An edited version of an academic essay I wrote in 2009, looking at common generic concerns.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, directors with oeuvres linked by collaborations and common interests, including science fiction, made at different points in their careers films that nonetheless sport closely coinciding imagery and ideas. THX 1138 (1971) and Minority Report (2002) each deal with the urge of individual men living in highly technological future worlds, to fight an apparently pre-ordained fate. Lucas’s and Spielberg’s individual works pose questions inherent in the genre, in such a way that looks at both the best and worst in both humanity and its creations. Such concerns include the nature of human identity, and what kind of world ours might become in the foreseeable future, especially in terms of the melding of governance and technology.
The theme of human beings contending with forces inimical to them, unleashed by unhindered progress, is one of the key concerns of science-fiction. Simultaneously, the struggle to assert a sense of the human spirit and free will is that theme’s constant companion. THX 1138 and Minority Report are set in disparate versions of the future. THX 1138’s locale is a subterranean civilisation, possibly post-apocalyptic. Minority Report takes place in a Washington DC
In Minority Report, the social desire is to end the crime of murder, which had reached epidemic proportions. In THX 1138, it’s a broader programme for annihilation of all emotional response and sense of attachment. In both films, a socio-political structure is being defended, or, from the other perspective, resisted, as an individual is driven to evade oppressive tools and look for alternatives to proscribed fate. In the case of THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) and his assigned mate LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), their rebellion begins in LUH’s desire to have a child, still alive under all the cultural and chemical conditioning. For Spielberg’s hero, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), both his commitment to the law, and his discovery of his destiny to break that law, stem from grief over the disappearance and probable murder of his son. In both, the powerful need to create and defend family, and the severed natural link between male, female, and child, is strong enough to rupture the limits imposed on the individual.
The question, then, that is vital to these films and others that invoke these themes is what, exactly, is human nature? Both THX and Anderton violate the moral precepts of their society which they themselves at least tacitly subscribe to, in obeying single-minded, private motives. In THX’s case, it’s to find and rescue LUH, who, being pregnant with his child, has been spirited away by the authorities, who regard their natural reproduction as a heresy. When THX finds LUH has been liquidated, he flees. Anderton determines to prove himself innocent of a murder he is predicted to commit, but drives irrevocably closer to the place and time where he will commit that crime. Both men defy and assault guardians of law and order, and threaten established certainties. Such a spirit is at least as destructive as it is nurturing, and asocial as it is social. And yet both films propose these are tendencies that cannot, and should not, be erased to favour one over the other. Here is the classic attitude of Emerson: “‘If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”
This factor is common to other genre works. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), adapted from Anthony Burgess’s novel, extrapolates a vision of the removal of free will from humankind, via futuristic techniques of aversion therapy, even as applied to its most depraved and destructive individuals, as obscene. This is illustrated in how, when the aptitude for violence is removed from Alex (Malcolm McDowall), it is still present in everyone else, leaving him at their mercy. A common theme of THX 1138, Minority Report, and A Clockwork Orange is the violence that can be inflicted on the transgressive individual in the name of protecting society, corroding that society’s pretence of moral ascendancy. In the first two cases, and in many other explorations of the theme, as diverse as Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) and Equilibrium (Kurt Wimmer, 2002), the heroes are supplied with personal motives – usually revenge, or the instinct to defend loved-ones – that assert themselves with such power that they defeat all conditioning. These primal, innately human qualities continually resurge and reclaim precedence, and the heroes’ new, self-directing will imbues them with unique power.
