French philosopher Roland Barthes proposes a most illuminating idea in his landmark work on literary theory and the search for meaning in works of fiction, S/Z. Barthes suggest that the act of rereading a novel is act of aggression against the very foundation of a capitalist economy that has evolved from subsisting on production to subsisting on consumption. Returning to a work of fiction is, Barthes suggests, “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us "throwaway" the story once it has been consumed ("devoured").
The point being that if you are spending time rereading a book like, say, Jurassic Park, you aren’t spending that time reading another book like, say, The Lost World . Which means you are not contributing to the strength of the economy by buying another book, reading it, tossing it away and repeating the process over and over and over and over and over again. Even more dangerously, each subsequent reading of Jurassic Park might be just the ticket toward discovering a secret hidden subversive message. It can be tough to find those on a first reading in which you attention is engaged by surface features like character, plot and emotional response.
The plot of Jurassic Park depends upon your acceptance that mosquitoes feeding on the blood of dinosaurs can eventually be used to extract dinosaur DNA. The hundreds of millions of dollars paid by those who bought Michael Crichton’s book or the Steven Spielberg film based upon the book suggest that most fans have little to no problem accepting that particular strain of highly improbable science fiction. But how easily can you swallow the following: the exploitation by the bloodsucking mosquito of the dinosaurs that actually provides the means for "Jurassic Park" to turn a profit is a perfect metaphor for capitalism.
Barthes allows for a few exceptions to this aggression against capitalist ideology: kids, old people and professors are allowed to indulge in the anti-capitalist deed of revisiting a text. Professors are insulated intellectuals who are already blind to the glories of Big Business, old people are too set in their ways to be affected by subversive ideas and kids don’t care.
Jurassic Park has traditionally been dismissed as just another typical summer Hollywood thriller that formed the basis for another traditional Hollywood summer blockbuster. Or, put another way, the original literary creation and its progeny are by definition devoid of any genuinely profound and insightful meaning with anything actually important to say about the state of culture or society. Commercialization, commodification and marketing of Crichton’s ridiculously successful capitalist marketer’s wet dream seems secondary to any inherent meaning exiting on either a narrative or philosophical level. In fact, it almost goes without saying that extended analyses related to Jurassic Park are far more numerous in marketing and advertising journals than academic journals. Do not be surprised if over time the balance between words devoted to those oppositional publications shifts to a more equitable state.
The inescapable reality is that the narrative content of Jurassic Park the novel and all subsequent marketing and merchandising related to its sequel, films and assorted merchandising enterprises is not just an example of integrated marketing, but an integrated thematic coherence which serves to reveal one of the paradoxical contradictions that keeps the engine of capitalism greased. Michael Crichton’s inspired idea that is dependent upon the exploitation of the bloodsucking mosquito by the dinosaurs reveals—upon the closer scrutiny provided by the anti-capitalist act of re-reading—how even a blockbuster “summer thriller” can work as a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda with the potential to shape exponentially more minds than the grungy pamphlets produced by socialists combined.
