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Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be. To be. Hey everyone, just before we get started with today's episode, I wanted to let you know that my co-host of Hot and Bothered Vanessa Zoltan and I are doing a live show. Isn't that right, Vanessa? Yes Hannah, we are going to Seattle, Washington. We are going to do a live show where I hope that we see Hot and Bothered listeners, but also many, many material girl listeners.
I hope so too. For those who don't know, Hot and Bothered is our show where we watch romance movies and analyze them. And for this live episode, we are going to be analyzing Notting Hill, which is 25 years old this year. It can rent a car. So if you want to hear us talk about Hugh Grant's floppy hair, how many smiles Julia Roberts has. And everything else in between getting just those two things, then you should join us on Sunday, September 8th at the Ballard
Homestead. You can buy tickets at NotstoryWorks.com and we'd love to see you there. We're really wet. We really, really wet. I'm here to find a new year frame. I want to take a ride on a mini train. You can have it all. Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand
the zeitgeist. I'm Marcel Cosman. And I'm Hannah McGregor. This week, I am violently resting control over the podcast for nefarious purposes, which is that I am shamelessly promoting my fourth coming book, Clever Girl, Cool and Jurassic Park, available for preorder now. Oh boy, Hannah, I'm so excited for your new book, but are we talking about it today and the podcast because I haven't read it yet because as you just said, it's not. It's forthcoming. It's not, it's not coming in, it's not came.
It's not currently came. It is not came yet, but it comes out on October 1st and anybody who knows things about publishing knows that that means that it actually secretly comes out a week before that. So you'll get it early if you preorder it now, but no worries. We're not talking about Clever Girl. We're talking about Jurassic Park, the movie, not the novel. Michael Crite can eat a big one.
Consider this episode a sort of sneak preview of the book. But Marcel, before we get deep into some close reading of my all time favorite movie, I want you to tell me about your relationship to dinosaurs. We know I like them. Just look at my decor. I do like dinosaurs. I live in the dinosaur capital of the dinosaur province. I don't live to be clear in dinosaur provincial park. I live in Alberta. That's the dream. But I do live in very close proximity to numerous dinosaur
fossils and numerous dinosaur museums and numerous dinosaur skeletons. I gotta be honest, I'm a fan. They're big is the thing. They're so big. Dinosaurous. Whenever they're small dinosaurs, I'm always like, I thought they were big. I don't understand. I don't understand this little dinosaur. What's your deal? I thought your whole deal was being big. No, sometimes their deal is being small and then there's a lot of them. I should also add that for people who, for whom this
is their very first episode of material girls, I have a child. Two, even. I have multiple children. One of them is at the age where she's learning a lot of really interesting facts. Sometimes she learns interesting facts about dinosaurs. That means that I learn interesting facts about dinosaurs. And last year, the year before, it was all about how birds are dinosaurs because birds are the dinosaurs that survived the meteor crash or whatever. And that's really cool. That's some cool facts.
So we know that kids continue to love dinosaurs now. Yeah. Did you experience the 1990s dinosaur heyday as a child? I didn't. And let me tell you a fun, sad memory that I had. When I was in grade eight, my friend gave me for my birthday like an actual Jurassic Park merchandise, like dinosaur from when one of the movies, first, second or third or whatever, movies had come out. She had bought it from her brother because whenever that was the toys were not available in store, it was passed.
