sexism in survival situations when I get back” (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 45:15, 1:37:25). Finally, she is the one to openly confront John Hammond about his crazy venture. Here there is an interesting swap. In the book, it is Ian that mansplains scientific discovery to Ellie, doing a sort of ecofeminist critique of scientific advancement, equating scientific discovery and rape, and confronting Ellie as a representative of this: “you don’t restore the land after you dig?” (Crichton, 1990: 329). This leaves her dumbfounded and not very articulate: “There’s no money, I guess…;” “Well, we’re just working in the Badlands…;” “Ellie said nothing;” “You want to turn back the clock?” (Crichton, 1990: 329). In the film, Ellie becomes a much more aware character, closer to Ian’s position but making use of a more composed tone and cogent arguments when confronting John: “The question is, how can you know anything about an extinct ecosystem? And, therefore, how could you ever assume that you can control it?” (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 37:00). The issue about the poisonous plants in the park disturbs Ellie in both the book and the film; however, only in the film does she dare tell John about it: “You have plants in this building that are poisonous. You picked them because they look good” (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 37:05). Finally, she acts as an eye-opener for him: “You’ve never had control. That’s the illusion. I was overwhelmed by the power of this place, but I made a mistake too. I didn’t have enough respect for that power, and it’s out now” (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 1:27:35).
Regarding Lex, in the novel she is a truly obnoxious whiny eight-year-old child whose actions often put her and others in danger. In the film, however, she takes on some of her brother Tim’s traits: she is between 12 and 14 and the oldest of the two siblings, and she is also a computer geek. Her combination of features throughout the film is somewhat startling though. In spite of her being the oldest of the two, she is also clumsier and more fainthearted than her brother: she thinks the big wooden doors to the park will not open (“Are we gonna hit that?”) (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 41:33); she is fearful of and disgusted by the prospect of the tyrannosaur eating a goat (“He’s gonna eat the goat!?”) (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 45:53); she falls over and has to be picked up by Alan; she is traumatised by the lawyer leaving the vehicle (she keeps repeating “He left us, he left us”) (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 1:14:52); she flashes the torch at the tyrannosaur and cannot turn it off after Tim asks her to, causing the attack; her competitive attitude when climbing first a tree and then a fence seems petty, considering the age difference between them; in a rather childish way, she calls the brachiosaurs “monsters” (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 1:23:05) and Tim has to explain to her what a herbivore is; she is rather inarticulate (the only name she can find for carnivores is “the other kind” and “meat-osauruses”) (Kennedy, Molen, Spielberg, 1993: 1:23:15, 1:34:36); when she finally gathers the courage to stroke the brachiosaur, she ends up covered in snot from the dinosaur’s sneeze, which serves to further ridicule her; and, even when she takes the lead in the kitchen and tries to save her brother, it is Tim who manages to lock one of the raptors up in the freezer. It is only towards the end of the film that Lex is characterised in a more positive light, as she is the only one with the necessary computing skills to reboot the system, making it possible to set up the security system again and call for help (it is Tim who does that in the novel). In spite of this, and unlike in the case of Ellie, the combination of downgrading and upgrading strategies does not seem to work very well for Lex: she is presented throughout as an annoying, frightened and clumsy character whose redemption at the end is more a token gesture than a genuine attempt at upgrading the character and giving her a nobler role in the film.
As has been shown, combining both downgrading and upgrading mechanisms, Jurassic Park offers a complex analysis of secondary female characters in their passage from book to film. This is uncommon in blockbusters and family films, often characterised by plot simplification, a smaller number of secondary characters and the use of downgrading strategies for female characters. This is possibly due to two factors: on the one hand, Jurassic Park is one of the very few examples in which both the book and the screenplay were written by the same author2, and in which there is a woman screenwriter, Malia Scotch Marmo, who has been said to be responsible for making Ellie and the kids “more assertive” (McBride, 2011: 418). On the other hand, the book’s and the film’s releases were closer in time. This is also true of, for example, Big Fish (book 1998; film 2003), where secondary female characters also fare a bit better in the film than in the book. In a way that may seem contradictory, the need to modernise and update the gender politics of a story seems to be felt as more pressing the closer the dates of the releases. As the following section shows, the use of an older text brings about issues of fidelity and the opportunity to perpetuate anachronistic gender politics.
5 The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and Disney’s 1967 homonymous animated film (Disney, Reitherman, 1967) serve as the basis for the 2016 Disney production (Favreau, Taylor, Favreau, 2016). Written for the screen by Justin Marks and directed by Jon Favreau, the 2016 family feature makes use of both computer-generated imagery (CGI) and live action to revive the old classic and make it more appealing to younger audiences. It has been contended that the film strives to shake off the rather dubious imperial, racial and gender politics of the 1967 version while purportedly getting closer to the book (Keegan, 2016), a claim that seems contradictory at best. Regarding gender, what the film actually does is lazily gloss over the most salient controversies of the 1967 version (the almost total absence of female characters from both the main story and the background plots and the cringeworthy final scene in which an overtly sexualised girl entices Mowgli into the human village, cancelling out his rational judgement and willpower) while leaving Kipling’s (and Disney’s) problematically gendered narrative unchallenged.
Commodity feminism as an appropriation of feminist ideology to work within Western patriarchal models (Goldman, Heath, Smith, 1991: 136) seems to be Disney’s marketing strategy in recent years, which have seen an upsurge of films featuring strong female heroes (Tangled in 2010, Brave in 2012, Frozen in 2013, Moana in 20161) together with the resurrection of old masculine tales (The Jungle Book in 2016, The Lion King in 2019, Peter Pan is on the way). In this way, Disney attempts to “capitalise on female consumers” (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 128) while asserting the place that age-old patriarchal narratives occupy in the history of cinematic storytelling. Furthermore, this is done in a way that resembles neo-sexism’s movement from overt to covert sexism (Martínez et al., 2010). Using the neo-sexist logic, it is easy to condone patriarchal products like the new Jungle Book because: it is more faithful to the book; modern standards cannot be applied to a different historical time; there are films with female heroes now; and Disney films are made for children and, therefore, “apolitical” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 4). This movement from the overt sexism of Kipling’s book (and the 1967 animated film) to the covert sexism of the 2016 adaptation happens through a series of mechanisms concerning the masculine atmosphere that serves as the background to Mowgli’s adventures and the reimagining of two secondary female characters: Raksha (Mother Wolf), who is given a relevant role as the leader of the wolf pack when Akela dies; and Kaa (the python), who is turned from male helper into female antagonist.
The masculine atmosphere of the book is maintained and even reinforced in the film. While it is true that the book is very heavily dominated by male characters, there are several secondary female characters, such as Messua (Mowgli’s caring adoptive mother in the village), Matkah (the white seal’s sage mother) or Nagaina (a female cobra and Nag’s cunning wife), who, even if only as mothers or carers, are central to some of the stories, contributing to a more heterogeneous background to Mowgli’s adventures than the film affords. As in the case of Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book does away with all these characters and their stories. The absence of female voices and references is so pervasive in the film that it becomes a screaming feature: for example, when the wolves recite the Law of the Jungle, only one female voice can be discerned, and the same happens when all the animals gather around the Peace Rock during the Water Truce. The film also blatantly and unashamedly maintains all the male-as-norm references
