Hollywood Utopia

78 Hollywood Utopia
descend into the island, their final ascent registers firsthand experience and ethical
knowledge of the primary laws of nature.
Yet Rajani Sudan continues to assert that the film’s closure maintains a smug
affirmation of patriarchal values with the two children on either side of the
stereotypical unwilling parent figure. Now at last he has proved himself to be a
worthwhile family man, Sudan affirms, much to the delight and satisfaction of the
nurturing figure of Lauren Dern. For such critics the closing scene reinforces an
ideological affirmation of conventional family values. Sudan goes further, however,
and suggests that it also presents the ‘white, middle class, educated American
family not as a product of biological reproduction but rather as a successful
survivor of competitive natural selection’ (1997: 110). Throughout his essay, Sudan
traces the marginalisation and otherness of the rest of the characters in the film
who ‘deserved to be destroyed’ like the greedy Nerdy mentioned earlier. He even
goes so far as to regard the ‘female dinosaurs’ as ‘unnatural creatures’ who
proliferate ‘like those legendary welfare mothers’, and therefore have to be
‘reconstituted’ or ‘destroyed’ (ibid.: 114). Such an otherwise engaging reading
degenerates into a crude ideological jump of the imagination which ignores the
textual nuances and cues in the final mise-en-scène.
As the camera oscillates between their enclosed space and the outside ecocidal
dystopia, framed by the sublime evocation of nature encapsulated through the
same majestic waterfall in the background as the flight ascends, many questions
remain foregrounded which are not as ideologically polarised as Sudan suggests.
Audiences are at last drawn into close-up portraits of the human protagonists, after
being preoccupied with the chase and the exotic otherness of the dinosaurs. This
is reminiscent of many reflective moments in action adventure movies. Rather than
ideological closure with all the loose ends tied up, which at first sight appears to be
the focus of such a sequence, this mega-blockbuster allows a form of aperture to
be created with major ecological questions concerning humanity’s responsibility to
its environment left provocatively unanswered.
This ecological and utopic reading remains at odds with the attitude taken by most
critics like John O’Neill who endlessly affirm that major questions are not asked by
Hollywood. ‘Yankee culture knows no bounds to its pragmatism, and its
pragmatism encounters no moral limit other than its own failure of nerve. Our
culture does not let Nature speak to us - any more than it allows our science to
correct our humanism to delimit our science.’ In short, he finally affirms that ‘the
biototalitarianism of the new science totters upon the sublime of our
disappearance as a species in favour of a programme or chip whose animation ends
in our death’ (1995: 308-9). O’Neill’s dismissal of the dialogical role of popular
culture to talk to itself and critique its own dominant meta-narrative is in many