Jurassic Park: The Wonder of Cinema and Learning
I fell in love with cinema when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. The year was 1993, I was 10 years old, and Jurassic Park had just been released at the cinema. To say I was excited would be an understatement. I’d heard of the film through playground whispers and billboard posters bearing that iconic logo. A videotaped news report from the UK premiere gave me my first glimpse of the film itself and I became transfixed, watching, rewinding, and watching again the shot of the Tyrannosaurus Rex peering through the touring car window at Lex. It had mystery, it had atmosphere, it had…
A FLIPPIN’ BIG DINOSAUR!
This was The Most Important Thing In My Life. No mere film — oh, no, no — Jurassic Park was An Event. Not an event like everything is an event nowadays, but a genuine, never-before-seen, hold onto your butts kinda event. I mean, come on, somebody had actually resurrected dinosaurs, built a dinosaur theme park and then made a film about it. My addled 10 year old brain actually believed that for a brief time (films never lie… right?), but even when I learned The Terrible Truth, it didn’t change a thing. Jurassic Park still had A FLIPPIN’ BIG DINOSAUR and I wanted in.
Sadly, my sister got there first. She went off to see Jurassic Park with a friend on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was left to stew, looking forlornly at my Dad in a subtle bid to guilt him into taking me, before quickly getting bored and taking the more direct approach: nagging. It worked and soon I was on my way to the local cinema to watch what I was convinced would be the greatest film of all time. I wasn’t disappointed. Back then, Jurassic Park was my Citizen Kane. Just better because, y’know, it had a lawyer getting eaten by a T-Rex on the toilet. Literal toilet humour and dinosaurs? What more could a boy ask for?
It’s very easy to be dismissive about Jurassic Park as an adult. It’s a film made for kids by a director who felt it “was important to be a kid” while shooting it, and because of that its sense of wonder is entirely sincere, utterly lacking the cynicism that seems so popular nowadays. But anyone who was my age around the time it was released will understand exactly what it was like to watch it for the first time. The thrill, the excitement, the very real sense that you were seeing something genuinely magical. It really was more than just a film, more even than an event. It was (and I know how horribly pretentious this sounds) some sort of divine experience.
When the film was over and I stumbled out of the cinema, the world looked different. Actually, properly different. My head was spinning, my eyes couldn’t focus, everything was blurry and weird. I asked my Dad what was wrong, he just said it’ll pass, like I’d caught a slight chill or stood on a Lego brick. Had he not seen it? Had he not just witnessed that? Had he not seen the FLIPPIN’ BIG DINOSAUR!?
Whatever ‘it’ was, it didn’t pass. It hung around and grew. I became obsessed with Jurassic Park, humming the theme tune, replaying key scenes in my head, reading and re-reading the Junior Novelisation (into which I drew, with reverential care, the iconic JP logo). With no transport or money of my own, a repeat trip to the cinema was out, so I shot my own version. Alas, uncooperative action figure actors and rapidly deteriorating papier mache sets put paid to my Jurassic Park dream, but my passion couldn’t be diminished.
I bought every action figure, every trading card, every magazine I could lay my hands on as long as it had something to do with Jurassic Park. Even if it didn’t, I’d find a link. We had a Super Nintendo game called Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Breaks Loose, and I played that obsessively. Sure it didn’t have dinosaurs (although there was a pretty cool Star Wars-esque last level), but it was based on a cartoon series produced by the man who brought the dinosaurs back to life. So I played it. Just because it was, in some way, related to Spielberg.
I suppose that’s the key. Before the film I was all about the dinosaurs, but after it, I wanted to know about Spielberg. Who was this guy? How did he do it? And why did it have such a profound effect on me?
I needed answers, but none were forthcoming. Spielberg’s next film was a stark black and white drama called Schindler’s List. Today, it’s one of my favourite Spielberg films, a towering masterpiece that underlines just what a distinct and brilliant film-maker he is. Back then though, all I could think was: where’s the Triceratops? It took four years, FOUR LONG YEARS, for Spielberg and his dinosaurs to return, and sadly by that point, I was at the age where having a Velociraptor pencil case made me a laughing stock. (Not that it stopped me buying one — come on, it’s a Velociraptor pencil case!)
That said, Schindler’s List put me on the path to studying Spielberg and setting up From Director Steven Spielberg as much as Jurassic Park did. Well, Schindler’s List and some zombies. Back in 2004, I was in my second semester at university (minus, alas, Velociraptor stationary). The academic year was winding down and I was considering topics for my third year dissertation. Though my degree was a joint English and History degree, rather than a full Film Studies degree, I’d taken a course in Cinema and Psychoanalysis earlier in the year, and was keen to write at length about film. So I got to work on researching a paper about the influence of social and political incidents during the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s on American horror films of that period.
Yay zombies!
It was well received, and I had such a good time putting it together that I couldn’t resist the opportunity to write about film again when asked to pick a subject for an extended essay in my third year Representing the Holocaust class. Schindler’s List was an obvious choice, and I took to studying it with the same excited glee I approached Jurassic Park with all those years earlier. The lack of dinosaurs still bugged me (obviously!), but my head again span, my vision again got blurry and I again felt like I was being shown an entirely new world — one of insight and learning. I discovered so much about Spielberg during the weeks I spent writing that essay that every day since I’ve kinda wished I could go back to them.
I know that sounds a bit silly — getting misty-eyed over plunging my head in an analytical book — and it probably is. But I remember several moments where I paused while reading about the film and thought ‘Woah, I never considered it like that!’. They were pure moments, as heartfelt as my sense of awe at seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and they’ve stayed with me because learning about the things you love is genuinely amazing. A chasm may separate them in terms of tone, but there’s no difference between the awe of seeing Jurassic Park and the awe of learning about Schindler’s List. Both are driven by the thrill of discovery.
I’ve always hoped to impart that wonder onto others in my writing about Spielberg (and films as a whole) because it’s one of the best feelings in the world. Whether I actually achieve it or not is another matter, but it’s worth the effort. And hey, even if it doesn’t work, there’s always other things to fall back on. Like FLIPPIN’ BIG DINOSAURS! LOOK AT IT. IT’S AMAAAAAAAAZING!!
