by Paul Bullock
PART II: LIFE THROUGH A LENS
"I don't mind looking the world in the eye, as long as there's a movie camera between us."
Steven Spielberg, 1982.
The camera pans slowly across a room, taking in a lunchbox, a stuffed toy, and a book entitled The Making of Jurassic Park.
The same book, with the same title, cover and authors (Don Shay and Jody Duncan) hit shelves after the film's release. Along with images, behind-the-scenes snippets and a wealth of contributions from all of Jurassic Park's key cast and crew, it contains the following quote from screenwriter David Koepp about the movie's film-within-a-film - an expository cartoon featuring a character called Mr. DNA.
"At one point, Steven laughed and said, 'We can call the narrator something like 'Mr. DNA'. He was joking, but I said, 'That's exactly what we'll call him! That's perfect.' Because they would. It was funny, but it was really getting into a weird area. Here I was writing about these greedy people who are creating a fabulous theme park just so they can exploit these dinosaurs and make silly little films and sell stupid plastic plates and things. And I'm writing it for a company that's eventually going to put this in their theme parks and make these silly little films and sell stupid plastic plates. I was really chasing my tail there for a while trying to figure out who was virtuous in this whole scenario - and eventually gave up."
(Shay and Duncan, 56)
It's a strange confession for the film's writer to make, and an even stranger one to publish in the film's official 'Making Of' book, but it exposes what has become the accepted truth of Jurassic Park's subtext. This is a film about film, or perhaps more accurately, a blockbuster about blockbusters. It's a film that hits out at Hollywood's obsession with the almighty dollar by taking it to its (il)logical extreme: the creation of an amusement park that's wondrous, delightful and an absolute goldmine, but ultimately recklessly dangerous. "We're gonna make a fortune with this place," the greedy lawyer Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) says upon seeing his first dinosaur. His last is the Tyrannosaur that eats him.
The film's critics have delighted in pointing out the same confused message Koepp noticed. Jurassic Park was itself a product of Hollywood greed, an era-defining, boundary-pushing blockbuster that cost $63 million to make and sought to recoup and exceed its budget with a marketing campaign that put its logo on every lunchbox, stuffed toy and tie-in book on the market (it succeeded: Jurassic Park grossed over $914 million). Constance Balides, for example, argues that the film's sense of wonder emanates from "the lustre of capitalism itself," while Andrew Gordon writes "Crichton's critique of the commercial exploitation of science and technology remains in one scene in the film, but it is undermined because the film itself is caught up in the same commercialisation." The film, he concludes, "seems uncomfortably self-reflexive and even hypocritical." (Gordon, 209)
While it's true that Jurassic Park has become a symbol of the greed it, in part, criticises (four different Jurassic Park amusement rides have been opened at venues across the world since 1993, the first of which was under construction before the film was released), its comments on the state of cinema are more complex and specific than simple meta-textuality. Like all Spielberg's films, Jurassic Park is a deeply personal piece of work that draws more from his blockbusters than blockbusters in general, and derives, perhaps more than any other Spielberg film, from a seminal moment in his past: his first trip to the cinema to see The Greatest Show On Earth.
That inaugural cinematic experience, which his father feared would be too much for him to take, did indeed prove traumatic for Spielberg, but for a very different reason. When Arnold suggested that he and Steven see Cecil B. DeMille's famous circus movie, Steven didn't hear the word movie. He thought he was being taken to see a real-life circus, with real-life lions, elephants and clowns. When none appeared, Spielberg was crushed, and spent the film's running length nursing a feeling of disappointment and betrayal.
He has explained:
"So the curtain is open and I expect to see the elephants and there's nothing but a flat piece of white cardboard, a canvas. And I look at the canvas and suddenly a movie comes on and it's 'The Greatest Show On Earth'. At first, I was so disappointed, I was angry at my father, he told me he was taking me to a circus and it's just this flat piece of colour... For a while I kept thinking, 'Gee, that's not fair, I wanted to see three dimensional characters and all this was was flat shadows, flat surfaces. I was disappointed by everything after that. I didn't trust anybody. I never felt life was good enough, so I had to embellish it."
