PART IV: A MAN’S GOTTA DO
"A man will search his heart and soul/Go searchin’ way out there/His peace of mind he knows he’ll find/But where, oh Lord, Lord, where?"
The Searchers
"This," said Arnold Spielberg holding a transistor in his hand, "is the future."
It's a future that lasted mere seconds though, because no sooner had Arnold finished his sentence than the transistor was out of his hand and in his son's. Steven then proceeded to place the object in his mouth and swallow. It was an act of rebellion and a cry for help. Steven wanted his father's attention.
This story illuminates much about Spielberg's early life and his strained relationship with his father. A computer engineer, Arnold was one of the most sought-after in the business, and his job demanded multiple relocations (Steven lived in Cincinnati, New Jersey, Arizona and finally California during his early years), along with numerous late nights and stretches of overtime. All of this meant that Arnold was often away from home - an absence keenly felt by his son.
One of six members of the Spielberg household, and one of only two males after his sisters Anne, Sue and Nancy were born during a six-year period in the 1950s, Spielberg slowly began to feel outnumbered. "[I lived] in a house of women," he has remembered. "Even the dog was female. I was the only guy in the entire house...I was eight or nine or ten at the time, and I was supposed to be the oldest in the family, but [my sisters] had the run of the house. I just remember my sisters were terrors. They'd run through the house, they'd come into my room, and they'd knock my models off the shelf." (McBride, 72)
When Arnold was around, Spielberg showed obvious excitement and grabbed the opportunity to spend time with his father. One such occasion came when Arnold visited Spielberg's school to show slides of a recent work trip to the Soviet Union. His teacher, Eleanor Wolf, remembers, "that's the only time I saw the kid excited, maybe because his father would take the time to come in." (McBride, 74). When not pre-occupied by work, Arnold did take an active interest in his son's life, helping foster his interest in science fiction by reading him sci-fi stories and encouraging his early film-making endeavours by providing cameras, money and filming locations. But the boy struck up a better rapport with Leah. "His father traveled a lot, and I think that's why Steve was close to his mother," teacher Pat Rodney told McBride. "She was a really strong person in Steve's life." (McBride, 74).
It's not hard to connect the dots. The boy who grew up without a strong father figure would spend much of his adult life constructing one through film. Or, at least, that's what general consensus holds. Spielberg himself, however, does not agree. While promoting the UK release of Lincoln in January 2013, the director downplayed the role of father figures in his body of work, suggesting that his films have not been affected by the distance he felt from his father while growing up. He told The Daily Telegraph’s Will Lawrence: "Even if I'd had a really happy relationship with my father and there was no emotional hiatus for a decade and a half, I probably would still have made some of the same choices for movies that I've made."
Though some of Spielberg's films seem irrevocably tied to his childhood yearning for a strong father figure (E.T., Empire of the Sun and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), in many cases, his most famous father figures (Duel's David Mann, Chief Brody of Jaws, Hook's Peter Banning, Minority Report's John Anderton and Munich's Avner) are defined as much by their masculinity as their roles as fathers. They are frustrated weaklings, domineering businessmen, depressed cops and vengeful government agents. Their problems emanate from their successes or failures as men and are resolved by their ability to either become stronger men or find a balance in their masculine power. Through these characters then, Spielberg doesn't just speak to his childhood yearning for a strong father, but his yearning for a strong version of himself - a strong sense of masculinity, the lack of which was strongly felt by the youngster.
Dubbed 'Spielbug' because of his sticky-out ears, protruding nose and bulging Adam's Apple, Spielberg was, in his own words, "a wimp in a world of jocks" when he was a child. He had friends, but they "were all like me. Skinny wrists and glasses. We were all just trying to make it through the year without getting our faces pushed into the drinking fountain." (McBride, 68-69). His attempts wouldn't always succeed, and he turned to an unusual technique to change his physical appearance and gain the respect he sought. "I used to take a big piece of duct tape and put one end on the top of my nose and the other end as high up on my forehead line as I could," he has explained. "I had this big nose. My face grew into it, but when I was a child, I was very self-conscious about my schnozz. I thought if you kept your nose taped up that way, it would stay... like Silly Putty." (McBride, 69). It never did.
Sport offered no solace for the boy - in fact, it only made his sense of inadequacy worse. "He would participate, but we'd kind of tease him about not being able to throw a football or catch very well," childhood friend Scott MacDonald told Joseph McBride. On one occasion, as remembered by MacDonald's sister Sandy, "someone got boxing gloves, and we made a ring between our two houses. When it was Stevie's turn, he got hit and ran away. He got a bottle of ketchup from his house and every time he was hit, he'd pour ketchup on himself. He had it all over his clothes and hair." (McBride, 61). It wasn't the only time Spielberg would use such entertaining tactics. In another incident, he was running a footrace against a mentally handicapped boy. His classmates were cheering the other boy on, and so Spielberg intentionally fell, allowing his competitor to take the lead. The boy went on to win, while Spielberg earned himself the nickname 'The Retard'. "I'd never felt better and I'd never felt worse in my entire life," he recalled (Crawley, 13).
