PART III: ADVENTURES ON EARTH
"He says the sun came out to him last night. He says it sang to him."
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Steven Spielberg's earliest memory is one of light and fear and wonder.
It came at the age of only six months. The boy was being wheeled in a pushchair by his parents through the corridors of a Cincinnati synagogue. All around him was religious iconography, ancient, foreboding architecture and the intimidating elders who wore thick beards and big, black hats. Spielberg was scared initially, but the fear quickly disappeared when he set eyes on the bright red light that illuminated the Ark of the Torah, which sat in pride of place in the synagogue's inner sanctum. The boy could not tear his eyes away from the sight. He was enchanted.
When this story is relayed by journalists and biographers, it's always expressed in cinematic terms.
In a July 1985 piece for Time, Richard Corliss wrote:
"All is darkness - as dark as a minute to midnight on the first day of creation, as dark as a movie house just before the feature starts. Then the movement begins, a tracking shot down the birth canal of a hallway, toward the mystery. Suddenly, light! A bright room filled with old men in beards and black hats: sages, perhaps, from another world. At the far end of the room, on a raised platform, is a blazing red light. The senses are suffused; the mystery deepens."
Joseph McBride in his 1997 biography describes the incident as follows:
"The child's eyes were wide with awe as he was borne from the surrounding darkness toward the red light burning before the Ark of the Torah. Framed in a colonnaded marble arch inlaid with gold and blue, the Ark's wooden doors were hidden by a curtain that glistened in the candlelight with an alluring, unfathomable aura of mystery. Under the domed skylight with a bronze chandelier hanging from a Star of David, the child in his stroller was pushed down the blue-carpeted aisle."
(McBride, 16)
Finally, in his biography of the director, John Baxter conjured this description:
"Still in his stroller, he stared in wonder as he was rolled down a dark corridor into a room filled with men wearing long beards and black hats. He only had eyes, however, for the blaze of red light flowing from the sanctuary where, in imitation of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the rolls of the holy torah were kept."
(Baxter, 20)
The use of such evocative language is not surprising. Spielberg's visit to the synagogue is a formative moment for the director, and a critical one for understanding a couple of key themes and recurring visual motifs in his work: light and nature. It's important to mention both these elements because too few studies of Spielberg's work do, yet they are inextricably bound. His use of light is well known; indeed, it's arguably the single most defining element of the director's visual style. Spielberg himself has dubbed it his 'God Light', and as Nigel Morris told The Algemeiner in December 2012, he's used it to create a "quasi-religious wonder" throughout all his output. Yet light is just one aspect of Spielberg's wider concern with nature as a whole, and the interplay between the two is perfectly exemplified by the scene in Close Encounters when the young boy Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey) is taken from his home by the alien visitors.
This is a scene dominated by a multitude of coloured light (reds, oranges, blues and purples), and one containing what Spielberg considers his 'master image' - the shot in which Barry opens the door to the visitors and stands, in total serenity, in the doorframe surrounded by glowing orange. "He's standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway" (Baxter, 20), Spielberg has said of a shot he believes encapsulates his whole career. Yet the scene does not associate wonder only with light. The 'attack' on the Guiler household is a total natural assault. The sky parts, the trees rustle and the atmosphere itself burns with wondrous orange. When the visitors have claimed Barry they return to the sky, disappearing into the clouds as if they didn't come from space at all, but the atmosphere itself, indeed nature itself. The scene closes on an extreme wide shot which takes in the Guiler house, the landscape and the sky. Barry's helpless mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon) is a dot against the awe-inspiring wonder of nature.
