IS JURASSIC PARK (1993) AN UNCONSCIOUS CONFESSION?

Indian Dunes. July 23rd, 2:20am, 1982

In 1982, two illegally-hired child “extras” were killed during the production of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The scene was directed by John Landis, who was also the movie’s co-producer. In a landmark criminal trial in 1986, Landis and two production subordinates faced Involuntary Manslaughter charges and were ultimately found Not Guilty.

Steven Spielberg was the movie’s other co-producer. He was never credibly reported to have been on Landis’s set. If the association is remembered at all, he is generally considered to have acquitted himself of it admirably (See e.g. What Went Wrong podcast (2022); Twilight Zone: The Movie (NY Times 2023).

Yet several factors suggest Spielberg’s possible indirect involvement: namely, the extent to which his closest aide at the time—Amblin Entertainment co-founder, Twilight Zone Executive Producer Frank Marshall—is implicated in facilitating the hiring, and the literal lengths he went to avoid speaking to authorities.

It’s highly likely that Spielberg, in his capacity as co-producer, would’ve been asked for his notes on Landis’s segment, including on the rescue sequence added to the 3rd draft. And also, potentially, a 4th draft, which included only a few small adjustments, including the addition of a simple prop: a Barbie doll, for the girl to offer the protagonist, as a token of her generosity. Chen can be seen holding it in the final shot.

Spielberg had a reputation for having a strong gravitational pull on any production that bore his name. He was already embroiled in a scandal for being a backseat director on Poltergeist (1982), with Tobe Hooper.

Spielberg had also recently developed a prolific storyboarding practice (well documented on Raiders and Temple of Doom for example). Landis mentioned there had been some storyboards for his Twilight Zone sequence, but only a single pre-production graphic was ever turned over by the defense.

As a means of extending the analysis, on the basis of Spielberg’s frequent comparisons of his writing process to “dreams” and “therapy,” I consider the often uncanny similarities between the accident and Spielberg’s mid-career magnum opus, Jurassic Park (1993), which—once its ironic, self-reflexive sheen is disarmed—reveals itself to be obsessively re-enacting a situation in which two children are put in danger of violent death from a terrifying force from above (approximately 25-feet).

This essay considers the possibility that Spielberg’s personal and professional guilt may have been sublimated into an optimistic, meta-cinematic meditation on creation, chaos, and control, thereby reframing moral accountability as redemptive spectacle. The analysis challenges readers to question the ethical and cultural implications of narrative absolution in Western myth-making, particularly when technology and storytelling converge to obscure power dynamics and systemic negligence.

2. Executive Producer Frank Marshall

On July 23, 1982, at 2:20am, at Indian Dunes, a 600-acre film park north of Los Angeles, during the filming of a major practical effects shot—a Vietnam war rescue scene—Hollywood actor Vic Morrow (age 53) and two child "extras,” Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6) and Myca Dinh Le (age 7), were killed when a helicopter crashed on them. The ensuing investigation revealed that the children had been hired illegally (without permits) and that the set had been operating under conditions of extreme negligence.

Although some one-hundred crew and spectators had reportedly witnessed the accident, by the time the detective assigned to the case (Sgt. Budds) arrived from L.A., the set had been cleared and only about a dozen people remained. Reliable testimony was scarce as many witnesses were potentially implicated in the accident themselves, or were the friends, colleagues, or employees of those implicated. The studio was especially cagey, as they had just been named, along with four other corporations and nine individuals, in a $200-million dollar civil negligence lawsuit filed by the Chen family on August 3rd, 1982, later joined by the Le family, who alleged that he filmmakers badly misled them in failing to convey the seriousness of the danger into which they planned to put their children, i.e., underneath a low-flying helicopter, amid at least 14 improvised explosive devices.

Because the accident involved an aircraft, the National Transportation Safety Board held primary jurisdiction over the crime scene, but made plans to share information and responsibilities with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office and CAL/Osha. Unfortunately, considerable evidence disappeared before reaching investigators, including one of two audio recordings; the on-set photographer’s negatives; all of the Executive Producer’s ‘making-of’ documentary footage, except for a single shot of a technical rehearsal (“DOCU2:00”); several “thumbnail sketches” mentioned by Landis during an early NTSB and CAL/Osha panel interview; all graphic and visual materials relating to the film’s production, except for a cryptic bird’s eye diagram of the set known as “the spotting plan,” which looked just like a bird’s eye diagram of the set, right down to the crashed helicopter. The defence resisted turning it over to the NTSB until ordered to do so by a federal judge.

