Can we find meaning in "The Lost World?"(feature film)(includes bibliography)

Maybe the blockbuster movie "The Lost World" is not just a superficial thriller but a metaphor for the destruction of our natural habitat and science gone awry. Or has arts columnist Patrick McCormick just lost his foothold in reality?

Ever spent a Saturday afternoon at a Muppet matinee? If so, you already know that the folks at Henson Productions long ago figured out that the only way to entertain both the 3-to 7-year-olds who fill up most of the seats and the 30-something chauffeurs who buy the tickets is to show two movies at the same time.

So, for all the kids who pour out of minivans and bury their faces in your shoulder every time a pirate appears on the screen, there's a charming little Golden Book adventure starring the irrepressible (and ageless) Kermit the Frog.

And for all the minivan drivers who have only been invited to the show because they are big enough to see over the dashboard or carry a child to the restroom, Henson Productions has slipped in the Miss Piggy story, replete with Mae West asides and cute little double-meaning jokes that fly safely over the heads of the children snuggled into their parents' laps. This way everyone goes home happy, or at least they leave the octiplex that way.

I was reminded of this Muppet strategy when I went to see Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg's latest mega-blockbuster, "The Lost World," their admittedly shameless but highly popular clone of the phenomenally successful "Jurassic Park." Now it could be that I got a bad box of Raisinettes, but in the midst of this movie it occurred to me that, deep within the belly of this T-rex of a techno-thriller about replicant dinosaurs, there might well be a second and even more interesting film.

What if "The Lost World" were, like all the best Muppet movies, really two movies in one: one a white-knuckled Saturday afternoon matinee targeted at the thrill-seeking 12year-old in all of us, and the other a probing social satire about the destruction of the world's rain forests?

Sure it seems like a silly idea, and I'm not usually the type to play Beatles records backwards in search of hidden messages. But the more I thought about this idea of a movie within a movie, the more I imagined I could make out the skeletal traces of an ecological morality play bubbling up to the surface of "The Lost World."

After all, if the paleontologists in this movie could determine the personalities and parenting skills of ancient dinosaurs from examining their fossilized footprints, wasn't I entitled to look for a moral message in a Saturday matinee? And so, at the risk of seeming a little foolish, let me suggest a few interesting ideas you, too, might read into Crichton's and Spielberg's movie, even if they never put them there.

First, on the surface of things, this film seems to be yet another jungle movie in which monstrous creatures prowling Central American or African rain forests threaten 20th-century humans with all sorts of murder and mayhem. We've seen a spate of these "monster in the jungle" films recently, including Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Predator," Crichton's own rather disappointing "Congo," Marlon Brando's embarrassing "The Island of Dr. Moreau," and Jon Voigt's highly forgettable "Anaconda." The message in all of them is fairly clear, and silly: a murderous predator lurks in the heart of the jungle, ready to wreak havoc on us and civilization as we know it.

But what if Spielberg and Crichton were using this formula to remind us of something we tend to forget in a darkened theater--that it's not the jungle that's threatening us but we who are endangering the jungle, and by extension the whole planet? After all, in the real world the danger is not that dinosaurs or giant apes escape from their jungle habitats and go on a rampage in New York ("King Kong"), Tokyo ("Godzilla"), or San Diego ("The Lost World").

Rather, it's that late-20th-century humans are encroaching on and destroying jungles and tropical rain forests at an alarming and unprecedented rate. And, as we are beginning to understand, it's that this planetary deforestation poses the sort of threat to us and our children that would make the damage left by an army of T-rexes seem laughable.

Watching Crichton and Spielberg's film reminded me that what is really scary about our jungles is what we are doing to them. After all, we have already destroyed half of the 15-million square kilometers of rain forests that used to cover 12 percent of the planet's land surface, and although there was a brief lull in the rate of deforestation during the early '90s, the burning and destruction of rain forests in the Amazon, Central America, and Indonesia are once again skyrocketing.

Now I don't know about you, but the idea that the loss of these rain forests threatens to rob our planet of its best air filter and climate-control system and accelerate global warming seems a lot more frightening to me than watching a couple velociraptors chew up some scenery. And the notion that our atmosphere could soon be as foul as a T-rex's morning breath--or worse, a sunny day in L.A.--is going to bother me long after I've stopped worrying whether there are any of those little chicken-sized dinosaurs in the backyard.

Second, the premise of Spielberg's and Crichton's film seems to be that the human race is endangered because a group of prehistoric creatures have been imprudently brought back from extinction and reintroduced into our modern ecosystem. This makes "The Lost World" a sort of Frankenstein story writ large, with mad scientists bringing not just individual persons but entire species back from the grave.

As anyone familiar with Mary Shelley's story, or Stephen King's "Pet Sematary," can tell you, things never go well for folks arrogant enough to play God in this manner. The motto of this movie should probably be: "Better to let sleeping dinosaurs lie."

Still, thinking about the movie afterward, it seems ironic that Crichton and Spielberg should have made a film warning us about the dangers of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction at the very moment in history when we humans are driving more life forms into extinction than at any period since the Mesozoic Age--the very time when our friends the dinosaurs died off. Could they possibly be sending us a subliminal message about the dangers of losing the vast variety of life forms inhabiting these jungles?

Could they be reminding us that our rain forests, which cover only 6 percent of the earth's landmass, contain half of the planet's 10 million species of life, and produce nearly half of all the medicines and drugs dispensed in our pharmacies and hospitals? Is there a hidden warning that the unprecedented rate of extinction of species of plants, animals, and insects resulting from ongoing deforestation threatens the biodiversity of the planet, the health and stability of our global food supply, and the richest pharmacopoeia we will ever have?

