Hollywood Utopia

72 Hollywood Utopia
‘nature’ as well as ‘history’ and ‘science’, since it is driven by the need to promote
a strong narrative which usually demands a form of linearity that promotes ‘simple’
cause and effect connections.
The isolation of ecological effects framed within an ethical discourse on the
genetic manipulation of nature nonetheless remains the core back-story of the
film. The use of technology to render nature accurate and believable becomes one
of the greatest, all-time challenges to human ingenuity.
Eric Faden, on the other hand, suggests that Hollywood’s contemporary
‘assimilation of computer technology relies on control, synchronisation, and
visualisation’, whereas early computer imagery ‘was largely shaped by those who
equated technology and science with control and predictability’. In the digital age,
cinema’s spectacle becomes much more ‘controllable’ (Faden 1999: 70). Focusing
particularly on Jurassic Park, which ‘paints nature as eternally unpredictable and
uncontrollable’, ironically ‘the film’s formal construction suggests the opposite’.
Indeed, ‘nature’ (at least the indexical signifier of nature) ‘remains very much
controllable, all the way down to the last pixel’ (ibid.: 72).
At the outset it is somewhat disingenuous to dismiss such special effects, and the
Spielbergian effect in particular, as simply reaffirming the ideological status quo by
‘controlling’ nature and human imagination as Faden suggests. While new
technology is most certainly driven by economic imperatives, audiences often find
ways to subvert their controlling ideologies, and philosophical and even ecological
questions permeate the shiny veneer of many spectacular effects.
In computer-generated culture, ‘the computer in-frames the world by making it
absolutely available and manageable’ (Wright in Robertson et al. 1996: 229). CGI
(Computer Generated Imagery) helps to produce film exposition of otherwise
unfilmable nature, such as the close-up representations in Twister discussed
earlier, to become more ‘normalised’ and ‘naturalised’. A major difficulty occurs,
however, with simulating ‘natural objects’ like clouds, trees and even crowds, ‘like
the Lumiere crowds’ that seem random but are ‘also complex and repetitive’. In
fact, a surprising majority of so-called ‘invisible’ special effects created, like the
waves in Titanic or the chase sequences in Terminator 2, are designed simply to
simulate and dramatise events in the actual world and save time and money. Only
a small percentage of SXF are truly ‘visible’ and capable of rendering a conventional
sublime sense of awe in audiences, 24 as with the ship in Titanic, the storm in
Twister, the shark in Jaws, as well as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Many critics assert that such constructed dinosaurs remain zombies, albeit
magnificent simulated bodies, which ‘lack their own behaviour, their own will, their
own drive for survival’ (Kelly 1994: 402). This reading is also affirmed by O’Neill’s