Spielberg: Minority Report part 1
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? John Anderton, like many Spielberg protagonists, has seen his family shattered. His son has been missing for many years, and that trauma destroyed his marriage. John is unable to put his family back together, and so he has, again, like many Spielberg protagonists, become obsessed with his work. As it happens, John’s work is being a homicide detective in the future, so he catches murderers by sifting through the thoughts of a trio of "precogs" who live in a swimming pool in his office. As a bonus, due to the nature of the precog’s thoughts, he is able to catch murderers before they actually murder. This he does to comfort himself about the loss of his son, and to please his "work father" Lamarr Burgess, the man who co-created the "precog" detective program and gave Anderton his job. Anderton is absolutely convinced of the rightness and justice of his job, and so when the precogs "accuse" him of a future murder, Anderton finds he must clear his name for the future murder of a man he’s never met.
Whew! That’s a whole lot of "what" for a protagonist to want. That must be why Minority Report has the most unique structure of all Spielberg movies: it’s four acts and a prologue.
Now this, ladies and gentlemen, this is a prologue. No white text on a black background, no old man we’ve never met telling a convoluted story to another man we haven’t met, no book on a pedastel opening up, no montage of moments presenting an idea as a narrator intones. Spielberg knows that he’s got a loopy concept that will require some explaining, and he does so with 15 solid minutes of action, detective work and thrills. Anderton doesn’t sit there and explain everything to someone, we simply watch him and his colleagues do their jobs, that is, we watch them behave, and their actions and behavior tell us (almost) everything we need to know to understand the fanciful, complicated setup that will drive the futuristic action detective thriller that will form the rest of the narrative.
And how, exactly, does Anderton sift through the clues he receives from the precogs? Well, he takes the fractured, disparate images and audio streams from the precogs visions and arranges them into a coherent, compelling narrative — exactly the job of a film editor. This becomes an important metaphor later on in the movie, when the theme asserts itself that images are not truth, that they can be endlessly manipulated in order to achieve a desired effect. This makes Minority Report uniquely qualified to function as a cinematic narrative (as opposed to a literary one). Anderton assembles and orders sounds and images to create "truth," and the theme that emerges in the movie is "seeing is believing." The first part of this formulation, "seeing," becomes an important motif throughout, with images of eyes and the lack of eyes, seeing and not seeing, in dozens of variations. The second part, "believing," also gets explored in multiple variations, as we will see.
Once the prologue ends, Act I, straight away, introduces Anderton’s real problem — he’s got a missing son and it’s eating him alive. Putting would-be murderers away seems to bring Anderton no satisfaction — he lives alone in a filthy, unkempt apartment (although, as a cop, his digs are much, much nicer than most of the other living spaces we will see in the movie) and spends his evenings getting high, watching videos of his ex-family and sobbing. Anderton,clearly, is in love with images — he lives his life by them. They can help him stop a murder and they can temporarily put his family back together. His home-movie images, like the images made by the precogs, are just another lie that can be manipulated to a desired effect. (The prologue ends with a slick commercial for the Precrime initiative, a political ad that demonstrates the extent to which skillfully-manipulated images dominate our political discourse and direct our political actions — an idea also explored in Wag the Dog.)