The prosecuting attorney assigned to the case, Gary Kesselman, struggled to assess culpability.

But legally speaking, who was at fault, and why?

In October 1982, based on recommendations by CAL/Osha, the DA’s office announced their intention to focus on Landis and four subordinates. Landis was the sole defendant accused of five counts of criminal manslaughter (two for deaths resulting from the illegal hiring, and three for deaths due to their professional conduct on-set), with the associate producer and the unit production manager also facing the first two “office” counts (for the deaths of Myca and Renee); and the helicopter pilot, and the special effects coordinator also facing the second three “set” counts (for the deaths of Myca, Renee, and Morrow).

Finally, in 1986, after a Grand Jury hearing, a preliminary hearing, and an appeal gone awry, co-producer/director John Landis and four production associates became the first filmmakers to be tried for involuntary manslaughter for deaths occurring in the course of making a movie. Landis and two others admitted to the illegal hiring but maintained they had no concept that the sequence was dangerous as planned. The defence successfully directed the blame towards the special effects technician whom they believed had fired the fatal blast, who had been given immunity by the state in exchange for his testimony, and on May 29th, 1987, the five defendants were acquitted, with the jury finding that the danger had been unforeseeable, “and you don’t prosecute people for unforeseeable accidents.”

The civil trial was settled on May 7th, 1987, during closing arguments for $2-Million dollars, with co-producer Steven Spielberg’s long-pending deposition reportedly scheduled for May 9th.

Twilight Zone: The Movie was an anthology film consisting of four segments, each by a different director (Landis, Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller), with Landis’s segment—the only one not written by Richard Matheson—being the first to go to production. The contract Spielberg and Landis worked out with Warner Bros. gave both filmmakers a high degree of operational control, with the studio’s involvement limited to signing-off on scripts and production expenses.

Although Spielberg was never reported to have been at Landis’s production offices or on the set (except for by a drunken truck driver whose testimony was uncorroborated and who later said he probably confused Spielberg with Marshall) it’s entirely plausible and consistent with the available evidence (detailed above) that Spielberg in his capacity as Producer, would’ve been involved in the scripting and planning stages of Landis’s segment.

Spielberg is linked to the tragedy through the actions of his closest aide at the time, Twilight Zone’s Executive Producer, Frank Marshall. Marshall and his girlfriend, and future wife, Kathleen Kennedy co-founded Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg. The company would go on to produce many of the most beloved children’s and family movies of the 1980s and 1990s. Marshall and Kennedy brought a much-needed professionalism to Spielberg’s production processes, which in turn forced Spielberg to develop techniques for the sake of maintaining efficiency, such as a newly prolific storyboarding practice (McBride 321). Within the past calendar year they’d pulled off Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Poltergeist (1982), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Twilight Zone was next up for the company, and most likely intended to be “A Steven Spielberg Production”.

Marshall is seriously implicated in the illegal hiring.