Again, even if the creators of this film never intended to send such a message, one lesson we might well take home from "The Lost World" is not about the dangers of bringing a couple of T-rexes back from extinction but a warning that, if we don't do something soon about our global habitat, the only way our grandchildren will be seeing a quarter of all the species now living on the planet will be to visit them in some future Jurassic theme park.

Third--and I confess that this is really my favorite--Crichton and Spielberg's summer blockbuster seems to be a movie about the dangers not just of dinosaurs, but of flesh-eating dinosaurs. All those vegetarian dinosaurs in both "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World" come across cuddlier than our purple friend Barney, and it's only those nasty carnivores--like the raptors and T-rexes--that pose any real danger.

Is it possible, then, that Crichton and Spielberg were poking fun not at the flesh-eating habits of raptors but at our own burger-chomping diet, a diet that threatens the very survival of the rain forests? After all, studies indicate that our consumption of beef, which is currently on the upswing, poses some real threats to our global habitat and food supply.

And more than a few social critics have pointed to the "burger connection" as a danger to our tropical rain forests, arguing that cattle ranching has been one of the leading causes of tropical deforestation, and that large amounts of the beef grown on Third World ranches, carved out of tropical rain forests, is exported here for fast-food burgers.

In the end it's probably unlikely that Crichton and Spielberg actually made this connection, or they never would have marketed their little "Lost World" watches through Burger King. That would have been just a little too satirical. Still, there's no reason we couldn't think of those watches as a reminder that time may be running out for us and the rain forests, and that we ought to think about ways of changing our meat-eating habits if we don't want to ruin the planet. It's a thought, anyway.

Finally, Spielberg's most recent movie seems, like its predecessor, to be just another high-gloss techno-thriller, a special effects extravaganza in which both the central problem and its solution are presented as hi-tech, not human, issues. After all, these nasty dinosaurs have been created in a genetics lab (bad technology!) and will be dealt with in part by a couple of bright adolescent hackers (good technology!).

This could explain the complaint of some critics that in "The Lost World," and so many of Spielberg's and Crichton's other creations, it's always the monsters and machines that have the good parts, while humans end up being cast as bit players.

Still, there were so many times in this film when hi-tech gadgets seemed to break down or fail that I began to wonder just a little bit if Crichton and Spielberg might not be poking some fun at our unquestioned faith in technological solutions to human and social problems.

Recognizing what mincemeat the T-rexes and raptors made of all the various vehicles and weapons systems brought to their island, and the ways in which cell phones and communication satellites broke down at the drop of a hat, I found myself imagining that the creators of "The Lost World" were reminding us that the threats to the rain forest could not be solved with the flip of a switch or the turn of a dial. They are not technological but social, political, economic, and human problems, and they call for social, political, economic, and human solutions.

As more and more studies indicate, the single largest problem leading to the destruction of rain forests isn't technology, or even lumber, cattle ranching, or mining (though these certainly pose dire threats). It's poverty, generated by the unjust distribution of land and natural resources, and sustained by an international debt that would make a T-rex look like one of those amber-ensconced mosquitoes.

From the Amazon to the Philippines, it's largely poor, landless peasants who are cutting down rain forests--hungry, desperate people in search of farmland or firewood, impoverished people without the luxury of an ecological conscience. And while there are a variety of causes for this poverty, one of the primary ones is surely the crushing international debt that has forced so many countries like Brazil and the Philippines to dismantle social and ecological safety nets, leaving their forests and their poor unprotected and endangered.

Now, I know I am reaching way out of the ballpark when I suggest that "The Lost World" is really two movies in one, or that Crichton and Spielberg have created a film with a deeply biting social critique of our destruction of the rain forests. Still, it doesn't seem so far-fetched to suggest that a jungle movie--even one with no more aspiration than to entertain us for an hour or so--might trigger a couple of deeper thoughts and questions about the world.

Saint Patrick saw the Trinity in a shamrock, and Newton felt the whole universe in a falling apple. So why couldn't a replicant tyrannosaurus serve as a catalyst to thinking a bit more seriously about the rain forests?

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If any of these thoughts have fired up your curiosity or imagination just a bit and you're wondering where to go to learn and do more about our tropical rain forests, I'd recommend any of the following books:

* Sean McDonagh's The Greening of the Church (Orbis, 1990) offers an excellent treatment of the dangers facing our rain forests and the indigenous and poor people who depend on them, as well as a thoughtful discussion of the sources for a Christian ecological ethic.

* In a similar fashion, Befriending the Earth (Twenty-Third Publications, 1991) by Thomas Berry, C.P. and Thomas Clarke, S.J. presents a somewhat larger discussion of the challenges the ecological movement brings to our church.

* Then there's John Vandermeer's and Ivette Perfecto's Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth About Rain Forest Destruction (Food First, 1995), which provides a highly readable discussion of some of the causes and cures to deforestation.

* If you're looking for a more encyclopedic presentation of the ecological crises and options facing us at the end of the 20th century, you might try Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (Houghton-Mifflin, 1992), while 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth (Earth Works, 1995) provides you with just what the title suggests.

Also, if you're interested in getting more involved in these issues, there's always the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Worldwatch Institute. The addresses of many of these can be found through your local library or on the World Wide Web.

By Patrick McCormick, an assistant professor of ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.