We learn that the Precrime initiative, the brainchild of Anderton’s boss Burgess, has stopped murder cold in Washington, DC and is now about to "go national," that is unless the bleeding-heart liberals at Justice don’t get their touchy-feely hands on it and "take it away" from Burgess and Anderton. Justice (the department, if not the concept) arrives in the form of Danny Witwer, a callow, gum-chewing young hothead who seems shifty and arrogant and determined to dismantle Precrime
One might wonder why Spielberg, at this jucture of his career, following the sci-fi parable of A.I. and with seemingly limitless vistas of cinematic achievement before him would settle for a genre picture for his next project, especially one that invites direct comparisons with an established classic, Blade Runner. Maybe he felt "why not? I’ve never done a noir before," maybe he felt a retreat to genre was what he needed at the time. Maybe he’s making a political point about the Bush Doctrine (you know, the one Sarah Palin had never heard of) — the cause of pre-emptive warfare and the dangerous precedent it sets. If he is, he doesn’t press the point too strongly. Or maybe he wants to raise larger, more philosophical questions about fate and predetermination, but they, too, are dealt with lightly and don’t get in the way of what is, essentially, a detective thriller about a cop on the run. And yet he also raises questions of faith: the swimming-pool room at Precrime is called "The Temple" and Witwer can’t throw a punch without kissing his St. Christopher’s medal first. (Or maybe it’s St. Michael — we don’t get a clear look at it. The point is, he’s openly "religious" — he has faith, which is the certain belief in something that cannot be proven. Spielberg, one can see, clearly has faith in the power of images to entertain and enlighten, but Minority Report warns that the manipulation of images can be put to dangerous, immoral ends.
The female precog Agatha (named after mystery-writer Agatha Christie? The other two are named Arthur and Dashiell — Clarke and Hammett?*) lunges out of her pool and grabs Anderton’s arm. "Can you see?" she gasps, directing his attention to her vision of a past murder. This launches the detective story aspect of Act I, and subtly raises the question of whether "seeing" must necessarily be "believing." It also, I note, quotes the opening line of the American national anthem, suggesting perhaps that seeing — truly seeing, that is — is a patrotic act in and of itself.
The theme of "seeing" gets substantial cinematic help from the narrative’s use of eyes as a both a symbol of identity and as the entry point of images. The image-manipulators of Minority Report understand that the eyes are the windows to the soul, and by filling eyes with seductive, seemingly-irrefutable images, they lay claim to that soul. "The eyes of the nation are upon us," says Burgess (after Anthony?), pressing the point of his political agenda. Burgess explicitly states that Justice wants to "take" Precrime "away from him," which raises, again, the behavior of the Bush administration, the idea that government is the personal possession of whoever happens to be in power at the moment, rather than an office in the service of a populace.
Anderton investigates the murder Agatha has brought up and finds that the murderer, in custody, is a John Doe and that the intended victim, Ann Lively (ha!) is a Missing Person. He reports his findings to Burgess, who is more concerned with the delicate politics of Precrime "going national." Anderton clearly sees Burgess as a surrogate father, and since he is obsessed with seeing himself as a "good father" (in spite of losing his son) he therefore takes Burgess, and government itself, as a "good father" too, a wise authority that knows what’s best for everyone. Because Anderton sees Burgess as a "good father," he therefore is intent on being a "good son" for him, and takes Burgess’s political battles as his own.
It isn’t long, however, before the precogs dream a new future murder, one that appears to be committed by Anderton himself. Act I climaxes with Anderton discovering himself in the images he lives to manipulate, and as Act II begins he will find out what it means to be on the other side of the tyranny of those images.
As with most Spielberg, the production design for Minority Report is dense, detailed, well-thought-out and precise. I’m especially in love with the cereal-box that won’t shut up.
*Several of my commenters point out that Arthur is obviously named after Conan Doyle, not Clarke. Which, duh.
I think Anderton’s appearance in front of the data-screen is noteworthy in that he is essentially “conducting an orchestra.” You talked about how the images are put together to form a narrative–I think that there is a lot of Spielberg “putting things together” in the movie. I suspect he kind of felt like he had to conduct the whole performance to get anything viable out of it.
Dealing with time travel or precognition is difficult at best and the story of Minority Report is kind of murky too (who did what eventually comes out–but it’s teased out with a lot of action filler and some tough philosophical questions we’re supposed to keep in mind).
What this means is this–I felt that the movie needed to sort of work “as a whole” in order to come together (I, myself, found that I was sort of drifting away from the big picture to the detriment of the experience)–and seeing what you wrote about the prologue I wonder if Spielberg had sort of the same experience (“I’ve gotta keep this thing together!). If so, the metaphor for conducting in the beginning would be relevant to Spielberg himself making the movie, knowing, of course, its future ahead of time.