That was the past. This was the present. And the reason that she got it for me is because she remembered me saying that I felt like because I was a girl, I was never given dinosaurs as a yes, outrageous. When I was younger, and I kind of missed out on having like dinosaur toys. So fast forward to now when I am a real adult and can buy myself toys, but I live by carry a sleep through my children, which is the reason people have children. One of my kids is
actually like a dinosaur kid in this like very enthusiastic way. Like he really likes dinosaurs. And so we have all these like dinosaur toys. And I think I really like having a dinosaur kid. It's really fun. I suspect that a lot of the dyno exposure that I had was because I had an older brother. Because you're right in the 90s, people were still really aggressively gendering the kind of species you were allowed to play with. That's right. They still had girl sections and
boys sections and toy stores. And dinosaurs didn't make their way into the girl section. They sure didn't. Girls not allowed to like science. The closest we're allowed to get is veterinary science. But veterinary Barbie. Veterinary Barbie. Okay. So there is a pretty good reason why in the 90s, we were all feeling pretty excited about dinosaurs. But this isn't a segment where I give you any kind of context. So this segment must end now. Oh, but what about you? What are your
features? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The segment's over. Hannah. How about this big bang? Huh? Meteor. Meteor. Segment over. Meteor. Fortunately, listeners, just because the previous segment ended doesn't mean the show's over. We've still got more like the big bang. It's time for why this why now the segment that asks the materialist question, what are or were the historical ideological and material conditions for
our objective study to become site geistie? Anyway, so today we're talking about Jurassic Park, the 1993 Steven Spielberg summer blockbuster mega hit. We're talking about Jurassic Park. The book. The movie. If I catch you mentioning the book one more time, heads will roll. Big bang. Big bang. And specifically, this will surprise you nobody who knows how much I
love talking about CGI. We're going to be talking about the CGI. But I do want to add a little sort of generalist dinosaur note about like why were we having such a big dinosaur moment in the late 80s early 90s because dinosaur media really surged in that period. And part of the reason spoiler that I'm going to argue is that the technologies that allowed for the visual representation of dinosaurs
in cinema reached a new apex that was very exciting for movie goers. But also there was some interesting stuff happening behind the scenes paleontologically that kind of started in the 70s. But you know, it takes a little while for scientific discoveries to make their way into the like pop culture mainstream. So we see it sort of showing up in the late 80s early 90s. And that had a lot to do with with John Ostrom's discovery of dinonicus, which is the dinosaur that the
velociraptors in Jurassic Park actually are. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And Alan Grant, Sam Neal's character in Jurassic Park is like loosely based on John Ostrom. So when we see him finding a velociraptor fossil that one he's not finding a velociraptor he's finding a dinonicus. Okay. Because he's in the US and that's where dinonicus was. Vlossiraptor was a turkey sized dinosaur found in Asia. Oh, the filmmakers just decided that velociraptor was a better name. Okay. Okay. And dinonicus is
like harder to say. Dinonicus. I can say it. You just said it now. So they just renamed them. So those are all the velociraptors aren't velociraptors. Okay. Isn't it also true that velociraptors were like quite a bit smaller? Yeah. Yeah. So real velociraptors were turkey sized. Dinonicus was the size they are in the movie. So everything that you see about velociraptors is based on the science that they knew at the time about dinonicus. They just changed the name. Okay.
Vlossiraptors did exist but they were just a different dinosaur. Okay. But Ostrom's discovery of dinonicus and more generally other paleontological discoveries of the 1970s really shifted the cultural understanding of dinosaurs because before then people thought that they were huge cold blooded, stupid, like these sort of lumbering creatures of an ancient earth who's like extinction was sort of inevitable because they were like so slow they couldn't even outrun a
meteor. Can you outrun a meteor science person? I like to see you try. That's right. Every action thriller about science is about scientists so smarty meteors. That's like their top thing. So the discovery of new fossils one started to sort of let scientists put together the evolutionary theory right. The dinosaurs evolved into birds. So so dinonicus for example is very bird-like very rapture like okay. And they started to figure out things like they hunted impacts. They were
intelligent. They were fast. They were genuinely dangerous predators and as soon as sort of pop culture got word of the fact that dinosaurs were like smart and deadly and hunted impacts. They were like oh well now we care about these acutement. Now they're fun. We love things that will totally kill us.
We love to learn about things that are scary. Yeah yeah precisely. So we get a real taste of the sort of updated conversation about paleontology in Jurassic Park happening through the character of Tim who is like constantly citing actually recently published books by major paleontologists of the
time. Sorry I need you to slow down. Who's Tim? Tim's the little kid. The little guy. Okay. You know how the guy who started it Richard Attenborough has his two grandkids come and visit because he's like we're gonna test an unbelievably dangerous park so I'm gonna bring my grandchildren here and send all the employees away. Yeah just show how safe it is. To show how safe it is. Yeah exactly. So there's an old white man Richard Attenborough who has a different name in the movie. Yeah that's
a normal thing for movies though. He's got this great big theme park where people are gonna be able to come. They're gonna be able to see dinosaurs. I R L like a safari but dinosaurs. Yeah and he mentions at one point John Hammond is the character's name. John Hammond specifically mentions that like the Dino the like big game expert. You remember him the Australian with really short shorts? He's the