On both occasions, Spielberg tackled his perceived masculine deficiencies in the same way he tackled his fears: through creativity. If he couldn't be seen as masculine, Spielberg would find a masculine activity, put a creative spin on it and "embellish reality", turning himself into someone who, if still not masculine, was entertaining enough to distract his friends from his lack of strength. It is, perhaps, for this reason that his early film-making efforts were in predominantly masculine genres - science-fiction (Firelight), Westerns (The Last Gunfight), Action (The Last Train Wreck) and War (Fighter Squad, Escape to Nowhere) - and why he has so often returned to those genres in his professional career. Not content with the masculinity he was given, Spielberg directed himself a new one.
DINOSAURS EAT MAN...
In Jurassic Park, Spielberg doesn't create one new masculine persona, but several. The film is dominated by men, and even the two women (Sattler and Lex) are defined by their tomboyishness, Lex being a computer hacker whose traditionally masculine-associated knowledge saves the day in the film's finale, Sattler becoming the proactive hero by turning the Park's power back on. The male characters are as follows: naive but determined Park creator John Hammond (Richard Attenborough); childish palaeontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill); "rock star" chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum); young dinosaur enthusiast Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello); Park warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) and computer technicians John Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) and Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight). Though some of the characters may seem incidental, they all play either overt or subtextual roles in the film's thematic drama, and often represent an element or elements of Spielberg's life and career.
For example, Arnold and Nedry are arguably the two sides of Spielberg's attitude to technology. On the one hand, there's Nedry, whose slobbish ways reflects Spielberg's messiness as a child (he paid so little attention to his personal hygiene that his mother had to ask a teacher he respected to talk to him about it). He's greedy and gluttonous, often seen eating or drinking in his scenes, and proves something of a problem child ("I don't blame people for their mistakes," chides Hammond, "but I do expect them to pay for them." "Thanks Dad," comes Nedry's sarcastic reply). He is the Spielberg who critics say gorges himself on technology and the spectacle it brings, the director who 'infantalised' cinema in the 70s and 80s.
On the
other hand, there's Arnold, an older, more experienced and mature man who is disgusted by Nedry's habits ("look at this mess," he says as he moves to his colleague's desk) and is something of a realist. It is he who reminds Hammond that the failed first tour could have been much worse than it was when Hammond complains, he who attempts to crack Nedry's complex code when it becomes obvious he isn't coming back, and he who enacts an alternative solution when the code proves impossible to decipher. Both men are killed, but while Nedry's death is shown to, and enjoyed by, the audience, the bad guy getting a nasty comeuppance, Arnold's is off-screen and heroic - he is killed by Raptors while trying to turn the Park's power back on. This is one of many occasions in the film where the mature, responsible man is portrayed as heroic.
Such oppositions litter the film and sometimes even cross over into other Spielberg films. In Muldoon, Jurassic Park has its own version of Jaws's Quint, with both men being experienced hunters and the ostensible alpha males of their films. They know how to deal with their respective monster and yet ultimately fall to them. The characters are also connected by their differences. Whereas Quint has an Ahab-esque obsession with the shark, a determination to kill it borne out of his experiences on the USS Indianapolis, Muldoon's is a more intellectual admiration. He understands the Raptors and appreciates their cunning. He doesn't relish having to track them down like Quint does, and nor does he look upon them with the awe-struck reverence that Grant, Sattler and Malcolm do when they are first shown their pen. He is another realist, and unlike Quint, whose fingernails-down-the-blackboard entrance in Jaws is one of cinema history's most memorable, Muldoon is introduced at the start of the film, and is overshadowed by the Raptor.
Yet Spielberg doesn't entirely condemn Quint. As the film's alpha male figure, Quint is something of a love/hate figure: a bully who holds the townspeople to ransom, but one who is knowledgeable enough to justify that money. He's the John Wayne lookalike Spielberg cast in Escape to Nowhere - a threat he fears but wants to get on his side. During the scenes on the Orca, this becomes particularly pronounced. Quint mercilessly picks on Hooper, calling into question his ability to tie knots and steer the boat (in other words, mocking his masculinity), and Hooper reacts by childishly exclaiming 'Aye, aye, Captain!' or pulling faces behind his back (in other words, joking about, as the young Spielberg did). Quint is, as Pauline Kael notes, a "nut Ahab...[who] stands in for all the men who have to show they're tougher than anybody" and she correctly notes that Quint's fate at the mercy of "the shark's cavernous jaws demonstrate[s] how little his toughness finally adds up to."
