Dr. Ellie Sattler, Jurassic Park, and Narrative Plot. Or It Wasn't About Dinosaurs.

 

It’s a rare moment when I can bring 3 themes into 1 post: leadership, XR, and design. Also, I’m going to be personal. Believe it or not, I’m not really personal on LinkedIn. Enthusiastic, yes. Personal, hardly.

Over the weekend, I wrote a gushing sentence to a friend that I realized I’d never written down before: I became a Biology major in college because of Dr. Ellie Sattler.

A mentor of mine once said writing is thinking. Writing that sentence lead me to do a lot of thinking and reading about her character and on the impact of the Jurassic Park (JP) movie.  I’m not alone as a woman in deciding to go further in STEM because of the Dr. Ellie Sattler character.  So huzzah all the Paleobotanists out there!

We have to time travel to talk about JP. In 1993, we’ve just BARELY broken out of the 1980s. For the first time in STEM history, scientific breakthroughs are being accomplished by teams instead of white men.  Think: AIDS breakthroughs & the Human Genome Project. Teams means women included. Prior to this point, women were the “also rans” in science.  Sisters. Mentioned on the side. Or worse, they had their research stolen. Strong women depicted in media? Disney’s top film of the 80s was The Little Mermaid and Aladdin was just released in 1992. Strong women, not so much. Video tapes existed; the Internet did not. If you wanted to see a movie, you bought a movie theater ticket.

We arrive when the music was rises in cool, dark, air conditioned theaters.  And then you see this: 

 

Caption: A character who does not care what you think because she’s solving a problem.

A character who lays out this line while she holds a stare on the richest daddy around:

“Look…we can discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back” 

 

I took that to mean that women are better in survival situations (not equal, as others took it.) and my life was shaped for the better.

I bought a $5 ticket 3 times over the course of that 1993 summer. Now that’s saying something. To this day, it’s the only movie I’ve bought multiple theater seats for. But realize, I have older brothers that saw Star Wars, what, a bazillion times?

Jurassic Park became the first movie to gross US$1billion.

Reading some commentaries and watching some videos over the past few days, I picked up some tidbits below. Some I agree with, some not.

1. To this day, the scene of the T-Rex crossing the paddock fence HAS NOT YET BEEN BEAT in movie history & you don’t need to try.  True disclosure: the raptor jumping up to the ceiling shot? I still can’t *barely* watch that. I wince too hard.

2. There’s been some 2022 commentary on the age difference between the Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) characters.  It’s been confusing and I’ve decided to weigh in.

In the book, Dr. Ellie Sattler was written as a grad student (Age 23, no advanced degree) but also no relationship. It was apparently Laura Dern’s own idea to give the character a full doctoral degree and in the movie the character holds her own against dinosaurs. In real life, I’m disappointed to say, Laura treats Sam Neill patronizingly and actually “left the party” of JP with Jeff Goldblum, which I find to be a big mistake. (I said this article would be personal, yo.)

 

Caption: The look of faithfulness.

Don’t be like this guy and not see the sexual tension in JP: https://youtu.be/jSPxu3WprSs  As far as the age difference? The problem came in when, in the book, the “relationship” was not there but in the movie it was. Laura was in her late 20s playing early 20s. Sam (then early 40s) continues to feel the (physical) burden of the age difference. If you need help to see what was happening, Deshi Basara has collected these gifs. Notice in gifs 2, 3, and 7 how his body immediately reacts to hers when she touches him. This is chemistry, folks.

I had to wade into all that because the point was that regardless of an age difference (which, arguably could be *less* than 23 years), there was a *quality difference* between Dr. Ian Malcolm and Dr. Alan Grant.

I will concede this one point (I disagreed with so much here that I couldn’t read more than 2 pages of this commentary) that Ellie holds her ground just fine (and doesn’t move despite Alan’s come here gesture) with a metamessage at the Raptor pit: 

 Vogue got an interview with Laura Dern where she points out that the Dr. Ellie Sattler character went on to be an activist and whistleblower. Interesting!! I’ll just leave that right there.

But most I really enjoyed watching these video analyses of the plot of Jurassic Park here and especially by Mike Hill here and why the movie worked when all subsequent versions of JP have not worked. The key was that Steven Spielberg worked in narrative plot. He carried a story all the way through that was human, basic, and emotional. Dinosaurs just happened to be there.

 

But that shows up in my VR/XR consulting work to this day.

The famous quote about rushing into things by the Choatician character Dr. Ian Malcolm:

Ian Malcolm: Don't you see the danger, John, uh, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power's the most awesome force this planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who's found his dad's gun.

Donald Gennaro: It's hardly appropriate to start hurling accusations--

Ian Malcolm: If I may, if I may. Uh, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility... for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it, you had, you've patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now (bangs the table) you're selling it, you wanna sell it, well.

John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody has ever done before.

Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

 

I fight this battle every day.

Industry and indeed some in academia want to use XR liberally in education. Yet, the power of XR is still unknown. Our early research is pointing to one thing that seems firm:

The mind believes what the eye sees.

That means that the XR experiences we put our children into will be real for them.

What power are we wielding in the classroom? Everywhere?

There are those that say “XR is the Empathy Machine! We can create empathy, soft skills in the workplace!” 

Oh yeah?

The most recent research I saw (from 2018) says that empathy coming from XR is a 50/50 gambit. That does not mean that it causes empathy for whatever you want half the time.

It means it causes empathy half of the time and causes the opposite of empathy the other half of the time!  

So, would you like your employees to don a headset to be more empathetic towards race, age, body size? Oh really? How would you like results that say that half of the time, those employees are going to take off the headsets and quietly say to themselves “Thank God I’m not black” 50% of the time? That’s one hell of a bet you are willing to take with XR.

XR is dangerous.

People say “Look at how you can look all around you! 360 degrees! A sphere! Isn’t this cool? Isn’t this new? Just think how this will reach new learners!”

I can take a learner into a new real physical space (for example on a field trip) and have them be overwhelmed. We’re all on the spectrum, remember? Was that cool? Were they reached in a new way when they cried? Would you like for me to even mention harassment events in VR that have already happened? We haven’t yet arrived into market saturation of haptic bodysuits, but it’s coming.

XR is dangerous.

I’d rather have a low, slow, plodding walk into an XR for education experience than every bell and whistle thrown at them the first day. The line “spared no expense” gives me chills.

XR is dangerous and if we aren’t careful, we will damage learners along the way. Jurassic Park should not have been built or opened. Dr. Alan Grant refused to give his endorsement. That was the lesson of the movie.

• I'm proud that I don't endorse some forms of XR (Dr. Alan Grant)
• I'm proud that I throw water on some XR ideas (Dr. Ian Malcolm)
• I'm proud that I tackle problems that no one else can survive. (Dr. Ellie Sattler)

But the parallel lesson of JP was “Build for story. Because the dinosaurs are not real.”

When I encourage XR design, I build for narrative plot. 

I build for emotions, 

because those are real.

 

#XR #Design #JurassicPark #NarrativePlot #InstructionalDesign #DrEllieSattler #DrAlanGrant #DrIanMalcolm #Dinosaurs #VR #VirtualReality #EmpathyMachine #Leadership #WomenInMedia #FemTech #Sexism #BestMovieSceneEver #Whistleblower #Scientist #PreoccupiedWithCould #SparedNoExpense #Emotion #DesignForXR 

Article originally posted same day to LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dr-ellie-sattler-jurassic-park-narrative-plot-wasnt-dodds-ph-d-