one who calls the philosopher after a clever clever girl exactly. He's the like game warden from Hammond's safari. Because Hammond is a like venture capitalist who owns a bunch of attractions including a literal safari. So like the safari connection is text. It's text. Yeah okay so John Hammond the old white guy who is the venture capitalist who has created this massive safari like dinosaur park
has brought his grandchildren as well as some experts. That's war, dern and Sam Neal and Jeff Goldblum. Yeah there are three working scientists with PhDs who have been brought in to confirm that the park is safe because the insurers are upset because a guy got eaten by a velociraptor. That's how the movie opens. parentheses, dynonicus. Dynonicus. Okay this is background to say that like in the 90s there's a reason why we're getting more dinosaur media. There's like a lot of interest happening in
representation particularly visual representation of dinosaurs. We're learning a ton of new stuff about them about you know how they moved and like oh actually they were faster than we thought people started to figure out that like T-Rex didn't like walk upright like a human with tiny short
arms that they like walked like at an angle sort of flat like that they ran like that and their tails were a counterbalance and like that's way scarier if you think of it as like walking totally upright with tiny little arms you're like whatever and then when you when you tip it forward and it's coming at you mouth first you're like oh no and that is the context in which the CGI for
Jurassic Park matters. Whoa whoa CGI hold on. What about Tim? He said Tim was quoting research. If you want we can come back to Tim I mentioned him only because he's he's there he's up dinosaur nerd so he's the voice of dinosaur nerds in the movie. Let's get you back on material context because we started talking about plot and it just coach got upset. Coach got upset. So Jurassic Park
is released 1993 and it immediately breaks a whole bunch of records. Okay it broke record for the most money made in the opening weekend and then it was the fastest movie ever to hit $100 million and then $200 million and then the first movie ever to surpass $500 million worldwide and then it won three Oscars for special effects and one of the big takeaways from movie studios was that people really liked CGI. Oh so Jurassic Park is often credited as being the movie that sort
of spurred the takeoff of CGI in Hollywood especially in summer blockbusters. So I can start blaming it for the like garbage CGI that would fall but you know we'll talk about that later that's fine that's fine I know I know we don't want to trash talk Jurassic Park it's not Jurassic Park's fault that people used its powers for evil. Okay so was Jurassic Park then the first movie
to use CGI? It was not arguably CGI can be dated back to the 1950s depending on how we're defining it but it was the first movie to really make CGI work and a lot of that has to do with how tastefully restrained they were about how they actually used it. Right so there's a really interesting article in the conversation by Peter Hodges lecture in contextual and critical studies for visual effects and motion graphics at the University of South Wales. What a specific job
Peter. Anyway last year was the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park so there's so many articles about it from last year. Okay and he argues that it was the way Steven Spielberg used CGI and Jurassic Park that revolutionized the film industry of the time. Okay well I'll bite pun intended what was revolutionary about how Steven Spielberg used the CGI Hannah was it just that it was tasteful? I mean it was mostly that it was tasteful. Okay so I'm going to give you a little behind-the-scenes
story about the process of developing the technology to depict the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. So by the early 90s Spielberg was known for being somebody who could like tastefully combine technology with storyline to make big like sci-fi action movies so we made jaws for example in one of the famous things about jaws is you actually see very little of the shark on screen. Right? It's like if you see the shark the whole time you notice that it's a bad shark but if you only
see it for a few seconds you're mostly like dreading the shark. Okay. Okay. He made close encounters of the third kind which is an alien movie where you like don't see the aliens. Mm-hmm. He made raiders of the Lost Dark where you barely see that arc. You watch Nazis melt important and he made
ET the extraterrestrial. So you do see that extraterrestrial quite a lot. So when they were looking for somebody to make the screen adaptation of Michael Criton's best-selling novel which will never mention again he was the ideal candidate but his big challenge was how do we put dinosaurs on screen? So how do we do it? Well, I should have asked this earlier. Are there movies about dinosaurs previous Jurassic Park? Yes, absolutely. Early movies about dinosaurs almost entirely using
claymation or similar technologies. And what's really interesting is that the original plan was to use stop-motion animation. No. Yeah. Because they wanted them to look real. Yes. So they built a bunch of animatronics and importantly a lot of what you see on screen in Jurassic Park is animatronics. Okay. Which is part of why the effects of age so well. Like the Triceratops that's on its side because it's belly hurts. Yeah. Okay. That's animatronic. I think she's a stegosaurus. I can't
actually remember. That's not true. She's Triceratops. That's a Triceratops. I've only seen the movie 4 and 3. How many times have you seen this movie Hannah? So many times. Yeah, that's an animatronic right? That's why they can all gather around her and touch her and interact with her and it doesn't look fake. So they were just for the action scenes. They were going to use stop-motion animation essentially using the animatronics. They brought on George Lucas's industrial light and magic team.
But they were only yes. But they were only going to do motion blurring on the stop-motion to make it look more realistic. That was going to be their only job. Okay. But then this plucky Canadian animator, Stephen Williams, who worked for industrial light and magic, was like, I think I can do this better with computers. And he rendered a T-Rex skeleton. Like he used fossil diagrams of what people knew about them to render a skeleton and animate it moving around.