A GREEN WORLD
Close Encounters is not alone in its use of Earth and nature as a source of amazement. Consider the dusty yellow-browns of the desert in Duel, the deep blues of the ocean in Jaws and the lush greens of the forest trees in E.T.. "Spielberg's world," as Michael Koresky notes in his analysis of Always for online film journal Reverse Shot, "is a green world." He paints nature as epic fantasy, a bright and brilliant canvas onto which his protagonists' hopes, dreams, desires and fears are drawn. Koresky continues: "The trees, plants, flowers, tall grasses, and forests in his films convey an otherworldly rapture, radiating a transcendent, decidedly unnatural glow." Always is one of Spielberg's most elemental films, the director filling his frame with fire, water and earth, and as Koresky notes in the concluding paragraph of his essay, it shows "what all those slack-jawed Spielberg characters are really staring at with that gaping astonishment. Whether divine or ruled by chaos, it’s right here on Earth."
Spielberg's fascination with the natural world stems back to his childhood in Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix was a town low on entertainment ("We had nothing! Except, probably, the worst television you've ever seen." (Crawley, 13)) but high on natural wonder. "I wasn't raised in a big city," Spielberg has remembered. "I lived under the sky all through those formative years, from third grade right through to high school. That's my knowledge of a sort of lifestyle." (Baxter, 31). The purity of the natural world gave Spielberg's imagination licence to soar - and one memory provided particularly potent fuel. "The atmosphere was clear there. We had a lot of starry nights," he has said. "I remember when my father woke my up one night and took me to a hillside at about 3am. He spread out a blanket and we sat there and watched a fabulous meteor shower. It was... extraordinary! I wanted to know what put those points of light up there. I was starstruck. I still am." (Crawley, 9)
This experience would help nurture Spielberg's interest in objects of light, awe and wonder, as well as their connection with nature, and despite his early disappointment with the medium, he found himself naturally gravitating to the lightshow of cinema. Freed from the constraints of parental guidance as he got older, the budding director quickly acquired a taste for the films of European arthouse masters like François Truffaut and Federico Fellini, along with British auteurs like David Lean, who sang the praises of Duel after his first viewing and would become something of a mentor for Spielberg in the '80s. However, it would be a distinctly American director who would exert the most overt influence: John Ford.
Ford's cinema consumed Spielberg. He met the director when he was an up-and-comer and has repeatedly made references to him in interviews and in his movies (to The Quiet Man in E.T. and to The Searchers in Jaws and War of the Worlds). Any assessment of Spielberg demands a look at Ford because the similarities between the two are numerous and unmistakable. Writing of Ford in the McMillan International Film Encyclopaedia, Ephraim Katz notes:
"Of all American directors, Ford probably had the clearest personal vision and the most consistent visual style. His ideas and his characters are, like many things branded "American", deceptively simple. His heroes.... may appear simply to be loners, outsiders to established society, who generally speak through action rather than words. But their conflict with society embodies larger themes in the American experience. Ford's films, particularly the Westerns, express a deep aesthetic sensibility for the American past and the spirit of the frontier. Ford was a folk artist, a master storyteller, and a poet of the moving image. His compositions have a classic strength in which masses of people and their natural surroundings are beautifully juxtaposed, often in breathtaking long shots. The mov
ement of men and horses in his Westerns has rarely been surpassed for regal serenity and evocative power. The musical score, often variations on folk themes, plays a more important part than dialogue in many Ford films. Ford also championed the value and force of the group, as evidenced in his many military dramas ... [and he] expressed a similar sentiment for camaraderie through his repeated use of certain actors in the lead and supporting roles...He also felt an allegiance to places, shooting nine of his films in the panoramic Monument Valley..."
(Katz)
A handful of tropes in this passage could just as easily be used to describe Spielberg's film-making - alienated loners (Roy Neary, Elliott, Jim), an interest in America's past (Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln), the camaraderie of community (Close Encounters and E.T.), an allegiance to certain locations (suburbia in Close Encounters, E.T. and War of the Worlds) and the evocative use of music (everything). Ford and Spielberg even share a common determination to seamlessly integrate the audience into the world of the film - a process Ford dubbed his "invisible technique". Above all though, they are bound by their interest in nature. One of the first Ford films Spielberg ever saw was The Searchers, and as John Baxter notes, it "opened his eyes to the poetic possibilities of landscape." (Baxter, 31). It is, by no means, the only Ford film to use landscapes strikingly.
