Is Jurassic World sexist? That’s the question that seems to be on everyone’s cyber-lips, for some reason. I don’t claim to know the answer, but I do claim that some of the arguments flying around to that effect are somewhat specious at best, if not entirely hyperbolic.
People can be offended by whatever they want, of course, and it’s been quite the season for it. We started the summer with Avengers: Age of Ultron, a big dumb action movie decried for the sexism of having its amoral super-assassin talk about her uterus and get captured by the bad guy for five minutes. Then came Mad Max: Fury Road, a big dumb action movie hailed as a triumph of feminism because Charlize Theron did more stuff in it than Mad Max. Now we’ve arrived at Jurassic World (known in foreign markets as Jurassic Park 4: Dumber Than a Box of Rocks), a big dumb action movie whose unabashed sexism includes having its female protagonist wear heels and learn to care about her family.
Why do we expect so much from big dumb action movies, again?
Let’s not forget that the first Jurassic Park is the only real movie in the franchise; all three sequels are just monster flicks populated with stock characters who exist only to carry the plot between scenes of people being eaten. Which is exactly where you expect to find the most nuanced representation of progressive gender politics. I just wanted to see people running from dinosaurs, not get sucked into an Internet vortex of amateur feminist film theory.
A common thread I’ve noticed in several articles is that apparently the Jurassic Park franchise is renowned for its strong female characters. I had never heard this before, and I suspect that it only recently became the case (when people reacted negatively to the lead female character in the latest movie). Multiple reviews, however, talk about how Jurassic World’s Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) represents a step backward from the previous films’ iconic feminist characters.
Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler from the original JP was a fine character, sure: strong, confident, reasonable, passionate about her work, and equally passionate about having kids with Dr. Grant. Her big scene in the movie comes when a man with a gun escorts her across the park so she can flip a circuit breaker then run screaming from dinosaurs. No disrespect to Ellie (the honest reactions of the first film’s characters to their situations is one of its many strengths), but let’s take off the feminism-tinted glasses.
Then there was Julianne Moore’s memorable character Jeff Goldblum’s Girlfriend from The Lost World. She inadvertently kick-starts the entire regrettable plot of the movie by going to Dinosaur Island, prompting Jeff Goldblum to fly to her rescue. The first thing she does when he arrives is tell him she doesn’t need a man to save her. The second thing she does is piss off a herd of stegosaurs and need Jeff Goldblum to save her.
Even Téa Leoni’s character from Jurassic Park III is given higher marks than Claire. You’re a better person than I am if you can remember anything about Téa Leoni’s character from Jurassic Park III, besides how she lied to Dr. Grant and tricked him into risking his life to help rescue her son from the dinosaurs. Endangering others to save your stupid kid is a more feminist character trait than coming to realize you can be more than an uptight business professional all the time.
It’s also Jurassic Park III in which we learn that Ellie Sattler, fearless kickass adventuress from the first movie, has settled down and become a stay-at-home mom. At least two reviewers leapt to defend this development, however, pointing out that this was perfectly okay because it was Ellie’s choice. Unlike Claire, whose character development was the result of a gun pointed at her head, or something. Oh no, her sister told her she should have kids someday; now she has to do it.
The most dishonest thing about this is that the third movie’s bungled handling of its returning characters didn’t even need to be taken into account. It was a cash-in sequel with no interest in respecting the character arcs of the first film (just look at poor Dr. Grant, who is still a lonely, childless grump in Jurassic Park III, despite the growth and change he underwent in the original). It’s not the viewer’s job to justify bad writing. But that isn’t allowed to be the case, because these arguments hinge on painting Jurassic World as the black sheep in a franchise of otherwise unimpeachable feminism.
Claire, in contrast to her predecessors, stealth-kills a Dimorphodon to save her boyfriend and uses herself as bait to lure a Tyrannosaurus into battle with the evil hybrid dinosaur to save everyone. Despite apparently being a horrible sexist stereotype, she’s kind of the most badass chick in these movies. Except for Jeff Goldblum’s adorable daughter Kelly, who uses gymnastics to kick a Velociraptor out a window (note: this is the most stupid thing that happens in any of these movies/in any movie).