And then, because he knew that he was not supposed to be doing this, he just left it plain on a computer screen when the movie producers were scheduled to do a studio visit. Oh my god. And like, they just showed up and saw this and were like, oh yeah, okay, we'll do that. So there's this amazing anecdote in a new state, it's been pieced by Pippa Bailey, where Spielberg has to then break to fill TIP it, the lead stop-motion animator, that the animation is now going to be fully
computer generated instead of stop-motion. And in response, TIP it apparently said, I think I'm extinct. And that conversation is played out in the movie Jurassic Park when Alan Grant, the paleontologist, is talking about how now that there are real dinosaurs, he's out of job. And Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum's character is like, I think you mean extinct. Art imitating life. Art imitating life. Okay, so it draws a parallel between the scientists in the movie creating real dinosaurs.
And then the CGI experts in the real world creating life like dinosaurs, right? Yeah, and that's a real through line. I think in what's going on in the movie is that they're like thinking about technologies of representation like cloning real dinosaurs as being related to technologies of representation like CGI. But we're going to come back to that later when it's thesis time for now. I got a pop quiz for you, Marcel. Okay. How much time do you think dinosaurs
are on screen in Jurassic Park? My hint is it's less than you think it is. Okay, so you have generously given me the suggestion of a half an hour, which is great because I was like, oh, like an hour. So instead of sounding like a total dummy and saying an hour, I'm going to say, oh, like half an hour. It's only 15 minutes. Oh my god. Oh my god. Of that 15 minutes, about nine minutes are animatronics. Wow. Including like a lot of the velociraptor close-up scenes, it's actually a
guy in a velociraptor suit. Stop it. Stop it. No. No. No. Yeah, there. No. No. No. So there's actually only six minutes. Six minutes of the industrial light and magic CGI dinos. So Jurassic Park won three Oscars and changed the direction and future of CGI in the film industry using six minutes of CGI minutes. And you know, we can talk more about
the power of using CGI sparingly. Mm-hmm. I also have a theory as to why, which I think Pippa Bailey summarizes beautifully in the line, quote, the film's main attraction was the same as that of its park. Dinosaurs life-sized real in your face. End quote. Mm-hmm. Beautiful. Okay, so you and Pippa Bailey both maybe are saying it wasn't just the use of CGI, but the use of CGI to generate dinosaurs specifically. That was so exciting. That is my theory. Okay. Well, you keep
saying theory. And so I think that we should maybe do some theory. What do you think? Yeah, I'm theory. Yeah. Okay. So this segment is called the theory we need. And I need you to hold on to your butts because this is going to get a little bit conceptual. Hold on to your butts. That's a line from the movie. Thank you. Okay. So we are going to dive a little bit into the history of American spectacle and
its relationship to dinosaurs. And I'm going to begin by asking if you know who P.T. Barnum is. No. Okay. That is lucky because it suggests to me that you have not seen the terrible movie, the greatest showman. I have not. I have not. Yeah. Bless you. You know what? Keep not having seen it. I know I'm alienating people right now. Don't care, guys. P.T. Barnum was a terrible man. He was a 19th
century showman and con man and founder of the Barnum and Bailey circus. And listeners may be familiar with him from the absolutely inexcusable musical loosely based on his life, the greatest showman, which casts him as a champion of the underdog. When in fact, he perpetuated a series of hoaxes grounded in exploiting non normative bodies. Okay. Let's not celebrate him. Let's not celebrate P.T. Fricken Barnum, you guys. Okay. All right. So Barnum actually got his start. His first ever
display was he toured and displayed and enslaved black woman named Joyce Hath. This is starting out poorly for champions of P.T. Barnum. Yeah. Sorry, guys. You're on the wrong side of history. Zendaya, shame on you. Okay. So Joyce Hath, the context in which he toured her, was he claimed that she was 161 years old and had been the quote unquote,
mommy to George Washington. And then when his audience grew bored with just gawking at a elderly black woman, he then deliberately planted a rumor that she was actually a convincing automaton quote. And this is in the information that he like spread about her quote, she was made up of whalebone, india rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together end quote.