Yet Kael's assessment ignores the admiration Spielberg has for the character. In one of Jaws's most evocative shots, Spielberg shows Quint moving to the head of the boat. He simply stands there, doing nothing and saying nothing, just swaying with the motion of the sea against a blood red dusky sky. The lack of sunlight turns Quint into a shadow, affording him both a sense of danger and beauty - like Monument Valley shot by Ford. We fear him, this strange and unknowable figure, but we also long to be him, to possess his sense of mystery and seemingly pervasive knowledge of the task at hand. If anyone can take down the shark, it is this man, a point proven by the film's iconic USS Indianapolis speech, during with Hooper and Quint bond over the former's story about the doomed submarine. Hooper's smart alec comments come to an end here as he is stunned into silence by the tale, a sense of respect replacing the sarcasm. Quint is no longer the bullying, antiquated seadog, but the pinnacle of masculinity, a man who was given the ultimate test of strength and passed with flying colours.
During this scene, Brody looks on, feeling unable to join in. He has no scars, except for the one earned when he had his Appendix taken out, and no stories to tell. If Hooper represents Spielberg the exhibitionist, keeping his lack of self-worth under wraps with comedic asides, Brody is the inner Spielberg, the scared and lonely boy who just wants to be accepted, but never will be. Like Spielberg, Brody is "a wimp in a world of jocks." He's given the menial task of chumming by Quint when on the Orca, is harangued by a neighbour into doing him a favour during the Kintner boy death sequence, and is manipulated into keeping the beaches open despite his better wishes by Amity's corrupt mayor. He's even slapped by Mrs. Kintner when she learns the truth about Crissie's death and how it influenced her son's demise. He is less cheeky than Hooper in the way he answers Quint back, and he posses a quiet respect for Quint long before Hooper does. Jaws is, as Andrew Gordon notes, "centrally concerned with male fears and desires, especially the masculine desire to prove one's potency" (Gordon, 38), and it's only when Brody stops being a wimp and takes on a little of Quint's masculinity that he becomes potent enough to kill the shark.
Muldoon entirely lacks such dramatic purpose. No other characters have to learn from his example, and the story doesn't take a significant shift in any direction when he is killed. By doing the opposite with Quint in Jaws, Spielberg infuses the film with some of the tropes of the classic Western, and it is vital for the appreciation of Spielberg's development of his masculine themes in Jurassic Park to understand the Western elements in Jaws.
The Western is described by Filmsite as follows:
"Usually, the central plot of the western film is the classic, simple goal of maintaining law and order on the frontier in a fast-paced action story. It is normally rooted in archetypal conflict - good vs. bad, virtue vs. evil, white hat vs. black hat, man vs. man, new arrivals vs. Native Americans... humanity vs. nature, civilization vs. wilderness or lawlessness... lawman or sheriff vs. gunslinger, social law and order vs. anarchy, the rugged individualist vs. the community. Often the hero of a western meets his opposite "double," a mirror of his own evil side that he has to destroy.
"Typical elements in westerns include hostile elements (often Native Americans), guns and gun fights (sometimes on horseback), violence and human massacres, horses, trains (and train robberies), bank robberies and holdups, runaway stagecoachs, shoot-outs and showdowns, outlaws and sheriffs, cattle drives and cattle rustling, stampedes, posses in pursuit, barroom brawls, 'search and destroy' plots, breathtaking settings and open landscapes (the Tetons and Monument Valley, to name only a few), and distinctive western clothing (denim, jeans, boots, etc.).
"Western heroes are often local lawmen or enforcement officers, ranchers, army officers, cowboys, territorial marshals, or a skilled, fast-draw gunfighter. They are normally masculine persons of integrity and principle - courageous, moral, tough, solid and self-sufficient, maverick characters (often with trusty sidekicks), possessing an independent and honorable attitude (but often characterized as slow-talking). The Western hero could usually stand alone and face danger on his own, against the forces of lawlessness (outlaws or other antagonists), with an expert display of his physical skills (roping, gun-play, horse-handling, pioneering abilities, etc.)."
Jaws doesn't incorporate all of these points, but it does include many of them. Brody's quest is a simple one (to kill the shark) and in doing so he will restore order to a town that, while hardly the frontier, is turned as wild as the frontier by the emergence of the shark. The battle between Brody and the shark is indeed a battle between good and evil, and here the stagecoaches and trains of the Western are replaced by the boats of the townspeople and Quint's vessel, the Orca. Finally, of course, Brody is a local lawman (Amity's Police Chief) and he ultimately has to stand alone against the shark and display his physical skill. In other words, he has to display his masculinity.