-Marco (I also think he really wanted a cool view of a future society. Everything I have seen in the movies from Children of Men on down suggests we will have animated print in the next decade)
The irony being that Spielberg, famously, does not edit on a computer — he insists on doing it the old-fashioned way, strips of film hanging in bins. The credits for Minority Report even boast that it is edited on a Moviola.
Appropriately enough, the music he’s listening to is Schubert’s unfinished symphony
“Conducting an orchestra” is a good analogy for it. But it occurs to me — I’ve stuck in MR to watch while I hem my gi — that it also serves an eminently practical purpose: it dramatizes what could otherwise have been a very boring piece of narrative.
“No, really! Our opening scene will be a pulse-pounding round of data analysis!”
That’s what it is, after all. Anderton’s analyzing data. But they found a way to make it physical, to turn a cerebral activity into a visual one the audience could not only follow but get engaged with.
Really, I love this opening sequence. It pulls off the grand challenge of speculative fiction, which is to get your necessary exposition across in a way that isn’t thunderously boring. It helps to have Witwer there, so people can explain things to him, but the scene embeds a lot of other information too, quite gracefully.
The female precog Agatha (named after mystery-writer Agatha Christie? The other two are named Arthur and Dashiell — Clarke and Hammett?)
Conan Doyle and Hammett. Nice trio of writers whose stories are often about not trusting your eyes.
Conan Doyle — of course. I was limiting myself to a singe century.
Or maybe he wants to raise larger, more philosophical questions about fate and predetermination
I think appearance versus reality is the more dominant theme; this, A.I., and Catch Me If You Can seem to form a appearance v/ reality trifecta.
Well, indeed.
touche, Alcott
Pre-cogs Names
My guess is that “Arthur” is for Arthur Conan Doyle.
Jumping ahead a bit, I’ve never read the Philip K. Dick story this was based on, but I strongly suspect it ended with the equivalent of the “false ending” at the end of … Act 3, I assume . . . and not the happy ending that finishes the film.
Re: Pre-cogs Names
Or, as a friend of mine once put it, “Minority Report is a great science fiction movie with an episode of Murder, She Wrote tacked on at the end.”
Re: Pre-cogs Names
I’ve been looking forward to you tackling this film in seeing your thoughts on that last act, which has angered and confused me every time I’ve watched the film. It’s not that it has a happy ending – it should, as should A.I.; some films earn it and properly head for it – but that the last 20 minutes of the film (just about right from the 2 hour mark on the DVD on) are SO damned clumsy. It’s like an entirely different screenwriter and director walked in and dropped the film several dozen IQ points. How the hell did this happen? The ending of A.I. is a solid concept slightly botched, but still passable – this is a disaster.
Yeah, your friend hit it on the nose. But why?
Re: Pre-cogs Names
The ending of A.I. is a solid concept slightly botched, but still passable – this is a disaster.
Wow. I had precisely the opposite reaction to those two films.
Re: Pre-cogs Names
I don’t feel that way about the ending of Minority Report. Maybe the detective-thriller aspect could have been handled with a little more panache, but in no way would I call it a disaster.
Re: Pre-cogs Names
Most of the Philip K. Dick stories bear little resemblance to the films. His stories are typically fairly short and deal simply with a what-if scenario. The what-if scenario and its outcome is the important part, but doesn’t quite flesh out to a full movie. The story “Minority Report” was pretty different from the film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report#Differences_between_short_story_and_film
Back to the Blade Runner comparison. The similarity in the eye motifs are too striking to be accidental. The eyes are the window to the soul, eyes determine identity, the mystery man in the sunglasses turns out to be a billboard (sunglasses = no eyes = not real), etc.
Re: Pre-cogs Names
I was a little startled by the Blade Runner lifts too — I would have suspected that Spielberg would have avoided comparisons to the earlier movie at all costs. But maybe he felt like the eye motif was too strong to pass by.
