Abstract
In Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, there is a remarkable scene that can be read as the unveiling of the fundamental fantasy of the new automodern consensus. The central action is the attack of a giant dinosaur, and it is important to remember that in Jurassic Park, all of the dinosaurs have been engineered (by men) to be female so that their breeding can be controlled. Furthermore, the first group of people who are attacked consists of two children and a male accountant, who is supposed to be watching over the children; in fact, we have already learned in the story line that these two children are the grandchildren of the park’s creator, and they are visiting because their parents have just separated. It is also important to stress that when the dinosaur gets near, the accountant runs out of the glass car and ends up sitting on a toilet in an outhouse, and as soon as this man bolts from the vehicle holding the children, the young girl exclaims, “He left us, he left us.” We can read this statement as highlighting the reactivation of the trauma of the broken family, and it is this unconscious restaging of the breakup of the nuclear family that is often central to Spielberg’s films and the unconscious backlash against women in contemporary society.
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© 2009 Robert Samuels
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Samuels, R. (2009). On the Psychopathology of the New Right: From Jurassic Park to the Gendered Culture Wars. In: New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernism. Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104181_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104181_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38235-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10418-1
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