Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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Spielberg’s Minority Report posits a futuristic police force that arrests criminals before they have a chance to commit their crimes. The unexpectedly topical premise, taken from a 1956 story by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick, posits a future in which mutant “precogs” dream of murders before they occur, thus allowing the police to arrest killers in advance of their crimes. Spielberg himself has expressed cautious support for the extra-legality of the current Bush war on terror: “I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9-11 from ever happening again. But the question is where do you draw the line?”4
Adding to the early twenty-first-century feel, Minority Report opens with a zappy, gore-filled “pre-visualization.” Chief inspector John Anderton (Tom Cruise) conducts the flow of images, hilariously accompanied by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” rewinding and recombining the evidence as though fashioning a movie on some telepathic editing console. The three pre-cogs floating unconscious in their high-security amniotic pool are not the only ones troubled by nightmares. The solitary Anderton is a secret dope fiend, haunted by the disappearance of his young son six years before. It is because of the boy’s abduction that the cop has become the poster child for the Washington, DC, pre-crime unit founded by the lordly, Ashcroft-like Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow). But is preemptive punishment a good thing? Inevitably, Anderton discovers that the pre-cogs have determined that he is destined to commit murder, killing someone he doesn’t yet know.
His trademark paranoia aside, Dick’s original story was mainly an exercise in the proliferation of bifurcating possibilities, closer in some respects to imagining a Borges conundrum than an Orwell police state. Spielberg’s movie, however, is less concerned with forking paths of predestination than in the process of exorcizing the past. The concept of the minority report that gives Dick’s story its twist is here something of a red herring—although the screenplay does introduce such other Dickian notions as compensatory drug use and pervasive advertising.
Anticipating the proliferation of online merchandizing, Spielberg imagines an all-too-credible world in which (as with TV ratings) consumers are defined by what they watch. Eyes, in Minority Report, are literally windows on the soul, and the soul is that which yearns for brand-name fulfillment. Every electronic billboard is a consumer surveillance mechanism programmed to recognize a potential customer and deliver a customized personal message. This is most wickedly visualized as Anderton drags a shaking and quaking, madly prognosticating precog Agatha (Samantha Morton) through a shopping mall with the cops in hot pursuit.5
Minority Report is a movie of haunting images and mindless thrills. Whatever its intent, it visualizes (as well as demonstrates) a future where the unconscious has been thoroughly colonized. All human desires are grist for capitalist gratification, just as any criminal thoughts are grounds for state punishment. Although the filmmaker may have wanted to trade legal freedoms for security from terror, his recurring images of thought police drifting down from the sky or crashing through the ceiling into someone’s life have a terrorizing resonance beyond the tortuous permutations of the plot. Similarly, the mechanical spiders that serve as police bloodhounds are spectacularly invasive—a key concept for the movies.6
There’s also a rueful edge to the tawdry image emporium—part sleazy disco, part psychedelic Radio Shack—where citizens seek solace and Anderton tries to “download” Agatha’s visions. And most fascinating is the bitter knowledge of its final mystery: If you can only create the right movie, you can get away with murder.7
Anticipating the commercial totality inherent in social networking, Minority Report can be seen as a prescient expression of the new social-real. At the time, it was clear that we had entered the Age of Bush. In late July, New York Times political commentator Maureen Dowd began a column, datelined “Los Angeles,” with the hilarious news that “Hollywood agents now advise budding screenwriters how to pitch scripts by using a political analogy.”
“You’re in the Oval Office,” they bark. “You’re briefing President Bush. He’s got no attention span. He doesn’t care about details. Sell him the movie.” If you can tell the story vividly and simply enough to appeal to the curiosity-challenged chief executive who likes his memos on one page, the agents figure, you might be able to win over busy, bottom-line-oriented studio executives.8
The WTC cast its non-existent shadow over the year’s holiday releases. Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated Gangs of New York was for most a terrible disappointment although, like other movies that opened at the close of 2002, it could not be seen apart from the events of 9/11. Scorsese’s concluding image was a stunning matte shot of smoky Lower Manhattan as viewed from a Brooklyn graveyard, followed by the inevitable time-lapse dissolve to the skyline as of September 10, 2001.
Scorsese’s fellow New Yorker Spike Lee specifically set his in-your-face paean to ethnic vaudeville and urban lowlife, 25th Hour, in post-9/11 Manhattan. Although the Event has no bearing on the narrative, Lee’s movie opens with aerial shots of the city that include the memorializing twin columns of light beamed up from the Trade Center site and ends with Bruce Springsteen’s 9/11 anthem, “The Rising”; another scene is shot in a high rise apartment above Ground Zero, which is distractingly visible through the window.9
25th Hour opened in New York on the same day as The Two Towers, which might have offered Lee an alternate title. Not only notable for featuring the first convincing human-digital cyborg performance (Andy Serkis, radically modified, as the pitiful Gollum), The Two Towers was a key component in what would prove Hollywood’s top-grossing year of the ’00s. Four out of the five worldwide top-grossing movies released in 2002 were sequels: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones; and Men in Black II. The fifth was Spider-Man, which would go on to spin off sequels in 2004 and 2007. All were essentially animated movies created from photographic material.
CHAPTER NINE
2003: INVADING IRAQ
The winter of 2003 was the run-up to the Iraq War—its beginning was protested, to no avail, by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers marching in the streets.
On March 14, George W. Bush made a televised speech to the nation maintaining that “intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” War came on March 21, two days before Oscar Night. Continuing a trend that began during the Clinton presidency, movie stars had come to serve the Democrats as talk radio personalities served the Republicans. Political dissidence was a matter of celebrity.
Titled “When Doves Cry,” the following article was the Village Voice cover story for the issue of March 25.
NEW YORK, MARCH 25, 2003
A cast of Bill Clinton’s cronies, a vaunted 1 billion viewers in 150 countries: there were some who imagined that Oscar Night ’03 might be the most widely seen peace demonstration ever beamed into the universe.
As the Desert Storm sequel drew nigh, the right-wing media shifted their enemies of choice from those The Simpsons calls “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to bigmouth movie stars. Could Shock and Awe really be upstaged by Stupefaction and Narcissism? The New York Post suggested that the Academy Awards be canceled. Meanwhile, the Internet crackled with reports that activists like Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen were on a blacklist and that acceptance speeches would be monitored for political content. Insiders warned a UK daily that failure to award Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature would be proof that Hollywood had reverted to “the witch-hunting 1950s.”
What was appropriate—and what should people wear? The group Artists United to Win Without War was handing out green peace buttons; other members of the Academy sported a more abstract silver squiggle apparently meant to represent a dove. Monitoring the stars’ entrance on the foreshortened red carpet from her E! Channel aerie, fashion arbiter Joan Rivers wondered what they meant. “Peace,” her daughter explained. “Every idiot in the world wants peace,” Joan snorted, suggesting that the morning after, the pins will wind up for sale on eBay. But what the buttons and squiggles really meant was that, for those of us who