Hollywood Utopia

82 Hollywood Utopia
imperialist force of hunters who couldn’t care less for the niceties of ecological
balance and harmony.
Two contrasting mise-en-scènes illustrate this collision of agencies and their
accompanying effect on the eco-system. The first is almost a critique, even a
parody, of the hunt sequence in Dances with Wolves explored in the following
chapter. Our heroes’ and hence the audiences’ focus for identification (using
classic narrative conventional analysis of ‘shot, reverse shot and opposing looks’)
are positioned in hiding on the top of a hill overlooking a long grass valley.
Iconographically they are positioned like native Americans observing the
‘unnatural’ cowboys traversing the plain. Both stalked and exoticised, the dinosaurs
in this instance extend their control and mark on the landscape as the hunt begins
with the counter-invasion force. But instead of remaining distanced from the hunt,
the spectators/audience becomes vicariously invited to join in the pleasure of the
‘ultimate hunt’ of an extinct range of dinosaur species. The camera swoops, dollies
and tracks, matching the eye-line of the attackers, unlike the more individualised
sublime excess first encountered in the original, when unadulterated awe and pure
spectacle dominated the mise-en-scène.
The human hunters fulfil what is regarded as an innate hunter ritual, validating a
hierarchical power structure with man at the top of the food chain and exhibited
throughout hundreds of generations and cultures. But in contrast to Dances with
Wolves, their hunt loses its mythic, symbolic and, most importantly, ethical
validation, since the hunting and subsequent entrapment is solely executed for
secular pleasure, serving no ‘life giving’ scientific purpose. The modus operandi of
the original King Kong myth can no longer be sustained or, more importantly,
legitimated within a post-colonial, ecologically sensitive late twentieth century
western culture. Spielberg positions himself and the audience with his normative
critical observers, who both metaphorically and literally maintain the high moral
ground, serving both to critique the hunt while at the same time validating, if not
legitimating, this form of kinetic excitement.
The cries of the otherwise long extinct creatures as they are unceremoniously
captured is counterpointed and contrasted with the later reversal of this hunting
motif. In the original, the opening horrific pre-sequel features a heavily fortified
caged dinosaur with the audience only able to see a close-up of an eye and to hear
angry animal sounds. The violent reality of hunters becoming victims is most
cogently illustrated when the chief hunter is outwitted by the superior raptors and
provides a foreshadowing of what is to follow.
Romney draws further correlations with the Vietnam war and how ‘one hunter
instinctively shoots a small dinosaur to provide it with a rationale, a blood lust, to
learn to fear man (read American)’ (Romney 1998: 24). There is in some ways a