So the footage of Owen training the tiny raptors in the new Jurassic World kind of (inadvertently, I think) confirmed something that always bugged me about the social dynamics mentioned in the first film.
Owen’s using the term ‘alpha’ wrong.
Of course, the concept of pack alphas is rooted in a lot of erroneous studies anyway. But if we take his actual assertions about it and Blue’s behaviour at face value, then Owen is wrong. He’s not the alpha. Blue is the alpha. The pack follows her cues, that’s why they go with her when she decides to follow the Indominous, and it’s also why they listen to Owen – because Blue does. If Blue stops, so do the other raptors. They’d don’t just wait it out to see who’ll win, they immediately follow Blue’s lead.
Blue’s the leader.
Owen is, actually, the mediator.
He is the one who stops disputes between the raptors and defuses tense situations. He is permitted this status precisely because he’s physically weak (compared to raptors) but socially important. His social importance was created by rearing the raptors and forming emotional bonds with them. But they know full well that he’s squishy and beatable (though they probably don’t realize just how lethal some behaviours might be for him, comparatively). Blue knows she can kill Owen and that Owen is not strong or very useful at leadership decisions for a velociraptor pack. She accepts his input because he’s dad.
So since Owen actually isn’t even in the running for pack leader, and challenging him would be pointless because then you’d just hurt him and cost the pack a socially important member, and also probably get beaten up by Blue, he is the ideal mediator of disputes. His intervention de-escalates situations by reducing the amount of violence that’s permissible.
But because he was using so much containment and physical force (even if it was through equipment, obviously) to keep the raptors in check, I think Owen misjudged his placement in the raptor social group. Especially since he actually was tougher than them when they were babies. He thought they listened to him because they believed he was stronger than them, and that this was an illusion he had to maintain.
That was never actually the case, though. Blue knew Owen was way weaker than her the whole time. She just valued him anyway.
There’s probably a metaphor about toxic masculinity in there somewhere.
You had me until the last line.
Would it still work for you if you removed “toxic”?
Nope. One bloke misunderstanding his social role in a group of bloodthirsty, primitive monsters is not a good or accurate metaphor for men.
Not a good one for women either if we’re the aggressive monsters, hmm?
Actually, what I was alluding to was the concept of Owen fixating on the assumption that he had to protect his social position via force and a misrepresentation of his own physical power, as having some allegorical similarities to masculine expectations of leadership and authority.
It’s not so much that he misunderstands his role in the social group that’s relevant, but why.
And that doesn’t actually require that the raptors be allegorical stand-ins for women. Because the dynamics of or composition of that social group is irrelevant, the salient point with regards to the toxic masculinity quip is Owen’s preconceptions about authority in the animal kingdom.
But, if we do want to look at the raptors as an allegory for women, it’s still not all bad. Because one of the major themes of the Jurassic Park movies is that the dinosaurs are not monsters. The monsters are the scientists and businessmen who seek to profit from their existence, who have made them, manipulated them, fenced them in, etc..
The reason why the dinosaurs are a problem in the movies is because they break free of the confines constructed around them, and then it’s no longer just about what the humans want, but about what the dinosaurs will do. And the messages of the movies, overall, is that responsibility still lies with the people who built the cages and manipulated the living things into forms and shapes they found pleasing, not with the creatures who then proceeded to liberate themselves.
But that’s a bit more of a stretch.
Still, that’s why I was deliberately vague with that last line. There’s always more than one way to read a story. Or piece of meta, as it happens.
Not gonna lie, I thought the ‘alpha’ line was more for the ease of the audience (since people believe that sort of thing still) and partly to maintain the theme name of the group (“Alpha”, Blue, Charlie, Delta, Echo)
Ironically, the term alpha makes more sense for the OG raptors. There’s significant increase in complexity in how they act as a species across the original 3 movies, and a popular theory is until the raptors started free-breeding and living in self-regulating packs instead of being lab-grown (IIRC Owen points out the only reason the Pack gets along is they’ve been socialized), they couldn’t act “naturally” and that might have made them overly violent and aggressive.