(McBride, 51)
This disappointment would inform Spielberg's whole career. From this point on, he would endeavour to remove the "white cardboard" and try "to involve the audience as much as I can so they no longer think they're sitting in the audience." (Baxter, 23). For Spielberg, this is more than a mere aim, but the very essence of his job as a director. "Making movies is an illusion, a technical illusion that people fall for," he has said. "My job is to take that technique and hide it so well that never once are you taken out of your chair and reminded of where you are" (Taylor, 40). The audience, Spielberg has insisted, "are my bosses" (Taylor, 12); everything is geared to serving them, everything is about making cinema the greatest show on Earth.
The relationship is by no means one way though; Spielberg feeds the audience, and the audience's enthusiasm, in turn, feeds Spielberg. "You walk into an air conditioned, freezing theatre and in about twenty minutes it gets really hot and people start making noise and having a good time," he told Tom Shone. "There is nothing greater than hearing that audience, being part of the experience." (Shone, 316-17). This, again, links back to his childhood. Just as he was validated by the response of his sisters to his childhood pranks, so too did Spielberg the adult find the reactions of audiences to his films an ego-boosting experience that would dictate the rest of his career. Speaking of a popular short he made while in the Boy Scouts, Spielberg said:
"My first [narrative film]... I made when I was twelve for the Boy Scouts.... In that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I think if I had made a different kind of movie, if that film had been maybe a study of raindrops coming out of a gutter and forming a puddle in your back yard, I think if I had shown that film to the Boy Scouts and they had sat there and said, 'Wow, that's really beautiful, really interesting. Look at the patterns in the water. Look at the interesting camera angle' - I mean, if I had done that, I might have been a different kind of film-maker."
(Baxter, 31)
Spielberg's unwavering focus on the needs of the audience has attracted praise and criticism in equal measure. British novelist Martin Amis is among the director's most esteemed supporters. In an Observer profile of Spielberg written shortly after the release of E.T. in 1982, Amis praised his ability to cut a line directly to the audience's heart.
"Film-makers today - with their target boys and marketing gurus - tie themselves up in knots trying to divine the Lowest Common Denominator of the American public. The rule is no-one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Spielberg doesn't need to do this because in a sense, he is there already, uncynically. As an artist, Spielberg is a mirror, not a lamp. His line to the common heart is so direct that he unmans you with the frailty of your own defences, and the transparency of your most intimate fears and hopes."
Robert Kolker, on the other hand, finds Spielberg's audience appeal crass and manipulative. Writing in The Cinema of Loneliness, he argues:
"He is the great modern narrator of simple desires fulfilled, of reality diverted into the imaginary spaces of aspiration realised, where fear
s of abandonment and impotence are turned into fantasy spectacles of security and joyful action. Security and joy is neither offered by his films nor earned from them, but rather forced upon the viewer, willing or not, by structures that demand complete assent in order to survive. His films are not so much texts to be read and understood, but machines to stimulate desire and fulfill, to manipulate the viewer without the viewer's awareness of what is happening."
(Kolker in Taylor, 31)
Spielberg's methods for achieving these goals have been many and varied over the years, but Frederick Wasser argues that eight stylistic techniques recur. Writing in Steven Spielberg's America, Wasser lists these as:
"1) subjective point of view shots extended in time ('Duel'); 2) shocking change of image scale (the shark emerges in 'Jaws'); 3) overwhelming action left, right and centre (crowd scenes in 'Jaws'); 4) dimensional sound effects ('Raiders of the Lost Ark'); 5) bathing the audience in light (God's light in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'); 6) and much later he used a chaotic hand-held camera ('Schindler's List'), 7) computer enhancement ('Jurassic Park') and 8) desaturated colour ('Saving Private Ryan')..."
(Wasser, 63)
ESCAPE WITH REALITY
The truth of Spielberg's attempts to involve the audience in his films is somewhere between these opposing views. His style is not quite as uncynical as Amis suggests, but nor is it as formulaic as Wasser argues. The desires he presents are not as simple as Kolker says and while he deals in fantastical genres, the spaces his characters occupy are hardly imaginary - quite the opposite in fact.