Brody's masculinity is not only established down the barrel of a gun though. Before setting out to sea, and before failing to protect the Kintner boy, Brody fails at a masculine task that leads to the film's drama and its multiple deaths: standing up to the Mayor. Spielberg ties Brody's failure to confront the Mayor with a failure of his masculine strength through careful framing of the scene where the Mayor tells him not to record Chrissie's death as a shark attack. Gordon writes:
"As Brody is about to board the ferry to warn some swimming Boy Scouts [about the shar
k], he is overtaken by the Mayor, the newspaper editor, and the coroner. There is a motif in this film of men hunting in packs: the Mayor's hunting party; the comic armada of shark fishermen in overloaded boats, and finally the trio of Quint, Hooper and Brody... Aboard the ferry, the Mayor and his group gang up on Brody, three against one, and he is pinned to the extreme left in a tightly framed shot. Intimidated, Brody capitulates."
(Gordon, 43)
Before Brody can kill the shark, he first has to regain authority by taking on the Mayor, and he does so in a scene set in Amity's local hospital following a 4th July attack that almost claimed the life of Brody's children. The scene begins with Ellen Brody tending to her son, Michael, who is in the hospital with shock. "Want to take him home?" Brody asks her. "Back to New York?" she counters. "No, home here," Brody replies, refusing to run and hide as earlier dialogue establishes he'd done when confronted with the violence of previous home city New York. This dialogue had portrayed New York as a sort of Wild West filled with killing and gun violence, and by blurring the two, Spielberg further establishes the lawlessness of Amity. Not even Ellen, so settled in Amity before, can tell the difference.
As Ellen departs the scene, the Mayor enters it to discuss the attack with Brody. The confidence and bravado he displayed in their previous conversation has disappeared. He no longer considers only the commercial difficulties of announcing the presence of a shark during Amity's holiday season, and has a personal connection to the attack since his children were on the beach as well. Seeing the Mayor's weakness, Brody senses his chance and corners him as he had been cornered himself earlier in the film, forcing the Mayor to sign a contract that will give Quint the exorbitant fee he demands to kill the shark. Here is the Old West Sheriff standing up to the corrupt incumbent. Here is a man ready to take up his masculine mantel.
Though a simpler film, Duel follows a similar Western-influenced narrative trajectory, with Gordon writing that it shows "the Easterner [Mann], a pale city fellow who lives by the rule of law, becom[ing] a man only after winning a showdown with a Westerner, a rugged individualist and outlaw bred in the anarchy of the frontier." These are thoughts echoed by Spielberg himself, who said that Mann is "a mild-mannered businessman... [whose] life needed changing, as they say in the Old West." The same can be said of Grant in Jurassic Park - indeed, the film as a whole can also be read as something of a Western, with issues of order and chaos, nature and masculinity emerging in it too. Yet while Duel and Jaws portray their protagonists' success as deriving from physical prowess and masculine dominance, Jurassic Park shows the opposite, portraying physical strength and masculine control as negative, even destructive, things. This is symbolised through the other male characters - Hammond, Malcolm, Grant and Tim.
SHEER WILL
Through Hammond and Malcolm, Spielberg explores the philosophy of control and creation, building them as distinctly masculine and destructive concepts. During the lunch sequence in which Hammond, Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Gennaro discuss the ethics of bioengineering, Hammond and Malcolm exchange heated words. Malcolm (another Arnold and Muldoon-esque realist) compares Hammond to "a kid who's just found his dad's gun," condemning his creation of Jurassic Park as a "violent and penetrative [act]... the rape of the natural world." Hammond brushes his concerns aside, and the debate continues, but he finds little more support, Grant and Sattler only echoing Malcolm's points. "I can't believe it," he says defeated. "I bring you to defend me, and the only one I've got on my side is the bloodsucking lawyer."