All of her accomplishments and character development are undercut, however, by her wardrobe. More than one critic, male and female alike, derided Claire’s skirt suit and stiletto heels, specifically calling her out as a “damsel in distress” because of them, which makes me think they don’t know what that term means (one prominent review even included Claire’s bangs as part of that problematic ensemble, which . . . what? I mean, what?). None of them can understand why, when the park she runs breaks down in the middle of a business day and her nephews are lost in the dinosaur onslaught, Claire doesn’t go home and change out of her work clothes into more practical jungle gear.
Honestly, I don’t get it. Aren’t we pretty blatantly reaching for something—anything—to complain about now? I remember reading an article last year criticizing the female protagonists of popular young adult franchises (Divergent, The Hunger Games, etc.) for all having the same body type, but instead of advocating diversity of female empowerment, it just came off as body-shaming petite women. Have we come so far that we’ve somehow looped back around on ourselves and become the thing we hate? I don’t know what else would qualify us to judge this character based on the way she dresses. How disappointingly reductive.
So what if Claire wears heels for the whole movie? She kicks ass in her heels, without calling attention to that fact. She dresses like a professional corporate executive; there’s nothing objectifying or exploitative about her outfit at all. It suits her character and personality—she belongs in a boardroom, not roaming around out in the field. Despite being ill-suited to the action hero role, however, she doesn’t shy away from venturing out into the Mesozoic wilderness to rescue her dimwitted nephews.
But because Chris Pratt, a Navy veteran-turned-dinosaur wrangler hired by the park’s CEO specifically for that talent, is a badass from the start instead of learning how to become one, Claire’s journey is somehow negated. Her heroic actions are just “mirroring” Pratt’s (no examples given), and played for the novelty of a girl kicking ass (no examples given). In reality, she’s just an object of disrespect, a punchline for her male colleagues’ inappropriate humor (no examples given).
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the only park employee who offers Claire any insubordination is Chris Pratt, and it’s not because he’s a macho hunk and she’s a fragile little girl with the vapours, but because he’s a douche. “He should have been fired for sexual harassment!” Yeah, but . . . it’s a movie, that’s his character. The “charming rogue” would be an asshole in real life, but we’re still allowed to find him a fun archetype in fiction, right? In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo sexually harasses Princess Leia for the whole movie. These are exciting adventure films, not how-to guides for interacting with your female coworkers.
The last line of defense, of course, is hyperbole, also known as “bald-faced lying.” These professional film critics/gender commentators would have you believe that Chris Pratt is “shocked,” “horrified,” and “disgusted” that Claire doesn’t know her nephews’ ages, but I saw the movie too and he just looked momentarily confused, then immediately moved on to something else. The movie did not want us to hate Claire for this, but it seems that plenty of people wanted it to want us to.
How about that ending, though, where Claire willfully decides to throw away her career so she can get married and become a mother, because having children is the answer to literally all of a woman’s problems? Virtually every condemnatory diatribe against this movie that I read included this summary of its conclusion. Except that Claire doesn’t get married or have children, she just gets a boyfriend, and she doesn’t quit her job to become a housewife so much as the company she works for self-destructs when the dinosaurs it created start eating its patrons.
(Childrearing is hardly presented as a panacea in any case. Claire’s sister, Karen, only sends her kids to the island in the first place because she’s in the middle of an embittered divorce with David Wallace over the rights to Suck It®. Many were quick to jump on her suggestion that Claire settle down as the film asserting that marriage and children are key to a woman’s happiness. Except Karen’s marriage is a sham and her life is falling apart. So much for eternal wedded bliss.)
The final lines of the movie actually imply an open, unfettered future. Having shed her self-imposed restrictions, Claire is finally able to look ahead without the need for constant certainty and meticulous planning. “What do we do now?” she asks as the remnants of her old life burn down around her. “Probably stay together. For survival,” Chris Pratt answers, smarmy egotist that he is.
Maybe they’ll stay together and maybe they won’t. The point is that Claire is now capable of seeing all her options, not just the safe ones she can control. As Jurassic World CEO Simon Masrani says earlier in the film, “The key to a happy life is to accept you are never actually in control.” It’s like a theme or something.
