Clones, Capitalism, and Dinosaurs
Figuring the autonomous mother in Jurassic World: Domination (2022)
Includes spoilers
Born in the 90s, I consider myself an original fan of the 1993 film, Jurassic Park. Considering my childish love for this science-fiction thriller, it isn’t all that surprising that I am in the field of culture studies of science and technology. In both Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic World (2015), the theme park is a centre site to explore the consequential influence capitalism has on technoscience, and the Western patriarchal industrialist tradition of using technology to dominate nature through the guise of education. The films that follow each franchise continue questions of the relationship between technoscience and capitalism; symbolised by the scientist for hire. There are problems to all the films, for example the trouble with how capitalism gets embodied by a self-interested villain; in Jurassic World: Domination (2022) it is a wealthy tech founder. The film that launched the Jurassic World trilogy has gross gendered tropes and (obvious) misogynist inflections. But in this short piece I want to briefly discuss, the mothers in Jurassic World: Domination (2022).
In the Jurassic Worlds, there are many mothers. One mother is Claire. Claire’s story begins with her as bit of a villain and childless through choice; these are not separable. By Jurassic World: Domination (2022) she has soften, as symbolised by the change to her hair and fashion. The corporate outfits, heels, and harsh bob have been replaced by flat boots, check shirts and soft wavy hair. She has also become an adoptive parent to Maisie Lockwood. So, the audience is now invited to like Claire and feel comforted by the gender role staying firmly in place.
The ‘Claire’ trope is a boring one, for it is the other mothers in Jurassic World: Domination (2022) that I found interesting. Situated in the current cultural moments of celebrity surrogacy, a (manufactured) concern for the ‘birth rate’ and erosion of reproductive rights, I wonder if it offers something new to Hollywood Blockbusters on the scale of this franchise. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) it is revealed that the child Maisie Lockwood is a clone. Maisie believes herself to be a clone of the daughter of her grandfather, Sir Benjamin Lockwood; who, motivated by the grief of losing his daughter Charlotte, created Maisie. Sir Lockwood is the old business partner of the founder of Jurassic Park, John Hammond. The conception of Maisie is corrected in Jurassic World: Domination (2022) when it is explained to her that she was both genetically engineered and birthed by Charlotte Lockwood. She is a clone of Charlotte because Charlotte is her only genetic parent. The ‘self-birthing’ woman characterised by Charlotte/Maisie runs adjacent to the story of the genetic engineered dinosaur, Blue/Beta. In Jurassic World: Domination (2022) Blue self-births her child, Beta, with no other partner. Western science-fiction imaginings are usually rooted in Christian traditions of masculine transcendence and a ‘world without women’ (Noble, 1992) however, this is a subversion of the story of the virginal birth.
Before this film, the Jurassic franchises already had self-reproducing dinosaurs but before Jurassic World: Domination (2020), the gender-changing and self-birthing dinosaurs threatened human civilisation. After all, the archetype mother and monstrous-feminine is a horror trope (Creed, 1993). The horror was once the ability of the dinosaurs to reproduce without a mate, however, in Jurassic World: Domination (2022), the metaphor once relied upon to scare the audience is flipped, as the audience is asked to like and champion the characters of Charlotte/Maisie and Blue/Beta. The horror is the domination of capitalism on bioscience and nature. Maisie’s body is the key to undoing the harm of a capitalistic bio-politics that is destroying the planet and Beta is symbolic of not dominating but living with the non-human/nature. A somewhat obvious subversion to the ‘virginal birth’ story is the lack of the boy-child, as both Maisie and Beta are girls, but (perhaps) what is most interest is the autonomy of both Charlotte and Blue in conception. Blue births Beta as dinosaur living wild, outside of captivity and Charlotte’s use of technology to clone herself to conceive Maisie is figured as an exercise of love and desire for motherhood. After Maisie is born, Charlotte alters Maisie’s DNA to save her from a generic disease that threatens to kill her; and this invention is replicated to save the planet from the harms of BioSyn - the pharma/generic/technological company that captures and researches dinosaurs. BioSyn is the true villain of the piece. Arguably, it is doing some of the same stuff by suggesting ecological harm (created by capitalism) can be solved by technoscience, however what makes it intriguing to me is the gendering of this through reproduction. A world without men (participating in reproduction) is not the threat in Jurassic World: Domination (2022) but the solution to the horrors of capitalism.
I have argued elsewhere that the self-birthing man reproduces a white masculinity that is historically rooted in specific power relations, but here, in this cultural moment when reproductive and trans rights are under attack, and capitalists are sounding an alarm about the dropping birth rate, I am interested in what this figure of the self-birthing woman might do. Not a birth given by God, but a birth that is autonomously engineered in the wild, that relies upon community and friendship to survive.
If you enjoyed reading this I recommend reading:
Creed, Barbara (1993) The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London ; New York: Routledge
Noble, David (1992) A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press
The films:
Jurassic Park, 1993, Steven Spielberg, US
The Lost World: Jurassic Park, 1997, Steven Spielberg, US
Jurassic Park III, 2001, Joe Johnston, US
Jurassic World, 2015, Colin Trevorrow, US
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, 2018, J. A. Bayona, US
Jurassic World: Domination, 2022, Colin Trevorrow, US
Photo by Yohann LIBOT on Unsplash