I don't like this. No, it's really disgusting. So Joyce Hath reminds us that the origin of American popular culture, particularly its fascination with staring at technological marvels, is deeply entangled with the history of the display of gendered and racialized bodies. Okay. Which we have talked about before is like there is a long history of this. Joyce Hath was not an outlier, the history of capturing and displaying black and indigenous people in particular,
was very popular in the 19th century. There's a fabulous article by scholar Lewis Tudes Ok, called the Uncanny History of Minstrels and Machines 1835 to 1923, that sets out a lot of this history. And in it, he connects Barnum's claim that Hath was an automaton to the quote, history of freakery, ethnographic display, and the complex birth of both the museum and the
western carnival circus complex end quote. So he's explicitly connecting the rise of 19th century museums and the rise of the circus as being intertwined in their fascination with the display of things that were freakish, slash things that were of ethnographic interest, which is a much
blurrier line than contemporary museums certainly want us to know. Right. Yeah. So museums and circuses were parallel institutions of popular spectacle and both were deeply rooted in imperialism and white supremacy and the politics of the gaze, of course, that is of who gets to do the looking and who is looked at. And those institutions were trying to make money, they were trying to attract
audiences. So they were seeking ever more exciting exhibits. And through those exhibits, they were also helping to mark the boundary between the human and the not quite human, between people who counted as subjects and people who could be displayed as objects of curiosity. And Joyce Hath, who was already being dehumanized by being toured around as curiosity, was further dehumanized by Barnum's later claim that she was an automaton, right, which pushed us her deeper into the category
of thing rather than person. Right. Right. Right. So not only is she a human who is being exploited by this person, he then further exploits her and takes away her humanity entirely by claiming that, oh, actually, surprise, she's not even human. Yeah. She's just a machine that was he claiming that he built her? Yes. Yeah. What he did was plant a rumor, supposedly not coming from him, that and the rumor was like, oh my god, PT Barnum actually just built an automaton to look like her.
And he's been trying to pass her off as a real human. So then people go back and like try to see whether she's real or not. Okay. So then how do we connect this history of circuses as racist institutions to dinosaurs? The museum connection's going to be important. But partially, there's just this really evocative coincidence of naming. Oh, because the fossil hunter who found the first T. Rex skeleton in the early 20th century was named Barnum Brown. He was named after
PT Barnum. Oh my god. Which was like, I was just reading a book while doing the research for clever girl and just came across this like Barnum Brown like he was named after PT Barnum because his older brother had been taken to see the circus. I really loved it. And so when there was a new baby coming, he was like, let's name him Barnum after the circus. And that is the guy who found the first T. Rex skeleton. And I was like, oh, thanks history. What a grotesquely small world grotesque.
So Barnum Brown was the fossil hunter who was hired by the American Museum of Natural History to find dinosaur bones to put on display there. That was his job. And that's important like 19th and 20th century fossil hunters. Like they weren't looking for bones just to further the field of paleontology. They were looking for them to display them. They were looking for displays. Okay. In this context, then Hannah is the gawking and display and spectacle. Is that just a facet of what science meant
in the early 20th century? It's a lot of what science meant in the 19th and early 20th century as it was really intertwined with these emergent institutions of spectacle and with early American capitalism in general. Because a lot of forms of scientific discovery were being funded by like American philanthropic capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan who were getting rich off land theft and resource extraction and the exploitation of you know unpaid or underpaid labor.
And who bought themselves good reputations by like building libraries and museums and funding right. Scientific expeditions. That makes sense then right because if you give the so-called average citizen which is like white voters. If you give them something to go and look at and you're like look, you can come and learn and see all these things that you've never seen before. And you can do that thanks to the exploitation of these people. Then you get narratives like well yes that's bad but
look at all the good that comes out of it. Yes yes 100 percent like it might be bad that these you know these landscapes are getting devastated by resource extraction. But in the process of dynamiting the shit out of half of the US we are finding bones. And you can come and look at the bones. You can look at those bones and they're pretty cool. And you can learn about history for a small
fee. You can just come and look at these bones. Yes okay all right. So historian of science Lucas Repel has in fact argued that American museums business models helped pave the way for the growth of American corporations in the gilded age. He basically argues that like museums invented vertical integration strategies so that they could control fossils from discovery through the display. That makes sense. So you would like hire people to go out and do fossil digs. But you have paid
for them to do the fossil digs in the first place. So every stage of it is controlled by you the wealthy person. I know this is only like laterally related but it's making me think of the displays that they have at the Royal Terrell Museum in Drum Heller, Alberta. Where like about how
good digging up oil is? Not exactly. So I'm not sure if this is still the case but at least in the recent past like the last 10-15 years the law was that if in the process of excavating something whether it was for resource extraction or building homes or whatever if you found bones you had to
stop and it had to be like investigated or whatever. So they had to get a team of paleontologists in there to finish the dig and figure out what it is etc. And they would have these displays at the museum that would show the maps and locations of all of the dinosaur bone discoveries and everything. And there was always this like huge absence of discoveries in and around the
tar sands areas. And so you're like looking at it and you're like oh wow how convenient for these like oil and gas companies that no bones have ever been discovered in this region that is famously plundered and decimated. And there's no way this multi-billion dollar industry is breaking the law. There's no way. So there must be another explanation. And just because this corner of the museum happens to be named the Sun Corr, like the Sun Corr wing. The Corr presents done its sorts.
