However, as Baudrillard has pointed out, “t the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past - or at least a version of the past.” Wu’s words evoke the spatial and temporal distance of the past and acknowledge that the past can only be approached via mediated encounters the past is (re)produced in and through media, broadly conceived. Writer Michael Crichton embraces the postmodernist play his character engages in, for the man tasked to engineer dinosaurs which resemble an imagined past reality goes on to underline the paradox he is caught in, for “he past is gone. Wu’s seemingly unintentional slippage between ontological levels presents an illustrative example of what postmodernism’s poster boy, Jean Baudrillard, referred to as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality,” for the visitors’ perception of the ‘real’ dinosaurs roaming the park (as imagined by and relayed through Henry Wu) becomes inseparable from the (no longer) extinct animals’ representations in visual media. “Visitors will think the dinosaurs look speeded up, like film running too fast,” remarks chief genetic engineer Henry Wu in Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park (1990) when detailing his dissatisfaction with his Frankensteinean creation vis-à-vis Jurassic Park’s founder, John Hammond.
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