the irony of it all
TNR:
In a 1995 interview with Time magazine, Crichton hinted at an agenda beyond dazzling people with roller-coaster plots and astounding Hollywood special effects. Somewhat ostentatiously citing Jean Cocteau's The Difficulty of Being, Crichton explained that the French writer "said what I've always believed about myself. He didn't care about being noticed for his style. He only wanted to be noticed for his ideas. And even better for the influence of the ideas."
Until then, however, Crichton, 63, was hardly known for his ideas. He was a plot machine. The son of a journalist, Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and then enrolled in Harvard Medical School. But, even while there, he couldn't resist cranking out sci-fi thrillers, and, after one of them--The Andromeda Strain, a 1969 novel about an alien virus brought to Earth by a fallen satellite--became a best-seller, he ditched his scrubs for a typewriter.
Through the 1970s up to the early '90s, Crichton offered few serious ideas. Instead, he delivered a steady supply of dystopian science-fiction thrillers--as well as Hollywood movies, which he began to direct after the film adaptation of The Andromeda Strain--in which science is fiendishly misapplied or veers horribly out of control: a computer-guided behavior-modification experiment goes awry (The Terminal Man); a cowboy-robot in a futuristic amusement park lethally malfunctions (Westworld); a hospital kills patients to harvest and sell their organs (Coma); dinosaurs are resurrected by cloning and freed by a venal scientist, resulting in carnage (Jurassic Park). Crichton's device was not an innovation: These were mere versions of the Frankenstein story, tales of often dislikeable scientists who misused or could not control their creations. But, in retrospect, they represent his germinating worldview: a distrust of scientists, of "the experts." It's a worldview central to the history of science fiction: Since Mary Shelley, the genre has critiqued modernization and the segments of society associated with it. In "The Imagination of Disaster," a 1965 essay about science-fiction movies, Susan Sontag noted, "The most ingrained contemporary mistrust of the intellect is visited ... upon the scientist-as-intellectual." But, for the Ivy League-credentialed Crichton, this represented a strange tension. He made his name as a credentialed insider in the world of science and technology--as someone who could be trusted to make arcane science accessible to the layman. Yet he couldn't stop deriding it.
There was likely another tension in Crichton's life at this time. He is, by any definition, a highly intelligent man--precocious (suspicious that a professor was grading him too harshly, he once turned in an essay written by George Orwell and considered his B-minus grade a vindication) and extremely ambitious. Though his books are pulp for the coach-class set, Crichton has always had one foot in a world far more high-minded than that of the $7.99 paperback. In interviews, he effortlessly drops literary and philosophical allusions from G.K. Chesterton to Jane Austen, disses Henry James ("he's trivial"), and once even wrote a book about Jasper Johns. And, tellingly, his first published essay--which, as it happened, appeared in The New Republic in 1969--argued that Kurt Vonnegut should be taken more seriously than as a mere science-fiction writer. But, until the '90s, Crichton had failed to live up to Cocteau's dictum. That was about to change.
[snip]
By the time he wrote State of Fear, Crichton had been living in the Hollywood milieu for more than 20 years--and his frustration shows. Crichton's treatment of limousine liberals is his crankiest yet. He creates one character, a pompous bleeding heart clearly modeled after Martin Sheen, and then feeds him to cannibals. Another scene features a dilettante Hollywood environmentalist shocked that a climate-change skeptic would question her scientific authority. "But I am very dedicated to the environment, and I have been all my life," she protests indignantly. "I read everything. I read the 'Science' section of the New York Times every Tuesday cover to cover, of course The New Yorker, and the New York Review. I am extremely well informed." In case you didn't get the point, the same character is later pressed about where she'd be willing to build the vast expanses of solar panels her philosophy demands. Texas, she proposes. "Nobody I know cares about Texas."
Besides red-state-bashing Hollywood celebrities, Crichton takes aim at environmentalists, whom he portrays as overhyping the global-warming threat for fund-raising purposes. In one scene, Nick Drake, who resembles "a latterday Ichabod Crane" and heads the "National Environmental Resource Fund" (nerf--get it?), berates subordinates for producing insufficiently alarmist promotional materials for a conference. "We need some punch here, some pizzazz," he complains. "This conference must point to a catastrophe."
This is the real argument of Crichton's State of Fear--that unseen forces are conspiring to alarm us so they can then manipulate us. The book is ultimately about something much bigger than global warming. Late in the novel, one character speechifies against "the politico-legal-media complex," which is "dedicated to promoting fear in the population--under the guise of promoting safety." The PLM is powerful because it "unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless." Also fueling the PLM are universities: "factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties ... to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't screw, can't think. ... The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I'm telling you."
Global-warming alarmism, then, is just one more product of this nefarious cultural conspiracy. The "experts" have evolved from a bunch of foolhardy scientists to obnoxious feminists and reporters, then to a veritable vast, left-wing conspiracy that tyrannizes the nation. This is an odd argument, to say the least, coming from a man who has made tens of millions by scaring America about everything from hideous viruses to killer nanotechnology. Of course, it's not the first time that someone has played this trick. There's a certain resident of Pennsylvania Avenue who also decries the scare-mongering of experts--at the same time he raises homeland security alerts, conflates dictators and terrorists, and predicts the imminent collapse of Social Security.
The nut of it - the "Crichton-media-politico-fear complex", perhaps - is that he still doesn't have any ideas. No analysis, no exploration of the thing, unlike Vonnegut the writer he lauded back in 1969. He's nothing more than a "media producer," doing lots of research and stringing it together along a thin line of plausibility while weaving in a gripe: essentially, Michael Crichton's "big ideas" are just angry book reports, which is no doubt why he's got fans in D.C.
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