You know like I guess what I'm saying is this all makes sense and it's still I believe in my heart that it continues to happen. It is still ongoing. 100%. It is something that contemporary museums go to great lengths to disguise now in a way that they didn't use to. There's this wonderful piece by a nature writer named Berlin Klingkenborg which is my favorite name anybody has ever had. That's quite good. It's about dinosaurs. I think it's called what are dinosaurs for?
Anyway he refers to how museums are trying to distance themselves from quote the Barnum-like hustle of their dime museum predecessors and quote no another gratuitous reference to Barnum. So yeah contemporary museums absolutely still have that in a lot of their DNA and in their Dan O'DNA but they are really trying to pretend that that's not the case anymore. Right because they don't want to emphasize the spectacle. Is that it? They want to emphasize the
learning? Exactly. Exactly. But it's my contention that Jurassic Park's success in part is about bringing together those parallel histories of PT Barnum's fake Catametons and Bardem Brown's museum-funded fossil digs because they were both about spectacle and looking at things. Yeah exactly and about looking at a particular kind of things right things that blurred the lines
between the real and the imagined between the natural and the artificial. And I think that dinosaurs which were real but don't seem real which were natural but also literally had to be put together by paleontologists kind of guessing which bones went where. That you know really scratch that particular spectacular itch and you know what else I think scratched that itch? Six minutes of CGI dinosaurs? Yeah and and so I think it's probably thesis time okay.
My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big row as man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laughing me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign go to LinkedIn.com slash results to claim your credit that's LinkedIn.com slash results terms and conditions apply LinkedIn
the place to be to be. Hey everyone just before we get started with today's episode I wanted to let you know that my co-host of hot and bothered Vanessa Zoltan and I are doing a live show. Isn't that right Vanessa? Yes Hannah we are going to Seattle, Washington. We are going to do a live show where I hope that we see hot and bothered listeners but also many many material girl
listeners. I hope so too for those who don't know hot and bothered is our show where we watch romance movies and analyze them and for this live episode we are going to be analyzing Notting Hill which is 25 years old this year. It can rent a car. So if you want to hear us talk about Hugh Grant's floppy hair how many smiles Julia Roberts has and everything else in between getting just those two things then you should join us on Sunday September 8th at the Ballard Homestead. You can buy tickets at
notstoryworks.com and we'd love to see you there. We really what? We really really what? Alright Hannah I'm ready. Give us a thesis. Him both PT Barnum Circus and Barnum Brown's fossil hunting were in service of a public hungry for something exciting to look at and who were fascinated by new technologies that might be able to trick them into mistaking fantasy for reality.
Dinosaurs that once real and surreal natural and constructed by paleontologists scratched that voyeuristic itch and that's the same itch that John Hammond the fictional creator of Jurassic Park's fictional park is targeting Hammond is a kind of modern day PT Barnum calling for us to step right
up tricking us with Artiface while promising to show us something real something in his words we can see and touch but that is also what Jurassic Park the movie is doing at the heart of the success of Jurassic Park was how beautifully it produced the sense of the dinosaurs as being real
and really there. Spielberg used both cutting edge computer generated visuals from industrial light magic as well as life-sized animatronics when the dinosaurs get close when our protagonists touch them they feel real because they are because they're actually there beautifully rot machines
not of whalebone and india rubber but certainly numerous parts ingeniously put together as John Hammond welcomes his visitors to Jurassic Park he welcomes us the viewers as well when our protagonists first look at the dinosaurs that is also the first moment we the viewers see the
dinosaurs and alongside them we are swept up in the sheer joy of looking. John Williams majestic score washes over us underlining that what we are seeing is larger than life that it is sublime but we are also swept into these parallel histories of circuses displaying non-normative bodies for entertainment and films displaying female bodies for the male gaze in this essay I will wait a second wait a second female bodies for the male gaze it's are we going to talk about Laura
Dern? Go no I mean we can if you want to but but no actually one of the really important things about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park is that they are explicitly all female so that they can't reproduce so that they can't reproduce except that they do except that life finds a way
so this whole movie that is fascinated with spectacle and with the display of non-normative bodies and with this wealthy white man who you know like the flamethrower capitalists of the past is controlling the vertical integration of dinosaurs by funding the fossil digs that
Sam Neel's character Dr. Alan Grant and Laura Dern's character Dr. Ellie Sadler are doing you know who's so convinced that he can take these ancient creatures and turn them into a theme park mm-hmm he is explicitly displaying female bodies and they are female because that is supposed to
according to the scientists that is supposed to make them more controllable listening to the male characters in the movie talk about these dinosaurs as she's and hers does remind one of the way that men talk about boats and trucks and tractors etc when they use she her pronouns to she's a
