As you may have read (#7 most popular Yahoo! news story yesterday, after all) there’s been something of a set-to over the meanings to be taken from the recent nature film March of the Penguins. Apparently, the penguin is poised to be conservatives’ most revered near-witless creature since Forrest Gump.

Conservative folks like Michael Medved have claimed that the film’s rendition of penguin mating practices makes Penguins “the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." In counter-attack, some, like Sheerly Avni at AlterNet, have noted that penguins actually engage in all kinds of non-monogomous, non-heterosexual activity that their new-found champions on the right would hardly like to encourage. (Others, like me, note that Michael Medved gave a glowing 3.5 star review to The Santa Clause 2.)

The debate is a tricky one – in part because Medved is talking about the characters established by the film’s anthropomorphization of its penguin subjects, while the counterargument concentrates on the wider range of observed penguin behavior not filtered through that particularly elaborate narrative and visual frame. The details of penguins’ actual sex habits might be sand in the gearbox, but they might not matter to whatever extent the penguins in the movie provide a device that fosters the imagination and recollection of whatever ideals might end up attached to them.

On the other hand, it seems true that if the movie had been entirely invented – say, a cartoon about the monogamous Monogoloids of the magical planet Egairram ("Marriage" backwards!) – it would look like a load of didactic tripe.

The key, I think, is the simulation of discovery, of scientific observation of the natural world. And in this, I detect the design of my old nemesis, which like all nemeses I both love and hate: Jurassic Park.

Amidst the admiration of the films’ CGI effects and the chaos theory hoo-ha, there was a remarkable consistency to the widely distributed interpretation of the film’s meaning. Through a seemingly endless array of reviews, features and news stories, the popular understanding of Jurassic Park was a interpretative consensus that the story of genetically engineered dinosaurs running amok was a cautionary tale of scientific hubris. This was in effect the authorized interpretation, as both director Steven Spielberg and Crichton–who co-wrote the script for the film–announced the struggle of science vs. nature as the “point” of the film.

The nearly unanimous focus on the struggle of science vs. nature set up by this account actually occludes an important second scientific discourse that runs through the film. “Science” as defined by the science vs. nature split described by the film’s producers and reviewers is limited to the genetic and computer scientists who worked to produce the dinosaurs out of the discovered DNA. This discourse never seems to recognize that the two heroes of the film, Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant, are themselves scientists (a paleobotanist and paleontologist respectively). In the account that defined the science vs. nature split, these two scientists somehow find themselves on the side of nature, and nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the attitude these scientists take toward the dinosaurs. For the other characters, the dinosaurs are scientific achievements, prototypes, or biological “attractions” to be marveled at, sold or exhibited. For Grant and Sattler, however, the dinosaurs are authentically natural animals to be observed.

Despite the ostensibly central dilemma of the legitimacy of their existence, for Sattler and Grant, and for the narrative frame of the film itself, once the dinosaurs are born they are unquestionably authentic. Because the dinosaurs are to be taken as animals rather than monsters, they can serve as legitimate objects of scientific study for Grant and Sattler. As animals, the behaviors and characteristics of the dinosaurs can be scientifically observed and interpreted to gain a further understanding of the natural forces that they embody.

Some of the discoveries that come out of these observations are focused narrowly on questions of paleontology, but most of the film’s energy is devoted to an observation of “nature” as a broad field that includes the human animal as well. This is Jurassic Park at its most dangerous, and it is here that the insistent representation of the dinosaurs as animals plays its most significant role. Their status as animals allows the dinosaurs to be placed into a subtly presented syllogistic chain – dinosaur/animal/human – whereby observations of the “natural” behavior of the dinosaurs can be reflected back onto human life through the common element of their animal nature. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in Jurassic Park, as in March of the Penguins, what's revealed as the key element of being natural is heterosexual coupling (even though some of the female dinosaurs have to switch gender to make that work - obliging of them, no?).

If you’ll excuse an instance of the old “revealing linguistic switcheroo” ploy, it seems to me that there’s a difference between science fiction and Jurassic Park’s fictional science. The film does not ask the viewer to understand the nature of the dinosaurs in a symbolic or allegorical relation to human existence. Rather, it presents the actions of the dinosaurs as a realistic, authentic simulation of animal life, and inserts characters to interpret their actions, in a classically passive-scientific mode, for the truths they reveal about a natural field into which the viewer is to recognize their own integration. For the penguins, it is of course an even easier sell, as the imprint of National Geographic and the genre itself suggest to audiences that they are indeed seeing nature, and the heavy fictionalization of their story is less apparent.

This is, as I noted above, potentially dangerous stuff especially in the age of “intelligent design,” in which science is increasingly compelled to tell us a story we like if it is to be believed. There should be some comfort here, though, for those who teach, advocate and engage in an active and critical engagement with culture. As science shifts further into the representational – at the urging of fundamentalist Christians rather than those sneaky intellectuals – there’s more at stake there than ever.