I think this was even the canonical explination for the Big One in the original movie; she was thrown in with the existing pack with presumably little socialization and straight up killed nearly all of them to establish dominance.
Initial studies of wolf packs, which first concocted the ‘alpha’ theory (that’s still erroneously used in a lot of dog training and by weirdo misogynists), were basically a bunch of scientists trying to study the social behaviour of some of stressed-out, unrelated wolves that they’d randomly stuck together. Sort of like the equivalent of trying to understand all of human society by going to a prison. They observed the wolves fighting and contesting with one another, still forming a sort of social group, but a violent one where the majority of wolves only ‘followed’ whoever the biggest bully was. And of course, frequently challenged said bully for position.
It wasn’t until later that studies actually examining wolf packs in the wild figured out that wild wolves have a more familial structure, and don’t struggle for dominance all the time. By then, though, the preconceptions about wolf behaviour were rampant and they persist even now.
So in that sense, the OG raptors and specifically Clever Girl/The Big One would be way more appropriate for any kind of ‘alpha’ dynamics claim. You’re absolutely correct, because they’re basically a dinosaur recreation of that same mistake with the wolves. The original raptors were social animals raised without proper communal and social interactions. They were constantly stressed and excessively violent, because they perceived nearly everything as a threat and also didn’t know how to interact normally with other raptors.
The raptors that Dr. Grant meets in the third movie, at Site B, have been living wild in their own communities for a while by then. They only bother with the humans because they want their eggs back. As soon as they have them, and Dr. Grant manages to kind of communicate some not-sinister intentions, the raptors go back to hunting meaty herbivores instead of these scrawny weirdo humans. Infamous in how the scene was handled, maybe, but actually more in line with the behaviour of intelligent wild animals – there are better things to hunt, so once the problem is solved, there’s no reason to waste any further energy on it.
(Well, curiosity, maybe, but these raptors probably also retain some background wariness of humans – making it more compelling to just avoid them in the end.)
Interestingly, as an aside, the first movie also adequately illustrates the fallacy of ‘alpha’ dynamics style thinking. Y’know, the same concept that has people mistaking ‘survival of the fittest’ for ‘survival of the most physically powerful’? The raptors have defaulted to this kind of social group, which serves to make them terrifying in their pursuit of the much-squishier humans. But the format falls apart entirely when they come up against the T-Rex, which is fully capable of killing all the raptors. But the T-Rex is also more easily fooled and evaded by the humans. If the T-Rex behaved like the raptors, then Dr. Grant and the kids would have been dead the minute it got them out of the cars. Instead, they survive, as does the T-Rex – but not the raptors.
The social group that revolves around violence and physical domination is doomed to be killed the minute something bigger comes along.
On the other hand, the raptors in the third movie just go back to their business. And in Jurassic World, the Indominous is basically another Clever Girl – the raptors following her proves deadly for all of them except for Blue, and Indominous also gets killed by something that’s ultimately bigger and badder.
So while the choice of language doesn’t really match up to it, ultimately, the movies have directed a lot of thematic criticism towards the whole ‘alpha’ concept.
While I doubt it’s intentional, I do think that this actually illustrates Owen’s major character flaw. Claire’s is obvious, of course. She greenlit the I-Rex project, and ran the park for years while viewing the dinosaurs as ‘assets’, only really conceptualizing them as living creatures after the first time she saw one die. She was so caught up in the perspective of business and profits that she was dangerously irresponsible in her decision-making without even realizing it – essentially carrying forward the themes critiquing capitalism and corporate greed that have always been part and parcel of the series.
But Owen is often deemed insufferable because the narrative doesn’t seem to think he can do any wrong.
However, if we look at him as someone who’s own misunderstanding of the animals in his care was just as dangerous and detrimental as Claire’s, I think a more well-rounded picture of events becomes clear. Both characters failed to really understand the impact their choices were having on the world around them. If Claire’s embodying the cautionary tale about the corporate side (and the potential to make amends), then Owen is embodying the cautionary tale from the ‘dominant species’ side. Which both combine to illustrate the theme of mankind’s hubris, but also the hope that our mistakes won’t be the end of us if we can adapt and learn better.
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