As Kolker argues, Spielberg is indeed in love with wonder and spectacle - but only when they emanate from reality. That's why his alien films (Close Encounters, E.T. and War of the Worlds) never take the audience out into space, and why only one of his 27 movies takes place primarily in a fantasy land - the self-consciously artificial Neverland of Hook, a film Spielberg has disowned, except for the bookend scenes based in London. "The real-world Peter Banning sections are the most effective of the whole film," he was quoted as saying in Total Film magazine. "I made a wonderful movie about Kensington."
He's also made wonderful movies about suburban neighbourhoods, shark-infested seaside towns and sprawling metropolises. Spielberg doesn't take his audiences out of these realities because that would only reinforce the "flat piece of white cardboard" that exists between them and the movie - we can't take the film with us, so once the two hours is up, we have to leave Neverland and head back out into the very different real world. The illusion, therefore, is ruined - Spielberg becomes DeMille, his films become false and disappointing. So instead, he doesn't take the audience to the magic but bring the magic to the audience by locating the wonder on your doorstep, down your street, in your neighbourhood. In other words, somewhere real and tangible. "I want to make reality something fun to live with, because that's what it is," he's said. "I don't want people to escape from reality - but to escape with reality." (Taylor, 40)
Spielberg's obsession with making his fantasies seem real began in childhood, both in his film-making (he'd conceive of ingenious techniques to create convincing special effects for Firelight (1964)) and in the games he played with friends. One, Sandy MacDonald, remembers how he'd find an innovative way to make army games come alive when she came to play. "I'd go across to Stevie's basement and we'd set up these huge battle scenes," MacDonald told Joseph McBride. "He always played with a box of nails and a hammer. When the soldiers were hit by arrows, he'd put nails into them, and use ketchup for blood. At the end of the game he had fewer and fewer useable soldiers... For him, it was worth it to get an effect; it had to be real, to have an arrow stick out." (McBride, 65). Any other way and again Spielberg becomes DeMille.
Four decades later, Spielberg's fastidious dedication to realism remained intact - though it wouldn't be easy. With Jurassic Park, the director's quest for believability faced its biggest challenge yet. It's one thing to convince a child that a plastic toy is really bleeding or to inspire an audience to believe in something they can experience in real life (like a truck or a shark), but how do you go about persuading them to believe in animals that they've only ever seen in trashy B-movies? "[We needed to get people to say]: 'Gee, this is the first time I'm really seeing a dinosaur,'" Spielberg said in the 1993 documentary The Making of Jurassic Park. "This isn't Gorgo [1961], this isn't Godzilla [1954]. This is real. This is a real movie that's really happening as I'm watching it."
The film's groundbreaking special effects and Michael Crichton's scientifically sound plot would, in part, drive this sense of realism, but Spielberg knew audiences needed more than convincing visuals and authoritative jargon. He knew they needed something they could relate to on an emotional level, and so, before screenwriters Malia Scotch Marmo and David Koepp refined Crichton's initial script, Spielberg brought his own creativity to bear on the story.
Crichton remembers:
"Spielberg went through every character in the story, outlining their physical appearances, their motivations, their hopes and fears, their quirks and foibles. Ideas about dialogue, gestures, and costuming tumbled out. Speaking very rapidly, he went on like this for an hour. At last he turned to the dinosaurs, but again, he spoke of them as characters. The strength and limitations of the tyrannosaur. The quick menace of the Velociraptors... Finally, I could stand it no longer. 'Steven,' I said, 'how are you going to do this?' He shrugged, and made a little dismissing gesture with his hand. Not important. Not what we need to talk about. I said, 'But these effects -'. 'Effects,' he said, 'are only as good as the audience's feeling for the characters.'"
(McBride, 421)
The audience's strongest feelings are reserved for the Tyrannosaur, and Spielberg plays up to them whenever it appears on screen. Look, for example, at the climactic scene in the Visitors' Centre, which as originally planned, starred only the Raptors, but was altered to feature the Rex as well. ("The audience will hate me if the T-Rex doesn't come back and make one more heroic appearance," Spielberg said (The Making of 'Jurassic Park')). Look also at the Main Road Attack sequence, which he also changed, this time turning it from a dry scene to a scene that takes place in the wet. "This sequence would be so much better in the rain," Spielberg remembers, "because we won't see the T-Rex that well. We'll be in the car, there'll be water running down the windows, the T-Rex will look into the window, you'll sort of see him, but you'll also see a lot of rain coming down." ('Jurassic Park': Making Prehistory).