Spielberg's Hammond is, on the surface, a less damning one than Crichton's. In the book, Hammond is a calculating and arrogant figure, whose reckless hubris is punished in the finale, when he is killed by a pack of Compsognathus. He is remorseless, ignores the warnings of the scientists he's hired to advise him, and refuses to be diverted from his path - he's the "dark side of Disney," as Crichton explained. Spielberg maintains the story's cinematic link by casting actor/director Richard Attenborough in the role, and for some critics this deeply personal choice (Attenborough starred in one of Spielberg's childhood favourites, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the pair struck up a friendship following the Oscar triumph of Attenborough's Ghandi over E.T. in 1983) prevented Spielberg from condemning the character too deeply. "The crotchety, almost dwarfish curmudgeon of the book," Baxter writes, "had transformed into a jolly Santa Claus whose toys have got out of hand." (Baxter, 378)
There is some truth in that reading - though it's a somewhat shallow one. There's a richness to Spielberg's Hammond that's largely absent from Crichton's, and it makes him a somewhat more dislikeable character. Under Spielberg, Hammond is as remorseless and relentless as he is under Crichton ("creation is an act of sheer will," he tells Sattler with thinly veiled ferocity - again linking violence with creation), but is somewhat more charming and a much better people person - a nicer Hammond, but a no less dangerous one. "I thought the part was fascinating, and quite different from the Hammond in the book," Attenborough said. "In the book, Hammond really was a bit of a sod - even a villain to a certain point. The screenplay illustrated a man of some ruthlessness and determination, but also considerable charm, [a man] who uses that charm and a kind of impresario flair to persuade people." (Shay and Duncan, 71).
Attenborough's observation about Hammond's use of his "impresario flair to persuade people" is critical to understanding just how venomous Spielberg's version of the character is. Spielberg is, like Hammond, a man of considerable charm and, when younger, he used his "impresario flair" to persuade friends to take part in his films and adults to let him use their property to shoot on. As he got older, he became no less charming, dazzling audiences with his movies and using his flair to become one of the most powerful producers of the 1980s. But by the end of the decade, he'd become disillusioned, knowing that he had "been in the candy factory for the last three years as a producer making sugar substitutes" and that if he didn't get out "it would ruin my health." (Forsberg in Friedman and Notbohm, 131). Hammond is a Spielberg who got stuck in the factory and pays the ultimate price, staring at the film's end into the amber egg that tops his walking cane, knowing his dream is over, but so frozen in time that he is unable to let it go completely.
A NEW MAN
Grant is quite the opposite. If Hammond is the man Spielberg fears he could become, a man of accidental destruction and masculine dominance, Grant is the man he wants to become - no less fascinated by the magnificence of dinosaurs, but able by the film's end to put them aside and focus on reality. That end finds him seizing a new lease of life through children, sleeping on the helicopter with Lex under one arm and Tim under the other. It's quite a change from the Grant we see at the start of the film, a closed-off man out of touch with the modern world ("I hate computers," he says in frustration at technical troubles at the dig in Montana) and disdainful towards children ("They're noisy, they smell!" he tells Sattler when discussing the possibility of starting a family). Grant has dedicated his life so entirely to the study of long dead animals that he's never stepped out of the past and into the world of the living. He, even more than the dinosaurs he digs up, is a fossil.
Spielberg's portrait of Grant is a significant shift from Crichton's, who writes that "Grant liked kids - it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs" (Crichton, 115). In changing the character's attitude so dramatically, Spielberg continues with much greater success an idea he explored in Hook, whose leading man, Peter Banning (Robin Williams), also possesses a contempt for children. The Banning of Hook is a Peter Pan who has grown up, become a businessman and left behind all traces of his previous life. He has a wife now and children too, but so obsessed with playing the high-powered businessman has he become that he spends little time with them, and during any time he does have to spare he shows them little but anger and frustration, shouting at his son Jack for acting childishly ("But Dad,
I am a child," comes the reply) and dismissing an origami flower his daughter Maggie builds for him as "just paper."
In the film's opening act, Banning is portrayed as an alpha male - a sort of business-suited Quint minus the fishing pole. Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith) calls him "a pirate" when she's told about his career in mergers and acquisitions and in one of the first scenes we see him in, he's playing out a gunfight with a colleague, mobile phones replacing weapons as Spielberg again portrays the masculine world as an inherently violent one. This idea is extended when Peter journeys to Neverland to recover his children, who have been kidnapped by Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman), and has to dress up as a pirate to sneak onto the Jolly Roger. Banning is seen as ludicrous in this real-life world of cut-throat masculinity, and his emasculation isn't lessened when Hook appears, the pirate’s eponymous limb (another signifier of violent masculinity) being attached to his arm in a bizarre ceremony that sees his men dancing and singing 'Hook, hook, give us the hook!'. The Captain is Banning's dark half, and he cuts through to the core of Banning's flaws, calling him "a cold, selfish man who drinks too much, is obsessed with success, and runs and hides from his wife and children."