• He was alerted to Landis’s intentions over a month in advance by a casting agent (Marci Liroff).
• The day before the children arrived on-set, he co-signed the cheque used to pay for the children for their first night of shooting.
• Marshall was on-set the first night (Wednesday, July 21st) the children were present; they only filmed indoor scenes, well-past midnight, and according to Landis’s testimony, Marshall was consulted in the apparently ad hoc decision to roll the production over onto an additional night for the three scenes involving the helicopter and pyrotechnics, when both sets of parents had been told that they would only be needed for a single night’s work. Only two were able to make it to the second night to supervise, despite the associate producer’s repeated assurances of safety, and overtures to take care of their children without them present.
• On the day of the second night (Thursday, July 22nd), according to one of Landis’s production assistants, she picked up an envelope filled with cash somewhere on the Warner Bros lot, from the production paymaster (Bonne Radford) who was also employed by Marshall’s payroll management company, DISC Management Services Group, Inc.. It’s unlikely that she would facilitate this without his authorization. Journalist Ron LaBrecque, at least, claims the PA picked up the envelope from the Amblin Entertainment offices, then located on the Warner Bros. lot (22).
• That night, both Marshall and Kennedy were in attendance for the earlier 9:30pm shot, in which the children were left in wait in close proximity to live explosives, and then also during the 11:30pm shot, when the scale of the pyrotechnics to be used was first displayed, and the helicopter crew were nearly torched alive, which became a matter of discussion at the midnight crew “lunch” while each child and one parent each were sequestered in the director’s trailer, about a mile away from the set.
• During the final shot (after Kennedy had gone home), Marshall was standing 100-feet away, across the shore, with the location manager (Richard Vane), who had worked for Amblin on Poltergeist and E.T., who was the highest ranking member of the production on the set the night of the accident to admit to participating in an on-set conspiracy to conceal the children from a particular Fire Safety Officer (FSO) known to be trained as a child welfare worker. Vane supplied Marshall’s alibi: at the Grand Jury hearing in 1983, he testified that Marshall turned to him during the shot and said, “they’re using dummies, aren’t they?”; Vane said that he (Vane) believed the children’s presence was being hidden for the sake of a few pick-ups shot to be taken after the main village destruction shot.
• Landis and his two “office” co-defendants, however, have consistently maintained that over the course of two meetings before the accident, Marshall had given him and two other co-defendants his explicit approval to hire the children illegally. They also said that during the first meeting Marshall had said that he would have Kathleen Kennedy call the labour board to see about the possibility of getting waivers to shoot later at night, implicating her in the plot as well. They say that it was at the follow-up meeting, a few days later, that Marshall informed them that Kennedy had made the call, and that the waivers could not be acquired, at which point, Landis testified, Marshall gave them the go-ahead to pursue the hiring and even volunteered to help procure the children.
• New research by journalist Steve Chain (Fly by Night (2022)), based on access to confidential Warner Brothers memos documenting interviews conducted by their lawyers with several of their employees or contractors (in Marshall’s case) in order to ascertain the studio’s potential liabilities. According to an interview with the young, recently hired Warner Brothers Executive assigned to the project (Lucy Fisher), Marshall was well aware of the practical problem presented by the addition of the children to the script’s third draft, as one would expect of an experienced producer. Chain also claims that Marshall was the first among the searchers to find the girl’s body, carried her to the shore, and laid her at the feet of her wailing mother. He then ordered the 2nd AD to clear the set and make sure the film was on the truck, and then ushered her and the boy’s father into separate cars headed for the hospital.
• The morning after the accident, Landis’s studio-assigned secretary (Alpha Campbell) recorded in her logbook that at 10:15am Marshall called and “needs a lot of things,” and that at 10:30am, he came by the office and picked up “21 rolls of black & white film from the lab.” She also noted that Marshall stopped by twice in January 1983—at a time when investigators were still lost in the fog—to pick up: “boxes of trims”, “boxes of Twilight Zone films”, “lab roll sheets”, “camera reports”, a “lined TZ script”, and some “paperwork”.

Marshall clearly had his own interests to protect by avoiding investigators. But why would he have put himself at professional risk for Landis in the first place, when he owed his fealty—and his future, as co-founder of Amblin Entertainment—to Steven Spielberg?

This point was first made by Landis’s criminal lawyer (Harland Braun) in two letters sent to the D.A.’s office in November, 1985, lambasting them for failing to investigate Marshall, Kennedy, and Spielberg when they had the chance. This was a strategic move designed to benefit Landis, but it also raised some very good questions.

3. A Broken and Naked Barbie Doll

The problem was that even after Landis’s second draft, his story still wasn’t working. It was too bleak.

The first two drafts of “Twilight Zone—Landis Episode” follow a frustrated businessman and Vietnam war veteran, Bill Connor, played by Morrow, who meets two drunk friends in a bar where he delivers a racist diatribe. But when he steps out, he finds himself in Nazi-occupied Paris, where he is stopped by Nazi officers and then, when the stop is going badly, makes a break for it. In the nick of time, he is transported to the deep South, where he is being hauled by the KKK to a burning cross. Next, he’s in Vietnam, hiding from a Viet Cong patrol, only to be noticed and fired upon by U.S. soldiers. Then is shot back through the KKK era, and then to the Nazi-era, where he is finally apprehended, and placed in a freight car with several Jewish people. He reaches through the slats, calling for help, only to see the outside of the bar, with his friends leaving, unable to hear him, as the train pulls away for the death camps.

