Life Finds a Way

Anne Sawyier reviews Hannah McGregor’s new book, “Clever Girl: Jurassic Park” in the context of big tech’s takeover of Hollywood.

By Anne SawyierOctober 2, 2024

• Cultural Studies

• Film

• Television

HOLLYWOOD WOULD BE grateful for an existential reckoning: at least that would suggest a showbiz-worthy bright light at the end of the tunnel. Tinseltown can’t locate the tunnel, never mind the light. As Daniel Bessner incisively writes in his Harper’s piece “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” the industry, colonized by monopolistic tech companies, has become overly beholden to the holy “quarterly results” and earnings calls, not to mention the almighty algorithm. By prioritizing stories that purportedly have the widest appeal, hoping to ensure endless financial growth, the streamers’ race for subscribers has monetized our collective unconscious; we are not communities sharing in story, our eyes twinkling in recognition at one another as we tell tales, but discrete groups whose clicks are being harvested. Communal nostalgia has played a multifaceted yet ubiquitous role in this landscape as executives cycle through a seemingly endless glut of remakes, professing a near-religious devotion to “IP.”  

Hollywood has tried to recreate the stories of the past, but cultural theorist Svetlana Boym warns us, in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), against the hubris of such efforts. Restorative nostalgia, she writes, is a futile-at-best, harmful-at-worst attempt at literally recreating a past, emphasizing the recreation of a lost home that can never be recovered. The failure of restorative nostalgia as business model is evident even in the dreaded data: streamers have seen that their most-watched shows are not the newest ones they’ve developed. Instead, the original sitcoms and procedurals from previous decades are on the most-viewed lists. Reflective nostalgia, which thoughtfully interacts with the past from a contemporary standpoint, explains the success of 2023’s blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer, proof that audiences are eager for original material, even (or especially) with familiar themes.

It is this reflective nostalgia that underscores publishing professor Hannah McGregor’s Clever Girl. Jurassic Park, a critical revisiting of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 juggernaut through queer and feminist lenses. Part of indie press ECW’s Pop Classics series, this collection of five short essays offers an insightful and funny journey through both a beloved movie and the author’s life:

Fat, femme, queer, hungry, monstrous, full of rage, and determined to be free: no wonder I have gravitated to these creatures as feminist role models. They offer a fantasy of freedom that sparked a young girl’s imagination, and since then has grown into a full-on obsession with what is possible when we embrace, without fear or shame, sublime monstrosity.

The most terrifying monster in Hollywood has always been the human woman. McGregor uses Barbara Creed’s theories from her 1993 classic The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis to connect prehistoric reptiles with humans: “Chances are if you see a gaping maw full of sharp teeth and a wet, dark interior, that maw is telling you something about the Western horror of vaginas and their dark secrets.” But a visual analysis is not where McGregor’s focus lies.

Similar to the essays in It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (2022), edited by Joe Vallese, McGregor’s writing reflects on her childhood shame and confusion at existing as a bigger girl who was also queer. Reflecting the “monster theory” tradition, in which film monsters are analyzed as an expression of a cultural subconscious and our thoughts on difference, it is the dinosaurs with whom McGregor finds an empowering identification. “Fat, closeted, and deeply uncomfortable in my own skin, I spent my youth trying to make myself smaller while admiring these […] women who were unabashedly enormous and powerful.” Those of us who grew up in the 1990s may have been treated to Jurassic Park–fueled nightmares, ominous heavy footprints building to the inevitable terrifying roar of a predator baring its enormous teeth. McGregor’s poignant and funny voice reveals how the dinosaurs’ roars and screeches were not only threats but also echoes of our own voices.

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Writing in n+1, Vivian Gornick writes in “Memoir & Criticism” that it is in “an aroused consciousness that the solace and excitement of literature are to be found.” McGregor transparently shares this “aroused consciousness” with us—one that is humorous, irreverent, and searingly honest—not only to generate new interpretations of an old blockbuster but also to remind us of our own power in discovering these meanings. She goes beyond analyzing the movie as an Icarian flight with technology and, in weaving in her personal experience with the film—as a self-professed “gay auntie”—re-empowers her audience from faceless data points to significant players in the making and meaning of narrative.

