Hollywood Utopia

novel is to serve as a mediating term between capitalism and nature: it reinterprets social forces
as natural forces’ (Sartelle 1993: 3).
30. Gleich, however, believes that chaos theory could undermine ecology’s most enduring
assumptions, which are based on a simple sense of equilibrium. Traditional models are betrayed
by their linear bias. Nature, he demands, ‘is more complicated. All simple deterministic systems
could breed complexity . . . systems too complex for traditional mathematics could yet obey
simple laws . . . the task of all (scientists and even cultural analysts) is to understand complexity
itself’ (Gleick 1987: 307-315).
31. As was convincingly expressed in the ‘Cybernetic Explanation’ in Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(Bateson 1973).
32. John O’Neill, in an unsubtle critique of the film, ‘Dinosaurs-R-Us: The (Un)Natural History of
Jurassic Park’, affirms how the film is ‘actually a repetition of the biblical story of “man’s”
nability to repeat the Divine creative act. This time the agents are Science and Commerce, or
Knowledge and Greed, and what is violated by their monstrous desire to clone Nature is fuzzy
logic, or the law that any total system must generate chaos’ (cited in Cohen 1996: 293). While
one must agree with his overall argument - like the way critical theorists misconstrue the
primary pleasure of popular culture -O’Neill appears to miss out on its sophistication. By
dismissing the movie ‘in JP, America can celebrate its emptiness as depth’ (ibid.:297), he refuses
to see, much less appreciate its ‘excessive potency’.
33. It was a similar island (Galapagos) which was ‘naturally’ controlled as a result of its distance
from the mainland that Darwin in 1835 described as paradise. Furthermore, he conceptualised
from this place a coherent view of natural selection while his crew described the same vision of
nature as hell, observing the unusual volcanic landscape and strange lizards, etc. (see television
documentary Wild Island, Channel 4, 28 July 1997).
34. Spielberg has always shown revulsion towards television as a medium for its insubstantiality and
often its mediocrity, as is most clearly evoked in Poltergeist (1982), which he did not direct but in
which his influence was pervasive.
2 Nature Film and Ecology 89