BBC's "THE LOST WORLD" # 1

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

       The BBC's 2001, two-part  televisioning of Arthur Conan Doyle's scenario replicates the 1925 film's sexualization of the hominid interactions: women to be repressed and "saved" from "monsters" by men already psychically threatened by profound anxieties. In 1933, it was: Ann Darrow's costumizing made an equivalence with gender; the bipedal, racialist coded primate with no sexual organs, hairless buttocks, having a gorilla-like head; and Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll invoking homophobic fears about masculinist purity (when Carl Denham asks Mr Driscoll if he is becoming "soft", the gendering insination is clear: males reinforce male phallic strength). Unlike 1925, where numerous Willis O'Brien/Marcel Delgado dinosaurs (regardless of horrendous anatomical inaccuracies from H.F. Osborn and Charles Knight) showcased OBie's almost magical ability to con!
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y their agility and complexity, in 1933 OBie had no control over the RKO remake's Manhattan opening and closing human sequences (rewritten by Ruth Rose from Edgar Wallace/James Creelman's plundering of Harry Hoyt's earlier "Creation" scripts). OBie had larger, but fewer animal puppets, and it was a herculean collaboration between OBie's team/Max Steiner/Murray Spivack strengthening and enhancing the Skull Island interior scenes with elements of Gustave Dore, Charles Knight, and the OBie's own profound appreciation of the excitement ACD had conveyed to him in the 1920s. And yet. The 1933 human frameworks, by the 1950s, were unmistakable: science fiction films (they were not, however, the science fiction of Isaac Asimov et al.) were engulfed in representational politics, the thematic violence of women explicit (and indebted to the vituperative fear and hatred of women propogated by Bram Stoker, in particular). The dinosaurs (or other taxa, including seemingly brainless creatur!
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 able to pilot craft from other solar systems to McDonaldize the earth, with colourful film posters of near naked women about to have intercourse with them) were vehicles for reinforcing Horrorwood's anti-intellectualism/racialism and economic imperialism. Like Steven Spielberg's gutting of Michael Crichton's visions to manufacture a "franchise" (the three Amblin Entertainment "dinosaur films" --  each having coded Hispanic victims, spectacular CGI dinosaurs and pterosaurs -- lack serious ideations because they do not occur to the accountants and type-writers), in 2001, BBC uses  the same  marketable chase-and-eat formula. The BBC 2001 incarnation of ACD's dinosaur tale is imbued with the same poststructuralist tensions between masculinist identity and political praxis. In 2001, hence, jingoist television "entertainment adventure" is incapable of creating viable plots re: the politics of diffference and representation between lesbian/male/gay male/feminist con!
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ptions one can find readily in their respective (overlapping) literatures concerning processes of evolution, extinctions, dinosaurs, etc. As paleontologists of all kinds, we should be vitally concerned with the cinematic gaze and the economic implications of spectatorial acts as we are with the "pure" paleontology of cladistics and phylogenetic systematics.