The 'Utopian Scholastic' Aesthetic in Jurassic Park (1993)

 

The future is going to be great!

Here at the Explorer's Club, we're becoming very interested in something called 'Utopian Scholastic.' It's a name retrospectively given to a look and a sound associated with mid 90s educational software, books and games. Encarta, Dorling Kindersley books, the game Myst, and, em, - museum gift shops - are its touchstones. It's busy, it's bright, it's cluttered, it's surrealist, and it's optimistic. It has a reverence for facts, science, and classical architecture. It believes that the world is big and full of cool things, like rainforests and whales and the coliseum. And it believes that through technology (such as CD-ROM, so cool) the future is going to be great!

Not only that, but humans and their tech are going to march into the future completely in tune with nature. Utopian Scholastic includes a sort of second-wave environmentalism as part of its vibe, and its look and sound sometimes puts me in mind of properties such as Ecco The Dolphin on the Sega Mega Drive, or the Aussie kids tv show Ocean Girl.

This is the world we here at the Club grew up with. We used multimedia CD learning programmes in school where a tiny window would play video of the viewer being taken through a CGI museum while books and dinosaur skeletons fly around.  We like encyclopaedias, museums, and we think that knowing stuff is cool. So it's been fascinating to go back and consciously re-experience this aesthetic which we were surrounded by (but took for granted) the first time around!

And there is something of a resurgence of interest in this look and sound. There are even albums folks have made that make you feel like you're clicking through one of those old multimedia programmes.

Now, perusing the wiki aesthetics.fandom, we note that the 1993 film Jurassic Park is listed among the properties considered to be Utopia Scholastic (henceforth referred to as US). Hmm. Not one that sprung immediately to mind as I was first learning to recognise this particular aesthetic, I will admit. But there are some elements of the film which do fit. And I don't think anybody has written on this yet. So ... let's take a look!

You Didn't Say The Magic Word: Aesthetics And Computers

I'll begin with a few loose connections between JP and US. Adimttedly, many of these are just bits of tech that were around in the 90s, and could have popped up in any film of the time. However, that the film chooses to focus on them at times, and the themes of science and computers being key to the heart of the film (more on that later) as well as the fact that much of the tech has a 'five-minutes-into-the-future' quality make JP more of a US film.

First off, the entire Jurassic Park facility is a 90s 'edutainment' resort (or a capitalist moneymaker masquerading as edutainment) and much of the in-universe branding and communications the resort uses fis in very well with the US aesthetic. The electric cars loaded with interactive CD ROMS and touch-screens fit in very nicely with the 'gee-whiz' ideal of a bright future through technology. And the brief glimpse of the CD ROM which we get shows a very 90s multimedia experience, with images, maps, and audio (with no expense spared on the narration!). It could have been made on an advanced version of Hypercard.

Later, we get glimpses of the Jurassic Park security system dashboard through the computer monitors of Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) and John Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson). Again, there are cluttered, visual-heavy interfaces reminiscent of mid 90s US educational software. At one point, Nedry inadvertently uses a classic US innovation when he pretends to have a video call which is actually a Quicktime video (!). Credit to flinkfuse for recreating the images above from the movie.

And then there's Mr DNA, a 'quirky' character who looks like he could be Clippy's uncle, and feels like he's come straight out of a Children's Interactive Encyclopaedia CD ROM.

Towards the end of the film, our young heroine saves the day (briefly) through her understanding of the Unix system, in which she navigates the park's security system via the fancy visual medium of 3D blocks. And this at a time when most viewers were probably still using DOS at home.

Other Aesthetics

Besides the look of its computers interfaces, Jurassic Park sports a couple of other aesthetics which fit into the Utopian Scholastic wheelhouse. Firstly, US often carried an element of environmentalism, realised often through visual references to jungles, and in particular, the South American rainforest. Jurassic Park, of course, was filmed in Hawaii, which was standing in for an island off the coast of Costa Rica. As such, jungle imagery is a huge part of the film's look, both in its bright, verdant locations, and through the corporate imagery used on everything from cars to hats to the merch in the park's gift shop.

And speaking of gift shops - one of Utopian Scholastic's BIG influences is the whole 'museum gift shop look.' Blending slightly with its sister aesthetics Frasierurbane and Global Village Coffeehouse, Utopian Scholastic often favours a 'shop' look with many varied items crammed into a small space, surrounded by warm brown tones. And those items tend to be educational toys and games: make-it-yourself wooden dinosaur skeletons, butterfly collecting kits, chemistry kits, etc. And not only does Jurassic Park have an actual gift shop (apparently in the extended lore it's known as the Gallimimus Gift Shop), but the main lobby in the Visitor's Centre has the look of a very Utopian Scholastic museum. It's a classic dome featuring a rotunda and winding stairs, with museum exhibit-style fossils and of course, the two 'feuding' skeletons taking centre stage. Certain materials hint at the tropical aesthetic, such as the reeds lining the ceiling, and the wooden-looking guardrails. The cafeteria, which we see later in the film, continues this look, with bamboo cane chairs and tropical plants.

Utopian Scholastic Gets Meta

Finally, we can bring in one of the elements which elevates Jurassic Park above many of its action movie brethren: the dual nature of the dinosaurs as a source of wonder. That is, they are a source of awe to the characters in the film, who are seeing the miracle of real dinosaurs brought back to life - and at the same time, in real life, the audiences of 1993 were seeing dinosaurs recreated on screen via CGI in a way which was almost equally astonishing. 

Maybe you had to be there to appreciate what a shift this really was. CGI had been used sparingly in films before this - perhaps most notably and effectively for the liquid metal villain in Terminator 2 - but this was the first time it had been used to create convincing organic beings. It's not just the technological leap - the dinosaurs are written into the script in a wonderful which treats them as real animals and not just movie monsters (only 15 minutes of on-screen dinosaur footage, used extremely well) - but the serendipity of this particular story being told at the exact time as the technology to tell it convincingly came along - makes Jurassic Park a uniquely organic, authentic melding of theme and technique (certainly by comparison with much of the poor CGI that showed up in films much younger than JP but lacking its artistic direction).

And so, in the spirit of Utopian Scholastic, the characters are seeing the opening of a new world of exciting possibilities thanks to science and learning - just as we, the audience, were seeing the same thing.

But, Lost Valley, you might say. Aren't the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park dangerous? Isn't their very creation a warning to us about the horror of technology, not its wonders? Isn't Jurassic Park a Frankenstein story?

Yes - at least, the script tells us so. And in the novel, this is 100% the animating concept. But regardless of what the script is saying, it has always been my contention that Spielberg's direction -the filmic way he tells the story- simply finds too much awe and magic in these extinct animals to truly commit to that theme. Spielberg identifies too much with Hammond to truly condemn him, or what he has done. After all, he only wanted to bring joy to millions of children around the world by showing them real dinosaurs (just as Spielberg wanted to himself). This, by the way, is a huge change from the Hammond of the book, who is a money-grubbing capitalist who comes to a nasty end. 

Instead, I would argue that the overwhelming - and lasting - emotion within the film is awe before nature, and before the dinosaurs. The wonder and fulfilment on the faces of Dr Grant and Dr Sattler when they first see the Brachiosaurus, as John Williams' reverential, almost religious theme, soars, a climax to their entire professional and emotional lives, is what audiences still remember all these years later.

It is the feeling that a new world is opening up, that technology can do wondrous things. It is the same feeling that Utopian Scholastic, from Encarta to Myst, attempts to instill.