Landis conceived of his segment as “the only political or moral episode in the film,” in the vein of the socially conscious episodes of the original TV show. On analysis, Landis’s segment appears to be a critique of American operations in Vietnam, echoing specifically the Battle of la Drang (1965).

Landis testified that after his first draft, he met with Fisher at Warner Brothers, who relayed Semel’s concern that the ending was too cynical. And then, after the second draft, he was called into the June 11th breakfast meeting at Semel’s house in the Hollywood hills where the sequence came together.

He testified that the executives “were concerned that I painted Bill so harsh [sic]. His character was too ugly. They said ‘He is so unsympathetic... Why watch the episode? What are you trying to prove?’ And, I thought they were right.“

They proposed to solve the anti-hero’s relatability problem by having him rescue two Vietnamese children orphaned in a village, expanding on a brief description of a helicopter and explosions as audio cues in Landis’s previous drafts, providing the stage for the protagonist’s spiritual redemption. The addition of children would also bring Landis’s story into line with the other three segments.

By early 1983, Marshall’s personal lawyer informed the D.A.’s office that, after several deferrals, his client had decided not to cooperate with the investigation willingly, and a domestic subpoena was issued for his testimony. But he was in Sri Lanka, filming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). It was only after Braun’s letters in November, 1985, that the D.A. had a renewed interest in Marshall as a witness who could clear up key details about the case, even though he was no longer eligible for prosecution.

After using precious resources to stake out Marshall locally without luck, Sgt. Budds learned that Marshall was in London on work relating to the pre-production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and so in June of 1986 the D.A. procured an international subpoena for his testimony, and sent Budds to London to serve Marshall personally at his hotel. But, according to a subsequent report by Scotland Yard, after Marshall was informed that an embassy official was waiting in the lobby to serve him papers, Marshall, and then likely fled to the airport and flew to Paris on an Amblin jet, where Spielberg was doing press at the time for Amblin’s The Money Pit (1986). By the time Interpol finally detained Kennedy in Spain in February 1987, and flagged Marshall in April as he entered the country, the prosecution was resting their case and could no longer make use of his testimony (LaBrecque 128; Chain Ch. 49; cf. Epilogue).

Not only did Spielberg never distance himself from Marshall despite his proximity to the criminal negligence scandal, but in the years after the trial, Marshall and the two other Amblin contractors involved in the plot (the location manager, and the accountant) were given promotions to Director, Producer, and Producer, respectively. Had Spielberg really not known about their roles in the illegal hiring of Myca Le and Renee Chen, or had he forgiven them for what he at least believed to be a misunderstanding?

Marshall’s silence is significant because it precluded him being asked even basic questions about Spielberg’s possible awareness and approval of the illegal hiring. Except for a few highly curated exceptions, neither Spielberg nor Marshall has ever spoken on the record about the accident.

Yet, in Spielberg’s capacity as co-producer, his notes on Landis’s story would’ve been highly sought-after by the studio. As well, in his creative capacity, he would have been compelled to provide input on Landis’s story, to manage the various structures and themes of the movie.

The Vietnamese village rescue segment—introducing the village set, the helicopter, pyrotechnics, and two children to the story—only appeared in Landis’s 3rd draft, dated June 13th, 1982. Two days earlier, Landis had met with two high-level Warner Brothers Executives (President of Production Terry Semel, and President of Creative Lucy Fisher) to discuss story changes, and out of that meeting, two children were added to the script.

Fisher (33-years-old) had recently been hired out of the ashes of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, supposedly on Spielberg’s recommendation (Chain Ch. 18). Spielberg and Marshall (both 36-years-old) along with Marshall’s new girlfriend, Kathleen Kennedy (27-years-old). It would have been within their professional ambit to discuss Landis’s script privately and off the record.

Spielberg was hard at work and heavily involved in his own Twilight Zone segment, so the movie was certainly on his mind. As well, by 1982, Spielberg had by his own admission become completely obsessed with filmmaking:

Spielberg had also earned a reputation for being occasionally overbearing as a producer. He was embroiled, at the time, in a controversy surrounding his alleged backseat directing of Poltergeist, which he had originally planned to direct before his imminent directing duties on E.T. forced him to withdraw due to DGA regulations.

