, resolving those feelings is just kind of a you problem.

[00:31:11]Hey. Periodic reminder that if you appreciate what we do here at Art Tune Shay Films, consider supporting us on Patreon. Also, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got a movie coming out later this year, The Vampires of New Orleans. So, watch this space for updates.

[00:31:26]I think John Hammond is the perfect Victor Frankenstein for our dystopian age. Even his costume, these blinding tropical whites, kind of brings to mind Frankenstein's lab coat in James Whale's film adaptation, as well as the sort of Stanley and Livingstone colonizer cosplay of the British man taming the wild jungle. Personality-wise, Victor and Hammond are actually quite different. Victor is young, a teenager when he begins work on his creature, ambitious, single-minded, outwardly arrogant. Hammond is in his autumn years and presents himself as a sagacious, eccentric [music] grandfather. But much like a tech bro's performative interest in stoicism, this mindful exterior masks a mountainous ego. Both Victor and Hammond describe scientific discovery as a light, which [music] is very Promethean, and both cast themselves in the role of the lightbringer. But neither of their discoveries are really theirs in any meaningful sense. Victor built on the work of the chemists and alchemists who came before him, and Hammond just well, Dr. Malcolm put it best.

[00:32:30]>> I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're that you're using here.

[00:32:34]It didn't require or discipline to attain it.

[00:32:38]You know, you read what others had done and you and you took the next step.

[00:32:41]>> Hammond's reaction to the birth of the raptor hatchlings is very telling to me.

[00:32:45]Of course, in Frankenstein, the creature's birth is essentially a living nightmare, this super heightened, incredibly shocking scene intermingling imagery of sex, death, decay, and birth to wonderfully disgusting effect. Victor abandons his creation in revulsion, but Hammond doesn't.

[00:33:03]I insist on being here when they're born. He coos over his creatures. He speaks to these wild predators as though they were puppies.

[00:33:13]It's paternalistic and belittling. He clearly has no respect at all for the power he's unleashed. They imprint on the first creature they come in contact with. No. No, they don't, John. They don't. They're Velociraptors, not corgis. They're wild animals who belong in their own social groups in the ecosystem to which they are adapted. But of course, Hammond can't internalize that because he's the most problematic type of father there is. One who sees his children as an extension of his own ego. Creation is an act of sheer will. Hammond consistently fails everyone who regards him as a father figure. Dr. Grant, I wonder if perhaps you would be good [music] enough to take a guess, chief, and bring back my grandchildren. And there's connective tissue between Spielberg and Mary Shelley and their raging unresolved daddy issues. Both of these artists had absentee fathers. Mary famously dedicated Frankenstein to her dad, William Godwin, which is such a [ __ ] backhanded compliment. I love it. And the deadbeat dad archetype pops up again and again in Spielberg's work.

[00:34:18]But what's really interesting about Jurassic Park in The Lost World is that Spielberg offers us positive contrasts of good fathers. In the first movie, Alan Grant, the unlikeliest parental figure in the film, takes responsibility for Lex and Tim when it matters the most.

[00:34:34]He loves us. us.

[00:34:35]But that's not what I'm going to do. The second movie is all about parents protecting their [music] children. Ian Malcolm and the bonded pair of T-Rexes are both just trying to rescue their kids from danger.

[00:34:46]These characters are in conflict, but none of them are villains. The true villainy is the pursuit of power and profit embodied by InGen.

[00:34:54]In fact, the male T-Rex is such a good dad that Spielberg feels compelled to give him a very satisfying, but ultimately pretty far-fetched happy ending. If Jurassic Park is in conversation with Frankenstein, then The Lost World is in conversation with well, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, certainly, but more directly, the most foundational big-budget effects movie in history, the original King Kong from 1933. In that film, King Kong is a noble savage, a relic of a bygone primitive age who strikes at the heart of Imperial Western society, but is ultimately doomed to defeat and death at the hands of industrial machinery, a testament to the inferiority of both colonized ecosystems and the colonized people imagined to be in balance with them. The third act sequence in The Lost World, where the male T-Rex rampages across San Diego, is saying something very different. Like Kong, the Rex is taking thematic revenge on the unnatural, synthetic, industrial society which has exploited him and stolen him from his home.

[00:35:58]But the film doesn't present his defeat as inevitable or even desirable. Killing the Rex for following his biological imperative would be an injustice, [music] which is why Malcolm and Harding tranquilize him before the cops can do what cops do best.

[00:36:12]The film is more or less on the T-Rex's side, in that pre-9/11 way, where we can delight in the wholesale destruction of major American cities.

[00:36:21]When you [ __ ] with nature, this is what happens.

[00:36:24]You sow the seeds of your own destruction. Frankenstein is an unremittingly bleak book, and King Kong ends poignantly, [music] a sort of the Great God Pan is Dead moment, signifying the last echoes of a barbaric, bestial age giving way to an avant-garde Promethean [music] one.

[00:36:44]But, Schmaltzy Spielberg gave his Holocaust movie a happy ending. So, no way is he going to do that [ __ ] In Jurassic Park, Hammond lives to understand the gravity of his mistake.

[00:36:55]So much so that in the sequel he's a completely changed man. And rather than sulking off to commit suicide like Frankenstein's creature, the dinosaurs [ __ ] win at the end. All our machines and ingenuity are completely impotent against these creatures and the terrible power of their wilderness of harmony.

[00:37:13]The Lost World ends with an explicit prescription and a moral lesson. The US Navy improbably returns the T-Rex to his family and his ecosystem, and Hammond practically looks straight into the camera and tells us to leave the wild places of this earth well enough alone.

[00:37:29]These creatures require our absence to survive, not our help. And again, this is coming from a dated, kind of naive, middle-class view of ecology. The separation of humans from nature has, as I understand it, been problematized in recent decades.

[00:37:45][music] A great example of this is the history of post-glacial North American ecology.

[00:37:50]The ecosystems currently living north of the glacial maximum have actually never not had humans in them. So, this division between natural wilderness and unnatural humanity is a little deceiving. However, I think the heart of what these movies are saying absolutely still stands. We need to stop sticking our dicks where they don't belong. We need to use our amazing gifts of intelligence and ingenuity to create technologies which will enhance the common good, not inflate the egos [music] of pathetic little rich men. And for [ __ ] sake, we need to radically rethink our relationship to the creatures we share this planet with because I don't know if you've heard, but we are currently at this very moment wiping most of them out. Human industrial activity is causing the biggest extinction event since the dinosaurs. And if the ecosystems that we depend on to survive go, I've got bad news for you, so will we. If we keep leaving the John Hammonds of this world in charge, Mother Nature will, at the end of the day, shrug us off like a bad cold.

[00:38:53]It might take 65 million years for her to bounce back, but as we all know, life uh finds a way.

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