by HH Stein
(continuing with the sci fi theme this spring and summer (May: The Day the Earth Stood Still; June: Independence Day; July: Men in Black)
Psychoanalysis is well known for its concept of penis envy, but the corresponding male envy of a woman’s ability to bear children is less publicized although certainly no less important. Edith Jacobson addressed this issue in a 1950 paper entitled “Development of a Wish for a Child in Boys.” Jacobson’s paper refers to a point in the first two to three years of childhood when children are fascinated by the magic of pregnancy and birth. She writes about a little boy’s envy of his powerful mother and her god-like ability to create life. Interestingly, Jacobson’s ideas are represented in an unlikely place, Steven Spielberg’s film, Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park was preceded by as much “hype” as any film I have ever seen. In the week before its debut, its themes were discussed on ABC’s “Nightline” as well as National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday”. Questions were raised as to whether it was too scary for children. I heard someone on radio say that he would not allow his twelve year old to see it, although it is hard to imagine anyone going to see it without a twelve year old. As far as I know, none of those discussions included the film’s psychoanalytic significance. Nevertheless, an action/adventure fantasy is a fantasy, and may well express the unconscious dynamics of the film makers and the anticipated audience.
The film, based on Michael Crichton’s novel, has a veneer of modern scientism, but it is an old style monster movie with the common moral that we flirt with great danger when we attempt to create the unnatural . As with the classic of this genre, Frankenstein, it is the power of creating life, reproductive power, that is usurped from nature in Jurassic Park.
The most obvious theme of the film has to do with men who, through overweening ambition, avarice, and greed, create monsters that get out of control, finally bringing these men to destruction. John Hammond is a very wealthy and ambitious grandfather who pursues his dream of creating a dinosaur theme park on an island off the coast of Costa Rica. His bio-engineers use dinosaur DNA preserved in amber inside the bellies of prehistoric insects to clone live dinosaurs for his island.
The film opens with workmen attempting to load an unseen beast from a large cage into an area of the park. By brute force, the beast causes an accident in which a workman falls down within its reach. We see the man being swallowed into the opaque cage by a powerful force accompanied by loud animal noises. The beast is shot with tranquilizer guns and eventually subdued. As the scene fades out, the head man screams out, “Shoot her! Shoot her!”
This large, mysterious, devouring creature sets the tone for the dinosaurs throughout the film. They are cunning, extremely powerful, and ruthlessly persevering in the pursuit of their sole purpose in the film—to kill and devour people. And they are female.
These predators can be seen as a projection of the unchecked devouring qualities of the greedy men in the film. These include Hammond, who is megalomaniacal in pursuit of his dream and in his ability to buy people with his money. There is also a lawyer, Gennaro, who represents the interests of Hammond’s investors. The investors have become nervous over the threat of a law suit (a devouring monster of our own epoch), and have insisted, through Gennaro, that a team of experts inspect the theme park for safety. Gennaro is portrayed as being motivated only by money. He waives all reservation about the theme park’s safety when he sees a live brontosaurus and realizes how much money the theme park can make. At one point, Hammond refers to him as the “blood-sucking lawyer.” Nedry is a computer whiz who is in charge of the computer system that controls the park’s security. He is presented as fat and gluttonous. His greed for money leads him to betray Hammond by attempting to sell dinosaur embryos to a competitor. In order to get to the embryos unseen, he turns off the security system, an error in judgment that leads to the dinosaurs getting loose. Malcolm, a mathematician who studies chaos theory, is presented ambivalently. However, he is like the chaos that he studies. He is presented as a womanizer on the prowl for his “next ex-wife.” The blood-sucking Gennaro and the greedy, gluttonous Nedry are the dinosaurs’ first victims, as is appropriate for this type of morality play. In fact, the monsters’ attacks upon the offending humans in films like this one demonstrate the use of destructive, sadistic fantasies to enforce morality and the use of conscience to justify sadism. Anyone who has seen a zealous moralist at work will recognize this close connection between conscience and sadism.
As with most films of this genre, there must be a voice of doom and popular conscience, warning of the dangers of tampering with “Mother Nature”. The island on which this film takes place has no peasants to raise this cry, and in keeping with the 90’s, the caution is not made in the name of religion, as in Frankenstein or Dracula, but from science itself. The voice of caution is the chaos theoretician, Ian Malcolm, who argues that nature is far too unpredictable to be tampered with so lightly.
