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The spreadsheet-worshippers of Hollywood have calculated the No. 1 blockbuster hit of this summer to have been the new CGI mega-sequel Jurassic World: Yet Another One, which would seem to have been about some dinosaurs on an island eating people again. To celebrate the film’s release, an essay was published by gay journalist Dylan B. Jones, who argued that, as he put it, “All the gays love Jurassic Park.” Professor David Starkey even has the full matching T. rex pencil case, backpack, and school lunch-box set.
As proof the series is innately queer, Jones has scoured through the original 1993 Jurassic Park movie’s script in search of lines with an alleged gay subtext, such as when someone utters the words “Hold on to your butts!” in the rough vicinity of Jeff Goldblum.
Furthermore, at various points, observes Jones, the film’s deadly dinosaurs attack female humans, and “for a lot of gay men, women in peril is a favorite genre,” which certainly explains why so many of them keep insisting on bursting into the ladies’ toilets these days. Dinosaurs themselves, Jones argues, “are deeply camp,” being analogous to drag queens, with “their fierce, confident assuredness…relentless energy and fierce joie de vivre, not to mention their various ruffs and feathers and talons and shiny teeth.” Some fringe scientists think they all died out from a prehistoric variant of the AIDS virus, too.
“Jurassic Park is no more about lesbianism than The Blob is about someone’s first period.”
To be fair to Jones, I suspect he simply wanted a quick £250 in his account from his editors. Far more alarming is that an actual academic has now tried putting out a book claiming Jurassic Park is surreptitiously gay for real, not just for money.
Stupid Girl
The learned treatise, squeezed out by Canada’s ECW Press, is called Clever Girl, an allusion to a scene in the first movie where a female velociraptor successfully traps and kills her male zookeeper. “Clever girl!” coos the doomed fellow, impressed by her cunning, an alleged tacit acknowledgment of the female lesbian intellect. The superior female lesbian intellect responsible for producing this particular fine insight is one Hannah McGregor, whose chosen pronouns are she/they—that’s at least two scholarly lesbians for the price of one!
Hannah describes her and her many selves as being “an academic, podcaster, and author living on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations in Canada.” If she’s so bothered by this, as her ostentatious admission implies, why doesn’t she just live somewhere else, then? Even though she demonstrably can’t use pronouns properly, “They’re an Associate Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where their research and teaching focus on the intersection of publishing and social change,” e.g., by writing stupid lying gay-books pretending dinosaurs are deviants.
If you recall the film’s plot, all the dinos in the park are genetically engineered to be female so they can’t reproduce out of control, numbers-wise, like Muslims do. However, unlike Muslims, certain reptiles can actually literally physically shift their sex in real life, and this happens to the dinosaurs in the park, some turning male. In McGregor’s queer eyes, this either makes them transgender icons, or agents of feminist lesbian rebellion against their straight white male oppressors. Just scan her blurb:
Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme-park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believe in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous and free. The velociraptors were not just jump-scares for children, but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.
Unlike Hannah McGregor, who appears to be some kind of dysgenic retard.
I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar!
McGregor is a literal fat blue-haired lesbian with more close-hand experience of tattoos than the city of Edinburgh during military marching season. You can see why she so identifies with dinosaurs, as she appears to be a kind of evolutionary dead end herself. As she admits: “Fat, femme, queer, hungry, monstrous, full of rage and determined to be free; no wonder I have gravitated to these creatures as feminist role-models.”
During an unhappy childhood, Hannah conceived of herself as a Godzilla-like monster, as “My fatness and queerness had given me a complicated relationship to my own desirability.” So obese was Hannah, she “accidentally hurt other children” when prancing around like a baby sauropod trying to play with them.
So, when she sees dinosaurs on screen, Hannah really sees nothing but Hollywoodland versions of her own fat, female self. Scenes in which dinosaurs display their wide-open mouths, “full of sharp teeth and a wet, dark interior,” are truly “telling you something about the Western horror of vaginas and their dark secrets,” or at least about the widespread Western horror of her own.
This kind of paranoid thought is honored by the pseudo-academic label of “Monster Theory,” which is best described as “Watching films like Godzilla and pretending they’re full of lefty identitarian things you want them to be full of” when they’re not, they’re just full of monsters. Jurassic Park is no more about lesbianism than The Blob is about someone’s first period. But that does not prevent Hannah McGregor from feigning otherwise.
Do Belt Up!
In a frankly inexplicable interview with ReligionDispatches.org, McGregor provides appalled Christians with an excellent instance of just how Queer Monster Theory works by pointing out that, at one moment in the movie, everybody in a vehicle must fasten their seat belts. However, one passenger has a faulty seat belt with two “slot-ends” and no “key-end,” and so has to knot them together to stay safe. This is the director Steven Spielberg’s subliminal attempt to induct viewers into knowledge of the lesbian practice of “scissor-sistering,” in which two sapphists repeatedly fuse and rub their own slot-ends against each other in the bedroom.
But why? Why is Steven Spielberg trying to turn his audience lesbian via the twin disguised mediums of dinosaurs and faulty seat-belt mechanisms? The true answer is that he obviously isn’t, but Hannah McGregor herself is:
My very favorite thing to do is to pick up a gem of beloved popular culture and turn it around to show fans how it can catch the light in ways you might not have noticed before. And if along the way, I, you know, indoctrinate you into feminist politics or accidentally turn you queer or make you gay? You’re welcome!
“Everything has always been gay,” Hannah asserts, pushing Monster Theory to its very limits. “The future is queer. The past is queer.” That’s distinctly Orwellian: “Who queers the past queers the future. Who queers the present queers the past.” I guess 1984 must have been queer too, then; that’s probably the subject of Hannah’s next valuable little exegesis.
Cretaceous Writing
As an Associate Professor of Publishing, McGregor’s role doubtless involves advising aspirant litterateurs on how to break into the modern-day industry (i.e., mention you’re a lesbian on your application form). In a promotional interview, one of the first questions asked of Hannah inadvertently illustrates the likely intellectual capacity of her students: “I’m curious how you would explain this book to someone who hasn’t heard of it and maybe won’t understand words like ‘reads’ or ‘texts’ or these things.”
If you’re a wannabe publisher so thick you don’t understand what the word “read” means, never fear, McGregor will enlighten you. In this postmodern era of “the death of the author,” reading a “text” (a movie is a “text” now too) is really one big exercise in something called “auto-theory,” otherwise defined as making absolutely everything about your own good self, because “The monstrous has its own subjectivity.”
If this all sounds nigh-on incomprehensible, then it is supposed to be. In fact, the true academic project here is to destroy all modes of traditional shared accepted meaning about things—that dinosaurs are dinosaurs and not lesbians, and seat belts are seat belts and not vaginas, for example—and replace the whole system with something completely alien and other, thereby to render Western civilization extinct in the name of Marx and Entropy, not Marx and Engels. Even the celluloid dinosaurs are in on this revolutionary, capitalism-overthrowing project, according to Hannah:
In dinosaur movies, dinosaurs always seem particularly angered by infrastructure. Yes. Like they’re always destroying, like, they want to crush a car. And it’s like, well, why would they want to crush a car? Like, they don’t know what a car is. A car, they would have no way of distinguishing between a car and a rock. Like, these would just be unknowable categories…. Clearly it’s not the buildings themselves the dinosaurs object to. It’s the spatial logic that they represent, the system by which we parcel out the topology of existence into named and comprehensible chunks…. It’s like the earth’s bones come back to life to punish us for our hubris. And, like, that is also part of the lesson to be learned from dinosaurs, is that they are unimpressed with our small human senses.
They’d certainly be unimpressed with yours.