Re: Pre-cogs Names
I was just reviewing all of the Dick material out there that has not been made, he did a huge number of alternative history kind of stories. I wish Sci-Fi channel would do some real versions of his work, his “do robots dream of electric sheep” is far more interesting of a mystery than the “blade runner” based on it.
Good post.
I can’t think of this film without remembering professional grouch Evan Dorkin’s hatchet job on it (second post, halfway through; you might want to cut and paste the text on a sticky note, the red background makes my eyes bleed) in a post on his LJ, not one day after I watched it and came away very impressed; I liked it quite a bit after my initial viewing, then Dorkin comes along and takes an AK-47 to my puffed up opinion.
I still like it a lot more than he did, 2-3 viewings and five years later.
I wonder what, if anything, naming that character “Witwer” signifies. “Witwer” is German for “widower.”
The name Witwer sticks out funny to me, too — I’ve been walking around for days now going “Witwer, Witwer — why would he name a character Witwer?” But I can’t see any reason except that it’s the character’s name in the original story and that it’s distinctive.
The original is by Dick. Maybe I’m overestimating him, but I believe he thought hard about what to name his characters. I’m sure there’s a meaning.
“Maybe he’s making a political point… … Or maybe he wants to raise larger, more philosophical questions about fate and predetermination, but they, too, are dealt with lightly and don’t get in the way of what is, essentially, a detective thriller about a cop on the run.”
I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s essentially a detective thriller. I think that he’s making some extremely sharp political and social points in this film. But that becomes apparent only when all the acts are done and all the film is gone.
I don’t know why, but when this one came out, I really, really dug it. Like, see-twice-in-one-week-at-the-theatre dug it.
There’s a sequence in part two, that I’m hoping you’ll address, because I want to know if I’m reading too much into something, or crazy or what. The auto factory scene.
Not Minority Report-related, but any insider knowledge on why there’s all these vampire romances going around? Twilight, Let the Right One in, the tv series True Blood, Vampire Harold & Maude, etc.
I have no idea. These things come and go — there’s a whole lot of zombie-related stuff on the market now, too.
It’s spilling over into tv/films from a recent boom in publishing, which happened when paranormal romances collided with urban fantasy. I won’t go into a detailed history unless anybody wants one, but you can’t walk through a bookstore these days without tripping over six vampire romances and a couple more about werewolves.
comparisions to Attack of The Clones
I love Minority Report, I think the script is strong and it’s a fun thriller – I’d noted the comparisons to Blade Runner, but they didn’t bother me too much, if anything, it felt like an homage and their problems with the subject of eyes were different enough (Anderton literally has to get NEW EYES to survive and see the truth) in how they were handled.
One comparison that did bother me a bit, however, was the fight in the factory sequence, when Anderton and Witwer were fighting, Anderton falls into a car and has to dodge automated factory drills, etc . . . it was a thrilling sequence (with a hell of a button on it) but I noted that there was also the same exact sequence in ATTACK IN THE CLONES . . . they both came out in 2002, Clones a month before MR . . . it’s hard to say who came up with it first but it seems a bit ingenius that one did not inform the other, as that the two directors are close friends.
I could be wrong, but when I rewatched Clones again (just once, couldn’t do it more than that) the two sequences are very similar to my eye (heh).
that being said, I really love Minority Report, and it’s one of those films that every time I see, I like even more.
btw, I believe Matt Damon was originally offered Witwer and turned it down for the first Bourne . . . I could be wrong about that, but it’s what I remember today . . .
Joshua James
Re: comparisions to Attack of The Clones
If you’re not feeling suspicious enough yet, I remember reading that the droid-factory scene in Clones was added late in the process — it’s hard to believe that both Lucas and Spielberg came up with the same idea independently.
We learn that the Precrime initiative, the brainchild of Anderton’s boss Burgess, has stopped murder cold in Washington, DC and is now about to “go national,” that is unless the bleeding-heart liberals at Justice don’t get their touchy-feely hands on it and “take it away” from Burgess and Anderton.
