Creator/Creature Relationships in Other Movies

(Warning: This post contains spoilers of the Jurassic Park movies and The Truman Show)

In my last post, I examined Tron: Legacy in light of how the creators (users) were related to the creature (programs) and spontaneously generated being (isos). That movie was in error because the creator had no real power over his creation. In this post, I want to look at a couple other movies which also have the creator/creature relationship as a central focus of the story.

The Jurassic Park series uses a classic plot: scientists create or bring to life creatures which then get loose and attack the scientists (and any innocent bystanders). In these movies, there are references to the Jurassic Park scientists as the creator of the dinosaurs. For instance, in the second movie, the CEO of INGEN says, in reference to the dinosaurs, “A creature brought back from extinction has no rights. We made them, we own them.” And in the third movie, while walking through an old laboratory where the dinosaurs were bred, one of the characters asks, “So this is how you make dinosaurs?” and the paleontologist character answers, “No, this is how you play god.”

But, despite their status as creator, the scientists loose control of the dinosaurs, who escape their cages and escape genetic failsafes which were supposed to make their propagation impossible. The movie attributes the ability of the dinosaurs to escape and survive apart from their creators as the result of nature. “Nature will find a way” was the ominous warning given before everything went haywire. So in the Jurassic Park movies, blind, undirected nature was a more powerful force than human intelligence.

Or at least, that’s what they wanted you to think. Ironically, nature had nothing to do with the events in the movie. Rather, it was human shortcomings that facilitated the escape of the dinosaurs. First, it was a human who, motivated by greed, shut down the power in the park which allowed the dinosaurs to escape. Second, the dinosaurs had been engineered to not be able to breed, since all the dinosaurs produced were female. Yet, the dinosaurs were capable of breeding. The reason was because of amphibian DNA inserted into their genomes. This amphibian DNA was used to fill in gaps in the dinosaurs’ DNA so that a complete genome could be created. Allowing the dinosaurs to breed was an unintended consequence of the amphibian DNA. So the dinosaurs escaped not because the creature usurped the creator, but because the humans were not the real creators of the dinosaurs: they were merely using pre-existing parts and information. As one character in the first movie said, “You stood on the shoulders of giants, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, put it on a tray, and now you want to sell it, you’re selling it!” He may have intended the “giants” to be evolutionary process, but as evolution had nothing to do with the events in the movie, “giants” would better mean the original creator of the dinosaurs, namely, God.

Another movie I want to analyze is The Truman Show. There are several allusions to a creator/creature relationship existing between two of the characters in the movie: Truman and Christof. Christof was the creator of a TV show and Truman was the star, only Truman didn’t know it. Truman lived in an artificial world controlled by Christof and populated by actors following scripts directed by Christof.

As the movie progresses, Truman begin to notice irregularities and peculiarities that cause him to question the reality of his world. The climax of the movie occurs when Truman has reached the edge of the artificial world as he attempts to leave. Christof had been watching Truman’s escape, throwing various hazards in Truman’s way attempting to get him to turn back. Finally, Christof speaks to Truman directly, his voice broadcast to Truman from out of the clouds. When he first hears this voice speaking to him, Truman asks, “Who are you?” Christof answers, “I am the creator… of a popular TV show.” Obviously, Christof sees himself as a god of his little world and Truman is his pet subject. While trying to talk Truman into returning to the life he was familiar with, Christof says, “ know you better than you know yourself.” Truman quickly responds, “You never had a camera inside my head!” And of course, Christof did not. Christof’s failure was the gimmick he built into the show: the star of the show didn’t know he was on TV and thus was following no scripts. Despite attempting to be a god, Christof failed because his subject (Truman) was not his creation, and thus Truman was not subject to nor inferior to Christof, but rather was his equal.

Here is the comparison between Tron: Legacy, the Jurassic Park movies, and The Truman Show: all portray a creator/creature relationship but they do it in various degrees of reality. In Tron: Legacy, the creator and creature are equals, because in the world of Tron: Legacy, the creator is a weaker entity than nothing. This portrayal is in stark contrast to reality. In the Jurassic Park movies, the creator/creature relationship is accurate. Since the creator only re-assembled pre-existing parts, the creature was not a novel creation and was capable of escaping the creator. However, the Jurassic Park movies err by attributing the escape of the creatures to the force of nature. The Truman Show is the most accurate, for it shows the folly of a man trying to absolutely control something he did not create.