Of late I’ve more or less accepted that I’m unqualified to write even lazy cultural theory.
Much to my frustration, and after realising I was applying for a Phd I couldn’t do, I’ve come to accept that I’ll never get a job in teaching or writing about something that interests me so much.
In part this is because I didn’t earnestly want to. Try as I did, I could never get my head around turning something that feels so real, raw, and ‘lived in’ into a profession that I can switch off from, and not get visually fucked up by at times.
Equally I was borderline illiterate until my 20s. Apart from map books of the urban areas of Britain, I’d only read one book before turning 18. This was ‘Jurassic Park’, the kids’ version, about 50 pages long, and full of photos from the film.
By the point I got into reading ‘proper’, I was already far more confident in practicing art, where the rules and requirements of all other subjects could be warped and steered in a more bespoke direction.
However, it is Jurassic Park that I wanted to talk about here.
I bought this book in a shop in Perranporth in Cornwall. In the weeks previous I had been to see Jurassic Park, and the world had gone dinosaur crazy. This was exactly 30 years ago.
The summer of 1993 remains golden in my memories. No colour has been left behind with time.
I write a lot about depression and anxiety, but I don’t think I’ve ever really written about what it does to actual colour. When depressed and anxious, (and to be honest, you never truly come back the same), you can look at a colour and say ‘yes, that is a beautiful luminous green’, but you can’t experience it quite the same way. Memories from the late 90s onwards have significantly less colour in them.
Aged 9 in 1993 the world looked unbelievably lush – the horizons looked expansive and welcoming. As I looked out onto the Atlantic Ocean across Perranporth beach, the first time I’d seen a sea that wasn’t a mucky brown, I seriously felt like I was in a movie.
…maybe because to some extent I was?
The whole Geist, feel of the early 90s (especially to somebody like me whose family had recently come out of poverty, creating a palpable sense of relief) was exciting and so promising.
The 20th century had done its deeds; war was over, walls had fallen, new shiny shopping centres had opened, and I’d watched our local coal mine get demolished in a moment that felt personally symbolic: the past wouldn’t be my future.
This memory, this beach, this couple of weeks in the summer of 1993 seemed like a manifestation of every cinematic presentation of paradise I’d absorbed in the 80s.
And it was all channeled through the gates of Jurassic Park, which I’d seen at the start of these weeks.
The End of History.
For anyone who doesn’t know who Francis Fukuyama is or what he said, perhaps it’s good to begin by saying that what he said at the beginning of the 90s wasn’t as important as the fact that he had a world that wanted to believe those words.
Between 1989 and 1991, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen square protests and the fall of the Soviet Union, we witnessed what Fukuyama termed ‘the End of History.
He didn’t mean that there would be no more historical events in human history, but that our Modern understanding of history consisting of competing ideologies and social systems trying to build a better world, had reached its final expression in a Western model of Liberalism and Capitalism.
He was criticised then, but even more now for saying something so sweeping and arrogant. But it was the fact that the world, or at least enough of the Western world, wanted this promise, in what Paulo Virno (I think?) said was a wish for an ‘escape exit from both the 20th century and any historical responsibility’.
Who could blame them, really? We wanted the world that twentieth century cinema and adverts had promised us, a paradise liberated from the shackles of historical debts. And the 1990s, the final decade of the century were the ideal terrain.
What I’m saying is that to some extent the 20th century was an Hollywoodisation of reality, and by the 1990s we collectively tried to manifest this. And, for me, the perfect expression of this was Jurassic Park.
Was Jurassic Park not, if only by accident, a transcript for a ‘post-politics’ future, where a Western hegemonic system was so at ease with itself that we could now turn to a playground of ideas that included cloning dinosaurs?
Were the citizens of East Germany not just behind a concrete wall, but metaphorically in front of the gates of Jurassic Park, through which a post-political paradise on earth was beckoning? Weren’t these gates also the metaphor for the plasticly-neoclassical gateways into new world of then-shiny food and shopping chain stores that were splashing bright colours up and down Britain’s previously dreary coal soot-stained main roads?
Be careful what you wish for?
The rest is the history…
Not the end of The End of History, but a slow and whimpering end to its ability to convince.
To an age of disillusion, were we can see behind the stage set. Where we see ourselves, toiling away out of habit and obedience for things we no longer believe in.
Yet who were the dinosaurs? Who did they turn out to be, but history itself, museumified, thought safe to look at behind glass.
David Graeber when speaking about the UK in particular said that our best export of recent times was our defeat of the working class, by which he meant the UK’s weakened unions and political apathy left it a very safe place for foreign investment and international tourism (we’re all trained people-pleasers here now).
Indeed working class life is now in museums here. In places like Beamish, a town recreated into a living model of life 100 years back.
All the while, we all really exist, as working poor, in hospitality, health care and other services jobs.
We are the dinosaurs in Jurassic park, we are the history that can break out of its museumification. Which doesn’t lead to me to making a rallying cry – I’m far from the right person, far from in the right place, far from in the mood to do so (And there are many examples that prove it has already happened, or at least continues to threaten to happen).
Whether we are the subdued working poor, striking in countries like the UK, or the people who have instigated movements against global oppression throughout the globe in the 21st century, aren’t we all the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park?
Yet, what if what holds us back is the fact that we are simultaneously both the tourists and dinosaurs at Jurassic Park?
Is Jurassic park not also the gentrified streets of our cities, the oven-ready (Instagram-ready?) lines of real ale bars and eateries offering toned-down options from around the world? Where work and leisure become 1 in places like the gymnasiums? Are we not both the dinosaurs eating the tourists, and the tourists being eaten? The T-rex and the coward in the toilet – the eaters and the eaten in this staggering and battered End of History reality?
And I have nothing left to say on this really, I just want to wish Jurassic Park and the end of history a happy 30th birthday.
John B Ledger 