Baxter continues, "[Ford] instinctively employed aspects of the natural world as metaphors for mental and moral states. Dust represented dissolution; rivers a sense of peace and cleansing; silhouettes presage death. Certain landscapes, like Monument Valley, were for him intellectual universes in miniature. Those weathered towers of limestone rising from the desert against a vast sky became the unalterable precepts by which honourable men must live." (Baxter, 31). Spielberg also uses vast skies, portraying them as representations of his characters' hopes and dreams in films like Close Encounters and E.T., and he referenced Ford's use of Monument Valley in the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Similarly, water is employed as a symbol of peace and cleansing (think of the finales of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Always, both of which end with the heroes engulfed in great gushes of water), and while silhouettes don't presage death for Spielberg, they are repeatedly used to introduce iconic characters (Indiana Jones and Abraham Lincoln).
Along with The Searchers, Ford's first sound Western, Stagecoach (1939), holds a particularly warm place in Spielberg's heart for its striking use of nature. "I really admire Stagecoach because it was Ford's first foray into Monument Valley," Spielberg told the American Film Institute. "He was starting to use landscape art to help tell his story, to create God's Country and to put little figures in a grand landscape... More than any of his silent movies, this is where he began to use nature as a character in his pictures." Writing in a piece entitled Ford Till ‘47 on online film journal Senses of Cinema, Tag Gallagher echoes these thoughts:
"A new magnitude enters cinema with Monument Valley in Stagecoach. Not bigger physically, like the ocean or sky, but bigger in feeling. Civilisation is corrupt, Stagecoach tells us over and over again. But each of the coach’s passengers makes a pilgrimage of self discovery and redemption, and this vastness is their aspiration. Space becomes subjective; ideas become space. Ideas are real. The valley = consciousness = our own interiority. It’s not simply a valley, but a valley turned into melodrama, like a consciousness expanding as it stares at the world’s immensity – in 1939, as the world turned toward war. It’s the reality of this gaze that’s important, of how things are looked at – not the reality of the rocks."
Gallagher's thoughts on Ford echo Koresky's on Spielberg. Just as "the reality of this gaze" - in other words, how characters view, interact with and have their inner lives reflected by nature - is vital to Ford's film-making, so too is it vital to Spielberg's. Ford's other 1939 film, Young Mr. Lincoln (their interest in the 16th President forming another significant bond between Ford and Spielberg), is another, somewhat more intimate, portrait of the relationship between man and nature, and it provides another interesting point of comparison between Ford and Spielberg. Of the film's depiction of Lincoln's first love, Ann Rutledge, Gallagher notes that Ford reflects their affection for one another through nature in the scene where Lincoln sits reading under a tree and spots Ann across a fence.
"The purity of aspiration in Lincoln’s vision of Ann resembles the way we looked at Monument Valley. Lincoln, in the Rousseau-like purity of nature, discovers law is nothing but right and wrong, and at the same instant is startled by this apparition of womanhood – whom, however, the fence demarks as belonging to another sphere. Momentarily he jumps the fence, but it’s there again at scene’s end. Ann appears as an angel above him, incarnates nature and law, gives him her flowers to hold while she tells him what he is to do in life, then disappears. Ford is full of magical apparitions – of characters staring at visions (Stagecoach: Hatfield at Lucy; How Green Was My Valley: Huw at Angharad; My Darling Clementine: Wyatt at Clementine; The Quiet Man (1952): Sean Thornton at Mary Kate; The Searchers: Debbie at Scar). Lincoln, in his mind’s eye, never stops staring at Ann, the river, his beckoning destiny."
