Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
It is the movie's thesis, delivered with a hesitant stammer that fans copy: complex systems escape the people who build them. Malcolm is proved right within the hour, and the line became shorthand for anything stubbornly resilient, from weeds in pavement to a species adapting. It also stands as the series' standing warning against playing god with a park.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for Jurassic ParkShow the scene
In Steven Spielberg's 1993 Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, a chaos-theory mathematician, is one of the experts John Hammond flies in to endorse his cloned-dinosaur park. At the visitor-centre lunch the group learns that every dinosaur was made female to stop breeding, and Malcolm argues that life will not be contained: it breaks free, expands, and, he says with a stammer, finds a way. The film proves him right. Later Grant finds broken eggshells, and learns that the frog DNA used to fill gaps in the genome let the animals change sex.
Sources (2)
- Wikiquote: Jurassic Park (film)Malcolm, lunch sceneReference checked
- Wikipedia: Jurassic Park (film)PlotReference checked
Context reviewed