Spielberg's decision put Stan Winston's delicate Tyrannosaur animatronic, which quickly absorbed water, at great risk, and Winston's team had to dry the puppet off at the end of every shot to stop the rain weighing the creation down and disturbing its inner mechanics. Yet Spielberg saw it as a gamble worth taking. Anything to bring the audience to the edge of their seats, anything to make their eyes bulge a little wider and focus snap a little tighter on the screen. Anything to allow the audience to believe that the "white cardboard" doesn't exist and that the events happening in the film are real.
THE CATTLE PROD
Indeed, Jurassic Park is, perhaps more than any other Spielberg film up to that point, about the act of watching. References to seeing abound, from the awestruck faces of Grant, Sattler and Malcolm as they witness a dinosaur for the first time, to the film screens and projectors that dominate the room in which the group discuss the Park's innovative bio-engineering techniques. As Nigel Morris explains, Spielberg's allusions to cinema also come in more subtle forms and begin in the opening sequence, which finds Park warden Muldoon ushering a new Raptor into its pen. Morris writes:
"Original audiences, primed by months of hype, hearing ominous music and animal noises accompanying the
black-screen title credits, [were] confronted in the first shot [by] something mysterious rustling through close-up vegetation... Cut to a worker looking up, anxiously, off-screen; an inscribed spectator wearing a Jurassic Park hat as though he had already bought the merchandise. Light beams through branches. An inscribed audience, all in hats with logos, backlit, look intensely upwards, the central figure chewing as if devouring popcorn. Smoke or steam motivates a shot included only to feature a light beam. A big-game hunter, heavily armed, underlines danger. Not only are these characters intensely backlit, reflected front lighting emanates from the suspended crate before them. Contractors' lamps, rectangular, figure simultaneously as surrogate movie lighting, projectors and screens. A point of view shot inside the crate confirms, yet defers the dinosaur's presence: an inscribed widescreen frame."
(Morris, 194)
Similar scenes can be seen in many of Spielberg's most significant works. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. feature conclusions in which large crowds of people gather around an object of wonder or danger that, like film itself, is marked primarily through light - a spaceship in Close Encounters and E.T., the Ark of the Covenent in Raiders. These people often bear technology such as spotlights and cameras (standing in for film set equipment), and Spielberg's camera revels in their enjoyment of the wonder as the Mothership lands, the celestial spirits emerge and E.T. bids his tearful farewell. These three scenes are set up like film sets and movie theatres, Spielberg aiming to remove the screen by turning it into a mirror and reflecting our own viewership onto it.
Of these three films, it is to Raiders that Jurassic Park shares its closest bond. Just as Indy and Marion have to respect the power of the Ark and close their eyes to the wonder and devastation that emerge from it, so too must the visitors to Jurassic Park - and Spielberg himself. The film is to Hook as Raiders was to 1941 (1979), a reaction against irresponsible and overblown film-making. Yet while Spielberg made his criticism of the over-budget and over-schedule 1941 by carefully adhering to George Lucas's strictures on Raiders, on Jurassic Park he bases the film's entire thematic narrative around criticising past triumphs - notably those of Duel and Jaws, the former described by Nigel Morris as "an attack on the spectator," the latter described by Spielberg himself as "like directing the audience with a cattle prod."
That cattle prod would first be put to use on the films' villains, a truck and a shark who posed two very different problems. For Duel's murderous truck, the problem was one of mass exposure. The film is nothing more than a 90 minute cat-and-mouse chase, and while the majority of the screen time is taken up by the film's mouse - henpecked suburban father David Mann (Dennis Weaver) - the truck has an almost constant presence throughout. Yet, besides a cowboy-booted foot and lingering elbow, we never see the driver or learn his identity. How, then, to invest the audience in this machine menace? The exact opposite was true of Jaws, whose shark star famously refused to act on cue, inspiring Spielberg to reduce its screen time, keeping it off-screen or disguised. How, then, to invest the audience in this little-seen demon?
