GAZE UP IN WONDER
Dinosaurs loom even larger in the eyes of a child
In 1994, shortly after my eighth birthday, Jurassic Park stomped and roared onto home video. I remember seeing a tower of VHS tapes in the queue for the cash register at Canadian Tire, looming irresistibly in a cardboard display designed to look like the Park’s extravagant main gates — a reliable way to get curious children pleading for an impulse buy, as I instantly did. “This says it’s rated PG-13,” my father observed, scrutinizing the back of the box as if it might yield some crucial bit of parenting advice. “Are you sure you won’t be frightened?” I promised that I wouldn’t be, and my father bought the movie. And then I had velociraptor nightmares for a year.
Dinosaurs, before Crichton and Spielberg so vastly enlarged them, occupied just a small notch in the popular imagination, commanding roughly as much fascination, among the average person day to day, as Egyptian pharaohs or distant moons. Jurassic Park made the dinosaur ubiquitous. It confirmed what children had already long believed: that the world was once a sprawling sandbox, roamed by appealingly horned and toothy beasts. The Cretaceous period had to recommend it the total absence of parents and teachers, bear in mind, as well as a great deal of very big and very interesting-looking pets. Of course it seemed attractive. What young boy could fail to be intrigued?
I was dazzled. Though the machinations of the story were quite beyond me, it occurred to me years later: I didn’t understand that a paleontologist and a paleobotanist were being whisked to the Park at the behest of a lawyer in order to assuage the concerns of spooked investors — nor indeed did I understand what paleontologists and paleobotanists did, or what investors were, or that lawyers did anything other than mediate divorce hearings. I had sooner memorized dialogue about lawsuits and testimonials than I knew what any of it meant, but the details hardly mattered. They could hardly have mattered to any children in the audience. The film’s effect on us was more immediate. What it inspired in us was awe.
And fear. Our first glimpse of a dinosaur in Jurassic Park is of a brachiosaurus, the long-necked, giraffe-like herbivore lumbering around the plains, and I seemed to handle that pretty well. (I didn’t duck behind the sofa or begin to watch from behind laced fingers.) Next up is a triceratops with a stomach ache: That doesn’t look so scary, I thought to myself, apparently oblivious to the cautionary tale embodied by the petulant child toward the beginning of the movie. Spielberg is goading kids into overconfidence with all these false starts and pulled punches, it seems to me now. Like the children in the film — and that they are children is significant — we’re encouraged to feel delighted and giddy, eager to catch sight of the tyrannosaurus.
Adults know to steel themselves at this juncture — because adults have a good idea, after a lifetime of moviegoing, of the horrors that are coming. Kids, meanwhile, being kids, don’t know any better. I remember feeling rather sanguine about things, midway through Jurassic Park. The much-discussed T-Rex was still to come, true, and I didn’t much like the look of that raptor pen. But so far the tottering and sickly herbivores had proven a lot gentler than expected. Things were looking swell until Dennis Nedry, that funny guy from Seinfeld, starting powering down the security fences. Now hang on a minute, I objected. If you do that the dinosaurs will get out. And our heroes are just about to pass the tyrannosaur paddock ...
Doubtless you recall how that goes. Well, it terrified me: that snarling, thunderous super-dino, squashing jeeps and swallowing litigators whole — awesome, certainly, but not in the agreeable, bloodless way I’d imagined. (Actually it was the mud that really got to me, when the T-Rex foot comes down and little Timmy is pinned to the ground. Spielberg somehow makes drowning in muck seem a less pleasant fate than being eaten.) After the tyrannosaurus arrives the venom-spewing, frill-necked dilophosaurus, with its horrible shriek. Then the velociraptors appear — and for the wide-eyed child any chance of a good night’s sleep is summarily dashed.
The velociraptors provide, among other thrills, the film’s biggest scare, when one sprints toward a young girl and collides with what turns out to be her reflection. (An all-time-great trick shot, it goes without saying.) Every night for countless nights thereafter I found myself trapped in that glossy kitchen, trying to outwit a pair of raptors. And every night I’d awake at three in the morning, sweating through my Jurassic Park pyjamas and Jurassic Park bedsheets, convinced that a razor-sharp claw was poised to slash my belly at any moment. My mother, of course, scolded my father for having put me through this PG-13 wringer.
But I was pleased. Shaking off the terror of another night’s raptor-harangued sleep, I’d invariably dash to the VCR to hit rewind on my favorite tape. I didn’t mind being frightened. I wanted to watch Jurassic Park again.
That thunderous, snarling super-dino, squashing jeeps and swallowing litigators