Clever Girl comes 31 years after the movie’s theatrical release. Based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel of the same name, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was a runaway commercial hit when it was released: it was the highest-grossing film released worldwide up to that time, and the first movie to generate $50 million on a single weekend. Critics were lukewarm, many arguing that the characters were one-dimensional. Even the most skeptical critics had to admit that it was an undeniable visual triumph, and it won the 1994 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

While initial reviews bemoaned that the primacy of these visual effects came at the expense of character development (a common complaint about superhero movies now), McGregor uses those very dinosaurs to make her own personal inroads into the movie. She reminds us that all of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are engineered to be female so the scientists can control their reproduction; even as they’re scientifically intersex, McGregor points out that the film insists on “their proximity to woman-ness.”

“Is this detail a mere curiosity,” McGregor writes, “or is it—bear with me here—the entire point of the movie?”

She combines her humor—she furtively looked at the Gen13 comic books since she was “14 and horny and closeted and [she] wanted to look at drawings of tits”—with emotionally wrought descriptions of her internal experience. She saw her “too big body” as a kind of “gender failure.” Though she wanted to dress in the pink tulle of princess outfits, none fit, and she accidentally hurt other children with her “clumsy, puppy-like desire to play.” As an adult, she came out as queer, then asexual:

I had just tearfully confessed that I feared I was broken because I couldn’t make myself want anyone. My fatness and queerness had given me a complicated relationship to my own desirability, one that for years had stood in the way of conversations about the possible substance of that desire.

Because we know McGregor’s childhood pain, and her adult journey with coming out, we can root for McGregor discovering the power and beauty of “monstrosity,” without feeling manipulated into it.

McGregor directly confronts the possibility that Jurassic Park is the ultimate exercise in looking at women as second-class citizens. “The problem with that reading is everyone fucking loves these dinosaurs,” she counters. The dinosaurs are appreciated not in spite of their monstrosity, their incomprehensible otherness, but because of it. The very title of McGregor’s book, “Clever Girl,” comes from a dinosaur gamekeeper’s compliment to a velociraptor before the comparatively human-sized beast kills him. McGregor also astutely weaves in Jess Zimmerman’s 2021 book, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2008 “FEMME SHARK MANIFESTO!” (McGregor increasingly identifies as “femme” rather than “female”). Throughout her analysis, McGregor’s joy that the dinosaurs are “ravenous, loud,” and “committed to taking down the system of the park so that they can be free” can be felt.

This “taking down the system of the park” happens both narratively and visually. In her strongest formal reading, McGregor shows how the movie’s use of the gaze disrupts presupposed power dynamics—the movie “isn’t just about the display of dinosaurs: it’s about the failure of that display, the refusal of the dinosaurs to be reduced to stops on a tour or exhibits in a museum.” Drawing heavily on Laura Mulvey’s canonical usage of the “male gaze” concept, McGregor interrogates how power is infused in the movie’s displays of looking. It is not the passive spectators that survive but, rather, scientists Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who “turn a skeptical gaze on everything around them.” (McGregor begins to develop an interesting point on how the history of dinosaur display is part of a longer history of the gendered and racialized history of American “crowd-pleasing spectacle,” but falters in an in-depth description or analysis here with too few examples and too tenuous theoretical analyses.)

The special effects may be a spectacle, but the apparatus of awe is also on display. The first time we see a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, it is a looming image of its floating eye. In another scene, we see the warning “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” in a jeep’s rearview mirror as humans desperately try to escape a chasing dinosaur. Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), the children of the movie, outsmart the raptors they are trapped in a kitchen with by using mirror-like surfaces. McGregor’s funny and personal asides in the book—“as much as I would love to be a Laura Dern gay, in her knotted shirt and khaki shorts and big, practical boots […] I am, alas, a Jeff Goldblum gay, all fun glasses and statement jewelry and a little too much cleavage for an academic setting”—mimic this process in the movie: we are always made aware that we are in the process of analyzing. The experience of experiencing, not just the special effects themselves, is a large part of what makes this cinema of attractions so attractive.

