Welcome you all again ❤ How was my last blog? I hope that it looks well for you because now I am going to guide you to another chapter of media in postmodernism again but it will be deeper into the remarkable thing of postmodern era, it is an overlapping of my first blog but it is more fantasy for you, trust ME 😉 Let’s start with this quote.
‘When I first saw Jurassic Park in the summer of 1993, I was stunned. The visions of sluggish, stupid reptiles in my elementary school’s library books were crushed in the jaws of hot-blooded, supercharged dinosaurs, including the fearsome Velociraptor. Small, agile and smart, these hunters relied on cooperation to stalk their human prey. “Clever girl”, indeed.”
– Brian Switek, the guardian science
Oh Yes! Today we will talk about Jurassic Park to Jurassic World. Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science-fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg. The plot was based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton. Now, let me ask you a question. What is the picture of a dinosaur in your mind? A cute, friendly, peaceful, strong, old, or creepy?
For 3 years-old version of me I will think about the left picture but after I watch Jurassic Park, I am on a right picture. I know you think that it is not related to postmodern BUT in postmodern as had mentioned on the last blog that merging of postmodern influence media to makes the reality be in an imagination and make imagination more reality that is a kind of hyperreality.
Hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
That is the things that you can’t judge between real or not real mostly you can see in technology field that helps media boost the power of themselves, for example, CGI (computer-generated imagery), the invention of this era, help the media to create the picture or movement that hardly or have no chance to perform or create to be real like our example, Jurassic Park.
In 1933, if someone can do a CGI then he is the god of film industry like Steven Spielberg, which postmodern idea is not really popular. In the past, they use a lot of humans to wear a dinosaur costume, robot, and little help of CGI in some difficult scene but nowadays the whole film uses CGI for dinosaur and some robot for specific close up scene. It totally looks unreal, in the past, you feel that the raptor was like a suit of someone or a toy that ran on the scene but it still touchable. Now, our raptor is like a cartoon, they are created by the best CGI looks untouchable in term of feeling but still catch audience attention.
CGI lead the media to the direction that the CGI are more detail and fantasy but not really touchable like in the first Jurassic Park you will see the beauty of real skin but it changed to be the beauty of creativity and skill of the visual maker. We are losing the sense of man-made things and the computer-made become more acceptable. If Jurassic Park goes back to use a human to wear a dinosaur costume again, I think it is like committing suicide because NOW PEOPLE LOVE CGI!
Jurassic Park, making of Raptors // Jurassic world making films
Isn’t it funny that we have to do the unreal more real or use the tools to make the real come up in an unreal style, However, how can you make it real since it isn’t real at the first place? but you must make it real as much as the audience want to, That is what hyperreality does. I did not mean that dinosaur wasn’t real but who saw it? We know the realness of them from their fossil, the appearance was making up or guessing.
For now, Jurassic Park blurred the line between realness and fact since they can bring a prehistoric animal to live but this film also made another thing that beyond hyperreality which is hyper similitude.
Hyper similitude is the way that hyperreality becomes your life until you deny the fact, change, and moreover, you get used to that unreal things until you believe that it is simple. You will lose the sense of excitement when you see that things since you get used to it and you will reject the change of that when the truth come out, for example, by using the real problem from Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park to Jurassic World creates a lot of misunderstanding that the audience will believe it anyway without questioning such as Dilophosaurus don’t have a neck ruffle and was not venomous. He wasn’t a nice guy but he is not bad, he just an animal and I has to tell you that I believed that he was the same in the film until I wrote this blog then I realized that I was on the wrong side for a long time but gladly that I changed.
Dilophosaurus on Jurassic Park
Tyrannosaurus is slower than a Jeep! That is really wrong how can our big giant coolest dinosaur run slower than a Jeep. It is the wrong fact but in the film, MEDIA CAN DO ANYTHINGS. Our T-Rex cannot chase the Jeep in time because he was too slow and the audience make joke of it, some believe in the power of Jeep that they are super fast and some try to claim that T-Rex stay in the cage for too long then it is the first time that he ran the outcome should be like this.
Maybe they have no time to check those facts or maybe they are intended to portray those dinosaur to be like that like we see on Jurassic world then they create super hybrid dinosaur for us “bigger, louder, more teeth.” like this example,
In 1996, the discovery after the first Jurassic park was released the paleontologists found out that some of the dinosaurs are covered by it own feathers such as our favorite Velociraptors. You won’t see it in Jurassic world. Maybe you notice that our raptors in The Lost Wold (Jurassic Park 2) have a little hair but the first Jurassic Park they do not have it just only ‘The lost world’ and after that rapports remain hairless. The reason is after the discovery they decide to put a hair in ‘The lost world’ to make it more realistic unfortunately that style of raptors is not real to the audience, it looks not real for them.
Imagine that your old raptors are always hairless even before Jurassic Park was released but one day you will put a hair on it that is kind of wired to see a fluffy killer but it is true, we super get deep into hairless raptors and if it has a hair then it is not a raptors anymore, not creepy, strong, it looks like a chicken. Even the director of the Jurassic world said that………
That is obvious hyper similitude. We all know those facts but we get deeply used to the old version that we first told. Someone was disappointed on Raptors’s feathers news but how can we fix since we are in hyperreality and now truly get deep to hyper similitude now.
Excitement is necessary for the media producer in postmodernism to appeal their audience nowadays, who want a fact! It is old, it is meta-narratives: fact, knowledge, and moral, we all want to be entertained by something after you watch, it is micro-narrative: combination, fusion, and independent. That way some way that for a long time from 1993-2015 Jurassic park&world, A film about a zoo that fully of dinosaurs. They still keep telling about uncontrolled animal or the deepest detail is human greed such an intertextuality that they keep doing some things, again and again, their own film but for 4 films is it enough for this?
Entertaining is the social norm for the media industry in this era. This film was the best successful dinosaur movie. The hybridity of the film is perfect, a combination of the soundtrack, visual effect, CGI, and the dinosaur was really fit well until they create the next chapter of Jurassic Park (The lost world), Jurassic Park 3, and Jurassic World.
The director makes the things that we taught it gone from our planet earth to live again on the film but hyperreality never stop just only that it will have many more things to discuss in term of postmodern media style. I have to say that we are ending now, I hope that I say it clearly and perfectly. Wish you have a nice day 🙂 and…….
‘The things that entertain you can educate you too.’
Sources of information:
- Jurassic Park
- Raptors’s Behavior
- Jurassic Park have no feathers dinosaur
- Hyperreality Definition
- Dinosaur’s feathers
- 20 facts about Jurassic Park
- Bad Dinosaur
Sources of Picture:
Toey-tankkanang 
I like the way you analyze it and I also agree with you that if we watch from Jurassic Park to Jurassic World, you will loose the excitement because the first time that I watch Jurassic Park it was so scary and look so real to me. But now I kinda get used to it.
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That mean you are hyper similitude now
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I search on Google for the word “Hyper Similitude media” and found your blog. It is an interesting topic actually. Thank you for sharing 🙂
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