Science Show

Michael Crichton was a doctor who went on to make movies including Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton died this week, November 4, 2008. By way of a tribute, we present an excerpt from an address he made at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1999.

Robyn Williams: Michael Crichton died last week. He was an unlikely Hollywood hero. Enormously tall, bending down under low ceilings, and funny talking to big crowds, but a bit scratchy later in life as he took on the various climate orthodoxies with books such as State of Fear. Here he is in Anaheim ten years ago talking about a New York Times article on why films are not more realistic, as they should be perhaps.

Michael Crichton: A variant complaint is to say the story doesn't need one or another additional element. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, whom I very much admire, is quoted in The Times article as saying; 'The natural world is fascinating in its own right. It really doesn't need human drama to be fascinating.' And he wondered why Jurassic Park had to have any people in it at all, when it already had dinosaurs.

Of course the natural world is fascinating in its own right, but Jurassic Park is not the natural world. The jungle is on a soundstage at Universal. It has been built to suit the action; if an actor has to climb a tree, the fibreglass bark is supported inside with metal girders to hold the extra weight. The whole thing is lit by artificial light. And for the most part, the dinosaurs on this set aren't there at all, they're added later by computer. The dinosaurs are photo-realistic animations, exactly like Mickey Mouse, except with more pixels.

Furthermore, no one knows what dinosaurs looked like or how they behaved. Technical advisors can't tell you, because no one knows. We have skeletal remains, some trackways, and some impressions, even, of skin texture. But the minute you start adding muscles and skin colour and movement and behaviour, you're guessing. Therefore, the film portrayal of dinosaurs in that movie is fantasy. A novelist imagined their behaviour, artists imagined their appearance, their actions were honed, and repeatedly revised at Industrial Light and Magic until they looked right to Steven Spielberg. There is nothing remotely real about them.

But let's imagine, for a moment, that dinosaurs were real and you could film a sort of Discovery Channel segment about them. Would that film be real? Are any of the nature films we see on television 'real'? For the most part no, because those films take raw footage, sometimes filmed over years, and cut it together to make a familiar narrative; the young cub goes on its own, meeting amusement and danger. Mother protects and defends her cute babies. The male is banished from his harem and sulks. And on and on. These stories frequently do not occur in front of the cameras. They occur in the cutting room.

Why are the films cut that way? Because people like stories. They find sequential narratives, even when palpably untrue, to be interesting and organising. In fact when people go on safari to Africa they're disappointed to find that the animals aren't acting out little half-hour vignettes they've come to expect from television. And even when they do find a real-life episode, it often lasts too long; a dominance fight between hippos can go on for hours, with no convenient commercial breaks in which to change film and go to the bathroom.

Dr Dawkins said he didn't know why you needed people in the story. The answer is that the person who dreamed up this particular fiction wanted it to be that way. It was written to revive the corny movies of people and dinosaurs together that I had loved in childhood; King Kong, One Million Years BC, all of that. Jurassic Park is meant to stand in a long line of related movies. It is explicitly a work of fiction. The natural world is entirely irrelevant.

Robyn Williams: Michael Crichton. I recorded him in Anaheim, Los Angeles. A final thought from him on why there are so many bad new stories at the movies.

Michael Crichton: Why can't we have positive stories? One answer is that people like scary movies. They enjoy being frightened. But the more important answer is that we live in a culture of relentless, round-the-clock boosterism for science and technology. With each new discovery and invention, the virtues are always oversold, and the drawbacks understated.

Who can forget the freely mobile society of the automobile, the friendly atom, the paperless office, the impending crisis of too much leisure time...do you remember that? Were people really going to be satisfying taking up painting? And the era of universal education that would be ushered in by television. We now hear the same utopian claims about the internet. But everyone knows that science and technology are inevitably a mixed blessing. How then will the fears, the concerns, the downside of technology be expressed? Because it has to appear somewhere, it's real. So it appears in movies, in stories, and I would argue that's a very good place for it to appear.

And let's also remember there is genuine reason for concern. As Paul Valery put it, 'The whole question comes down to this; can the human mind master what the human mind has made?' That's the question that troubled Oppenheimer. It troubled the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It troubles many scientists now. And it should.

Robyn Williams: Michael Crichton ten years ago. He died last week. You can hear him at length with me on In Conversation next Thursday at 7:30pm, ABC Radio National, on why scientists are not so badly portrayed in the media after all.

Guests

Michael Crichton
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

David Fisher

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