The worlds that THX and Anderton inhabit bombard them with depersonalised information, and technical creations that reduce humans to receptive entities. In both films, a wryly humorous take on advertising establishes this invasion of the private world. THX and LUH cannot open their medication cabinet without having a cheery commercial-like voice recommend pills to them, and the god-figure, OMM, advises them to “buy more”. Anderton walks through a shopping mall where the beams from iris-recognition registers allows the hologram advertisements to address him by name, a personalising touch that only reinforces how entrapped he is by this technology, and how fundamentally impersonal it is. His choices are limited by having choices inflicted upon him. THX, LUH, and the other inhabitants of their underground society are endlessly watched. Anderton must escape the omnipresent optical registers and invasive spidery robots. Agatha and her fellow seers, the twins, referred to as “Precogs”, are kept in a tank in the “Temple”, wired up to machinery, stripped of all cognisant capacity except for the perpetual perception of murder. The miscreants of both films’ societies are severed from those societies in harsh fashion. THX is imprisoned in an all-white void where unseen technicians use electrical impulses to contort him like a marionette. In Minority Report, the accused are cryogenically frozen.
In both films, then, technology is both wellspring and product of repression. THX 1138’s world is not specified in terms of who or what has brought about this state of affairs: the rhetoric on offer is a mash of socialist, theocratic, and consumerist phrases. THX works on an assembly line in which he is reduced to an automaton, building automatons. In Minority Report, the possibility of free will is not considered by the Pre-Crime Unit, the individuals accused of potential murder imprisoned despite having committed no actual crime. The subsequent plot revolves around the possibilities for misreading the prophecy of the Precogs, of whom the female, Agatha (Samantha Morton), is the most powerful and the only one able to detect discrepancies in the visions. The head of Pre-Crime, Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow), is in fact a murderer and a hypocrite, but he is motivated but an altruistic sense of mission.
Moral and religious concepts are indeed invoked to justify such oppression in each situation. THX and LUH’s fornication is described as a crime with religious consequences by THX’s prosecutor. Fletcher (Neal McDonough), one of Anderton’s fellows at Pre-Crime, theorises that precognition confirms the presence of a deistic influence. The crimes are therefore inevitable, a proof of doctrines of predestination. This theocratic element removes from the individual any right to private moral orientation. Anderton denies the religious significance of the Precogs: for him they are merely tools in law-enforcement. He is the film’s exemplar of the individual conscience, and the dramatic crux comes when he resists the predicted urge to kill a man who appears to be his son’s murderer, thus confirming that the visions are not infallible, and free will exists even in the context of precognition. In Lucas’s film, religion has become an empty iconography. THX retches uncontrollably whilst OMM’s image offers pre-recorded homilies. Both films are cynical about religion as a social tool, but neither film denies the possibility of a deity. In Minority Report, Witwer (Colin Farrell) confirms his own Catholicism in kissing his rosary, and he is defined by his own distrust of merely human systems.
The desire not to be human, not to feel or think when these bring pain, is conceived in this material as a genuine urge of sentience, the price it pays for its nature, and an inherent contradiction. Technology, whether the nuts-and-bolts of machinery, the chemical effect of new drugs, genetic engineering, or mysterious fusions of all these, is developed to liberate from labour and concern, and at the same time dulls humankind’s capacity to feel and act independently. In THX 1138, a whole society is drugged to avoid such tribulation. This drugging causes constant industrial accidents, but, as THX knows, his job might well be impossible without it. In Minority Report, Anderton, to suppress his grief, regularly indulges a synthetic drug, but finally leaves himself more vulnerable to its resurgence.
Abuse of the same drug caused the birth of the hyper-aware Precogs, whose gifts rupture the limits of the liminal world as the desire to repress sensation brings about its exact opposite. When Anderton flees to the edges of Washington DC
In images common to THX 1138 and Minority Report, entrapped individuals are stripped of identity and gender by having their heads shaved, a further move towards removal of individual specificity. In THX 1138, this includes the whole population (male-female partnering is asexual), and in Minority Report limited to the Precogs and the frozen prisoners: Anderton, finally, will have his head shaven. The Temple
The fringes of both worlds are defined by far seamier, decaying infrastructure, and more marginal lives. Directorial technique emphasises a surveillance culture. Lucas shoots much of his film through video intermediaries, layered with dissociated sound effects, to enforce the impression of total immersion in a technological world lacking self-determination. Spielberg’s camera is constantly catching people in some illicit or embarrassing act, and roves in a long overhead shot as the spider-bots invade an apartment block. Both robots and camera roam freely and strip away the illusion of privacy.