Grant also wants children gone, but in Jurassic Park, the stakes are much higher (literally life and death) and the violence heightened. Writing in a 1993 issue of Sight and Sound magazine, critic Henry Sheehan argued that the film explores Grant's "child-murder fantasies" and repeatedly presents him with scenes linking children with death. He writes:
"The two most terrifying scenes in the film revolve specifically around the children's near-death at the hands first of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and then of the velociraptors. But these encounters also serve to play out the child-murder fantasies of Dr. Grant. Grant's girlfriend, paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler claims laughingly that the scientist has a phobia about kids, as if it were a bachelor tic. But the way Neill plays Grant, dark and morose, there doesn't seem anything lighthearted about his disdain for them... "
Sheehan's argument perhaps takes Grant's dislike for children a little too far, but the character's introduction in the Badlands scene is an interesting case study for the film's exploration of masculinity and violence. In this scene, Grant is confronted by a child who questions the ferocity of dinosaurs, comparing a Velociraptor to a "giant turkey." Grant calmly retorts with a description of how Raptors killed their prey, hunting in packs, slashing at their victims' bellies to spill out their intestines, and finally eating them alive. While telling this story, he uses a fossilised Raptor claw to mimic the actions, gently 'carving' the boy's belly open to explain the slashing. It's a dark inversion of the bedtime story scenes witnessed by Elliott and ET in E.T. and later by David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Instead of offering comfort, as those scenes did, here Grant offers nightmares. The stunned boy can only utter a whispered 'OK' in reply, and Grant leaves the scene, having re-established his dominance and re-affirmed his cosy bubble, in which dinosaurs are still awe-inspiring creatures and children are disrespectful and rude.
This scene is echoed later in the film when Grant, Lex and Tim are stranded within the now offline Park and seek safety in the branches of a tree. By this point, Grant has saved the children from the Tyrannosaur attack and struck up the beginnings of a relationship with them. They sit in the tree, which the setting sun is casting soft Spielbergian orange light onto, and tries to comfort them, telling them he'll stay awake during the night in case any dinosaurs come. The children rest under his arms, as they do at the end of the film, and Tim tells a couple of dinosaur jokes, gently mocking the creatures just as the boy earlier had. This time though, Grant joins in the fun and laughs. Williams's score plays a soft, almost lullaby-like version of the film's main theme, and Spielberg's camera tracks slowly out. The scene goes quiet as the kids fall asleep, and Grant removes the Raptor claw he'd used to intimidate the boy earlier from his backpocket before throwing it to the floor just as Banning does with his phone at the end of Hook. Both moments are symbolic of men leaving behind one version of their life and replacing it with another, better version.
In this respect, Grant and Banning share something in common with Duel's David Mann, another Spielberg male who trades one masculine persona in for another, superior, one. Yet while Grant and Banning discard their aggressive masculine signifiers, happy by the conclusions of their films that they no longer have to define themselves through physical prowess, Mann's journey takes him in the opposite direction. Duel is the story of a character who has to prove his worth by shaking off the confines of a home environment dominated by his wife, who lambasts him for not standing up to his lecherous boss and not commanding a more authoritative role at work. Just as Grant's masculinity is symbolised by the Raptor fossil and Banning's by his mobile phone, Mann's masculinity is also symbolised by an object - the open door of a washing machine, through which Spielberg frames the character during an early scene at a laundrette. Here, as Nigel Morris notes, the audience view Mann "through a female lens" (Morris, 24), and so immediately identify him as a weakling with no or little strength.
Mann also shares Banning and Grant's early hatred of children, but while Hook and Jurassic Park work to undermine their view, Duel only serves to reaffirm Mann's. In a scene midway through the film, Mann encounters a stricken school bus and is coerced into pulling over and helping. His efforts serve little good though. His car's bumper gets stuck under the bus's rear end and rather than sympathising, the children laugh at him through the window and later climb on top of his car. These are the noisy, smelly, uncontrollable brats Grant talks about during the Badlands scenes, and their mocking of Mann only serves to further diminish his masculinity. The truck, which appears on the scene and succeeds in helping the children out, also does this, seeming to the children not the villain Mann knows it to be, but heroic. Children are not only smelly, noisy and uncontrollable, they're also stupid enough to fall for the truck's facade.
Mann, of course, eventually wins the duel against the truck, just as Brody wins his against the shark and Banning wins his (a literal duel) against Hook. Grant wins his battle too, but more through luck (the fortuitous arrival of the T-Rex) than any kind of firm action. Indeed, even when he does take up arms (to repel the Raptors during the finale) his efforts are in vain as he shoots impotently into a glass window. Grant survives not through physicality, but because he grows into a mature and protective masculine persona who no longer needs the protective bubble he fought so hard to preserve at the film's start. His reward is a closing scene that echoes the sunset conclusion of Duel, but rings with more warmth as he sets off into a sunset with Sattler and the kids. Mann, on the other hand, sits alone on the bonnet of his car, stronger physically, but somehow more isolated.