The answer in both cases was for Spielberg to do what he did on Jurassic Park, and humanise the inhuman. On Duel, that meant scouting for an appropriate truck with production manager Wally Worsley, who remembers that Spielberg was looking for a vehicle "that looked like it had been around, a street-smart truck." (McBride, 203). They eventually landed on a rusting, mud-encrusted Peterbuilt that looked old and elemental, as if it had emerged fully-formed and ready for the kill from the ground itself. It was, according to Spielberg, "the smallest one, but the only one that had a great snout. I thought that with some modelling we could really get it to look human." (McBride, 203)
Spielberg's solution to the Jaws problem would be even more ingenious. Like the truck, the shark also had to represent something elemental, but here Spielberg wouldn't show us our foe, but ask us to conjure it ourselves through canny use of searching point of view shots. The first clear sight we get of the animal doesn't come until the attack in the Amity pool, when Spielberg presents us with an aerial shot, showing the shark gliding beneath the water's surface, mouth agape, to devour another victim. Spielberg doesn't ask us to be afraid of his demons, but afraid of our own, leaving our imaginations to do the dirty work just as his imagination had done the same by turning trees, clouds and cracks in walls into terrifying threats when he was a child.
Indeed, point of view proves vital to both films - both begin with point of view shots, alternate between objective and subjective shots at critical moments, and revolve their most significant scenes around the audience's alignment with the protagonist. Duel, for example, bases its entire title sequence around a point of view shot, with Spielberg keeping his camera located on the bonnet of Mann's car as he makes the long, slow drive from the safety of his suburban home to the wild, untamed landscapes of rural America.
At this stage, Mann could be anybody. We don't see his face and the only dialogue we hear is a talk radio show, on which a male caller discusses his strained relationship with his domineering wife. The film, as I discuss in Part IV, is about masculinity, and the chatter on the radio comes to act as Mann's subconscious, a line into his inner life, expressing if not his real thoughts then certainly his fears that he too is becoming like the caller. By not showing us Mann's face until the fifth minute but exposing us to his 'thoughts', Spielberg allows us to become Mann, sharing his viewpoint and his emotions, and ultimately aligning us with his plight.
Yet, throughout the film, Spielberg also allows us power over Mann. As early as the sixth minute, Spielberg's camera shifts away from Mann's viewpoint when we first get a glimpse of the truck. No longer mounted on Mann's bonnet, but attached to another (unseen) car riding alongside Mann's vehicle, Spielberg's camera leaves Mann and glides slowly along the road to the truck, finally landing on the grill of the rusting behemoth. The slow shot and imposing nature of the truck's 'snout' pre-empts the film's drama, contrasting Mann's tiny, pristine vehicle with the imposing, earthy bulk of the truck, and subtly lets us know that the truck is a threat to Mann, something he himself is not yet aware of.
The shot is echoed later when Mann pulls in at a gas station to refill his car. Here, Spielberg uses a medium wide shot to capture both Mann's car and the space behind it. For Mann, the scene is a rest bite, and the empty space visually echoes that. However, the emptiness is soon consumed by the truck, which also pulls up at the garage. Mann is aware of the truck's presence, but only the audience, through Spielberg's use of a two-shot that captures both vehicles in the same frame and which ends with the truck's 'snout' once again dominant, appreciates the threat the truck poses. Audience and protagonist therefore experience two very different emotions, Mann enjoying the freedom, blissfully unaware of the impending threat behind him, the audience growing ever more anxious for the character's safety - and quietly enjoying the building tension.