THX flees into the superstructure of the city where mutants dwell, and then to the surface. Anderton hides in slums and then in the countryside, which still offers rustic refuge. In these environments, the possibility of freedom from control is still open. There are implicit links here to countercultural idealism (the era of which both directors began working in, and THX 1138 is very a work of that era) and to the American traditions of Emerson and Thoreau, where reference to the natural world is vital, and the individual is the paragon of civilisation. Such a perspective is the polar opposite to the Platonic ideal Republic that Robert Cormier investigated in relation to THX 1138. “The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to…is still an impure one,” Thoreau stated in ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, and in THX 1138 and Minority Report, the government has tried at once to become more perfect, and succeeded in becoming less humane.
There is, however, in these traps of technology, usually a method of circumventing them, and reconfirming the design of technology as helpmate, not hindrance. Anderton will have his own eyeballs surgically replaced. He and THX appropriate cars to flee to freedom. Breaking loose and breaking free, fleeing that cocoon of technology and society, is crucial in both narratives. THX, once his last ties to the city are severed, leaves the safe realm. Anderton removes Agatha from the shelter of the Temple
“Everybody runs”, Anderton repeats when facing arrest, affirming this as an essential human trait: the act of running, the act of choosing, as the rejection of passivity, are constantly correlated. THX choses to seek another possibility. Anderton establishes his capacity to choose his fate. A parallel is manifest in Minority Report and Lucas’s film from the same year of release (2002), Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones: both Anderton and the protagonists of the Lucas film have to survive a battle on an automated production line. The image of the human caught within a machine that does not notice or care for their presence is at its most literal here. The limits of even the most advanced technology, lacking human suppleness of thought, wit, self-realisation, are constantly reiterated. Once THX has entirely shaken off his conditioning, the robot policemen of the city cannot deal with him, and they are reduced to pleading with him to come back when they exceed their budget. Anderton can elude the eye scanners or use them as he needs to, with his own eyes in a plastic bag.
Minority Report is based in the writing of Philip K. Dick, who also provided the source material for Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1981), another tale which explores the nature of humanity through the prism of the possibility of a technological creation – cyborgs – made sufficiently in the human image that they take on human characteristics. Like THX 1138 and Minority Report, Blade Runner conceives the nature of humanity as increasingly nebulous, asking who may be granted the status of a human, and who or what can take that status away, as the “Replicants” develop emotional responses and become, essentially, human. Likewise, in Lucas’s Star Wars series (1977-2005), the qualities of humanity are not only associated with homo sapiens, but shared by a vast array of life-forms, and even robots, and yet the threat of that humanity being replaced remains. “He’s more machine now than man,” Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) says of his former student, series arch-villain Darth Vader. In THX 1138, the hologram SRT (Don Pedro Colley) helps THX and SEN (Donald Pleasance) escape the void-prison. Though machines that aspire to humanity are ennobled in Lucas’s films, any aspirations in the opposite direction, or to force that state on another, are defined as utterly wrong.
Each of these films establishes the sentient being as an entity imbued with inalienable rights and characteristics. In the worst of situations, such a being will assert its true nature, which is to overcome the situation. The qualities of sentience are defined as manifold, uncontrollable, and unpredictable, against the limitations of mechanism, unbending, logical, and unfeeling. Such narratives serve to both stoke and soothe anxieties about a civilisation increasingly divorced from the natural world. Yet they also move beyond this to question, and pose through the ready metaphorical tools of science-fiction, age-old questions about the nature of self-determination, and individual engagement with society, and questions of immutable natural law versus efforts to restrain that nature. In THX 1138 and Minority Report, the heroes triumph, but at a cost. THX ventures into a vast and terrifying new world; Anderton and his society lose the hope for a world free of murder. The idea of perfection, of utopia, is rejected in each, but this may be a necessary loss, because it is not in the nature of humankind to be perfected.