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What If God Were One of Us?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The world of dinosaurs was very real to me at five years old. I had a complete set of flashcards, and I memorized them with the help of my father. We lived in Baltimore then, in a shitty apartment that barely had room for the crib of my newly born brother, whose facebook pictures now appall me.

Then came the 1990s, which we now know was the finest decade in American history. I had read everything about dinosaurs up to that point, so that the publication of paleontologist Robert Bakker's Raptor Red — a novel from the perspective of a velociraptor (my GOD!) was a major event.

But of course most of my finest hopes and desires coincided with the entry of the most formative contribution to the literature of those great, extinct things, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. It is easy to look back at it as simply an entry in the much shat-on genre of airport literature, but it was really a coming together of epic proportions.

Dinosaurs and humans...together? Why? How? For christ's sake, when?

It is difficult to recall exactly why the experience of the book and the movie was so different. For all its harrowing moments, the book was a safe space for humans and dinosaurs to meet each other. A book can discuss, even depict chaos theory, but a film can do so much more.

By then we were living in a rental house in New London, Connecticut, and the film's premiere was a hotly anticipated event. I spent most of the film's two hour plus running time sobbing in my mother's arms, for this was an all-too real coming together of man and beast. I was a little old for that, but since my more nerdy alter-ego was getting electrocuted off a 20 foot high dino fence, I think I was entitled to my grief. (The actor who portrayed Tim Murphy was born a mere seven days after I was.)

Now the CGI has aged poorly, and the images have grown iconic. But then! On a bimonthly basis I relive Wayne Knight's desperate existential descent to the docks to drop off samples sabotaging his employer. Later these corporate betrayals would grow prescient, but then it was only Dennis Nedry's contempt for an animal that spat venom and would eat him.

Sir Richard Attenborough attends a similar dilemma in the presence of the vulturous compys. He dies at the hands of those treacherous scavengers in the book, but gets saved that fate in Spielberg's film. In fact the great failing of the film and the book is that every single human was not consumed by his or her inane belief that they could master something they could never know as intently as themselves.

Articles constantly appeared in newspapers about whether Crichton's innately scientific mind had actually suggested something that might one day be possible — the replication of once dead beasts from amber, gold from gold. As it usually does, it fell to the Jew to sound the warning. Jeff Goldblum's utter handsomeness was at its nadir then, and he looked almost exactly like my father, rendering his calls of doom all the more sonorous.

Ian Malcolm was a mathematician, a role that somehow was necessary to have on hand before the park opened. Most mathematicians were like, "I can get consultant work like that?" but Goldblum's Malcolm just sacked up in a leather jacket and tried to hit on the nearest paleobotanist he could find.

Sam Neill was of course the gentile dinosaur establishment. Frightening small children at dig sites by pretending to be a velociraptor was his usual source of amusement, but this old fogey wasn't all fun and games when it came to showing two random children the pleasures of stroking a brontosaurus.

All in all, these were the raw components of my first real life, and to see them going off the rails so suddenly and violently was a nightmare I carried for some time afterwards, in the darkness of my closet, in the innocent suggestions of classmates and teachers, in the frailty of my parents. We would all be redeemed or stranded and left to ancient creatures who knew nothing of our ways?

For most it was an innocuous wait until Spielberg finally granted us the adaptation of Crichton's winsome sequel to the world he made, The Lost World. Forever answering the question, "Should we build an auxiliary island to our dinosaur theme park?", all the major figures head to Isla Sorna, where dinosaurs run wild and free, and represent an incredible investment opportunity for the right financial mind.

And yet it was simply another descent into madness. My father (Jeff Goldblum) had inexplicably fathered a child with Julianne Moore. That's the kind of news you just don't want to wake up to. Before I had viewed the world with a fairly bifurcated eye: things were either to be loved or feared, and sometimes both. Dinosaurs perfectly categorized my unending respect for other things and people: I both treasured their insolent leathery ways and was scared to death by what they would tear me into if it should come to it.

Thus irony had advanced bounds but my reaction to dinosaurs hadn't. Say what you want about the willful ignorance of Jurassic Park's characters, but it was a genial not-knowing. With the introduction of a set of mercenaries "evilly" trying to capture a few dinos for a stateside attraction, I learned of one additional way to react to the world; not everything had to be feared or loved, things could also be profited from.

I was a little older by then, and not childishly frightened by the threat. And yet The Lost World is probably one of the most unappreciated films of 1990s. An absolutely insane sequence turns the healing of a young T-Rex into a fight for survival against its mommy and daddy. On that island, for a couple hours, Goldblum in particular is forced to relive the horror all over again, but this time he does it with his closest friends and family.

Isla Sorna had its own set of slightly wilder characters. Julianne Moore replaced Laura Dern, so that dinosaurs could be seen in contrast with gingers for the first time in human history. The film's moral angle was that the dinosaurs deserved to live on this island alone and not be imprisoned. They didn't offer a reason why, but what the hell.

Vince Vaughn played the sad-eyed jack of all trades, and like Julianne Moore's martyring paleontologist (what is it with Ian Malcolm and paleontologists?), he is an archetype that no longer exists in cinema, for we have lost all that once stood for unquestioned joy in dinosauring. I blame Lindsay Lohan mostly, but I also blame Lou Reed.

The Lost World ends in a very unsatisfying way — as if a lone T-Rex in Los Angeles would last more than mere minutes before being taken down by any and all military weapons!

I started to realize that dinosaurs, in the right settings, could be controlled. I had never before felt so apart from Ian Malcolm, with his adopted love child and little island family. I felt like the lawyer in the first movie, and I never wanted to get off the can.

Soon enough, there was talk of Jurassic Park III. The millennium was coming on, and most people had moved onto other things: scarves, theatre, women. The list goes on and on. I was still like, "Did you guys hear what they discovered in Montana?" No one ever took that bait. I lived my dinosaur life on in pictures, and forced some weak-willed person to screen the third film with me in Waterford, Connecticut.

As I watched the film, I struggled in vain to think of what kind of violence I would perpetuate on the person who cast Tea Leoni and William H. Macy as a couple in a feature film. That's the worst kind of insanity, like letting Spielberg saunter on and make a fourth Indiana Jones movie. We need boundaries in our lives, not JP3...or 4.

My struggle to empathize with humanity came to a head with that film. I shudder as I think of the pitch meeting where Spielberg was like, "This one's Die Hard and Jurassic Park combined!" When you're as alienated from humanity as I was during the 1999-2003 period of American life, you can see yourself a lot better in a raptor. And in fact the scientific plot point here was that the raptors were way smarter and could talk to each other. Gag me with a fucking spoon.

We are an old, very ancient form of them. They are reptiles, but they cared for their young as perhaps only OctoMom could. We see their import everywhere: in our children, in Starbucks, in Jesus. (There's a pterodactyl Jesus, I know it in my heart.) We live with what they did and left us. They could have stuck around, but instead they wanted us to be the ones to really fuck things up.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

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