Ford's portrayal of Rutledge is no different from Spielberg's depictions of objects of love - the aliens in Close Encounters, Anderton's kidnapped son Sean in Minority Report, Frank's parents in Catch Me If You Can (to name but three). All are objects of his characters' desires (obsessional love, paternal love and romantic love) and all are linked to either nature (Close Encounters' connection of the aliens to Devil's Tower); light (Catch Me If You Can features an early scene in which Frank's then-happily married parents dance in their living room, which is lit with subtle orange) or both (in Minority Report, Anderton watches a holographic recording of his son that is set in a forest and emerges as a brilliant shaft of blue-white light). These moments permeate their films and haunt their characters; just like Lincoln in Ford's film, Neary, Frank and Anderton never stop staring at these magical apparitions.
The most magical of all Spielberg's depictions of the transformative properties of nature is E.T., which the director has described as "my personal redemption." The film links its title character inextricably to nature, through the plant that dies and returns to life when he does, his vocation (E.T. is an alien botanist who comes to Earth to study its plant life) and the location of both his arrival and departure (a forest). The film's most significant scenes take place at night, or just as day is turning into night, and together Spielberg and his cinematographer Allan Davieu created a deep, alluring night sky for Elliott and E.T. to get lost in. It was inspired, Spielberg told Rolling Stone's Michael Sagrow in 1982, by his experience of another cinematic representation of nature: Disney's Fantasia.
"Remember in Fantasia, Mother Night flying over with her cape, covering the daylight sky? When I was a kid, that's what night really looked like. The Disney Mother Night was a beautiful woman with flowing, blue-black hair, and arms extended outward, twenty miles in either direction. And behind her was a very inviting cloak. She came from the horizon in an arc and swept over you until everything was a blue-black in this kind of animated sky. I wanted the opening of E.T. to be that kind of Mother Night."
(Sagrow in Friedman and Notbohm, 113)
This blue-black is also used in the film's most iconic sequence: the night flight, during which E.T. and Elliott fly across the face of the moon on Elliott's bike. If, as Spielberg suggests, his use of this colour is to create a "very inviting" mood, then this scene represents a certain level of comfort, E.T. and Elliott escaping their loneliness and being welcomed into the comforting embrace of Mother Night. Yet the film is not purely about escape. The Moon shot is rhymed with a similar shot later in the film when Elliott and his friends escape from the government agents and fly across the face of a roaring orange sun. The sun here represents growth and development; Elliott has matured by this stage in the film, realisi
ng now that he has to let E.T. return home, and that he too has to return to his home. Fantasy and reality, childhood and maturity, indeed Elliott's entire arc during the film, are symbolised in E.T. by two of human life's most elemental forces, Spielberg using nature to speak more powerfully than words ever could.
POET OF SUBURBIA
If nature is the benevolent force Spielberg's characters must escape into, the malevolent force they're fleeing from is suburbia. Spielberg's depiction of suburbia and the camaraderie of neighbourhoods is dismissed as warm and cosy by many critics, and his seemingly positive portrayal of the setting led Vincent Canby to dub him "the poet of suburbia," a tag that captures his enduring interest in the area, but perhaps paints that interest as unquestioningly positive. In truth, Spielberg's attitude is somewhat more melancholic, a deep love for the comfort suburban togetherness provides mixed with a deep resentment for the confines it imposes. As Joseph McBride writes:
"It is impossible to imagine Steven Spielberg never having grown up in suburbia. 'I never mock suburbia," Spielberg has said. 'My life comes from there.' And yet... Spielberg does not entirely believe in it, share its values, or depict it in quite such glowing terms on screen. In such Spielberg films as Duel and Close Encounters and E.T., the suburbia to which his upwardly mobile parents escaped in the early 1950s becomes a place of entrapment from which his dissatisfied middle-class characters yearn to escape."
(McBride, 49)
Indeed, in a rare criticism of the suburban lifestyle made in Time Out magazine in 1978, Spielberg vented his frustration with the monotony of modern suburban life.
"It begins on a Sunday; you take your car to be washed. You have to drive it but it's only a block away. And, as the car's being washed, you go next door with the kids and buy them ice cream at the Dairy Queen and then you have lunch at the plastic McDonald's with seven zillion hamburgers sold. And then you go off to the games room and you play the quarter games: Tank and the Pong and Flim-Flam. And you get into the car and drive to the Magic Mountain plastic amusement park and you spend the day there eating junk food.