I think you had a touch of sentence amnesia here: the phenomenon where a person starts writing a sentence, get’s slightly distracted, and then completes the sentence without accurately recalling how it started, often resulting in a sentence which contradicts itself. Happens to the best of us.
My guess is that the precogs living in a swimming pool makes for a much better visual than in does a verbal description. Just reading about it, it sounds outright silly.
If I had a trio of precogs solving murders for me, I’d let them live in whatever swimming pool they wanted.
The visual isn’t bad, and the dialogue makes a nod in passing to how the fluid they’re suspended in facilitates their precognitive abilities.
One might wonder why Spielberg, at this jucture of his career, following the sci-fi parable of A.I. and with seemingly limitless vistas of cinematic achievement before him would settle for a genre picture for his next project, especially one that invites direct comparisons with an established classic, Blade Runner.
I object to the notion of “settling” for a genre picture. 🙂 The fun thing about sf/f is, you can design a custom environment for talking about whatever philosophical/thematic issues you want. Done well, genre is a great tool.
I’m curious, too, why you leapt to Blade Runner as your comparison. They share the PKD connection and (sort of) the professions of the main characters, but the two films address seriously different questions; I don’t find them much alike at all. Even visually, they’re rather distinct, though the alley Anderton buys his drugs in might exist somewhere in the BR universe.
I like this movie quite a bit, for a whole host of reasons. Spielberg respected the genre he was working in by getting people in to do some technology projections for him — I love the manipulable video, and the general use of light — and a number of the secondary characters stand out as personalities above and beyond their plot function. Also, I remember fairly vividly that I thought the trailer spoiled the whole plot; when I saw the film, I was pleasantly surprised to discover it hadn’t, that it went beyond Witwer into something more interesting.
Spielberg respected the genre he was working in by getting people in to do some technology projections for him — I love the manipulable video, and the general use of light
The biggest draw that brings me back to watching this movie every chance I have is the futurism. There’s things I think are blatantly wrong (sometimes outright silly), but much that’s at least right in the sense of the general direction technology will go, and I love seeing it put on display. The personalized near-omnipresent advertising is sorta the epitome of that: it’s going to happen, the portrayal in the film is a precise snapshot of the future, and it’s going to suck.
Expecting any given work of science fiction to “be right” about the future is an exercise in disappointment. What’s more interesting is whether it’s a plausible projection of current trends — commentary on the present, as it were. I hope to god advertising doesn’t go the route we see there, but it’s a future I can believe in all too well.
And given the multi-touch screens and the like we’re seeing now, I expect that kind of manipulable interface will probably prove far too conservative an extrapolation.
I’m sure of that too. In fifty years, people will watch Minority Report and laugh at the clumsy, limited, complicated technology the characters are saddled with.
Fifty? Ten years from now, half of it’s probably going to look dated.
For one thing, I’m sure the Gap logo will have changed by that point.
People, people…the future is now.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
How about right now?
G-Speak … life definitely imitates art here!
I have no problem with genre and I like Minority Report, my question is only why he would do a sci-fi genre picture after his “mind-blowing sci-fi parable” picture. Minority Report is very smart, but it doesn’t re-shape the genre the way a movie like, say, 2001 does. AI takes a giant leap outside of genre, Minority Report is happy to stay true to the rules. Fitting perhaps, seeing as how the protagonist is so in love with rules.
It’s not just the Dick aspects that invite the Blade Runner comparisons, it’s the dwelling on eyes as a device, the portrait of a society with extreme high and low classes, the way the protagonist is a detective who gets dicked around by his superiors, the exhaustive imagining of the future. I think Minority Report does all these things very well, but to me it’s still, in some regard, Spielberg trying to beat Ridley Scott at his game. Which, box-office wise anyway, he did.
To my way of thinking, Minority Report is more like Strange Days. Again, police corruption, and a recurring motif of recreated experience — less of a focus on the eyes, I suppose, but the underlying ideas feel more similar (since Blade Runner uses eyes in connection with humanity more than truth).
I remember seeing this when it came out as a kid…
How about Justice is blind? Simple, no?