Ironically, the one character in the film that openly identifies with the oral aggression of the dinosaurs is not presented as being greedy and immoral. He is the hero of the film, Alan Grant, a paleontologist who is devoted to the serious study of dinosaur fossils. In his opening scene, Grant is in the field with a coterie of co-workers and on-lookers, examining dinosaur bones they have just uncovered. They are from a predator dinosaur called a raptor. Grant uses his sophisticated equipment to create a computerized image of the whole dinosaur. A pre-adolescent boy complains disparagingly that the raptor looks like a big turkey.
Grant approaches the boy with a claw from the raptor. He tells the boy to imagine that he is facing the raptor straight ahead. Suddenly another raptor attacks him from the side, ripping open his belly with the sharp claws. Grant runs the claw across the boy’s shirt. He tells him that the raptor eats his guts while he is still alive. The boy is clearly terrified and in awe. Afterwards, Grant’s fiancee, Elle Sattler, gently chastises him for scaring the boy. She points out his murderous impulses by telling him that it would have been simpler to point a gun at the boy.
If we start with this scene, we can conceptualize the monstrous events of the film as an embodiment of Grant’s aggressive fantasy directed at the boy. In fact, the scene Grant has envisioned comes to life later in the film, with the raptors using this exact method to kill the caretaker of Hammond’s park. Looked at from this viewpoint, the dinosaurs can be seen as the creatures of Grant’s imagination as well as his personal “monsters from the id,” a term coined in a forty year old film, Forbidden Planet. In that film, the monsters that haunt a group of explorers on a mysterious planet turn out to be expressions of one man’s unconscious jealous aggression, projected into force fields by sophisticated telepathic equipment.
Grant’s destructive urges are directed at a child. The boy is a chubby, awkward looking pre-adolescent. We get a hint that Grant dislikes children. His fiancee, Elle, is trying to convince him that they should have children of their own. He is horrified at the idea. He tells her that babies smell bad. The theme of adult aggression directed at children is not a new one to Spielberg. In E.T., the adult scientists are portrayed as coldly hostile to the childlike E.T.
There are other children in Jurassic Park as well. They are John Hammond’s grandchildren, Tim and Alexis. Their parents, we are told in a passage that can almost be missed, have just been divorced, a background theme in many of Spielberg’s films. One of the central emotional themes of the film has to do with Grant’s initial avoidance of the children and gradual development of acceptance and affection for them as he protects them from the dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the monsters he protects them from represent his own destructive fantasies. The film can be seen as a man’s struggle with his own aggression towards children, an aggression that is finally brought under control in the film’s ultimate suspenseful moment as Grant, Elle, and the children are saved by the dinosaurs turning on one another.
This brings us back to the controversy over whether to allow children to see the film. Although it is a legitimate question that should be raised, I think it likely that it arises in part because of the unconscious message that the aggression towards the children comes from adults, and particularly from parental figures. In a sense, this is a “Hansel and Gretel” type story. Hansel and Gretel were sent into the woods alone by their abusive stepmother and negligent father to cope with a witch who wanted to bake them and eat them. Tim and Alexis are sent by their loving grandfather into an untested theme park filled with large ferocious predators. Their parents are not present. They are presumably occupied with their own divorce and have sent the children to the care of this capricious grandfather. Grant, the paleontologist, is Tim’s hero, but he avoids Tim when they first meet. It is only when the children are in real danger that he changes, somewhat like the father in some versions of “Hansel and Gretel”.
Shortly after seeing Jurassic Park, while doing research for something else, I read Edith Jacobson’s paper, “Development of a Wish for a Child in Boys”. She writes, primarily, about men who were absorbed with their continuing wish to have children, losing interest in wives, for instance, who could not give them a child. In a small section of the paper, she also discusses a different type of male patient. Jacobson writes that in late adolescence, girls are absorbed with issues of maternity, while boys the same age are far removed from fantasies of having children of their own. She explains this difference partly on the basis of social factors, then writes: “But the absence of a longing for children in men until they approach marriage is also due to firm defenses against the envy of woman’s reproductive functions.” She goes on to write that she has analyzed men who resisted their wives’ demands for having children. “In the course of analysis, their conspicuous disinterest in having children of their own regularly proves to be a stubborn defense against a deeply repressed envy of woman’s reproductive abilities.” (p. 144)
I was struck that this description accurately fit Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Elle is overt in her attempts to get Grant interested in having children. She tries to push them upon him. Not only does Grant resist having children, he also fails to hide his murderous fantasies directed at them. Following Jacobson’s suggestion, it would appear that he is defending against his envy of woman’s reproductive abilities. One of the key manifest themes of the film is Grant’s transformation from being phobic and aggressive towards children to being a warm, protective paternal figure.
