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Lost Boys and Girls in Spielberg's Minority Report

2005; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.2006.0005

1549-0815

Karen B. Mann,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Lost Boys and Girls in Spielberg's Minority Report Karen B. Mann (bio) It is not surprising that there is a child in Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report (2002). The lost son Sean joins Elliott of ET (1982), Jim of Empire of the Sun (1987), and David of AI (2001) as representatives of innocence at risk from the adult world. It is even the case that some of Spielberg's earlier films provide two children, one of whom is a girl: ET has Gertie and Hook (1991) has Maggie, although clearly their roles are subordinated to the present and dominant brother. (One might wonder how AI would play if David were replaced not by a biological son but a biological daughter.) In Minority Report, however, Agatha (Samantha Morton) plays a role equal to if not more important than the lost son, and her gender is central to a number of the film's concerns. Can Spielberg's doubling and gendering of children here open up new insights for him and for the viewer? How is the story of a boy different from the story of a girl?1 The Child Narrative: Spielberg and Spielberg There is no doubt that Spielberg has attended in his films to the experiences of boys. Often that experience is determined by the absence of adult figures, whether mothers or fathers, as in ET or Empire of the Sun, or even Hook (1991). Further, analyses of Spielberg's child-films have often attended to questions of sexuality, primarily from the position of the boy. [End Page 196] Claudia Springer sees an Oedipal crisis in Jim's discovery of female sexuality during the war in Empire of the Sun (16). Ilsa Bick recognizes the emergence of an unrestrained and perverse sexuality in the absence of the father in E.T. (28). AI offers perhaps the most disturbing possibilities for a boy's need for a parent, especially in its concluding image. As Richard Corliss sees it, "the film is basically about a boy's urge to crawl into his mother's bed" (62). Although it is not the direct focus of my attention here, AI does provide a prismatically fractured image for Spielberg's sense of gender and familial role. The father/daughter bond between Anderton and Agatha of Minority Report is (p)re-figured in the mother/son bond of Monica and David in the earlier film. However, several factors peculiar to that film place real limitations on Spielberg's exploration of boys growing up through a developing relationship with the parent. Most obviously, the very different director Stanley Kubrick bequeathed to Spielberg a story and an approach that the latter felt some obligation to honor.2 And always hovering over the text is the possibility that the issue is mechanism vs. organicism rather than child vs. larger human and social world. Yet there are relevant questions that this earlier film raises. They deserve introduction as a backdrop to reveal the greater distance Spielberg travels in Minority Report. As a boy, David (Haley Joel Osment) has two fathers, both of whom have ambiguous relations to woman. Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), in choosing to make an artificial replacement-son, not only for himself but for all mankind, is a descendant of the deluded Victor Frankenstein: Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. (Shelley 58) As Frankenstein's alter ego Walton says, he will "confer [an inestimable benefit] on all mankind to the last generation" (28). Robert Kiely notes that the scientist's hope is in many ways an evasion of the female, an attempt to create a child without the help of a woman (164). Henry (Sam Robards)—aptly also the name for Mary Shelley's more human friend for Victor—may seem more personable as David's adopting [End Page 197] father. However, his pleasure in providing a child for his wife is clearly instrumental: he wishes to regain the woman he has lost, even if it...