BOOKS OF THE TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Why Are Dinosaurs Green? Don't Ask
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: December 29, 1998
THE LAST DINOSAUR BOOK
The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon
By W. J. T. Mitchell
Illustrated. 321 pages. The University of Chicago Press. $35.
In ''The Last Dinosaur Book,'' the scholar W. J. T. Mitchell solemnly suggests that Steven Spielberg's ''Jurassic Park'' does for the dinosaur what Spenser's ''Faerie Queene'' did for the dragon. He adds that the movie's ending -- in which the human characters manage to escape when their pursuers, a pair of voracious female velociraptors, are attacked by a huge Tyrannosaurus rex -- expresses ''a nostalgia for the days of big patriarchal capital, before the arrival of career women and 'clever girls' in multinational corporations.''
As Mr. Mitchell sees it, the T. rex symbolizes ''the good old days of 'feudal' capitalism, when companies were identified with individual 'giants' (like Spielberg himself) who were capable of great evil and great good,'' while the raptors ''represent the new stage of post-modern capitalism, of 'downsizing,' flexibility, rapid strike forces, teamwork, adaptability, steep learning curves, and (not incidentally) gender confusion.''
Were such observations delivered with any wit or tongue-in-cheek humor, ''Last Dinosaur'' might well make for entertaining reading. As it stands, however, the book is a lumbering, dinosaurian tome that takes a potentially engaging subject, our current fascination with dinosaurs and the cultural reasons behind it, and turns it into absurdly pretentious treatise, gussied up with all the latest Marxist, feminist and structuralist allusions.
Although Mr. Mitchell has assembled an impressive archive of dinosaur images -- from Barney to the dinosaur skeleton in the Cary Grant movie ''Bringing up Baby,'' from the Sinclair gas logo to the logo of the Toronto Raptors basketball team -- he does little to shed light on what these images might mean.
The main problem with this copiously illustrated book is that Mr. Mitchell, a professor in the departments of English and art history at the University of Chicago, sees dinosaurs not merely as ''an infinitely flexible cultural symbol,'' but as ''a kind of blank slate on which every kind of collective and individual fantasy can be projected.'' In other words, dinosaurs can mean anything and everything.
They are ''us'' and ''not-us,'' Mr. Mitchell writes: ''As erect bipeds, they resemble us; as reptiles, they are the 'other,' the exotic, strange, sinister alien, loaded down with satanic associations, from the serpent who tempts Eve to the Great Red Dragon of the Apocalypse.'' On one hand, dinosaurs ''can symbolize the dominant 'master race' that commands a global empire''; on the other hand, they can symbolize ''the vanished, savage races that lost out in the Darwinian struggle, or an invading horde of aliens who threaten white supremacy.'' They can be figures of ''obsolescence and failure to adapt,'' or in the case of Godzilla, symbols of ''novelty and sometimes runaway innovation.''
''The dinosaur is a prestige symbol for modern nation-states,'' Mr. Mitchell asserts, ''and a model for ideologies of world conquest and domination. It is associated with childhood, old age and everything in between. It is associated with sexual differentiation and reproduction, and with the failure to reproduce. It is a figure of everything alien to human nature (coldblooded, reptilian, rapacious) and of all that is most familiar in human nature (coldblooded, reptilian, rapacious).''
To the Victorians, Mr. Mitchell contends, the dinosaur was a fitting symbol of ''the world's largest empire at the peak of its glory and self-confidence.'' The Crystal Palace exhibition of 1854, fittingly enough, included the very first dinosaur reproductions made for the public: huge, life-size leviathans that ''reflected the best scientific knowledge of the time'' but that look, in retrospect, like reptilian hippos or the offspring of a buffalo and iguana.
To Americans of the gilded age, however, the dinosaur's aura was best captured, Mr. Mitchell argues, by Charles Knight's famous paintings, which depicted heavily armored behemoths in one-to-one combat: ''the paleontological equivalent of that other war of giants, the struggles among the 'robber barons' in late 19th-century America.'' This period, he goes on, ''so often portrayed as the era of 'social Darwinisn,' economic 'survival of the fittest,' ruthless competition, and the formation of giant corporate entities headed by gigantic individuals is aptly summarized by the Darwinian icon of giant reptiles in a fight to the death.''
Although such arguments make sense in a late-night college bull session sort of way, they are undermined by Mr. Mitchell's repetitious and highly disorganized narrative, his passion for pompous and unhelpful digressions (about everything from Jeffersonian democracy to modernist art), and his tendency to push his observations past the bounds of common sense.
Indeed, ''Last Dinosaur'' is peppered with specious remarks. In one chapter Mr. Mitchell writes: ''When Foucault wondered what would take the place of the Age of Man he probably didn't suspect that it would be the Age of the Dinosaur.'' And in another: ''If the dinosaur is an ancestral figure at the level of community or nation, it is the Oedipal father in the private sphere.''
Some of Mr. Mitchell's remarks are pedantic statements of the obvious: ''A cubist dinosaur would not be of much use, either to a paleontologist or to the public.'' Some are predicated upon dubious findings: ''The fortunes of dino-science seem to flourish in inverse relation to dinomania: when the scientific side is depressed, the popular image seems to become even more inflated and prolific.''
And others are just plain comical. Wondering why dinosaurs in the modern period (1900-1960) were usually depicted as being green, Mr. Mitchell asks, ''Is it a symbol of the 'colored' racial other, the savage, primitive denizen of the green world? Or is it an emblem of the white man's burden, the color of the military camouflage required for the Great White Hunter to blend in with the jungle and thus to dominate it?''
Such passages do not add to our understanding of dinosaurs as a cultural icon. They instead read like a parody of current academic scholarship: lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Photo: W.J.T. Mitchell (Joel Snyder/University of Chicago Press)