‘Man destroys god, man creates dinosaurs’: Escaping from freedom in the Jurassic Park franchise

This article analyses the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises through Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom , arguing that the films dramatize a recurring dialectic in which technological freedom generates new forms of domination. Fromm contends that freedom, when experienced as anxiety and insecurity, produces a desire for submission to authority. Reading the two trilogies as distinct cultural formations, the article shows how this dynamic shifts from late-twentieth-century techno-scientific optimism to post-financial crisis anxieties about corporate power and technocratic governance. It argues that the franchise organizes this dialectic through three interrelated mechanisms: commodification, engineered autonomy and structured domination. Dinosaurs are transformed from ecological beings into market assets, then granted limited agency so that responsibility, violence and control can be displaced onto them. Drawing on political theory, critical theory and animal studies, the article situates Fromm’s framework as historically and culturally specific, demonstrating how popular cinema offers crucial insight into contemporary ideologies of freedom, authority and power.