Yup, Jurassic World Is Also Libertarian

Gee wiz, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie in a theater, and I’m glad I broke that trend with Jurassic World. It has already made more money than the second Avengers movie did, and that’s kind of a big deal. 

What I imagine is going on at Universal right now is that scene at the end of the third Die Hard movie when the Germans are popping champagne on top of piles of money, saying, "Now we have to decide which country we want to buy!"

When I gave my talk two years ago on the 100 highest grossing films of all time, I argued that Jurassic Park was libertarian because the triumphant dinosaurs represent the free market. It is not an anti-science film because the thrill of seeing dinosaurs at all is what got us spectators in the seats in the first place. It’s not anti-capitalist because Spielberg replaced the greedy charlaton of the book with a sympathetic old man with a sense of adventure. 

Plus, the lawyer gets eaten, as does the thief that started the whole mess. Spielberg went out of his way to get us to relate to the whole idea of a dinosaur theme park. He practically said, “no, seriously, this is awesome. Amiright?”

It was awesome. And so is Jurassic World.

What’s the common denominator of these two films? What is the theme that Jurassic World seems to hammer home over and over? Simply put, it’s about control.

Literally. That word is spoken so many times in the film, I lost count.

If you were expecting a treatise on environmentalism, or even just a lecture on cruelty to animals, you came to the wrong movie. This movie likely will make people WANT to go to Seaworld this summer. Maybe you think that’s a bad thing, but this film doesn’t care. 

This film is channeling the same American moxie that sent the proud, oil-rig-drilling Texan Bruce Willis into outer space to blow up an asteroid. It's a lot like that, actually.

But that’s not to say the film doesn’t address animal cruelty. It’s very clear that raising animals in captivity is not what’s being criticized here at all. Instead, it’s saying that working with animals is a relationship, and it’s wrong to always think about that relationship as being one of supremacy by one over the other. 

But it goes deeper than even that. 

Why make the hero a veteran of the Navy, when the film clearly demonizes the actual villain for his pro-military approach to pretty much EVERYTHING. He’s the guy that wants to weaponize the raptors and use them for military operations. There's even a disturbing boyish grin on his face as the dinosaurs begin to wreak havoc, like a playground bully poking an injured animal.

That’s pretty dark, but even that is not so black and white. The film seems be informed by an anti-military worldview, in fact, by making a soldier the film’s primary hero.

Actually, you could say that the whole film is a series of mandala-like paradoxes. 

Consider the geneticist. He’s responsible for creating the Indominous Rex, and he doesn’t even seem to feel any guilt about it like we might expect him to. But he makes a good point: Everything that was done in that lab was an invention that might be considered “unnatural” by those that tend to frown on innovation. Everything that's new could have negative consequences, and that was always true. It was true with the locomotive, and with nuclear energy. He’s not the bad guy. 

What do all these stories have in common? The lab tech, the manager, the soldier? They are all familiar with having to think for themselves from within larger institutions which operate using the control-or-be-controlled binary. 

The soldier, the animal wrangler, the scientist, and the park manager all understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to do what they do. You could say that the film champions the proletariat, except that there’s no similar indictment of capitalism. In fact, the solution to the problem was found from within the same system that created it. No outside intervention necessary.

And let’s not forget the kids. These amazing specimens go from being hampster-wheel-driving Rex bait to safety, all on their own. And they do it by working together (much like the kids in the original film did). They don’t respond to danger with the expectation that help will come, but by rigging a Jeep and saving themselves. There’s a whole libertarian story in its own right.

One last observation you could also make is to point out the commentary on transparency. It’s understandable for a corporation to not want the pubic to know about a new attraction in the works, but its entirely another when the park manager doesn’t even know anything about that creation. Actually, no one but the chief geneticist himself seems to understand what the thing even is or what it can do until it’s too late. 

I can say with some experience that this issue of transparency is not just a problem in government, but in any institution that is big enough to hide big secrets. Why would we libertarians expect corporations to be incapable of this? The only difference is that the losses are private losses, not socialized losses.

Well, there is one socialized loss, I suppose: getting eaten by a dinosaur. Let’s face it, that’s gotta be a drain on the economy. 

The moral of the story seems to be: working together voluntarily (even across species, as the case may be!) is preferable to force. To turn any of these animals into weapons, or to treat them like they are owned (even if, legally speaking, they are), is not good. It’s not bad because “animals have rights,” but because it demonstrates an insidious behavior that, if used against one’s fellow man, is demonstrably bad. 

Whether the world of our story is pubic or private, politically speaking, the same libertarian tendencies still triumph. Non-aggression, free association, open communication and transparency, mutual respect, spontaneous order. What fails are policies of control, manipulation, dishonesty, secrecy, cruelty, and ignorance.