Male envy of female reproductive power can be easily seen elsewhere in the film. In re-creating dinosaurs, Hammond, like Baron Frankenstein, is attempting to usurp woman’s reproductive power. In an early scene, the visitors to the park, Grant, Elle, Malcolm, and Gennaro, arrive at the bio-engineering laboratory just in time to see a “cute” baby raptor emerge from its egg. An excited Hammond encourages the baby, “Come on, come on” in a high pitched voice aimed affectionately at a baby. He explains that he has made sure to be present at every birth. During the ensuing discussion, the supervising scientist, also a man, explains that the dinosaurs on the island will be unable to reproduce on their own because they are all hatched as females through hormonal controls. “There is no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.” Malcolm, the mathematician, suggests that they should not be so sure, that the unlikely is statistically likely to happen. Hammond’s scientist asks ironically whether females will reproduce on their own.
In essence, these men have not only taken over reproduction, they have also denied the female dinosaurs the ability to reproduce. This accentuates the fact that females cannot reproduce without males, taking from women the magical power attributed to them by the very young child. The dinosaurs will later retaliate by attempting to kill the humans and their offspring. The film becomes a phylogenetic battle with a disguised battle between the sexes. (Incidentally, the two human females in the film symbolically eschew destructiveness, and particularly oral destructiveness. They are both vegetarians.)
When Grant first meets Tim and Alexis, he literally runs from them. Tim chases him from car to car, trying to sit with him on the ride through the park. At one point, Alexis feigns falling as they approach a sick triceratops and does not let go of the hand that he instinctively offers. His transformation starts with the triceratops. When Alexis sees him leaning over the animal, listening to its breathing, she smiles with seeming admiration. Grant is forced to deal with the children when they are threatened by the park’s tyrannosaurus. Faced with the realization of his own violent fantasies, he becomes protective. He reassures Alexis that he will not abandon her and gently coaxes Tim out of a tree. When they reach relative safety, he puts his arms around them and promises to stay awake all night while they sleep. As he softens towards them, they also come into contact with the kinder, vegetarian dinosaurs. At this point, he drops the raptor claw he has been holding, the symbol of his destructive fantasies.
The next morning, Grant and the children discover dinosaur eggs in the park. Grant explains that the dinosaurs were cloned with some amphibian DNA to fill gaps in the structure. Amphibians have the capacity to change sex for reproductive purposes. Grant, who by now has spent a night protecting the children, appears to be pleased that the dinosaurs have been able to produce offspring. Clearly, he has shed his defenses and is more openly identifying with maternal reproductive powers. He is well on his way toward becoming a father.
With insights gained from Jacobson’s paper, the interweaving fantasies of Jurassic Park suggest that boys (and presumably girls, as well) must give up omnipotent, narcissistic fantasies of producing their own babies without help in order to move to mature acceptance of sharing in the process of reproduction. Nedry, the gluttonous computer whiz, Gennaro, the money hungry lawyer, and Hammond, the megalomaniacal entrepreneur, pursue solitary ambitions. Malcolm, the mathematician, pursues women, but has no thought about a stable sharing relationship or the sharing of a family. Elle Sattler is ready for motherhood from the beginning of the film. At one point, we see her tending to an ill triceratops, going through its feces with gloved hands. She is ready for the arduous and sometimes messy business of caring for babies.
Alan Grant is the one character in the film that progresses through a maturation process. At the beginning, he defends against his envy of women. He avoids children and delays marriage. In Jacobson’s terms, he is envious of women’s ability to have babies and unconsciously harbors his own wish to produce babies on his own. At the end of the film, he is accepting of his limitations and of his ability to gratify his wishes to have children by taking a sharing role as a spouse and a parent. This resolution is dramatized in the film’s final scene. With grandfather Hammond and a beaming Elle looking on, the children sleep leaning against Grant as they leave the island. The family structure, disrupted by violent envy, has been restored.
Jacobson, E. (1950) Development of a wish for a child in boys. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 5:139
Published previously in PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein: an EReads book (2002)