Landis, however, could not be pushed around; his profile was larger and his personality was stronger.

According to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) producer Julia Phillips who had introduced Landis to Spielberg on the set of Jawsg in Martha’s Vineyard, “Steven hated him, although Michael and I always wondered if he felt threatened, Landis being so child-prodigy and all, Steven pretty much feeling he had the corner on that arena. There’s always someone younger than you.” Landis, for his part, felt jilted that Spielberg took his ideas for Close Encounters and had only made friends with him after the success of Animal House (Chain Ch. 6). The two seemed to be engaged in a soft, unspoken rivalry.

As well, Landis at the time had also just lost John Belushi, his friend, the turbulent but beloved comic actor, to a cocaine overdose (March 5th, 1982).

Perhaps sensing all of this, Spielberg decided, as a matter of tact, to deliver his feedback indirectly and by proxy.

Landis also turned in a 4th draft (June 26th, 1982), but it contained only minor adjustments. The simplest was the addition of a prop to the scene where Morrow’s character first encounters the children, along with a single line of dialogue.

In the 3rd draft, Morrow is moved to his moment of dramatic recognition by experiencing the innocence of the orphans.

In the 4th draft, the gesture is given concrete form as what is known in popular storytelling terms as a MacGuffin. The girl hands the protagonist “a broken and naked Barbie doll” and he (Morrow’s character) says

(genuinely moved) Thank you honey. Thank you very much.

The 4th draft was apparently never turned in to police, and saved from destruction by Landis’s secretary, along with a second copy of the 3rd draft, with the handwritten note on the cover, “Read 6/16/82.”

Is it possible that the 4th draft reflects Spielberg’s notes, or that Spielberg otherwise contributed to the essential design of Landis’s segment?

And why otherwise would Frank Marshall facilitate Landis’s hiring of two children to work at night illegally, around special effects, when he would have known that such a hiring would be a serious crime, implicating the studio in substantial liabilities?

Both Marshall and Kennedy would have been well-aware of the regulatory burden of using children in proximity to special effects at night; after all, they had just produced Poltergeist and E.T..

When he was told on the phone, by a trusted casting agent, that Landis had been flaunting an alarming plan to hire two children “off the streets” for a nighttime scene with a helicopter and explosions, he told her he would check it out.

But why from that point forward had he been so lax in monitoring Landis against such a serious allegation, especially after Landis’s production team, whose reputation preceded them, had been getting into constant trouble, of which Marshall was well-aware?

Why hadn’t Marshall followed-up with Landis before the final shot, to make sure Liroff’s report of Landis’s plan didn’t come true?

Both Marshall and Spielberg, in particular, had worked closely around stunts involving propellers. And in a 1981 Interview with Dick Cavett, Spielberg displays a savvy awareness of the danger of stunt accidents on film sets. Spielberg’s E.T., Poltergeist, Close Encounters, and Jaws, all involved incidents illustrating a significant disregard for safety, and actors (many of them children), so that the director could get the shot. Landis, meanwhile—who hardly ever worked with children—was naive enough to think he could hire two children through a casting agency for a scene involving a helicopter and explosives shot on location at night.

And why if Spielberg hadn’t approved of the hiring in some way would he continue to associate with Marshall, Vane, or Radford, let alone promote them to roles in which they would continue to oversee the well-being of children?

No one has ever been able to ask Spielberg or Marshall even basic questions about Spielberg’ involvement. As such, Spielberg’s exact role in the hiring remains a “black box.”

It’s possible—as one limit of the “box”—that Spielberg was told a rose-tinted version of Marshall’s story, or otherwise decided to forgive him, along with Radford and Vane (insofar as he knew their role in the conspiracy to hire and shelter the children illegally). In this scenario, even the strongest resemblance to Jurassic Park might mean nothing more than Spielberg’s receptive imagination filtering some kind of guilt by association.

It’s also possible, however—as the other limit—that Spielberg was more involved than the public record would suggest in the scripted inclusion of two children into the fatal helicopter scene in Twilight Zone: The Movie.