Spielberg's use of objective and subjective viewpoints in the opening sequence of Jaws echoes their use in the opening sequences of Duel. Here, we find young swimmer Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) skinny-dipping off the Amity shore. Her death at the jaws of the shark is among cinema's most famous and controversial scenes, with many critics arguing that the film, through its use of point of view, objectifies her and revels in her demise. "Jaws is a model of precision and effectiveness, playing perversely on universal phobias: the fear of what may be hidden underwater," notes Cahiers du Cinema's Clelia Cohen, "but also the dangers to which one if exposed if one's sexuality is acknowledged too fiercely. [Chrissie is] an attractive woman skinny-dipping by moonlight, [and she] bears the full impact of a voracious American puritanism, a theme that has since become a hidden subtext of horror films." (Cohen, 19)
Chrissie's death has little to do with gender and vilification of sexual liberation, though. With this opening sequence, Spielberg doesn't build an enjo
yment of death, but an intense fear of it. He alternates between three distinct angles - the shark's point of view, a medium close-up on Crissie, and an omniscient point of view from the beach - and by doing so, helps us associate with Crissie (through her point of view), appreciate her isolation (through the omniscient shot from land) and fear the shark (which, crucially, we do not see). We are, as Gordon notes, given a chance to "momentarily [identify] with the aggressor" but as it remains unseen throughout, and because we don't know its position in relation to Crissie until it's too late, we can't fully associate with it. "The shark is in a position of power: it sees, but itself remains unseen." (Gordon, 31)
Crissie's death scene cuts to Brody's introductory scenes with dark waters fading into clear blue waters as night turns to day. Brody interrupts the shot, moving across the camera in silhouette. He has just awoken - the previous scene being framed as if it were the fevered nightmare of this committed aquaphobe. This nightmare comes into brutal reality later in the film when Brody watches on helplessly as the young boy Alex Kintner is killed by the shark. It is a scene that makes significant use of point of view and finds an effective complement scene in Duel when Mann visits a restaurant that the truck driver has also stopped at.
WATCHING AND WAITING
Both scenes revolve around the idea of viewership, with both characters spending their scenes surveying the setting around them - Brody fretting about bathers entering the water, Mann searching for the truck driver. Both scenes also make heavy use of point of view - both visual, through blocking the camera when the character's view is blocked, and audible, through exclusive use of diegetic sound - to align the audience with that viewership and build an unbreakable bond between audience and character. To understand these scenes is to understand Spielberg's early use of audience involvement and how it evolved in Jurassic Park.
In Duel, Spielberg forces us into Mann's claustrophobic, paranoid viewpoint immediately with a long take tracking shot that takes us into the diner, through a corridor, into a restroom, back out again and finally into a booth where Mann sits down and orders something to eat. Taking each diner one by one, Mann surveys his surroundings, trying in vain to work out which of his fellow diners is driving the truck. We see events through his point of view, the camera picking out suspects as he does, and hear his addled thoughts. By the end of the scene, we are no closer to knowing who the driver is; as Gordon notes, "Spielberg has played a cruel and clever trick on both audience and hero, raising false expectations, enabling us to participate in Mann's unhinged state, and plunging us into the condition of paranoia where the ordinary becomes treacherous and we scan the environment for menacing clues." (Gordon, 20)
Brody undergoes a similarly traumatic experience. Sitting at the head of the beach, he scans the sea ahead of him, watching with anxiety as a variety of bathers entering the water. There's a fat lady, a man and his dog, a young couple, a little boy, and an old man. Any one could be the shark's next victim, and Spielberg shows us each character in medium close up enjoying the sun, sea and sand of a day out at the beach.
Just as in Duel, the scene plays out without score and is shot almost exclusively from Brody's point of view. When his view is blocked by a bather our view is blocked too, when someone diverts his attention, Spielberg's camera goes with it. It is only when the attack is imminent that Spielberg's shooting style changes as the shot cuts to the point of view of the shark as it movies in for the kill. Brief though it may be, this shot gives us power over Brody, affording us a moment to brace ourselves for the attack. The Vertigo-referencing reverse dolly shot that closes the scene establishes Brody's shock and horror at the killing, but we do not share it - instead we enjoy it. We have been separated from Brody's viewpoint, we have delighted both to the anticipation of the attack and the knowledge of its imminent arrival.
Spielberg's expressive use of the camera has not been greeted with universal delight though. Richard Matheson reported that after seeing the dailies, network executives on Duel were "considering pulling the plug - it looked so unusual" (McBride, 204), while Spielberg himself seemed concerned by his immersive approach on Jaws, which he described, with pointed coldness, as "an exercise in film-making," in a 1976 interview with David Halpern of Take One magazine. It wasn't the only time he'd express such reservations.
