Cross-Species Kinship Dilemmas: Adoption and Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park Franchise

abstract:Each of the five films currently comprising Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park series (1993–) presents adoption, with a particular focus on the adoptive father, both as a problem and as the solution to problems within the birth family and the commodity culture within which that family is situated. The series repeatedly traces the process of "substantiation" (we borrow this term from Christine Ward Gailey) by requiring adults to look after children from whom they are at first emotionally as well as genetically distant. Yet the tendency to affirm adoption as a solution to weaknesses in the American family coexists with a readiness to consider thorny issues to which adoption draws attention, including the commodification of children, the exploitation of birth parents, and the ethical dimensions of reproductive biotechnologies. This article examines each installment of the franchise to demonstrate the scope and complexity of the commentary on adoption that the series provides. For while all the films manifest certain structural commonalities, each also focuses on a different adoption-related issue, allowing the viewer to read the collective as a decades-long meditation on the preoccupations of the American adoption community in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.