So, then, is Jurassic World actually sexist, or just T-rexist? There is one central aspect of the film, buried beneath the circular arguments and unconvincing justifications, that the above clutter was invented to protest. Claire is a successful, career-driven woman, and her arc over the course of the movie involves her becoming receptive to a life beyond that career by forming a relationship with a man and two surrogate children. Through her ordeal she is “softened,” changed in a way that paints her earlier worldview as incorrect, or at least incomplete.
This is, if not sexist, not particularly deep or original either (but consider that this is the third sequel in a 22-year-old franchise about dinosaur clones and you can see how much the studio prioritizes depth and originality); Dr. Grant had almost the same arc back in the first film, after all. If it is sexist, however, it’s so mild and non-malicious I can’t see calling it out as anything harsher than “somewhat problematic.”
But what Hollywood movies aren’t “somewhat problematic”? What is it about Jurassic World specifically that has drawn so much ire? Many articles credited their initial awareness of the movie’s sexism to “well-respected voice” of feminism Joss Whedon’s now-infamous tweet. Good call, guys, but maybe we shouldn’t jump to appeal to the authority of the dude who just wrote a movie where a character talks about how her hysterectomy makes her feel like a monster. (That’s something that happened, right?)
“Like so, so many of you, I bought a ticket to see Jurassic World this past week,” wrote Kelly Lawler of USAToday.com. “I went to recapture that feeling I had when I saw the original as a child. Unfortunately, I walked out of the theater not with the sense of wonder and amazement Jurassic Park gave my 10-year-old self, but instead with a familiar mix of anger and depression.”
Of all the reactions I read, this one saddened me the most, because it was the most honest and most understandable, and also one of the most unfair. We can’t go home again, Kelly. If we watched the original Jurassic Park today for the first time, who among us would still feel that childish sense of wonder and amazement? Who would be bored by the middle-aged cast, the talkiness and debates about morality, the low body count and scant dinosaur screen time, and play Angry Birds on our phones until something loud happened? Who would be underwhelmed by no-longer-special special effects we’ve seen a thousand times before in a thousand other movies, a thousand times as big and fast and loud? Who would live-tweet their outraged scorn for how Ellie Sattler does nothing but talk about wanting babies, get fought over by two men, shriek while being chased by monsters, and break down crying at the end? We can never go home again, never look at something new with fresh eyes, never allow ourselves to be shaped by an experience rather than trying to reshape the experience to fit what we already know. Maybe Jurassic World is perfect; maybe it’s we who are broken.
Then Kelly started talking about how the movie was brainwashing little girls into believing they are morally bad people if they don’t become mothers (“Won’t somebody please think of the children!”) and she lost me.
It’s perfectly natural to lash out when we perceive a threat to something we care about, have fought over and struggled for. Sexism is all around us, its talons sunk deep into the fabric of our everyday lives, so we’ve conditioned ourselves to be on the lookout for it at all times. On the bus, on the subway, at work, at school, on the news, at the club, on the street, in advertisements, online, in the movies. We can’t escape from it, and we’ve gotten used to the idea that we never will. So when we see something, even something ultimately harmless and well-intentioned, that sets off the subtlest of alarm bells in the back of our minds, it’s easy to go off half-cocked with that tweet or Tumblr post or overly self-congratulatory web editorial.
If you felt offended or belittled by Jurassic World, that is of course your right. But let’s allow ourselves at least a little honesty: even if the movie is sexist, most of the ways people have gone about arguing it are crap. This is not a particularly feminist film franchise. There is no reason a strong female character can’t wear heels and a skirt and be more comfortable making an itinerary than going on an adventure. There may be some small irony in lambasting a movie for being written exclusively by four men when it was really written by three men and a woman.
Jurassic World has its problems, as every movie does. Some mild form of antiquated chauvinism may well be one of them, but it’s a problem you can encapsulate in a single sentence. If you find yourself writing a dissertation on how sexism is inextricably baked into this movie’s 65-million-year-old DNA, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.
Movie still wasn’t that great though, better luck next time, Chris Fatt.
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