There’s no shortage of doomsday scenarios out there. Glance through the daily news and take your pick. We will soon destroy ourselves through nuclear weapons or climate change or political malfeasance or biological terrorism or just sheer stupidity. And if those don’t get you scared, pundits have a hundred other options, some in small case (asteroid impact, solar flare), others in bold capital letters (the Rapture, the Singularity).
Pick your poison!
But the most subversive notion of all is a seemingly benign one: namely, the idea that we will entertain ourselves to death . Only a few iconoclastic writers have tackled this very idea in recent years, perhaps most notably David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest , where he describes a video so mesmerizing that viewers can’t stop watching it. (I note that Wallace opts for the big capital letter here too, calling his destructive film The Entertainment —and also that his working title for I nfinite Jes t had been A Failed Entertainment .) Around the time Wallace died by suicide in 2008, I started seeing people everywhere staring into small screens—so addicted that they had to carry those screens with them wherever they went. He didn't live long enough to experience smartphone addiction, but he v ery much anticipated it in his most famous book.
Horror fiction has rarely tackled this scenario. After all, how scary can entertainment be? Is there really much room for suspense and dramatic tension in death by diversion? Ye t a handful of genre writers have explored this notion. Kathe Koja, in The Cipher , presents us with a group of slackers who can’t stop watching a videotape made inside a bite-sized black hole. Even earlier, Robert W. Chambers explored the notion of a dangerous literary work, called The King in Yellow , that destroyed the lives of all who stumble across it.
But no one did more for the notion of "death by entertainment" than Michael Crichton. More than any other author, Crichton grasped that this story line possessed untapped dramatic potential. The problem with tales such as The King in Yellow is that they work better as concepts than plot devices. Few things are less suspenseful than an account of someone dying by sitting in a comfy chair and reading a book or watching a video. (Just thinking about that puts me in mind of that Monty Python comfy chair Inquisition skit .) But Crichton smartly realized that death by entertainment in an era of advanced technology could involve some very terrifying spectacles indeed.
Crichton first explored the dark side of entertainment in his 1973 film Westworld — for which he served as screenwriter and director. He found movie studios reluctant to make this film about a high tech amusement park that can prove fatal to its paying customers. Who can be surprised when you consider its implicit commentary on the entertainment industry? Crichton claimed he offered this story to every major studio. "They all turned down the project except for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer…. Nobody who had a choice made a picture at Metro, but then we didn't have a choice." The studio, for its part, kept a tight control on the budget, which was around one million dollars, and forced Crichton to film the entire movie in just 30 days. Yet the end result was not just a highly profitable film, but that most craved of all Hollywood ambitions: a brand franchise. The success of the recent HBO Westworld TV series shows that Crichton’s vision can still grab audiences almost a half-century after his initial cinematic treatment.
But Crichton had an even bigger vision for death by entertainment, which he unleashed on his readers 17 years later with his novel Jurassic Park . This too would turn into a hit film and brand franchise. Universal secured movie rights in a bidding war involving four studios, even before the book’s publication, and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation became the highest-grossing film ever at the time of its release.
I’m hardly surprised. Death by entertainment becomes much more interesting when the entertainers are enormous dinosaurs. The spectacle of a T-rex chasing a jeep or velociraptors stalking frightened children is sure to grab an audience’s attention. In the heat of the action, the more philosophical aspects of the story might get lost in the jungle mist. That’s a shame, because Crichton has many important things to say about the shallowness of a society obsessed with entertainment and the irresponsibility of scientists in the under-regulated world of genetic and biological science. You don’t need to go to Westworld to experience a Wild West free-for-all; just read about the experiments underway at labs around the world to come up with human-animal hybrids or lay the groundwork for DNA-build slave servers. But if Crichton’s message is dwarfed by his dinos, it’s not because is message is too small-minded. It’s just because those dinosaurs are so bloody large.
The plot could hardly be simpler. An obsessed business man named John Hammond has found a way to bring back extinct dinosaurs from DNA strands embedded in amber. He embarks on a plan to create a dinosaur theme park on an island off the coast of Costa Rica, where well-heeled tourists can see these Jurassic era creatures up close and personal.
But delays and cost overruns have raised the suspicions of his investors. To allay their concerns, Hammond agrees to bring a small team of experts to the island to view Jurassic Park in advance of its official opening. He hopes to secure their vote of confidence, and reignite the enthusiasm of his nervous backers. In this tense situation, paleontologist Alan Grant, paleobotanist Ellie Staler, mathematician Ian Malcolm and lawyer Donald Gennaro arrive in Isla Nublar, where the top secret park in is the final stages of preparation.
Crichton adds a few interesting subplots—a rival company is trying to steal dinosaur embryos, babies in Costa Rica are getting bitten or devoured by mysterious ‘lizards’, etc. But the power in Crichton’s writing isn’t the narrative arc—or prose style or character development. His strong suit is his science, learned during Crichton’s student days at Harvard and Harvard Medical School.
From the moment he made his reputation, with the amazing bestseller The Andromeda Strain from 1969, this author grabbed readers with the eerie plausibility that he imparted to his tales through the careful gathering and presentation of the scientific methodology of his characters. When you read The Andromeda Strain , you believed in the possibility of a disease spreading in just the manner outlined in Crichton’s pages. And when you saw Westworld or Jurassic Park , you found enough of it credible to get you thinking— and worrying—about the entertainment options of the future. In a revealing admission, Crichton once mentioned that people misunderstood Westworld as a story about technology malfunction. Instead, they should have focused on the motives of the people running the theme park. That, he felt, was the real locus of danger.
The same could be said of Jurassic Park . The obvious monsters are those huge dinosaurs. But the real problem is the people who brought them back to life. How odd to think that the scariest things in this story aren't the T-rex and the velociraptor, but that person in the three-piece suit, and that other one in the white lab coat.
Too bad they don’t make brand franchises about the people who create the brand franchises. But that may be the most compelling horror story of them all, and it’s laid out in Crichton’s oeuvre for those who have the eyes to see it. Yet how many people even consider that his entertaining stories are actually a critique of entertainment? Maybe the audience should mull over that idea. For a start, they might consider turning their attention away from that flickering screen in their hands and wonder, instead, why they are holding it in the first place.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.