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Magazine
Spielberg's trilogy of predetermination
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Steven Spielberg's last three films ("A.I.", "Minority Report", and "Catch Me If You Can") all seem to have a single predominant theme — that of "predetermination" in human thought and action. AJIT DUARA examines the troika in the light of this idea.
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Identifying the gene for crime in "Minority Report".
BETWEEN the first quarter of 2001 and the end of 2002, Steven Spielberg was in a very distinct creative phase. This film maker has two consciously designed creators within himself — one is the "kiddie" filmmaker of "Indiana Jones" and "Jurrasic Park" fame and the other is the technically proficient social realist — author of works such as "The Colour Purple" and "Schindler's List". He has alternated discreetly between the two personas, the successful economic equations of his "trivial" films allowing him the big budget production values of his more "personal" work. But this recent phase is different in that there appears in the three films — "A.I. - Artificial Intelligence" (released in June 2001), "Minority Report" (June 2002) and "Catch Me If You Can" (December 2002) — a period like the one in the careers of other visual artists. A single theme seems to obsessively predominate and to take over a prolific output in creativity.
In Spielberg, this theme is the idea of "predetermination" in human thought and action. The extraordinary "A.I.", scripted from an idea by Stanley Kubrick, is about a little mecha robot, created sometime in the distant future (at a time when the polar ice caps have melted and Manhattan is partially submerged). The boy, played by the precocious Haley Joel Osment, is programmed to look, think, act and feel like a real human. His brain has been predetermined by his scientist creator, and so sensitively that his human mother (Frances O'Connor) who has brought him home, as a "replacement" for her comatose son, cannot decipher her own feelings for the robot. His sensitivity to her feelings and his obvious need for a mother's love has her completely confused. She knows that the robot is programmed to think but cannot understand how he can love and want to be loved. Puzzled, she takes him to his original programmer and wants to know what has gone wrong with the machine — and even while the scientist opens up the robot and tries to figure it out, she feels herself getting deeply attached to a boy whom she knows to be a machine.
Like the rest of us, she has believed in the notion that love is a uniquely human expression. But the mecha robot is the creation that contradicts this conceit. Is love more to do with predetermination than it is with the quality of being human? This is the conundrum of "A.I."; that some of us are preconditioned to love and some are not, irrespective of the species we belong to. Further, the capacity to love could be an accidental programming (which the creator of the robot boy admits to), like the "accidental" transmission of faulty DNA from a mother to her son, in human genetics.
"A.I." is an exploration of the capacity to love.
It is the job of the department of precrime, in Spielberg's next film, "Minority Report", to identify the gene for crime, to arrest the criminal before he acts on his predisposition to some villainy. Police Officer John Anderton, in this Philip K. Dick science fiction set in 2054, takes the help of three pre-cognition "experts" to establish the location of the 'pre-crime', arrive at the scene of the 'crime' and make a pre-emptive strike before the 'criminal' acts. Naturally, this film was made after 9/11 when the U.S. began to get transformed into a high security area with notion firmly in place that one could, by preventive or pre-emptive means, forestall a crime from taking place.
The "precogs", as the "experts" are called — once humans now zombies — have extra sensory perception and can, by a highly evolved system of deja vu, visualise the crime, providing vital information of time and place to the police. Interestingly, the precogs are named Agatha, Arthur and Dasheill (after the crime fiction writers, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett). Being the only woman of the three, Agatha is the most perceptive. It is she who tells Police Officer Anderton of his own destiny, including his predisposition to the crime of murder. Anderton (beautifully played by Tom Cruise) is traumatised by this information and the film is about how he tries to discover the motive for a murder which he has no clue about and which he is yet to commit. If he finds out why he might want or need to kill someone, he might be able to take the help of Agatha to alter the sequences of circumstances and events which add up in time and space to the destiny predicted for him. As with genetics, one simple alteration in the sequencing of the DNA will change the final evolution of both Anderton and the ending of the movie.
In his next film, released just six months later, "Catch Me If You Can", he comes up with the recreation of a true story from the 1960s. What can you say about a boy who starts off in his teens as a confidence trickster, an embezzler, a forger; a teenager who passes himself off as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, before he is finally arrested by the FBI at the age of 21. Did the kid, Frank W. Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo Dicaprio), have a faulty upbringing? Was he a supremely intelligent and gifted youngster gone astray? Are his actions the result of an abused childhood?
Were his actions predetermined? The real Frank Abagnale with Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Hanks on the sets of "Catch Me If You Can".
Frankly, Frank Abagnale did what he did because he really enjoyed it; it was his personal expression of the American dream! To be an airline pilot, with a stewardess on each arm hanging on to your every word, to be a doctor with adoring nurses and awestruck patients, to be a much admired lawyer — these were the aspirations of his times. Abagnale simply took a short cut to all of these role models, in the process defrauding individuals, corporations and banks to the tune of millions of dollars!
There is a clue to the mystery of Abagnale Jr. in "Catch Me If You Can". This is his father, Abagnale Sr., wonderfully played by Christopher Walken. Dad was in France during World War II where he met his French wife (Nathalie Baye). He started a business after the war, didn't keep up with his dues and finally went bankrupt with the IRS taking over his store. The wife left him and Junior was left to fend for himself. However, the father was a charmer, with a suggested history of fraud and embezzlement. Did Junior inherit his characteristics? Did he turn professional after watching his amateur father? Clearly, in the movie, the boy is always looking for a father like role model and finally finds one in the FBI officer who is tracking him, Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Were the behaviour and actions of Abagnale predetermined?
It is a curious case and Steven Spielberg makes a curious film of it, wonderfully entertaining with a recreation of the 1960s, not just through sets and costumes, but with the aspiration of those years — Pan American Airlines, the 'Come fly with me' girls, right down to a sequence from the James Bond film of that time, Goldfinger (with Sean Connery as Bond). And like the famous special effects opening title sequence of the 1960s Bond films, "Catch Me If You Can" also opens with those animated title shots.
Not only does Spielberg present a protagonist who is predetermined in his actions, but also presents him in an ambience that is equally so. Furthermore, he predetermines his audience response to a character from the 1960s who, today, after his illegal career ended at the age of 21, is an advisor to the F.B.I. on cheque forgery and is married with children, like the baby boomers of those times. Indeed, he may well be a contemporary of Steven Spielberg himself!
The trilogy of predetermination comes full circle with the most charming and innocent of the three films.
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