At the beginning of Jurassic Park, Donald Gennaro, the lawyer tasked with ensuring that the amusement park won't pose a massive liability for InGen, its parent corporation, explains to a minor character that, in addition to several experts coming to the island to certify the park's operability, the grandchildren of founder Dr. Hammond will also be in tow. Asked why the kids are coming given the safety issues, Gennaro explains that Lex's and Tim's father recently walked out on their mother. This line seems completely random and is quickly forgotten as the movie speeds on to introduce the other main characters.
The theme of fatherly abandonment is harrowingly recapitulated when Gennaro leaves Lex and Tim in the Jeep while the T. Rex attacks. In a panic, Lex keeps repeating, "He left us! He left us! He left us!" referring at once to Gennaro's retreat to the outhouse (where he is famously eaten headfirst while sitting on the toilet) and also her and her brother's trauma over the dissolution of their family. Dr. Grant, the film's primary protagonist and world-famous paleontologist, on his own journey toward accepting the responsibilities of fatherhood at the behest of Dr. Sattler, the brilliant paleobotanist who is his partner, breathlessly consoles Lex in the shadow of the T. Rex, "But that's not what I'm gonna do!"
Unwittingly assuaging her deeper psychological fear that she and Tim are unprotected in general, Dr. Grant's assurances eventually allow Lex to relax. This begins a chain of supportive and protective behaviors that culminate in Lex's third-act decision to trust her own hacking skills and save Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, Tim, and herself from a pack of rapacious velociraptors that have them cornered.
What makes Dr. Grant, who begins the movie resistant to fatherhood, decide to embrace it? It is the overwhelming need of protection, encouragement, and guidance that he observes in the terrified and newly fatherless Lex and Tim.
What makes Dr. Grant initially suspicious of fatherhood? In his opening scene at the dig site in Montana, he seems to dislike the flippancy of a younger student. He seems bothered by how unbothered young people are with the seriousness and importance of life, science, and the study of dinosaurs. No doubt, children of his own would only impede his life's work. By the end of the movie, however, Dr. Grant has witnessed the destructive potential that an obsession with dinosaurs unleashes if unconstrained by the common sense and humanism that, for Dr. Grant, the role of father brings out.
Meeting Tim for the first time, before all the dinosaurs get loose, a kind of inverse occurs; Tim is too eager to discuss dinosaurs and has even read Dr. Grant's book. Tim is certainly annoying, but perhaps in him Dr. Grant also sees the threat of time—that a new generation that will ultimately swamp the old. Dr. Grant's initial suspicion of fatherhood, therefore, could be viewed as an attempt to defer his inevitable replacement. To lovingly tend a new generation requires the sometimes difficult acknowledgment that one's own generation is not eternal.
Dinosaurs are the apotheosis of nostalgia. They fascinate us in childhood, and they dominated Earth before we even existed. Dinosaurs present us with a power that is apolitical, ahistorical, and impersonal. Fathoming such a power allows us to fantasize about it without any connection to our real lives and all the messy and contradictory obligations that bind us. Loving dinosaurs is similar to loving God. The child loves any form of power because a child lacks power. The child loves doubly any power that is more powerful than its parents because it assuages the fear of parental abandonment. If God exists, we are not alone even if our parents leave us. Unlike God, however, believing in dinosaurs and investing our imaginations in them allows us to feel in subordination to and superior to that power. That some very powerful beings once roamed Earth and no longer do invokes a human telos of simultaneous impotence and supremacy. To a child, the size and power of dinosaurs makes them worthy of awe, but their extinction implies that God, fate, or nature has favored us over them. In this way, belief in dinosaurs soothes much of the fears that plague early consciousness. We are powerless and powerful relative to thunder lizards, and the power-fluidity of this imagined relationship makes it extremely practical, psychologically, for the powerless. To remain obsessed with dinosaurs as an adult, however, may indicate an inability to accept the facts of our mortality and our social responsibility in the way that all adults must if they wish to metamorphose into unselfish contributors to society.
By the end of the movie, Dr. Grant has seen the destructive consequences of his desire to look at dinosaurs as representations of power that can be awed at or that can supply self-awe at one's leisure. Like how a long-distance relationship remains protean, shifting definition in its lovers' minds to fit their vacillating feelings as long as the distance is long, but then is often shredded by the friction of actual contact when the distance is closed, the relationship to dinosaurs changes completely when they're real and living among us. In Jurassic Park, it is as if Dr. Grant's naïve conception of dinosaurs has kept him from growing into his fatherly role; as soon as it is shattered, he accepts the responsibility of adulthood, of the present circumstance, of protecting the vulnerable, of a duty beyond professional vanity.
It is not incidental that the theme music for the island is so magisterial, echoing the melodies and instrumentations of imperial marches and coronations. This music characterizes dinosaurs as high royalty, and, by contrast, positions us as peasants and courtiers. Encountering dinosaurs on the island evokes the desire to worship the power of higher beings, beings of more obvious destiny, beings beyond comprehension, and inspires, to a certain extent, our longing to be ruled by them.
Jurassic Park plays up the fallen grandeur and the noblesse oblige we associate with heroes of all lost ages. Nothing may be more disgusting than modern examples of geopolitical power, but long-gone examples of the same thing are another story. Ruins are beautiful; the wounds are not so fresh. Countless TV shows, movies, comics, novels, and other stories exploit our desire to imagine (and to imagine ourselves alive in) an era even more rigid, when the political order was even more grotesque, and when, like children basking in the absence of responsibility that their powerful parents provide, we had no choice but to simply stop worrying and let our rulers govern the world. I don't think it's a healthy yearning, nor is it a wholly evil one. It is a natural one that politicians, marketers, and storytellers of all moral spectrums play to all the time. Most stories we have about power, especially political power, usually involves someone who uses it justly battling others using it unjustly.
So there should be no dispute that we tend to romanticize power in the hands of the good. At no point in Jurassic Park, however, do dinosaurs wield their power responsibly. But in the end of the movie, when the T. Rex rescues the protagonists from the velociraptors—as the boomingly imperialistic score climaxes—we glimpse, for just a moment, the sense of serendipity and relief that comes when a powerful ruler, pursuing their own destiny and utterly indifferent to ours, only happens to benefit us. For those who wish to go on living, the relief of this type of deliverance can be practically transcendent.
It is dangerous that this feeling of humility and good fortune can feel so gratifying. But it ultimately teaches us that even today, in the present, as adults, when we should take responsibility for ourselves and the wellbeing of others, and in which human beings possess the greatest power we know of, we are still peasants in the realm of nature, and that nature includes our own behavior. We live and die at its leisure, and whether we endure a million more generations, a hundred more, or ten more, we have no ability to comprehend its measure, nor have we ever.