4. Thumbnail Sketches

The four screenwriters of Jurassic Park (1990-1992), like most of the screenwriters who’ve worked with Spielberg in the past, have attested to the director’s intense mode of conveying his ideas to them, in a manic but highly-structured flow state.

A close reading of the myriad pre-production documents of Jurassic Park, however, reveals the story’s often uncanny resonances with the Twilight Zone accident.

For example:

• Hammond’s financiers are being sued for $2 Million or $20 Million Dollars dollars by a family of a young worker killed in a velociraptor attack fraudulently represented as an “industrial accident” (the story’s inciting incident), echoing the damages claimed and settlement paid to the Chen and Le families.







• In Jurassic Park’s early storyboards, based on “rough thumbnails” by Spielberg, the little girl is depicted as being Asian, with pigtails, holding a doll, when there is no draft of the book or script featuring this description;

According to Jurassic Park illustrator Dave Lowry, brought on in 1991:

Koepp would later say he found the storyboards “enormously helpful. It was like having a large portion of the movie just handed to you, to be able to walk around and soak up the feel of what the movie’s supposed to be like.”

By the time this sequence got to Koepp, it had already been locked. “I was handed a pile of storyboards. [...] The visual sequence was done, I just typed it up. And I got a very nice compliment, he said, “boy, that action is all so well-described.”

In Jurassic Park, two children, a boy and a girl, are repeatedly put in danger of violent death from above. E.g.:

The Hammond character was changed from a greedy businessman in Crichton’s book, to an eccentric, well-meaning dreamer by Koepp’s drafts.

According to Koepp, “Steven identified with him, whether consciously or not.”

Spielberg has always compared movies to dreams, but more recently he’s been comparing them to therapy as well.

Speaking on Catch Me If You Can with Scorsese in 2002, Spielberg said: it takes, sometimes, something very Freudian to get me to say, “Well, this is interesting; I better read beyond page 50.”

In HBO’s authorized 2017 documentary, Spielberg, he tells the camera, “I’ve avoided therapy because movies are my therapy.”

Spielberg has repeatedly told the story of his first experience with a therapist, his father’s therapist, which Spielberg said was to get a draft deferment out of Vietnam.

And in 2022, during press for The Fabelmans, he told an anecdote of his time with his father’s Freudian analyst.

In a 1978 Rolling Stone interview, Spielberg went into more detail about the sessions.

The Fabelmans (2022) especially reflects a deep respect for Freudian tropes, such as the Oedipus complex (clip) and castration anxiety (clip).

What Spielberg downplays as “extemporaneous bullshit sessions” sounds like the standard-at-the-time Freudian practice of narrative-form free-association, and matches the format with which Spielberg would go on to use with most of the screenwriters he worked with over the course of his career.

In other words, applying a Freudian lens to Spielberg’s work is more than fair, it’s basically required based on the director’s own testimony, as part of an overall effort to understand that director’s body of work.

According to Freud, all dreams (and, as a corollary, all artworks) are disguised attempts at wish-fulfillment, with the wishful impulse “often of a very repellent kind, which is foreign to the waking life of the dreamer and is consequently disavowed by him with a surprise of indignation.” Because the “repressed material itself will never occur to the patient, but only something which approximates to it in an allusive way,” the analyst must listen carefully to the stream of associations for unusual patterns.

I also consider the implications of this connection for Jurassic Park’s meaning as a major Western cultural text, known by those who grew up in the ‘90s practically by chapter and verse. Jurassic Park, by the time of its final drafts by David Koepp, became a highly self-conscious, highly self-reflexive work, in which a group of archaeologists working at a dig site, are flown away to a futuristic island, where they witness a stunning display of miraculous new creative technology, explained in a movie theatre/theme park/ride, that promises to capture the imagination of the entire planet. This sequence reenacts the way the filmmakers first encountered CGI and, famously, added it to the production, making practical effects all but “extinct.”

As Koepp notes, both filmmakers were aware of the story’s “meta-implications,” namely that Jurassic Park the movie was financed by Universal Studios on the back of its colossal merchandising potential.