yeah yeah oh she's look at her she's so majestic etc yeah you know what's really interesting is that the dinosaurs who are the most consistently gendered female via characters are the velociraptors mm-hmm and that in fact despite knowing that all the dinosaurs are female Dr. Grant when he is
talking about T-Rex and how T-Rex functions as an animal it uses he him pronouns oh really T-Rex is always male just like how dogs are always male it's the rest it's the rest the rest T-Rex is a voice and awful officer actors are girls we know this huh okay okay okay so then
would you suggest then that the way that the female dinosaurs break free from expectation and wreak havoc on the park is also perhaps related to our preconceptions of what we expect women to do and how they act when they are out of control yeah I think there's a lot going on with
Barbara Creed's concept of the monstrous feminine here right the way that that movies like to depict monstrous women in particular as villains you know I think it's really significant that the dangers the dinosaurs present are frequently big open mouths big gaping maws big gaping
tooth filled maws wet gaping tooth filled maws yeah sort of there's sort of a vagina dent had a situation going on which is really ruined by the recent paleontological discovery that T-Rex is probably had lips never I'll never stop and I think it's really important you know in this
first movie that we get a lot of maws and then we get like these three explicitly female velociraptors like I said all of the dinosaurs are female but the only ones who they like extensively talk about their femaleness are the velociraptors and the clever girls and uh
you know what those clever girls favorite pastime is it's trying to hunt down and eat children specifically they are so hungry for john Hammond's grandkids they learn how to open door knobs they want to eat those kids so bad oh my goodness oh my goodness because you know that's the most
monstrous thing that a that a female can do children each children um just ask media this is just a wee tangent um to my knowledge I've only seen Jurassic Park twice I saw it when it first came out I saw it at the drive-in movie theater and I saw it again recently just a few months ago
when they were screening it in drum heller alberta and so I took Elliott we went to see it together it was great amazing but something that I discovered on that rewatch is that because I saw the movie originally at the drive-in and they always have to start the movies before it's fully dark because
people who are there to see the movie at the drive-in just like start honking while the sun is still up it's really annoying but because it was so light out I actually like have no visual memory of the first like half an hour of that movie and so the bit at the very beginning where the person
is eaten by the dinosaurs yeah it was totally lost to me completely so like I didn't know what the impetus was for bringing all those people into the park yeah yeah they got to bring them in because the insurers are mad because of the eating incident so they want to prove that the park is safe and
so they bring in these three science well they bring in a paleontologist a paleobotnest and a chaoticion yes who theorizes the uncontrollability of complex systems hyster and really funny for insurers to be like what about this guy who theorizes the idea that nothing is insurable like I
don't why is he there he's there to swagger around pelvis first and then to lie with don't share it on sweaty and injury that's his job he's the eye candy I just go blue is eye candy is very funny to me it is very funny yeah so the opening scene is really vital because it's kind of
the first time we see a dinosaur but we actually only hear her and see her eye oh you don't see her a little claw you don't see her little claw you just see a guy disappear into her enclosure and then you see her eye looking at you through the bars of the cage like while you hear people like
screaming and like gun's going off she's just it's like just one eye watching you and then the next time you see a dinosaur on screen that isn't a fossil or an animation like I've quote unquote real dinosaur is the moment when john hammond says welcome to Jurassic Park it swells and then there's
a branch of sorus there you know and like sam niel alan grant starts like hyperventilated needs to put his head between his knees because there's like a whole a whole dinosaur there but that's like we see them at the same moment that those characters see them right like the we are also like
whoa but before that they saw us right like the eyes looking at you and is like I'm looking at you looking just looking through that cage like you think you're looking at me but actually I'm looking at you who's gazes who's whoa so all joking about how many times you've seen
this film you have actually written a book about the movie because you love it and have so much and I obviously want to ask you questions about like what do you love about it but I also I want to save those questions for material concerns and instead I want to ask you the really hard
hitting intellectual questions about like the politics of the film and so you were just you were just saying like who sees who like who's gaze is it talk to me more about what you see is the politics of this movie and why it excites you so much yeah so for me Jurassic Park is a really
interesting combination of a film that is making an argument about technology and mediation and power and the dangers of capitalism etc that I think is all text and a movie that is available to an even more radical reading in ways that I think are not cannot be attributed to the creators
right like a lot of my reading of Jurassic Park requires us to kill the authors and to sort of argue for a larger almost sort of mythical reach or scope to this story so at the level of creator intention deliberately inserted text it is undoubtedly a movie that is about the dangers of big
tack and a scientific overreach and of in particular white male hubris that understands nature to be something that can be controlled and displayed through human mastery and like the argument of the movie is like no you can't that is foolish and people will die if you try to do that and it is