Grant emerges from Jurassic Park as something completely new in Spielberg's career. The man who once allowed audiences to thrill to the world-saving adventures of Indiana Jones, here presents a character who through his rugged looks, earthy costumes and devil may care demeanor looks like Indy (indeed Spielberg originally wanted Harrison Ford to play the role), but displays little of his masculine strength. The director did the same again in Schindler's List by turning Liam Neeson's tall, dark and handsome Oskar Schindler into a blubbering wreck at the film's close, and would repeat the trick in many of his post-Jurassic Park films, including his portrait of a powerless fish-out-of-water Indy in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and his casting of the big name duo of Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise. Clelia Cohen explains:
"In Tom Hanks, Spielberg found the perfect embodiment of the average man, an heir to James Stewart. But in Saving Private Ryan, his character, an elementary school teacher from the Midwest, proved to be a war hero; in The Terminal, he played the hero living in an airport concourse, where the image of his hand, as a symbol of resistance, was displayed everywhere on posters. Tom Cruise, on the other hand, a depressed cop in Minority Report and a docker and bad father in War of the Worlds, was relegated by Spielberg from superstar to human bein
g. The inversion of the two great figures by Spielberg was complete: the ordinary man had become a hero despite himself, and the star had turned into the everyman."
(Cohen, 44)
By the end of 1993, Spielberg's filmmaking had changed irrevocably. The young boy who looked yearningly towards icons of masculinity or mocked the very concept of masculinity had gone forever. What replaced him was a man who had learned that the ultimate act of masculinity is not venturing into the wilds to destroy a truck or blow up a shark, but something smarter and subtler. Schindler uses politics to outwit the Nazis and Grant uses his knowledge of dinosaurs to survive the Park. Both put their lives on the line to protect those weaker than them. The heroism of Captain Miller, John Anderton and Viktor Navorski comes through similar passivity. Masculinity, Spielberg had shown, is not fought for, it is earned.
CONCLUSION: RAIN INSTEAD OF SHINE…
"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
It would take Steven Spielberg four years to return from Jurassic Park - and when he did, he was not the same man.
During the four year sabbatical, the director turned to other interests. He recovered from the grueling experience of shooting Schindler's List, he spent time with his family (which numbered seven by his return to directing in 1997), and he co-founded DreamWorks alongside Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. He emerged from this break period with a repeat of the education/entertainment double he'd produced in 1993. On the one hand, there was another tale of oppression and human rights in the shape of slavery drama Amistad; on the other, there was a second dinosaur romp in the shape of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Neither gained universal critical plaudits; only the latter made waves at the box office.
Yet, while it may have done blockbuster business, carefree entertainment The Lost World is not. A dark and occasionally brutal movie, The Lost World is even more damning than its predecessor. Where Jurassic Park featured a fundamentally decent (albeit blinkered) Hammond, The Lost World stars his greedy and cynical nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard). Where Jurassic Park sees a lawyer devoured on a toilet as comical payment for his cowardice, The Lost World sees a good man ripped in two in one of Spielberg's most violent death scenes. And where Jurassic Park sees the dinosaurs restricted to an island where they can do relatively little harm, The Lost World brings them to the mainland with a T-Rex stomping through San Diego looking for her stolen child. In The Lost World, the dinosaurs are more human than the humans.
The film opens with one of Spielberg's smartest and funniest transitions. The first scene finds a wealthy British couple holidaying off the coast of Isla Sorna, a supplier site for Isla Nublar, where dinosaurs are allowed to roam free without the infrastructure of an amusement park. They stop on the island's shore, and it is here that their young daughter is attacked by a herd of Compsognathus. The scene ends with a close up of the girl's mother screaming and then cuts to the returning Ian Malcolm yawning in front of a similarly tropical background (which is revealed to be a subway poster). It's a comment Spielberg's disillusionment with blockbusters, their artifice and their irresponsible attitude to violence. It would be a further 11 years before he would return to escapist blockbusters in the shape of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and while Minority Report and War of the Worlds were made in that time, both are dark and harrowing pieces of work.
Minority Report is the most interesting of the two, indeed arguably the most interesting, rich and complex film of all Spielberg's Noughties output. Dubbed by the director a "gourmet popcorn movie", it is based on the same-titled short story by Philip K. Dick and stars Tom Cruise as John Anderton, lead detective of a new form of law enforcement called Pre-Crime. Using three clairvoyant siblings to see into the future, Anderton and his team detect and prevent crimes before they happen. The result is a world without crime, but it's an illusory one. By the film's conclusion, Pre-Crime has been exposed as a lie, and its leader, Lemarr Burgess (Max von Sydow), as a criminal himself. Pre-Crime is dismantled - the perfect law enforcement system is no more a viable reality than the perfect theme park.
