Casualties of the Woke Wars: Ellie Sattler, the Part-Time Feminist

Living in a reality in which every piece of media is part of some ephemeral, unwinnable game of tug-o-war that is both perpetual and intractable has made a good many things less fun and compelling than they used to be. I call these things “Casualties of the Woke Wars.” There are too many of them to name, but most of it comes down to a lot of media, ideas, concepts having their nuance buffed out into a shiny and reductive notch on the belt of some abstract political ideology.

One such thing is what I’m dubbing the “part-time feminist.” A woman that is fully aware of the ways in which men have tried to define her reality and is more than happy to comment on it, when she is not too busy with all the cool shit she has going on. And probably my all-time favorite “part-time feminist” is Ellie Sattler.

Rewatching “Jurassic Park” recently, aside from how well the movie holds up, I was stricken by how absolutely badass Ellie Sattler is throughout the mfovie. Smart, tough, empathetic, sweet, she is this walking embodiment of the platonic ideal of womanhood, extremely competent while rocking an extremely practical pair of khaki shorts. Yet characters like Ellie Sattler have a difficult time thriving in our current binary media Hellscape because she is somehow both too feminist while simultaneously personifying categorically sexist power dynamics.

If you need a refresher, Ellie Sattler is a paleobotanist played by Laura Dern. Sattler is one of three scientists tasked with calming down jittery park investors by visiting the park filled with genetically-modified dinosaurs and offering her seal of approval. When the dinosaurs get out and go a-chompin’, Ellie plays no small part in saving everyone she possibly can, when she isn’t calling out park creator John Hammond for being a delusional lunatic.

Let’s start with my left-wing friends and their obsession with power dynamics. There are all kinds of ways in which these massive, macro and sometimes invisible forces dictate how people live. And while talking about them is completely fair game, sometimes it means folks can only see the forest, individual trees be damned.

In “Jurassic Park,” Ellie Sattler is married to a paleontologist named Alan Grant. Grant is played by a fella named Sam Neil, who was born a solid 20 years before Laura Dern. For a lot of folks, that age difference is both gross and inherently problematic, given the power imbalance and all. (All of this without considering the fact that Sattler is Alan Grant’s Grad Student in the book. But the book is a whole other thing.)

A couple years ago, this all got drummed up on Twitter and elsewhere, mostly by bad-faith media outlets rummaging through the tombs of old media, looking for controversies to dig-up in the midst of a new “Jurassic World: IP Never Sleeps” movie. Nevermind that as a child, I thought both Sattler and Grant were a couple of married middle-aged nerds that were roughly the same age, I can now see the age difference. So what?

The important part is that looking at Ellie Sattler the character 30-years-later and all you see is still this shining beacon of self-actualization, a grown woman making up her own damn mind about what she wants. There isn’t a scene of Grant exerting any kind of power over Sattler, unless you count him turning Sattler’s head away from a resurrected plant species to show her a resurrected dinosaur species. If Sattler is with an older man, well, that’s because that is what she wants. It’s a free country, so you are more than welcome to make some backstory in which Alan Grant groomed Ellie Sattler or something, but that is very much a “You” thing, not a “movie” thing.

The anti-woke crowd is no better. If the left fixates on the forest, the anti-wokesters are unable to tolerate any discussions about them. Any mention of any structural problems and my friends on the right act like you have dumped a drum of cyanide into the town’s water supply. One simply cannot bring up identity politics at all without a bunch of wing-dings getting bothered.

Twice in “Jurassic Park” Ellie Sattler calls out sexism: 1.) She states “Women inherit the Earth” after Ian Malcolm’s diatribe about "God creates dinosaurs… dinosaur eats man…” and 2.) She mildly chastises elderly park creator for suggesting that his limping, geriatric body was possibly better suited for a dangerous trip to reset the circuit breakers for the park.

Neither one of these lines has anything overtly to do with the plot. Sattler just casually points out some inherent sexism in the English language and tables a discussion on sexism in survival situations. Both times she moves on to the much more interesting presence of a sick triceratops and pressing need to save her husband and a couple of kids from a pack of velociraptors.

And that all makes sense, because she has a lot more interesting stuff to deal with than casual sexism, but she is compelled to point it out nonetheless, because that is who she is. If “Jurassic Park” were released today, right-wing dweebs would pull those clips on social media and blame the film for man-bashing. And a disingenuous discourse would blot out any reasonable discussion of a movie which is arguably fairly conservative in its worldview. (Of course

Obviously social media isn’t real, but it shapes how people consume movies. It reinforces groupthink and dumb takes while reducing film criticism to a “does this match my ideology” rubric. Which bums me out, because so few blockbusters have characters this smart anymore.

-B.S. Lewis

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