very interested in the technological overreach and hubris particularly as a film problem what do you mean so what I mean is that Jurassic Park is very much a film makers film it is very interested in itself as a film it spends a lot of time thinking about and playing with ideas of representation
for example there's a very famous scene where they're getting chased in a jeep by the T-Rex and they're looking at her in the side mirror and it says objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear and we we see the T-Rex through the reflection that's right that opening I seen like
that is not an accident that a film opens with something looking at you right like these are moments that are thinking about the relationship between spectacle or display and the viewer and that are thinking about the limits to which people will push things in order to put on a good show
some people theorize I heard this from friends of the podcast Helen Salzman and Martin Ostwick that some people theorize that in part Spielberg was alluding to the disastrous events of the Twilight Zone movie oh do you know about this at all I don't know no please tell me in 1982
while John Landis was directing a film version of the Twilight Zone there was a helicopter crash on set that killed one adult actor and two child actors oh my god there was a lot of legal action against the people involved in the shoot including John Landis and a lot of contemporary laws about like how you were allowed to for example treat child actors on set and the kinds of safety precautions that you have to go through like emerged in the wake of that is that if the essentially criminal
neglect that happened on that set and so the idea of somebody being so focused on whether or not they can that they don't stop to think about whether or not they should which is Ian Malcolm's you know accusation towards the Jurassic Park scientists about cloning dinosaurs also applies to these like
white male directors who treat actors like they are props or tools in order to achieve something spectacular on screen without adequate concern for human life that that's also like really sort of available as a subtext of the movie and we know that movie makers love making movies that are
about movie making so that's just a classic mise ennebume I don't know if I believe that anybody involved in the movie was deliberately making a feminist argument but I think the feminist argument is extremely there because of the way in which they treat biological sex in relation to the dinosaurs
because of the important fact that only men are eaten and you know I think that there's some other really interesting feminist subtext available in the movie that primarily has to do with the fact that it's a family movie and a lot of it centers around our main male protagonist Alan Grant
taking care of two children and making sure that they don't die yes yes like that's his major contribution like they establish up front that he really doesn't like kids and then when tasked with keeping these kids safe as they make their way through the park he steps up and there's a very strong through line that the men who step up and take care are allowed to survive and the men who are cowards who endanger other people who put self-interest over collective care they die.
What about the specifically they get eaten by dinosaurs very specifically? Lady, lady, they get eaten by lady dinosaurs. What about the clever girl guy? What about like the safari guy? Where does he land on that spectrum? Because he's not a coward. Yeah, he's quite brave. Yeah yeah yeah he's not a coward he's very brave. His death I think is a little different because
he is the one who like really understands how smart the velociraptors are. If we return to the conversation we were having earlier on about like the way the field of paleontology was transformed by the discovery of dynonicus as an intelligent hunter. Like this movie is obsessed with how smart the velociraptors are and how good they are at killing. And so as a character he's like you know the trope of the wildlife hunter who's ultimate end is to be killed by the most majestic creature imaginable.
You know this is always a thing like Brad Pitt and legends of the fall need to get eaten by a bear. It's like a real trope is like a man who loves the deadliness of nature so much that he simply must be consumed by it. I'm hesitating on whether or not to say it's like he sacrifices himself to the velociraptors. He does sacrifice himself to the velociraptors. Yeah and his final words are clever girl. It's like it's all it's all he's expressing awe for the fact that he's about to be
ripped to shreds. Which truly for me is one of the most powerfully feminist moments in the movie because what is more feminist than a man being like yeah girl you eat me. That is an ally. That's an ally. A man who will laugh. That's the only form of allyship I am interested in from white men. If you are not calling me clever while I actively eviscerate you you are not an ally. That's so fair. That's that's so fair. Thank you. Thank you. But yeah it is a sacrifice. He knows
in that moment and you know who he sacrifices him for. The children. The only woman. Oh Lord a journey. No Ellie. Yeah because the two of them are headed to the like outbuilding where they can reboot the power. So they can restart all of the systems that that Dennis Nendry the corrupt computer programmer disabled in order to steal dinosaur embryos. So they're headed there together and he's like they found us it's already too late. Like we're already surrounded and he tells her
to run while he holds their attention. So he he sacrifices himself to the velociraptors for the only woman so that she can heroically turn the power back on. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well Hannah I simply must tell you that my ma is slick and salivating. I am ready to just bite into your book as soon as my pre-order arrives at Audrey's books here in Edmonton. All I want is for everybody to shove this book in their wet gapy mosque. Big bang.
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