Resurrection of Hammond

 

As said in a previous essay, Spielberg and Crichton had different reasons for keeping certain characters alive in the first two episodes of Jurassic Park.

In the first book, John Hammond and Ian Malcolm die.

Crichton restores Malcolm back to life in the opening pages of the second volume, “The Lost World,” Spielberg, however, apparently planning the second film kept both alive so that they could reappear in the second film.

Malcolm, who becomes the hero of the second book and film, serves as the mouthpiece for Crichton’s philosophy and without him, Crichton would  have had to create a character like him, so he just brought him back to serve the same role in his second book.

The situation appears much more complicated for Spielberg in regards to Hammond.

Spielberg creates an under story with Hammond that doesn’t exist in the book, somehow saying something significant about Spielberg’s life and art.

Hammond is an old entertainer, a Scot who started his entertainment career with a flea circus, creating illusions to entertain people, much in the same way Spielberg started using toy soldiers to create film illusions early on in his career.

Hammond aches to make something real, that people can touch, but is told that even his most ambitious project: Jurassic Park is just one more illusion.

You have to wonder if Spielberg is reflecting on his own career and how he ached to create a masterpiece of his own that was “not an illusion.”

You have to remember that he was already contemplating his next project “Schindler’s List” when filming Jurassic Park, and edited Jurassic Park during filming of Schindler’s List.

Even as late as 2005, Spielberg told one interviewer that he still has yet to create his “Lawrence of Arabia,” a sad note from what is one of the greatest directors of our time.

In Jurassic Park, we get a much more sympathetic Hammond than the one that appears in the book, someone who loves kids so much he has gone through the expense of creating something he believes is real just for their enjoyment, something he believes is not an illusion, but in reality, proves to be beyond him.

Hammond as kindly an old man as he seems in the first film assures us he can control the monsters, he creates, using computers and other safeguards while the subtext shows his daughter is the middle of a divorce and he brings his grand children to the heart of darkness where the must be protected by a more responsible (if quite reluctant) Dr. Grant.

“What better a p3rson to bring my grandchildren through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert,” he said during a conversation with Grant’s love interest, the symbolic mother figure in the first film.

At this point, Hammond does not yet realize his mistake and blames technology for the failure to control his dinosaur children, and he has to be corrected by the woman who says control is an illusion when all that really matters is love.

Hammond like Dr. Frankenstein is the symbol of how evil evolves out of good intentions. Where as Dr. Frankenstein created his monster in order to keep his loved one free of the grip of death, Hammond always the show man wants to give his audient thrills that are not an illusion.

He is the benevolent father, whose actions lead his children doom. At heart, he believes always he is doing the right the thing, even as he lectures Nedry, his symbolic son about excesses.

Hammond – as with other Spielberg father figures (such as Ray in War of the Worlds – constantly gets everything wrong, small things that suggest early on that his greatest accomplishments are also flawed, although his prediction that Jurassic Park would make his amusement park in Kenya seem like a petty zoon may be perversely true.

His prediction that the blood-sucking attorney would apologize after the weekend is perversely untrue since the attorney gets torn limb from limb by the T-rex.

Hammond thinks he knows what he is doing when he picks plants that poison his dinosaurs. His claim that he can read a schematic proves false and its takes Malcolm’s more practical mind to steer the woman hero out of danger.

The Hammond in the movie is a little less edgy than the Hammond in the book, with the exception in his dealings with Nedry where his ruthless side show through the veneer of gentle old man.

In bringing him back to life for the second film, Spielberg strips Hammond entirely of this ruthlessness, and we get only the gentle old man that Spielberg may even foresee himself becoming. Though underneath both Hammond and Spielberg, there is ruthless ambition that is reflected in these films.