"Afterwards, you drive home, stopping at all the red lights, and the wife is waiting with dinner on. And you have instant potatoes and eggs without cholesterol - because they're artificial - and you sit down and turn on the television set, which has become the reality as opposed to the fantasy this man has lived with that entire day. And you watch the prime time, which is pabulum and nothing more than watching a night light. And you see the news at the end of that, which you don't want to listen to because it doesn't conform to the reality you've just been through prime time with. And at the end of all that you go to sleep and you dream about making enough money to support weekend America."
Such frustration is seen in The Sugarland Express, Jaws and War of the Worlds, which depict the descent of seemingly passive suburban communities into mobs, and E.T. and Close Encounters, which portray suburbia as a bland and generic place from which the only escape is into the stars. Close Encounters is, as Frederick Wasser notes, "harsh (as much as Spielberg can be harsh)... This is a portrait of a man frustrated by the limited imagination of those around him, in both his family and his neighbourhood." (Wasser, 82)
Cahiers du Cinema's Clelia Cohen expands on Spielberg's Duel quote in her analysis of Close Encounters, writing in the film journal's Masters of Cinema book about Spielberg that the film is about Capitalist fatigue.
"The space around [Neary] is signposted with American symbols: Shell and McDonalds logos, TV soaps and Budweiser ads, Coca-Cola labelled trucks serving as a cover for the army's planned masquerade. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is nothing more than the figure of a man at odds with America, a deserter who unhesitantingly abandons his family, without showing the least sign of remorse, to board the spaceship at the end of the film."
(Cohen, 29)
The conflict between nature and suburbia, and the need to throw off the shackles that the latter imposes, is a struggle that faces many Spielbergian heroes. Look, for example, at David Mann, who journeys from suburbia into the wilds of rural America to battle the truck, wins and is rewarded with a shot that bathes him in warm, orange sunlight. No less lost in the space between nature and man-made living areas are Martin Brody, an aquaphobe who conquers his fear to save Amity; Indiana Jones, a school teacher who performs heroics in the sandy climbs of Egypt, and Empire of the Sun's Jim, a spoiled rich boy who is bloodied up and literally has to crawl through the mud and dirt to earn the respect of his fellow captives at the Soo Chow internment camp. Like The Searchers' Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), Spielbergian heroes are given a trial by nature, and must accept nature to pass the test.
Indeed, if Spielberg's fascination with nature emanates from Ford, his frustration with suburbia comes, a little more indirectly, from another classic he watched at The Kiva: David Lean's masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Speaking to Laurent Bouzereau on the featurette Lawrence of Arabia: A Conversation with Steven Spielberg, the director explained his enduring fascination with the film:
"[My hometown of] Phoenix, Arizona is a desert community; I was raised in the desert, so I had an affinity for Lawrence's love of the desert. I understood his obsession with how clean the desert was. That's what I always thought: that the desert was cleaner than the city and the neighbourhoods. Nature just swept all the debris out of the desert and kept it pristine. It was that idea of Lawrence and nature at one with each other that I really could relate to."
For Spielberg then, nature is clean, a blank canvas on which to paint Fordian and Leanian visions of emotional transcendence. Suburbia and the city, on the other hand, are where "the debris" of life has been swept into, a chaotic world dominated by cars, billboards and buildings. Urban areas are those where man has painted his own destiny and made a mess of it. Only by retreating back to nature can the canvas be cleared, and a truer destiny be attained.
BREAKING THE BARRIERS
In Jurassic Park, however, this rule is broken in a violent and destructive way. The very concept of a 'Jurassic Park' sweeps the debris back into the desert. It is nothing more than a bid to relocate a "Magic Mountain plastic amusement park" to the natural world, and corrupt it with the monotony of the suburban routine. It fails, of course, and screenwriter Malia Scotch Marmo who, following her work on Hook, penned the first draft of Jurassic Park before David Koepp was brought in for subsequent rewrites, aimed to work in imagery that would emphasise man's doomed bid for dominance.
