Watching Jurassic Park in Tamil Nadu

Something a bit different on my mind this week. Since the cinematic dinosaurs are back on the big screen, I thought I’d share a story about my experience watching the very first Jurassic Park under rather divergent circumstances at opposite extremes of the cinema-viewing technology spectrum!

I remember the excitement upon watching the above cinematic trailer in theaters in San Diego where I was a graduate student in the early 1990s. It had all of us biology grad students really excited. We had devoured the novel upon which the film was based, dissected it, and debated it’s qualities as only nerds studying evolutionary biology could. There was even a more immediate local connection for us since the author Michael Crichton had been a postdoc at the nearby Salk Institute, albeit many years before our cohort started grad school at UC San Diego.

When the movie opened, of course, I lined up for a ticket as I had been raised to do in a cinema crazy (of the Bollywood variety; but more on that some other time) household near Mumbai. I don’t remember if I got tickets for the opening day/show, but am quite sure it must have been within the first week that I dropped my scarce dollars into the Universal Studios coffers for this soon to be juggernaut that would transform cinema. It was money well spent, for me, and most certainly for them.

The first time I saw Jurassic Park was when it was first released in one of the then brand new DTS surround sound equipped multiplexes in San Diego (an AMC theater as I recall, in Mission Valley). This I believe being the first movie using that technology. As a biology nerd, of course, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching dinosaurs come to roaring life in crystal clarity on the big screen, and being blown away by the truly stunning DTS soundtrack while ensconced in new comfy stadium seats. I was also left a bit disappointed at what struck me then as the rather one-dimensional caricatures most human characters had been reduced to from the already limited dimensionality in the source material. Nevertheless, that scene when we first meet the Brachiosaurs grazing on the plains remains indelible in my cinematic memory, as I’m sure it does for anyone who ever got to experience it on a big screen for the first time.

A year or so later, the film finally reached the distant backwaters of rural Tamil Nadu in Southern India where I was doing field research on migratory leaf warblers. I had been carrying out my own annual migrations between California and Tamil Nadu, between Hollywood and Kollywood. One evening, after a long hard day spent trying to catch my little green leaf warblers, my local field assistants invited me to join them on an 8 km bicycle ride into the nearest town with a movie theater, for an evening at the cinema that could not have been more different from the experience in San Diego.

This theater was a warehouse/barn with a big cloth screen strung up at one end, big box speakers on its sides, and no seats on the enormous bare floor which curiously had a rope running right through the middle dividing it into two halves. The mystery of the rope was solved after we had rushed in with the throngs waiting in long lines outside: it was a barrier to keep the male and female members of the audience separated. Obviously, with no seats, the cinema owners could squeeze in (and I do mean that literally) as many viewers as was physically possible, never mind any fire safety codes. As everyone sat down shoulder to shoulder on the dusty floor, eager to watch the spectacle about to unfold, I couldn’t help but wonder how ready they were for the dinosaurs about to step off the screen.

The cacophonous crowd quieted down as soon as the projector was turned on, for this was an audience in perhaps the most cinema-crazy state in India, having elected multiple film stars as chief ministers of the state. The audience reaction to what followed on screen left me astonished. For in that rustic "theater", packed in like cattle, watching a film entirely in American with no subtitles or dubbing, this Tamil-speaking audience reacted almost identically to the one munching popcorn in the plush stadium seats in California. But here I could literally feel the emotions and thrills rippling through the dense mass of rapt bodies. The gasps of awe at the dinosaurs were, of course, to be expected, but what really surprised me were the reactions to the human characters speaking largely incomprehensible American. The mathematician’s cheesy jokes and lame flirtations were laughed at, the old billionaire grandpa admired and then scolded for endangering his grandkids, and of course the T. rex cheered enthusiastically when it ate the lawyer even though lawyers were not such movie staples nor so despised in rural Tamil Nadu as they are in the States.

That is when the true cinematic genius of Spielberg hit me, for he had, in reducing the human characters to relatively simple tropes, turned them into human universals that anyone could relate to (or revile)—something that would likely not have happened had he worried about satisfying the picky nerd in the audience like me instead. It was also where I got a visceral appreciation for something I continue to think has to be an essential quality in any good work of cinema: it has to be elemental in its narrative and visually engaging enough to draw a viewer in even if the dialog is incomprehensible. It is, first and foremost, a visual medium. The DTS sound in the AMC had no doubt made the movie a lot of fun, but it worked here even with the basic speakers sat on the floor next to the screen, for an audience with few English speakers and little familiarity with American accents. I had to doff my hat to Mr. Spielberg as, indeed, a truly great B-movie director!

I vividly remember riding back that night into the forest of Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve with my two field assistants, Sankaran and Kumar (more on them too in some future post). I don’t remember if the moon was up, although my mind projects the road as reasonably moonlit. We pedaled upslope, breathless both from the exertion and the rush from the movie, excitedly chattering all the way about the marvel of dinosaurs as they peppered me with questions. As we rode along the forest road, climbing up the winding road to Mundanthurai plateau—my home away from home during much of that decade—our heads were spinning with visions of dinosaurs in the mysterious darkness of the forest around us. At some point, when we were back to talking about the real forest we were living and doing research in, I remember Sankaran wistfully remarking that he wished we could get some dinosaurs here to protect this park from poachers! I don’t remember if I told him we already had dinosaurs there and that he better be up at dawn the next morning to catch some of the little ones I was studying. I don’t remember if I knew for certain at that point that birds shared ancestry with dinosaurs.

The film also spawned perhaps the cleverest bit of political poster art I have ever seen. At the Tirunelveli bus stand some months later, I stood and marveled and laughed silently at a poster mocking the then Chief Minister (and ex movie superstar) Jayalalitha (referred to as Jaya but mostly known as Jaya Amma for short). Copying the film’s iconic poster design with the profile of the T. rex inside the arch with the words "Jurassic Park" at the top, some local polemicist/cartoonist had replaced T. Rex’s head with Jaya’s, and the title read "Jayassic Park"! To my eternal regret, I did not have a camera and didn't think to steal the poster itself at the time. Periodic searches online have failed to turn up any reference to this poster either. But hat's off again, to Spielberg and to the anonymous local artist for such iconic posters!

Last night, continuing the family tradition, I went to see the latest film in the franchise on the big screen with my kids. After giving up on the abysmal sequel trilogy of a few years ago, we were cautiously hyped again after seeing trailers for this new Rebirth. And thankfully, we were not disappointed! While the film doesn’t break any new ground, and faithfully reproduces many of the beats of the original, it does so competently enough that it held our attention, and even had us tautening in anxiety during the key action sequences. What more can one ask for in a summer popcorn flick?

Meanwhile, I suspect the good people of Ambasamudram are also enjoying watching the new Rebirth this week. The same movie theater appears to still be standing over 3 decades later (see photo above), but inside it now has plush seats to rival those at AMC, or so the internet tells me. You can even buy tickets to showings of the new movie online there right now, without having to wait many months for it to show up as we had to in the old days. And the best part? You can watch it in Tamil too! How fantastic is that? My only wish is that I could join Sankaran and Kumar again, this time with all of our kids, to go see the dinosaurs in that theater again.