In 1978, he told an audience at London's National Film Theatre that Jaws is "a violent, nasty, crude" film and that "there was nothing in that picture that was personal to me. It was a calculated movie. I made each cut with glee, knowing the effect it would have on the audience." (Baxter, 119). Further criticism came in an interview with Sight and Sound magazine's Richard Combs. "[I] could have made a very subtle movie if I wanted to," he said. "[Instead, I chose to] reach audiences on two levels. The first level was a blow to the solar plexus, and the second was an uppercut, just under the nose; it was really a one-two you're out combination... I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture." (Combs in Friedman and Notbohm, 35-6)
A CINEMA WITHIN A CINEMA
These "mixed feelings" are fully expressed in Jurassic Park's most famous scene - the Main Road Attack. The similarities between the Main Road Attack and the diner scene from Duel and Kintner boy death scene from Jaws are myriad. All these scenes focus on a man surveying the area around him, and they also all feature lives being put at risk - Mann's in Duel, childrens' in Jaws and Jurassic Park. They are all about the dizzying thrill of spectatorship and they all invite the audience to slide to the edge of their seat and lean in to the screen to get a better view. Unlike Duel and Jaws, however, this vicarious pleasure is explicitly condemned in Jurassic Park, with Spielberg covertly twisting the knife on characters and audience.
The key difference between the Main Road Attack and the two other scenes is that it is not initially presented from the point of view of the protagonist - our alignment instead lays with the victims, Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards). Tim, who spends the early part of the scene playing with night vision goggles in the first of many references to sight, is the first to notice that something is awry by pointing out a vibrating cup of water, while Lex confirms the presence of danger by asking where the goat that was previously in the T-Rex paddock has gone. It doesn't take long for her to get an answer as the goat's chewed and bloodied leg falls onto the car's sunroof and the Tyrannosaur's head slowly emerges from the trees.
To emphasise the threat the beast represents, Spielberg slowly moves his camera away from the window, up, out of the car, through the sunroof and to the Rex. The shot's use of screens is a recurring visual motif in Spielberg's film-making. The director often uses screens as a symbol of safety and comfort. Sometimes they are film and television screens (Frank watching Goldfinger (1964) in Catch Me If You Can) and sometimes they are glass screens (locals pressing up to the window of Jim's car as he travels through the streets of Shanghai in Empire of the Sun). Whatever form they take, they always represent a barrier between reality and fantasy, and more specifically the barrier between film and audience. As Nigel Morris explains of the Empire of the Sun scene:
"Violence that later engulfs Jamie is presaged by a Chinese boy's taunts and a trussed chicken crashing against the [car] window, smearing blood on the glass - rendering visible the protective cultural barrier, a metaphorical screen, while intimating its fragility. Reverse-shots from the crowd emphasise [Jim's] limited perspective, revealing him as an isolated oddity."
(Morris, 137)
Empire of the Sun, arguably Spielberg's bleakest offering, resolves the conflict between reality and fantasy by destroying them both, the film concluding with Jim closing his eyes - curtains closing on the film he created to protect himself from war, eyes closing on the reality that created that war. Jurassic Park evolves that idea, as well as the concepts of viewership seen in Duel and Jaws, by cleverly playing on reality and fantasy, care-free viewership and real-world
responsibility.
As the Tyrannosaur breaks free of its paddock and emerges onto the road, the audience's line of identification remains with Tim and Lex. They are abandoned by Gennaro and struggle to work out how to counter the Tyrannosaur's threat. Tim closes the door Gennaro left open and Lex turns on a flashlight. Both only attract the creature's attention, Lex's flashlight shining through her window and into the Rex's eye - another of the scene's signifiers of sight. Here, Spielberg is allowing us to share the fear of the victim rather than the man watching. We feel their terror, but crucially we also delight in it, watching the master of suspense tease us with the threat of what might be coming.
