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Double take in dino-land: The feminist interjections of Jurassic Park's rock star mathematician

I love Jurassic Park. I watch it at least once each year, sometimes more, if, on a lucky Sunday, I am fortunate enough to stumble across it while flipping channels (a version that isn’t censored to sh*t, that is).

In ’93 when this gem first hit movie screens, I was absorbed in exactly the ways its execs designed: admiring the special effects (that even today are still rawkin’), hating Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), and fearing the T-rex until, at the movie’s climax, she* saves the day by chomping the raptors (the real bad girls*) that have cornered the plucky, though white-bread, heroes.

Watching it now, 16 years later, I can appreciate the subtle nuances that rocketed over my eight-year-old head.

Namely, that Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), in addition to being a somehow oxymoronic rock star mathematician, makes some backhanded feminist comments.

Setting aside his lusty glances at Laura Dern’s character Dr. Ellie Sattler and his references to multiple failed marriages, it is Malcolm that provides an arguably feminist, read: “bigger picture” socially conscious, perspective.

In response to John Hammond (Richard Attenborough)’s defense of Jurassic Park as a penultimate example of scientific discovery, Malcolm asks: “What is so great about discovery? It is a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

While Dr. Sattler and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) provide their own rebuttals to this argument, they remain focused on the biological and environmental consequences. It is Malcolm that pays lip service to colonialism and the gendered imperatives of discovery that frame Hammond’s dino-Disneyworld.

As part of the same conversation from which the above quote is pulled, Malcolm elaborates, saying, “I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [pounds table with fists] you’re selling it, [pounds table again] you want to sell it!”

Malcolm removes Hammond’s veil of self-proclaimed altruism (that Jurassic Park is a gift for people all over the world), pointing a finger at the capitalist motives fueling the creation of the park—and the danger inherent in his ill-thought-out project (in the immediate sense of the impending prehistoric panic but also more broadly in the anticipated commercial greed).

Ultimately, acting as the spokesperson for the “natural world” and giving capitalism the stink eye earn Malcolm my feminist props—and if it wasn’t for his syrupy appeals to Sattler, I might even raise my hand for a high five. As it stands, a nod (or, because Goldblum’s so damn sexy, a low-five) is all I will muster.

*There’s also something to be said about the fact that all of the reckless, man-eating dinosaurs are female, and that they run amok (coincidentally?) as a result of their genetic material being stolen and sold for profit in the patriarchal capitalist marketplace. Too far?

-J. Balmer

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