About the Author

Michael Fuchs

E-Mail: m.fuchs@uni-graz.at

Website: http://www.fuchsmichael.net/

Michael Fuchs is an assistant professor in American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. He has co-edited three books and authored more than two dozen published and forthcoming journal articles and book chapters on video games, American television, horror and adult cinema, and American post-WWII literature. One of his current monograph projects explores monstrous animals in American horror and science fiction.

Contributions by Author: Michael Fuchs

Issue 2
nonhuman
digital effects
visual effects
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park (movie series)
animal representations
nonhuman animals
hyperreality
simulacra
genetic code
Jurassic World

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth?

Digital Animals, Simulation, and the Return of ‘Real Nature’ in the Jurassic Park Movies

“Visitors will think the dinosaurs look speeded up, like film running too fast,”[1] remarks chief genetic engineer Henry Wu in Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park (1990) when detailing his dissatisfaction with his Frankensteinean creation vis-à-vis Jurassic Park’s founder, John Hammond. Wu’s seemingly unintentional slippage between ontological levels presents an illustrative example of what postmodernism’s poster boy, Jean Baudrillard, referred to as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality,” […]