Essay Questions

How does the book’s portrayal of Jurassic Park as an amusement park align with an interpretation of the novel as a corrosive critique of the nature of capitalism?

Jurassic Park takes the essential conservative ideology of amusement parks to its logical extreme. The more sophisticated types of these amusement entities are an attempt to impose authoritarian control on the natural world through simulated experience that allows for strict and comprehensive governance of elements existing in ways that are far less subject to control outside the gates that in the real world range from wild animals to old west shootouts to historical events to nostalgic recreations of times long gone. Capitalism is not just about commodifying every aspect of society, but putting complete control into the hands of the profit-seeking owners and away from the influence of government regulators, the demands of the working class and even, as best they can, natural events. An amusement park is the ultimate capitalist dream because even weather can be controlled to a certain extent (recreating rivers or cityscapes indoors under protective shelter, for instance) for the purpose of commodifying it to sell to consumers. Jurassic Park’s conservative ideology actually begins to verge into fascism as it introduces elements of genetic purity and reproductive under its domain of authority.

What is the significance of Jurassic Park being located on a fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica?

Scientific exploration and commercial exploration go together like Dr. Ian Malcolm and black clothes. You can’t separate knowledge from consumerism. Every leap forward in the discovery of the natural world is inextricably tied to a leap forward in the world of commerce. Jurassic Park is just the latest in a long and literally rich tradition of white men with European blood profiting off the backs of Third World workers. An amusement park situated off the coast of Central America distinctly ties the discovery of how to clone dinosaurs with the discovery of the New World. The cost of getting visitors to that island implies that it will hardly be an amusement vacation available to all classes, thus situating it as merely another example of colonial exploitation for pleasure of rich white people. Considered in light of the novel's thematic concerns about the bioethics when science is forwarded for the benefit of profit, Jurassic Park becomes almost Marxist in its critique of the influence of Big Business into the world scientific advancement.

How is John Hammond a much different character in the novel than the person portrayed in the film?

John Hammond is a much more malevolent figure in the novel and is portrayed as more of a caricature of the evil capitalist than in movie. Hammond’s survival at the end of the film coincident with expressing a rejection of his own park is at odds with the much darker fate Hammond faces in the novel. That fate of becoming food for a pack of roving dinosaurs is consistent with the book’s stark portrayal of Hammond as a capitalist pig. Far from rejecting what he has built due to a few “minor setbacks” the man who in the novel that creates Jurassic Park refuses to admit defeat or mistakes. In the novel, Hammond’s fate can be interpreted a moral balance of the scales setting right the fact Hammond’s amusement park is an entrepreneurial wet dream that is free from all the governmental regulations that inhibit pure capitalist theory from becoming pure capitalist reality. Hammond’s island is not subject to legal oversight, environmental regulations and ethical intrusion. Free of the socialist devices that serve to handcuff pure capitalism and force it to adopt measures that inhibit unrestricted growth and take the plight of the working class into its equation, the only overseers to which Hammond must pay fealty are his investors....whose only requirement is profitability.

What is the political and economic dimension of cloning according to the novel?

Cloning is capitalism’s attempt at controlling the natural state of evolution. Marxian philosophy is about the natural progression of economic evolution from feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Compsognathus is the smallest species of dinosaur that appears within the world of “Jurassic Park” and also happens to be the species that has been used an example since the days of Thomas Huxley to forward the argument that some dinosaurs naturally evolved into birds. Cloning is a philosophical betrayal of the natural order of things imposed on the world through the process of evolution. Compsognathus is viewed as infinitely more harmless than the bigger velociraptors and T. Rex species because of their size, yet ultimately may be proven (if indeed, they did evolve into modern day birds) as one of the most durable species because they successfully evolved beyond the imposition of limitations that doomed the more dominant and dominating species to extinction.