When it comes to art, why do we prefer lighter fare in the summer months?
How Jurassic Park saved me from my 12-year-old self
There are two things I remember about the summer of 1993: 1) Jurassic Park came out; and 2) I got pimples.
The moral to be derived from both of these staggering events was that nature is cruel. For dinosaurs, that cruelty led to their extinction. For humans, the disregarding malice of physiology afflicts us with blemishes at a time in our lives when we’re least capable of coping with them; when our skin is at its thinnest (and oiliest).
My 12- year- old skin was stretched from a wintertime growth spurt and bruised by the clumsiness that comes from being suddenly unfamiliar with one’s proportions. This was followed by a voice-cracking spring. By the time summer rolled around, my sweat no longer had the whiff of adorable mischief. Instead, it was a pungent scent to be masked by deodorants or blocked by antiperspirants.
And then came zits. Oh, t he zits. Pimply, gangly, creaky and awful- smelling, I went from being blissfully unaware of myself to inordinately obsessed. For a boy who wanted nothing more than to live in a remote cave somewhere to go through puberty in isolation, the appeal of long-extinct creatures wreaking havoc on their presumptuous reanimators should be easy to understand – at least more understandable than why my mom wouldn’t let me go see the PG-13 movie on my own.
I’m certain other movies were released in the summer of 1993, but none of them mattered. The typical mar- keting strategy of a Hollywood blockbuster usually makes a moviegoer feel an overwhelming obligation to see a newly released film on its opening weekend, and then, if that’s not accomplished, there’s a diminishing urge to see it as each week goes by. Jurassic Park had an incredible curiosity inducing trailer, which was coupled with unanimous word of mouth endorsements from those who saw it.
It took a visit from my mother’s younger sister to finally gain me acceptable accompaniment. Looking back, i t was exceedingly generous of my aunt – who would have been in her early 20s at the time – to take a self- obsessed, pubescent freak show to the movies with her. Of course, her gesture was not appreciated.
She was an aunt; an adult. When you’re 12, the movies are not the place to be seen with such people. And seen I was. Three friends from my baseball team were in the mall where the cinema was located. Two girls I knew from school were in line in front of us.
The only thing that a 12-year-old boy feels more in- tently than the hyper- cognizance of an abruptly bumpy appearance is the delusion that everyone else is every bit as aware of him as he is. One of the more comforting conclusions that one comes to as one ages is that others are just as self- obsessed as you are, and therefore mostly unaware of your bad hair days and temporary patches of red marks on your forehead. In order to learn this though, one must first go through the purging fires of adolescence when it seems as though the entire world is judging every expression you make.
Once we entered the cinema, I asked my aunt to get the seats while I went to the washroom. I remember hiding in a stall until closer to the movie time to avoid being seen with her – and again, I emphasize, she was infinitely cooler than me, but reason rarely prevails in the cocktail of hormones and chemicals swirling around a 12-year-old. When I emerged, minutes before the movie was scheduled to start, I found her and my seat – next to the two girls I knew from my school.
It’s so stupid. And I can laugh about it now, but the burden of self-awareness has never been heavier than in the seconds – each feeling like a minute – between that moment and the movie starting. I remember so much of this night, but for all intents and purposes, I might as well have been blacked out just then. The only thing I can recall is the extreme shame for absolutely nothing other than nature running rampant all through me and over my face.
But t hen, t he movie began.As the characters descended on Jurassic Park via helicopter, I was transported for two merciful hours outside of myself. The music. The action. The sight of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! It was all so new and amazing and beautiful and simply thrilling. And it made me forget about my pimples; my awkward lankiness; the layers of deodorant I’d applied to mask the stench I assumed filled any room I entered. I didn’t think about OXY pads or my creaking voice. I didn’t imagine everyone was staring at me.
All I thought about were the velociraptors chasing heroes through hallways and into kitchens.
This is what a summer movie is capable of: taking you outside yourself. In so doing, Jurassic Park taught me the blockbuster of lessons: no matter how dreadful I might have appeared, no matter how convinced I was of being the centre of everyone’s attention ( and subsequent derision), there was always something vastly more attention-grabbing for people to focus on than me.
Thank you, Jurassic Park.