When it finally does come and the Rex attacks, it does so through the sunroof, destroying once and for all the barrier between fantasy and reality, film and the audience's enjoyment of it. Tellingly, Spielberg shoots the moment from the Rex's point of view in a reference to Jaws, but the shot doesn't increase the tension as it did in that film. Spielberg lingers for a second as the children look up - at the camera, through to the audience - as if pleading for help. The audience's enjoyment is turned back on us - suddenly, we're complicit in the attack. We are the monster.
It is here that our alignment with Tim and Lex ends. As the Rex smashes the car to pieces and the childrens' hopes of survival become increasingly bleak, our focus shift to Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who is watching events through his car windscreen - another surrogate screen. Crucially, we don't see events from Grant's eyeline as we saw events in Duel and Jaws through Mann and Brody's. Instead, Spielberg's camera is placed just over Grant's shoulder, with darkness covering the insides of the car, so all the viewer can see is Grant, Malcolm and the wide, thin windscreen, which contains the Rex lurching into view, illuminated by the car's headlights. Spielberg has set the shot up so it looks like two people in the darkness of a cinema watching a film, and he emphasises the point by including another reference to seeing as Grant warns Malcolm not to move because the Rex's "vision is based on movement."
Grant's understanding of the Rex's physiology proves damning as the scene continues. Unlike Brody, Grant's hands are not tied by a corrupt politician, and unlike Mann, he is not crippled by an ignorance of his foe. He could have done something earlier to help the children, warned them not to move as he warned Malcolm. Instead, he remains in the car, blindly hoping that the Rex will retreat back into its paddock, and watching - a state of affairs that elicits another reference to viewing, as Malcolm clears the condensation from his side of the window to get a clearer view. We the audience, peering through the rain and dark that was so vital to Spielberg's vision for the scene, are doing the same, now making us complicit with Grant and Malcolm. We are all watching the potential deaths of two children - and doing nothing about it. In fact, we're enjoying it.
Grant's attitude changes as the Rex flips the kids' car over and starts crushing it beneath its feet. Finally realising the severity of the situation, Grant is compelled to act, and Spielberg conveys the switch in a similar, though more focused and emphatic, fashion to the response Brody had upon the attack on Alex Kintner. Instead of a dramatic camera movement, Spielberg cuts to a close-up of Grant and Malcolm's eyes (another signifier of sight), alternating between them and the kids as the need for intervention grows stronger. After this sequence of shots, Grant leaves the car and attracts the Rex's attention with a flare. Malcolm interjects as well, further enforcing the need for action by distracting the Rex with another flare and giving Grant time to recover the children.
The scene concludes in a sort of desolate triumph. Only Gennero has died: Malcolm, Grant and the kids may be injured but they remain alive. The coward who left the children to fend for themselves has been punished, while the coward who learned the errors of his ways has come to their aid and emerged a hero. By acting, rather than passively watching, Grant has left the scene a stronger man, while Mann and Brody (who never acted) left theirs weaker. From here, Grant's role shifts. A paleontologist at the start, he passively observed life that he could not interact with; now he has to actively participate with life that looks to him for comfort and protection. Spielberg compels the audience to do the same - abandon cinema and interact with reality.
The Main Road Attack is something of a Rosetta Stone moment in Spielberg's film-making. It links back to his early films, but only to disavow them, and it connects to his other 1993 film, Schindler's List, by presenting an alternative version of Oskar Schindler's moment of realisation with the girl dressed in a red coat. Divided by genre, tone and visual style though they may be, the Main Road Attack and Girl in the Red Coat sequences are bound by a common idea: the danger of passive watching and the necessity of active intervention.
Spielberg would touch upon this idea again, notably in 2002's Minority Report, and his quest for utmost realism would continue after Jurassic Park in both his dramas (Saving Private Ryan) and his blockbusters (Minority Report again). Yet, unlike in Empire of the Sun, Spielberg doesn't condemn cinema entirely. The boy who sought to break down the white cardboard during The Greatest Show On Earth had gone full circle. In Jurassic Park, the cardboard is re-erected, but it is no longer blank white. Instead, it's a mirror, reflecting back to the audience our inner demons, lust for vicarious thrills and quest for an embellished reality. To escape, we must break through the rain and darkness and enter the light.