Welcome to Jewrassic Park — Spielberg’s first Nazi parable

Steven Spielberg said “that with Jurassic [Park] I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws. On land”. I have argued how, on these pages, his earlier shark film can be read as Jewish. Like the shark lurking beneath the waters of his earlier film, Jewishness prowls the undergrowth of his dinosaur movie which celebrates its 30th anniversary this month.

Spielberg was editing Jurassic Park while filming Schindler’s List which also celebrates its 30th anniversary later this year. It was inevitable that the two films would bleed into one another. He shot brutal blood-soaked footage of the Holocaust during the day and edited brutal blood-soaked footage of dinosaurs by night. This produced uncanny plot similarities between the two films summed up by one critic: “A wealthy and eccentric businessman who decides to risk everything to save those who are utterly different from him trapped behind electrified barbed wire and threatened with complete annihilation, filmed with beautiful cinematography and a soaring emotional score by the composer John Williams”. You may think this plot description refers to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List but it’s just as apt for Jurassic Park.

The dinosaur park, then, echoes the centuries of Jewish artistic and historical objects, which were preserved by Nazi Germany, to create a so-called ‘Museum of an Extinct Race’. The dinosaurs are ghettoised and the dominant colours of red and yellow used to brand the park are those that have historically been used to mark out Jews from the blood libel through to the yellow star. The idea of Jews as predators in pursuit of innocent Christians is not a new one. Jews are also seen to embody fossils of a bygone age.

Popular culture has also connected Jewishness with dinosaurs. Consider the lead singer of the British Glam rock band T-Rex — the Jewish Marc Bolan. The toy dinosaur Rex in the Toy Story franchise is voiced by the Jewish actor Wallace Shawn.

Underpinning the narrative of the film is an opposition between Jewish and non-Jewish values represented by two rival groups of characters. Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler and Ian Malcolm stand opposed to John Hammond, Donald Gennaro, and Dennis Nedry.

As played by Jeff Goldblum, Malcolm is an eccentric, hipster, intellectual, scientist, and nervous talker. Malcolm raises a crucial ethical question. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” He thus embodies a tradition of intellectual inquiry, respect for learning, and intense involvement with morality and law. But Malcolm is more than a mensch, he is macho, too. The image of him lying back with his black shirt unbuttoned to expose his lightly furred musculature turned him into a sexualised and hot Jew. He gets to be the movie’s conscience and libido.

If Malcolm stands for a macho mensch, then Hammond is, initially, the embodiment of its opposite. One might even play on the implicit treif-ness of the name of the film’s villain — Hammond as in Ham(mond) — suggesting that this film is Jurassic Pork.

Hammond is treif because he puts commerce before human life, endangering not only his workers and guests but also his grandchildren. It is telling that the gift shop is completed before the security systems. Intentionally, or otherwise, he invokes Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the “banality of evil”.

Computer programmer Dennis Nedry, even more than Hammond, is motivated by money down to the molecular level. As played by Wayne Knight, he is instantly recognisable to viewers of the sitcom Seinfeld as Jerry’s arch-nemesis Newman. Donald Gennaro is just as bad. “The only one I’ve got on my side is the bloodsucking lawyer,” Hammond laments, using a long-established historic trope for Jewishness if ever there was one. Luckily, though, the lawyer has a Celtic given name and an Italian family name.

Spielberg’s choices reinforce the message of the film that ‘greed isn’t good’. Here, Spielberg comes down on the side of the mensches — all of whom survive — versus those on the other side, two of whom die. Hammond is allowed to live because, like Oskar Schindler, he undergoes a moral re-evaluation. Is Hammond also a stand-in for Spielberg’s father, Arnold, a pioneering computer researcher?

Jurassic Park taps into the Hebrew tradition of the golem, an artificial homunculus created by magic that, over time, has become a metaphor for something impossible to fully control and hence a danger to its creator. While the specificities of the settings and characters may differ, the story shares various points of similarity with Jurassic Park. Hammond creates life from dead matter, only to lose control of his creation. It is not just the dinosaurs that are the problem but also the technology used to clone, birth, navigate and hold them, as nothing functions properly.

Spielberg encapsulates this when Nedry tapes J. Robert Oppenheimer’s portrait on his computer screen, showing an awareness of what he has unleashed. Oppenheimer, subject of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic which opened last week, was, of course, the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, credited with being the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ for his role in developing the first nuclear weapons. As shown in Oppenheimer, on viewing the Trinity test, where the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, he recalled words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film, School of Arts, Culture and Language at Bangor University.

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Steven Spielberg