In a deliciously acerbic takedown of the more recent Jurassic World movies, McGregor shows how they defang our dinosaurs by removing the very subversion of normative female behavior that McGregor found solace in. Bryce Dallas Howard runs in her infamous heels. Laura Dern is replaced by Chris Pratt, the straightest, whitest guy in Hollywood, who manages to “tame” the notoriously violent (female) raptors. Even the character Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum’s cheeky chaos statistician, is turned into “a hyper-masculine action hero, which entirely misses the point of both the character and Jeff Goldblum.” While McGregor could have supported her claims with more rigorous inclusion and citing of other academic texts concerning queer film theory, her personal analysis has the reader cheering for the dinosaurs as underestimated victims of a laughable patriarchal attempt at control.

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Like the initial dinosaur eye of the movie, McGregor’s grief over the loss of her mother looms throughout the book. McGregor lovingly sprinkles in descriptions of her “hairy-legged and braless” hippie mother: she gave the young McGregor a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1968) in the hopes of imparting 1970s feminist thinking, wore an “abandon hope, abandon fear” T-shirt to chemotherapy treatments, and tended to an “overgrown garden” with plant medicines. We appreciate this unique woman when McGregor heartbreakingly renders the “slow apocalypse” of her death:

We lived inside the slow fact of her death, an apocalypse that culminated when I was 16 and she chose to die by suicide, her body ravaged by tumors, her remarkable reserves of patience and fortitude finally exhausted. And it felt, in a totally non-metaphorical way, like the end of the world. The moment I found out she was dead, I thought, “Then I’m going to die too.” I couldn’t conceive of an after to her, even while I’d been obsessively imagining it for half my life.

Though the movie does not involve the complete end of our world as we know it, the threat of such destruction is ever-present. “The scientists in Jurassic Park have bred an apocalypse,” McGregor explains, “by bringing dinosaurs back into the world, they have done something profoundly transformative and completely irreversible.” While other writings have looked at Jurassic Park as a fable of man trying to control nature, McGregor adds a new psychological layer to the dissolution of human control on display in the movie. Her honesty with her perspective—“With the clarity of hindsight, I can see how much of my fondness for Dr. Grant and his care for Lex and Tim stemmed from my own childhood desire to be cared for”—allows us to trustfully follow her into her analysis. Spielberg’s psychology is on display in his entire filmography—he pretty much perfected the absent father/substitute male father figure trope—but McGregor mines her own autobiography to form her compelling analysis.

McGregor poignantly describes how the death of her mother altered her perception of order in the world, even the supposed orderliness of chronology. When her mother decided to homeschool her in the second half of eighth grade, which McGregor now realizes was her mother’s way of spending more time with her, her interest in plate tectonic history intensified. All of the people who excluded her as a child seemed inconsequential in the face of “the slow grinding migration of continents over millions of years.” She takes this new expansiveness of time and thought-provokingly reinterprets Sattler’s iconic line, “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the Earth,” as not only a reassertion of female power but also a takedown of the supposed rational ordering of time into a patriarchal teleology. She also argues that Sattler isn’t comforting the park’s wealthy founder John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) when she tells him that he needs to “feel” his way through the dinosaur attack. Rather, she’s showing him how his blind dependence on rationality has wrought horrific violence on those he loves, as well as challenging him to relinquish his false sense of control.

That pretense to control, McGregor proves, is key to differentiating how the Jurassic World sequels depart from the original. Jurassic Park ends with birds flying freely, as we look on from behind them. One of Alan Grant’s running theories is that birds are the latest descendants of dinosaurs, and so the movie’s last shot showing us these birds proclaims a strong message, that “those birds tell us: dinosaurs aren’t back, they’ve been here the whole time. They say: the world has not suddenly become wild and dangerous, it has always been so, and any fantasies of control were just fantasies.”

Jurassic World, on the other hand, ends with two dinosaurs earning survival by saving humans, a third needing to be put down: we are back in a controlled gaze, where we have power over nature. This progression mirrors Hollywood companies’ treatment of their audiences. Rather than curiously looking at our wild natures and interests, like those birds in Jurassic Park, we are the murdered dinosaurs in the Jurassic World series: we are being controlled, forced into neatly ordered habitats where the gazers can confidently know we remain.

