Screengrab via Jurassic World trailer
Jurassic World broke box office records last weekend, and part of that revenue is likely because kids got to see it twice: once with their dad, and once with their mom.
The $500-million-plus summer blockbuster sees two young brothers pawned off to the dino-themed park by strung-out parents on the brink of divorce. If this seems like a familiar setup, then you’ve probably seen all of the previous films in the series or you’re a devotee of Steven Spielberg’s canon.
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A separation of the conventional family unit is a subject broached in Jurassic Parks one through four, and the various circumstances are deeply rooted in much of Spielberg’s back catalogue and personal history.
In the Jurassic films, parents are almost entirely absent, and when they do show up, they’re either suffocating their kin or neglecting them out of self-interest. It’s the pseudo-guardians—Sam Neill’s Alan Grant (twice, in Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III), and Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard’s Owen and Claire from Jurassic World—who begrudgingly take on the role and discover the thrilling highs and horrifying, screaming lows of child-rearing.
But is Spielberg simply offering up a series of allegorical apologies from divorced parents everywhere? Even the de facto guardians, though more receptive to the whims of the kids, are still far from ideal. Both the kids and the dinosaurs sense an agenda on the part of their creators, but they also recognize the failings of their supposed protectors, which is why the kids and dinos are always busting out of their cages, both literal and metaphorical.
Jurassic World‘s divorcees-in-waiting are Karen and Scott (Judy Greer and Andy Buckley), whose opening lines include, “How long does it take to get your little butt in the car?” as they rush to offload their kids Gray and Zach (Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson) with Karen’s sister Claire at a perfectly safe petting zoo before the remains of their marriage are spilled over the breakfast table. Claire “handles 20,000 people a day,” Scott says through clenched jaw. “She can handle two more.” The boys are left to fend for themselves and prove resourceful without their clawing family.
Pre-teens Tim and Lex seem better off in the original Jurassic film for having learned how to survive a family schism—though both are desperate to make friends with Dr. Grant, whose first on-screen encounter with a child involves stabbing the air with a raptor claw. Later, the three of them sleep like babies on a tree-top before being sneezed on by a veggie-saur. As the philosopher Ace Ventura once said, “It is the mucus that binds us.”
The beloved Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) of the first two films is a pretty bad dad in The Lost World, constantly chastising his stowaway daughter before storming off to play action hero. In the original, Dr. Malcolm is clearly ready for commitment, saying he’s “always on the lookout for a future ex-Mrs. Malcolm.” Meanwhile, William H. Macy and Tea Leoni, in their what-am-I-doing-here performances in the third film, best show their parenting abilities by repeatedly shouting “Eric!” while searching for their lost son on a dinosaur island that otherwise is fairly quiet and flat.
Even the dinosaurs display ham-fisted parental care, mostly in the second and third films where the plots are as thin as a triceratop’s shit is piled high. The Lost World tackles a real-life theory from paleontologist Robert Bakker, who discovered evidence that Tyrannosaurs displayed child care at nesting sites. That’s why we see mommy and daddy T. Rex chasing after baby, cradle and all. The third film sees some idiot steal raptor eggs before the whole group is chased by a raptor family à la Raising Arizona.
And though Spielberg directed only the first two Jurassics, his DNA is embedded throughout the series as an executive producer. The director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, E.T., and Hook experienced his own family split as a high-schooler, and later a divorce from actress Amy Irving. The theme of divorce and familial schism runs throughout the aforementioned Spielberg projects, perhaps most strikingly in Hook, where Peter’s son Jack is caught between two father figures in Pan and the infamous captain.
Many of the people involved in the Jurassic films have been touched by some kind of separation in their family lives—Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton was divorced four times, while Lost World star Julianne Moore took on the role in the wake of her divorce settlement. In Jurassic World, Zach passes off his parents’ split as inevitable: “All my friends’ parents are divorced.”
All of this is not to say that divorce is wrong or that male-female partnerships are the required bedrock for healthy children. But the question is: Why do movie fans need Jurassic Park to tell them an allegory about broken families? Spielberg has shown again and again that kids act out when parents and guardians selfishly make shit about themselves.
In a film series about playing god and ignoring the mistakes of the past, it seems appropriate to show that any guardian figure who thinks only of themselves will ultimately have that bite them in the ass. Hammond—who is hilariously immortalized by a statue in 2015’s instalment—shows more affection for that dead-eyed raptor baby, bursting forth from its egg, than for his talented grandchildren. They’re only at the park because their parents are insane and so Hammond can sell the Wow Factor to the smirking lawyer.
Spielberg, whether as director or producer, attaches himself to scripts where the kids are pushed aside by family, but never in the story. Even the cameras follow the action from low angles, putting the audience in the size-six shoes of the young protagonists, like the raptors-in-the-kitchen scene in the original Jurassic Park.
Spielberg’s heroes in these films are often the youth movement, and the parents and control freaks within the films work against them. Hammond’s Park is not a nature preserve but an excuse to spare no expense and to stock as much ice cream as you could possibly want. His mistreatment of his dino-babies is mirrored in the conventional parents but shattered by the unwilling babysitters who eventually pick up the pieces. Spielberg isn’t asking these new parents to simply save the children, only to acknowledge them.
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