The film opens with a Pre-Crime raid that lets the audience know how the system works and the kind of crimes it prevents. We are shown a seemingly happy family - a husband, his wife and their son. However, when the husband leaves for work, it's revealed that his wife is having an affair. He returns to the house, discovers the affair and, so the Pre-Cogs' premonition says, will go on to kill both his wife and her lover. The premonition flashes up on a screen at Pre-Crime headquarters, a pair of wooden balls reveal the perpetrator and victims' names, and Anderton analyses the vision, scanning through, zooming in on and isolating certain elements of the image to work out where the crime will take place.
The scene is littered with signifiers of sight. The husband wears glasses, he is seen cutting the eyes out of a cardboard mask of Abraham Lincoln for his son's school play, and when the Pre-Crime team arrive at his house, they burst through a screen (a glass window), like Jurassic Park's T-Rex breaking through the Tourer's sunroof. Once the man has been caught, he has fitted to his head a halo, a metallic circle that sedates the criminal readying him or her for prison. The halo is held by one of the Pre-Crime officers just in front of Spielberg's camera, framing the husband as if it were a camera lens framing a scene. Spielberg isn't the one calling the shots though - it's Anderton, who sizes up the premonition like a director readying his latest scene.
These signifiers of sight continue through the rest of the film, most notably in its futuristic advertisements, which use eye-scanning technology to discern the identity of each person who passes by and serve them commercials based on their specific preferences. With this, Spielberg directly connects the eye to identity, and when Anderton is himself accused of Pre-Crime and goes on the run, he avoids detection by having his eyes replaced. He needn't have bothered. His slavish devotion to Pre-Crime has blinkered his vision and killed the good man he used to be. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, says one character. Anderton is that one-eyed man - seeing clearly enough to lead Pre-Crime, but blind enough to ignore its short comings.
The film's repeated motifs of sight and perception give it a common link to Empire of the Sun and Jurassic Park - indeed, the three films form something of a loose thematic trilogy. All three deal with ideas of masculinity in crisis (Anderton's arc playing like Grant's in reverse, taking him from happy family man to violent loner), and they all posit natural creations against man-made ones (Minority Report portraying a world where technology has taken over so completely that little to no nature exists any more). The most important link between the three, however, is their depiction of the barrier between fantasy and reality.
Empire of the Sun concludes with Jim's sense of fantasy, which proved so crucial in helping him survive the war, being entirely destroyed, while Jurassic Park closes with Grant shunning fantasy and embracing reality. Anderton's unquestioning devotion to Pre-Crime comes because of his guilt over the disappearance of his son, who was kidnapped while in Anderton's care. Just as Jurassic Park gives Hammond a chance to atone for the 'failures' of his first attraction, Pre-Crime gives Anderton a chance to atone for his failure to protect Shaun. Both are illusions designed to improve reality.
By the film's conclusion, these two concepts become irretrievably blurred. Before Burgess's deception is uncovered, Anderton encounters the man he is fated to kill, and does just that. He is arrested and put into prison with all the other criminals. His internment doesn't last long though as shortly after, his estranged wife discovers Burgess's secret, breaks Anderton out of prison and makes her findings public. Burgess kills himself, Pre-Crime is shut down and the Pre-Cogs are released. Anderton never finds Shaun, but he is reunited with his wife and in their final scene it's revealed that they have another c
hild on the way. It's a dream ending - everyone lives happily ever after. Perhaps too happily...
Earlier in the film, the prison guard discusses with Anderton the nature of internment, explaining that being imprisoned is like being asleep, and while asleep you have visions where "all your dreams come true." Certainly all Anderton's dreams come true, so what is the audience to believe? Has Anderton really escaped prison and exposed the Pre-Crime lie? Or is this a mere dream conjured by his addled mind and in reality, he remains safely locked away while Pre-Crime continues to flourish under Burgess's stewardship? Spielberg never gives a clear answer, and perhaps that's the point. If Empire of the Sun destroys fantasy, and Jurassic Park celebrates the return of reality, Minority Report finishes with a question. What is preferable, Spielberg asks: a reality in which people are free, but which is nonetheless unsafe, or a fantasy based on a lie in which violent crime has been ended? Is there an answer, and can we see clearly enough to find it?
The blurring between the two is underlined in a scene between Anderton and Pre-Crime's co-founder, Iris Hineman (Lois Smith). She discusses with Anderton the concept of a Minority Report and leaves him with a solitary sentence of advice. It comes to sum up Anderton's journey through the film, the arcs of so many Spielberg characters, and the director's key themes. Above all, it emphasises just how delicate the concepts of reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, are, and how they need each other to exist.
"Sometimes," she says, "in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark."
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