"I wanted to show the fatal flaw in tying to control nature. And I did that by juxtaposing a lot of jungle imagery with the pristine control room - things like having one wall of the visitor centre uncompleted so that greenery is pushing in and vines are swinging down. Small things like windows being opened and vegetation bursting inside and little lizards that run across the sidewalk. The idea was that nature was always in the way, always pushing hard against intrusion."
(Shay and Duncan, 42)
Though many of Marmo's more overt ideas didn't directly make it to screen, Spielberg's longtime production designer, Rick Carter, would bring them to light through his sets:
"What we were trying to convey was that this is a process. The park is in the final stages of completion, but it is never completed. The building of the perfect dinosaur is not quite there yet, the building of the perfect park is not quite there yet, the building of the perfect security system is not quite there yet. Building the perfect anything is impossible - especially when one is dealing with nature."
(Shay and Duncan, 45)
Even the decision to shoot the film on location in Kauai, Hawaii (which stood in for the Park's Costa Rican setting) was also motivated by Spielberg's wish to highlight the natur
al world. "Steven wanted a very realistic look for Jurassic Park so that the audience would feel as if they were in the park as much as possible," says cinematographer Dean Cundey. "One of the reasons for going to Kauai was to reveal this island where the story takes place. We wanted to get larger and more expansive backgrounds behind some of the scenes." (Shay and Duncan, 68-69). They wanted, in other words, to make the location a character.
Working closely with Cundey, Spielberg draws a powerful visual juxtaposition between the natural world the Park is created on and the false one Hammond tries to build within it. The natural world is full of lush greens and earthy browns. They are seen in the Badlands of the Montana wilds where Grant and Sattler dig for dinosaur bones, the green plains the Gallimimus flock over, and the coffee brown mud the Tyrannosaur stomps into. The man-made world, on the other hand, is all lifeless grays, pristine whites and dark blacks. Any colours that emerge are primary colours without subtlety or nuance (such as the block red and yellow of the Jurassic Park logo), or an imitation of earth (such as the pale brown of the jeeps or the sickly green of the touring cars).
Even the characters adhere to this careful colour coding. Hammond, for example, wears nothing but white, a comment on his naivety, surface-level purity and idealism, as well as the (in his eyes) perfect world his Park represents. Grant and Sattler, meanwhile, wear primary colours - Grant blue with a red neckerchief, Sattler pink with a blue vest beneath. These represent their gender roles (another order which Jurassic Park seeks to undermine - as I shall explore in Part IV), and by the end they, like Hammond's purity, are destroyed - Grant's clothing becomes covered in mud and grime, Ellie, who becomes the film's proactive hero, removes her pink shirt to reveal the masculine blue underneath. Tim and Lex, meanwhile, end up just as mud-caked as Grant, and end the film in his arms, a new family forged out of the earth.
This is typically Spielbergian, but Jurassic Park also emerges as a significant break from his traditional view of nature. Nature is not as clean as Hammond would like to believe; it's dirty, muddy and grim. The storm that descends on the island shows that even with sophisticated computer technology, nature can't be predicted or prepared for, and the rain that the storm brings turns the park's lush greenery into black mud. The storm becomes something of a purging fire, ridding Hammond of his naive illusions about nature, and making a mockery of his bid to imitate its pristine perfection (note the slash of mud that covers the jeep's Jurassic Park logo at the end of the film). We must not only admire nature's pristine beauty, the film says, but respect its chaos and confusion.