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To that end, McGregor falls into her own trap, attempting control over unwieldy topics. When she veers away from her own emotional experiences and dives into postcolonial environmental humanities, covering such sprawling topics as poetry to Westminster Abbey to camping trips, her analysis falls short. She repeatedly refers to Verlyn Klinkenborg’s 2019 essay “What Were Dinosaurs For?” while her other citations are spotty. This is also where her tone falters: her charmingly relatable voice turns distractingly jocular—“Oops, I’m About to Compare Dinosaurs to Literature”; “writing cool, sexy books that everyone wants to read, like this one.” These moments read like the wallflower in Ottawa she once was, still apologizing for taking up space.

It is when she speaks with searing clarity and perspective, especially about her mother’s death, that her analysis shines. By going beyond intangible theories of what apocalypse may look like, and into her lived response to the dissolution of ordering principles through an experience we will all have, she empowers movie viewers from the role of passive spectator into an indispensable element of meaning-making. She reminds readers that profound turmoil and terror are like those objects in the rearview mirror: closer than they may appear.

While a personal apocalypse involves terrifying destruction of the familiar, the profound existential reorganization also proves uniquely fertile for a rebirth. Following McGregor’s mother’s death, she writes, “the ordered world I’d been promised if I was good enough turned out to be a lie […] if being a good girl couldn’t protect me from chaos, then maybe being good wasn’t the point.”

McGregor sees Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, and even the humans, as participating in new sorts of queer family-making. All the dinosaurs are, after all, female and still find a way to reproduce; in a moment of foreshadowing, Grant ties together two “female ends” of a seatbelt. This is a key visual for McGregor: Grant does not find a substitute for the male end of the seatbelt, but rather “finds a way,” just like our dinosaurs will find a way to procreate outside of the confines of patriarchal, heteronormative systems.

Outside of the mechanics of reproduction, McGregor looks at the movie as “not just a survival movie—it is a feminist apocalypse that asserts matriarchal, care-based values in the face of a crisis of motherlessness.” She knows she treads on fragile ground here—“Isn’t it retrograde to associate feminism with childcare?”—but thoughtfully reframes the conversation as a shift from gendered logics of care to a collective-based ethics of care instead. In Jurassic Park, McGregor quips that “the absence of mothers means everyone else needs to step the fuck up.” While the callous lawyer, Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), abandons Tim and Lex and is swiftly eaten (while he’s on the toilet, no less), our valiant Grant and Malcolm consistently protect the children and survive. McGregor also reframes the end of the movie, with Ellie Sattler smiling as she looks at Lex and Tim resting on Alan Grant’s shoulders. Sattler is a feminist icon not only because of her boldly stated lines or her practical clothing but also because of her role in getting the men—usual victors of the patriarchal society—to adhere to matriarchal rules of community care.

While McGregor’s argument could have been strengthened by visiting more existing texts on queer utopia—she chooses to reference only Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel, Herland—her vulnerable discussion of her own community-making gives us layered insight into these utopias: “Part of my conviction that I am both queer and asexual lies in the fact that queer community is the place where my asexuality is seen and celebrated, whereas within the discourses of reproductive heterosexuality, I am a failure.” Knowing McGregor’s joyful experience of these communities, we feel ushered into an understanding of this community of care, even if it’s one we haven’t been a part of ourselves.

It is this joy of the outsider experience—the pain of which needs to be acknowledged, but also whose refreshing and unexpected perspective needs to be celebrated—that Hollywood’s current algorithmic programming forbids. With endless growth as the goal, stories are no longer narratives that invite meaning and identification but molds for us to conveniently slot into. Data-driven programming might try to shrug off the outliers and confidently stay within the bell curve, but that outlier remains, growing in power and hunger, until it tramples the fence and devours not only the insiders but also the bell curve itself. Jurassic Park is about not the display of dinosaurs but the failure of that display, not unlike how strict algorithmic planning is failing in the face of wild creatures—us.

Through her funny and exquisitely vulnerable “aroused consciousness,” McGregor uses her own life story to reveal new depths in Jurassic Park and the process of pop culture hermeneutics—depths that no machine, no matter how expensive, powerful, or beloved-by-data it is, could reach. In the age of algorithmic group sorting, Clever Girl is a fierce reclamation of the power and necessity of showing up to the movies as your own unique, monstrous self.