Hollywood Utopia

or post cold-war America’ (18 July 1997). This issue of philanthropy and finding a
balance between ‘benevolent’ entrepreneurship and ‘ecological’ ethics becomes a
dominant thematic tension particularly embodied in the character of John
Hammond (Richard Attenborough), the owner/creator of Jurassic Park. His
ecological sensibility, I will argue, becomes most pointedly transformed through
the original blockbuster and into its sequel.
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park, until recently at least, has been considered as the second highest
grossing film of all time and is specifically about ‘nature’. Like a Disney metaproject,
the island is a man-made world, planned out like a large landscape garden
and controlled by a computer centre with the minimum of staff. Like Walt Disney,
the founder of the greatest simulacrum American culture has ever produced, John
Hammond, the fictional entrepreneur of Jurassic Park, also plays God with nature,
controlling every aspect of its evolution. 20 But as one of the protagonists ironically
affirms, Jurassic Park is very unlike the benign reordering of nature in a Disney
theme park where the ‘animals’ do not bite back and economics control the space.
Patrick Murphy raises some interesting points that go beyond the usual
simulacrum debates when he affirms that
escapism is based on denying wild nature as an integral part of the biosphere at the
world level and as part of individual character at the personal level. The denial of wild
nature serves the fabrication of a timeless, universal and unchanging order, articulated
in part by means of cultural values and generalization
(in Bell et al. 1995: 125).
Murphy continues that in ecology we speak of ‘wild systems’ and places as part of
a process, ‘with its active manifestations contingent, indeterminate, and
contextually particularistic, and thus continuous demonstrations of the principle of
difference’. The Disney ethos, on the other hand, Murphy claims, promotes
escapism from the indeterminacy of these ‘wild systems’ through denial of process
and difference. This is helped by the relative primitiveness of the mimetic
animation aesthetic that consistently displays ‘static’ depictions of nature. ‘Both
are based on androcentric hierarchies and dichotomies with women and nature
objectified for the benefit of the male subject’ (in Bell 1995: 125B6). Murphy
further claims that the ‘androcentrism’ of Disney animation is both ideologically
consistent, yet at the same time incoherent. The consistency resides in the
objectification and subordination of life forms, while the incoherence resides in the
philosophical justifications and ideological formations that naturalise them.
2 Nature Film and Ecology 69