The events on the island rid Hammond of his Disney-fied view of nature, but they also rid Spielberg of his Ford-ified view. Unlike Duel, Close Encounters and E.T., Spielberg doesn't use nature to represent characters' emotions in Jurassic Park. Indeed, the film includes an explicit condemnation of such action in the scene between Hammond and Sattler in the Park's restaurant. Here, Spielberg establishes Hammond's motivation for creating the Park as primarily emotional. He speaks of his first attraction - a flea circus - and the wonder the children who visited it felt. With Jurassic Park, he says, he wanted to create something "that wasn't an illusion, something that was real, something they could touch." Hammond does this though nature, just as Spielberg had done, and the director visually expresses his disgust by bathing Hammond in the orange of one of the restaurant's spotlights. It's a dull orange glow, without body or warmth, far away from the brilliance of E.T.'s rich sun.
In Jurassic Park then it is the "reality of the rocks" that is important, not just the way we look at them - nature is an independent force, and in the film's opening scene, Spielberg shows its anger. The film begins, as many Spielberg films do, with the title slowly appearing on a black screen behind which are guttural, elemental sounds. The title card switches to a shot of trees rustling in the dark as John Williams's score introduces a dark and foreboding choral element. A Velociraptor cage emerges, crashing its way through the treetops as Williams's music continues to build. The Raptor is being ushered into its pen, but it escapes and kills one of the Park's workers. The scene ends as it began - with a shot of nature - as the Raptor's eye fades into the calm waters that open the film's second scene. Nature has grown angry, thrown off man's shackles and restored the natural order. "These are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in," says Sattler in the film's roundtable sequence, "and they'll defend themselves, violently if necessary."
The message of this first scene is repeated in the following two scenes, which both establish the desecration of nature by man and man's corruption in the face of nature's purity. In the first, we see Gennaro visiting Hammond's amber mines. He speaks to the lead digger, Juanito (Miguel Sandoval), who is extracting the amber from which the dinosaurs will be cloned. He lifts a sample up to the camera, Spielberg backlighting the rock so its golden hue shimmers as Williams's celestial music emphasises the moment's heavenly nature. Throughout this scene, Gennaro discusses nothing but business - the position of the park, the assurances Hammond's backers are looking for, and the need to enlist Grant and Sattler in getting them. The "lack of humility before nature" that Malcolm later describes is established here.
Completing this trilogy of sequences is a scene that takes place in the Bandlands of Montana, where Grant, Sattler and their team of paleontologists are working to recover a dinosaur fossil. The sequence begins with a series of close-ups on the fossil as sand is patiently dusted from it. It is black and broken - ancient nature at its purest. Later in the scene, however, all this hard work undone when Hammond arrives in his helicopter, blowing the sand back onto the fossil. It is silver and blue, unnatural colours invading this word of natural browns and blacks. Just as Gennaro had in the previous scene, Hammond discusses commerce and capitalism. The film's representation of greed has emerged to enforce his view of nature at the expense of nature's own view.
Spielberg again underlines his point when Hammond, Gennaro, Grant, Sattler and Malcolm arrive at the island. Using large scale wide shots to introduce the island, Spielberg depicts the helicopter the group is in as a tiny dot set against the vast expanse of the ocean. Just as Williams's main theme strikes up, he slowly tracks up from the chopper, following it as it homes in on the island, the vehicle once again becoming a dot against the Park's immense size. Humanity is small against the enormity of nature, and the island demands and deserves respect, but Hammond shows it little. Once the group land, Spielberg shows us the world Hammond has created. A majestic waterfall is framed behind a metal fence, and the lush greenery is oppressed by the paddocks Hammond has constructed to make the island 'safe'. Man has severed his complementary relationship with nature by using it for his own ends - and he will be punished.
Yet Spielberg's depiction of nature is not entirely violent. The dinosaurs are presented as objects of wonder as much as fear, something it holds in common with Jaws, the shark of which possess, according to Andrew Gordon, "a monstrous beauty... [that is evidenced] in the photographs of sharks and their awesome jaws and in images of its sleek body gliding silently and powerfully through the water." (Gordon, 35). Joseph McBride expands on this vision of the monster as both beautiful and terrifying. "The director's ambivalence sharpens the suspense by encouraging the audience to admire and even identify with the dinosaurs (as Grant does), while also experiencing the terrors of their human prey," he writes. "The resulting complexity of tone produces the kind of unsettling 'attraction/repulsion' ambivalence famous from Hitchcock films." (McBride, 423).
