Hollywood Utopia

Chaos Theory and Ecology
Chaos theory persuasively demonstrates that there are connections between
everything and ‘teaches us to accept that there will be periods of turbulence in life,
but then a pattern will emerge. It teaches us to accept that we can’t always be in
control and centred’ (Wright in Robertson et al. 1996: 227). Sobchack even
suggests that chaos theory has become a conceptual metaphor for postmodernism,
if not always a complementary one. She interprets chaos in terms of a desire to
combine the ability to ‘impose scientific order’ on the world with a ‘desire to
transcend its physical limitations’ and attain a kind of ‘digital freedom by entering
a mathematical space of infinite fractal depths’ (Sobchack 1990: 229).
‘There are only so many plot lines in literature - interaction between (classic
Apollonian, Augustan) order and (Dionysian, romantic, irrational, chaotic) disorder
which tends to occur in Literature (and film)’. By contrast, exclusive and absolute
order and chaos fail to resonate ‘with the way nature organises itself or the way
human perception sees the world . . . Certain character types designed to embody
the dynamic interaction between order and chaos, recur in art’ (Hawkins in
Robertson et al. 1996). 28
Naturally Goldblum’s character exposé of the potency of chaos theory is more indepth
in Crichton’s covertly ecological novel. 29 Explaining the theory, Malcolm
pontificates:
We have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens
outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash, or beyond our control,
like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as
built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us . . . that
straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics
to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world.
Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads
strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may
change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way
(Crichton 1991: 172).
This critique of linearity also serves as a potent critique of ‘realism’ and the classic
Hollywood narrative, to which Spielberg apparently subscribes. The film version,
of course, uses a shorthand version of (eco)chaos thinking: ‘A butterfly flaps its
wings in Peking, the weather in New York is different’ - the butterfly effect.
Malcolm concludes that in spite of the precaution of ensuring that all the dinoanimals
are created female, he correctly predicts they will reproduce, adapting an
ecological chaos theory/paradigm: ‘life will find a way’. 30
2 Nature Film and Ecology 75