The implications pertained not only to the present, but to the past, as Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), along with George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), is closely associated with the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster—a simultaneous revolution in storytelling and marketing. Blockbusters reshaped the New Hollywood countercultural sensibility into a more affirmative “hero’s return” structure, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s concept of the “mono-myth,” a universal narrative pattern purportedly underlying all stories, building on the psychological theories of Carl Jung, Freud’s more optimistic successor.

Pauline Kael, who had been musing on the problem for years, finally passed judgement after Raiders:

She eventually produced her iconic critique of Spielberg:

It’s a line of critique that’s persisted to the present day, for example, in Martin Scorsese’s critique of superhero films:

The story’s creative technology is critiqued by Dr. Malcolm as an act of hubris, having at some point crossed a tipping point to inevitable but unpredictable cosmic blowback. Later, he frames the T-Rex attack as man’s punishment for “killing” God, alluding to the dictum popularized by Western philosophy’s most ferocious moral critic, Nietszche, whom Freud admired as having “a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live."

Although Grant admits “Malcolm was right,” in the specific sense, it’s actually his own more optimistic conjecture which is validated by the discovery of the immaculately-conceived raptor eggs. Malcolm’s prediction, “Life finds a way,” does not necessarily mean that the cosmos will punish us for our transgressions—or must, for us to learn—sometimes, it will be enough for us to be guided back to the path, chastened but intact. And so in the end Grant is poised to accept creation as a generally compassionate and redemptive phenomenon, and move on to the next stage of his life—fatherhood—echoing Spielberg’s state of mind prior to the birth of his first son, Max, with his first wife, Amy Irving, on June 13th, 1985.

Spielberg married his second wife, Kate Capshaw, on October 12th, 1991. The Spielberg-Capshaw family eventually included seven children, a mix of biological and adopted: Max (from Spielberg's previous marriage), Theo (whom Capshaw had adopted prior to their marriage and whom Spielberg later adopted), Sasha, Sawyer, Mikaela (also adopted), Destry, and Jessica Capshaw from Kate’s previous marriage. Capshaw converted to Judaism before the marriage; Spielberg studied along with her, later reflecting that he had "learned more in one year than I had learned all through formal Jewish training” (McBride 57). Including, one would expect, the principles of teshuvah (i.e., that forgiveness is best sought directly from the aggrieved party, rather than resolved privately in the theatre of the soul).

It was around this time that Spielberg had been doing some psychotherapy—his second, less talked-about therapy experience.

Possibly, that therapist was John Bradshaw, a guru specializing in healing the inner child, by imaginatively regressing his subject(s) back to their early childhood. According to Bradshaw, Spielberg was deeply impressed by his work. Los Angeles magazine reported that in February of 1992, they met at Spielberg’s house to discuss a TV show Spielberg had been convincing him to do. Bradshaw says, “Steven looked at me on the set of Hook and said, ‘This could be the most powerful television program of all time.’” Spielberg must have valued something about Bradshaw’s analysis, as he hired him as an on-set consultant for Hook, and cast his daughter in the movie.

Spielberg’s breakthrough on Jurassic Park provided the catharsis necessary to move on.

Finally, at the 1994 Oscars, Spielberg received the prize that had eluded him first for Jaws (1975), and then for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Hollywood’s most coveted prize: the Oscar for Best Director.

I have friends who have won this before. But—and I swear…—I have never held one before. This is the first time I’ve ever had one of these in my hand.

Later he added: “this is the best drink of water after the longest drought in my life.”

He also would go on to rise to the challenge of his next stage in life, becoming himself a studio mogul, as one of the three founding members of Dreamworks SKG.

In media theorist Carolyn Kane’s Chromatic Algorithms (2015), she characterizes the narrative form as “Hollywood’s commodity par excellence.” Through the application of Joseph Campbell’s mythological theory, the narrative form has supposedly been successfully reduced to its essential structure, and become a well-rehearsed format for producers and spectators alike.

In fact, a “new Jurassic era” under Executive Producer Frank Marshall is, as of this writing, just on the horizon.

In Crichton’s novel, in the original ending, Hammond falls into a narcotic stupor before he is eaten alive by small dinosaurs.

Who dictates the terms of forgiveness for the powerful?

The problem is that when American ideology—particularly Democratic (left-wing) ideology—is used as a shield to justify international power abuses, it loses its claim to moral authority, upon which so many hopes depend.

"To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world." (Aristotle, De Anima)