The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are presented as more than just figures of attraction though; they are figures of the divine. Spielberg expresses this through high angle camera shots (see the introduction of the Brachiosaur), characters who proclaim their awe through dialogue ("You have a T-Rex? They have a T-Rex!"), and John Williams's music (which tinkles gently with nursery rhyme grace during the ill Triceratops sequence). Even the Velociraptors, the film's ostensible villains, and the only dinosaurs to be portrayed as almost
entirely evil, are granted a hushed reverence, with Williams using celestial choirs when Grant holds a Raptor that has just hatched. Spielberg presents nature as wondrous in and of itself, not just through its relationship with man.
For Spielberg, the desire to imbue his creatures with a sense of the divine and an almost child-like innocence was deeply personal. One of his childhood hometowns was Haddonfield, New Jersey, a place rich in dinosaur lore. The town was built on land that was once a prehistoric ocean, and it was the site where the Hadrosaurus foulkit, the first almost-complete dinosaur skeleton to be discovered in modern times, was unearthed. History was not just something written in textbooks for Spielberg, and dinosaurs were not just alive on the movie screen. He and his classmates were taken to museums and went on field trips to the Hadrosaurus discovery site; the very land the boy stood on vibrated with the echoes of the past.
Speaking on the 1993 documentary The Making of Jurassic Park, Spielberg explained:
"My first toy, from a museum, that I ever got was a little lead cast of a Triceratops. I became fascinated as a kid, as all kids do, because they're bigger than us, and they were something that doesn't exist today. And because they don't exist today, there's no immediate, direct access, it becomes the thing that mythology is made of and that makes mythology so fascinating. Only it's real, it's not mythology, but it has the pull and seduction of mythology."
The making of Jurassic Park was undoubtedly a way of reconnecting with his childhood for Spielberg, and during promotion for the film, he spoke of how "like most kids, some of my first largest words were 'Triceratops' and 'Stegosaurus,'" how he was "interested in the fantastic size of these creatures" (McBride, 61) when he was young and how he "wanted to make a movie for all those dinosaur lovers" (Return to Jurassic Park). The film was an attempt to resurrect dinosaurs, remove them from their trite B-movie image and give them the sense of awe and wonder a child has towards them. In other words, Spielberg wanted to make them, like the rest of the nature in the film, amazing in and of themselves.
By doing so, Spielberg upsets the usual course of monster movies and the themes explored in his own entries into the genre. This is seen in the film's finale when Grant, Sattler and the kids are hunted down by Raptors in the Visitors Centre. The two Raptors journey through the complex, opening doors, hunting down Tim and Lex in the kitchen and invading the Control Room. It is the total dissolution of the boundary between man and nature. Finally, the Raptors, along with the humans, move into the Visitors Centre plaza where they prepare to attack their prey, only for the T-Rex to emerge from nowhere to kill them both.
As mentioned in Part II, this scene was a late addition to the script. As originally planned, the Rex didn't return; instead the Raptors were to scale the fossils that hang from the ceiling to pursue and attack Grant, Sattler and the kids, but perish when the bones fell, crushing and skewering them. It's an ending that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the film, a statement in which real nature (the bones) triumphs over the man-made nature the genetically-engineered dinosaurs represent. It's poetic and ironic, but it serves to underline man's mistake (again using nature to reflect a human element) and to destroy nature.
The finale Spielberg eventually opted for is something a little more complex, and much more satisfying. When the Rex appears, it's only doing what comes naturally - hunting ("T-Rex doesn't want to be fed," Grant says early in the film. "It wants to hunt."). Artificially engineered though it may be, nature has restored a natural balance, broken free from the inference of humanity and snapped the food chain back into order. Man hasn't triumphed over nature like in Duel and Jaws, nature has triumphed over man. Life, to borrow a phrase, has found a way.