Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)
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Transgressing the Frontier: Modernity, Ideology, and American Cinema / Bennett Huffman
<1> So, as way of introduction to the theme of transgression in film let us look at two pieces whose nexus is the transgression of point of view.
<2> Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) begins with an excellent montage of the future murders of Sarah Marks and her lover Donald Dubin as seen by the precognitive detectives, primarily Agatha, back at Precrime headquarters. The edges of the screen are blurred and ever changing. At one point we see the lovers in bed through the eye glasses of Howard Marks, Sarah's husband. He says on picking up the glasses from the bedside table, "You know how blind I am without them." But like the precogs Howard sees quite clearly that his wife is in the arms of another man before he puts on the glasses. Order is everything in this film as the judicial system itself has turned itself upside down by imprisoning people for crimes before they can commit them. The murder weapon is a pair of scissors, and immediately after the initial stabbing of the man (the images come to us out of chronological sequence) we see the Marks' son cutting the eyes out of a life-sized headshot of Abraham Lincoln ("Honest Abe"). This piercing the vision of the honest broker is setting the stage for our exploration of the divide between real and unreal, the projected future that never happens throughout the saga. As soon as Howard's glasses are secure on his face he begins stabbing first his wife sitting on the bed and then the lover having been chased by Howard to the bathtub.
<3> This sequence "ends" (the first fifteen minutes are seamlessly pieced together so traditional scene changes only barely apply) with the open and dead eye of Sarah Marks, though it may be Ann Lively's eye. The camera tracks in on the dead pupil until it switches to that of the pupil of the most gifted of the three precognitives, Agatha, who is Ann Lively's daughter. The camera tracks out to reveal the identity of who has been "witness" to this crime. As with the other film to be discussed here the eye and all it means to the disruption, corruption, or transgression of viewpoint, and thus truth, is the frame from the opening sequence which cements the trajectory of these films' exploration.
<4> John Anderton's (Tom Cruise) reviewing the captured images from the precognitives' collective "vision" is interrupted by the "real time" action at the Marks' house. The son pierces the Lincoln face with scissors, the couple discuss Howard's blindness. Howard has just come in from retrieving the paper squinting at Sarah's lover across the street without quite recognizing him - had Howard been wearing his glasses everything would be different. And it is interesting that in arresting Howard for almost murdering the lovers the film deftly makes us feel that the cuckold is the villain instead of the lovers breaking the Marks' marriage vow.
<5> In the apprehension of Howard Marks for the future crime of the lovers' murder Anderton uses a retinal scanning device shined in one of the perpetrator's eyes to positively identify him. This technology becomes a central image to the film raising questions of our own identity - are we what we see?
<6> Anderton is addicted to a drug called "Clarity" (Neuroine) that he purchases from a man without eyes, who says enigmatically that "in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king" (did Tom Waits coin this phrase, or is it much much older than that?). This takes place in the Sprawl - the transitional zone between controlled urban space and the frontier beyond. One way in which Anderton transgresses the frontier is by leaving the antiseptic city space and invading the verdant space of Doctor Hineman's green house. Hineman, the genetic architect of the precognitives, tells Anderton that "sometimes in order to see the light you have to risk the darkness." In order to continue his search for truth Anderton has his eyes surgically exchanged for those of a stranger, and in this way avoid detection by the citywide retinal scans. He uses his own removed eyes in order to gain access to the precognitives in the Department of Precrime headquarters.
<7> The true transgression comes not when Anderton uses his own removed eye to violate the civil space, but when his wife uses the eye to break Anderton out of the suspended animation prison. The wife takes the authorial power in the eye to liberate Anderton, who is still clearly himself despite having Mister Yamamoto's eyes in his head. The male gaze has been co-opted by the female (Doctor Hineman implies that the more talented precognitive is "of course" the female).
<8> Stephen Elliott's Eye of the Beholder (1999) embraces the power of the male gaze even more overtly than the previous film. From its opening sequence, which gives the title of the film by showing Ewan McGregor's eye close-up as it focuses down the barrel of the rifle on which is mounted surveillance equipment, above to the words "of the Beholder." The use of the rifle for observation instead of assassination acts as a fundamental transgression from the beginning. This imagistic titling places emphasis on the eye and all it comes to imply in terms of power relations. What this initial eye is seeing through its telescope is the lascivious mating of a secretary by a bank manager, which McGregor broadcasts to the computer terminals of all the bank employees and even as a fax as the manager emerges from the act. This transgression of space and privacy through the power of the gaze is illegitimate somehow as we never know what the bank manager has done to offend The Eye's sensibilities. The moral ambiguity of the spying act and of the spy himself is explored as his activities transgress, several times, whatever moral authority such a character might have had.
<9> McGregor's character is not clearly named for the viewer. We discover his name is Steven, but Director Stephen Elliott refers to the character as The Eye (K.D. Lang's character calls him Lucky Legs). Beholder is admittedly an amoral movie, which contrasts with Minority Report, which ends as a moral commitment to criminal justice. McGregor's morally ambiguous character follows the clearly morally empty, due to her series of murders, Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd) across the United States to fifteen different cities. The action moves from East to West - into the frontier. It begins, as Minority Report, in Washington D.C., the political center of American urban space. It moves through several East Coast cities to San Francisco (West Coast), the Mojave Desert (Wild Western frontier), to end in a tiny village in Alaska (the end of the earth and America's final frontier).
<10> Beholder plays with three essential images throughout its scope. Eyes are important obviously. A spiral staircase makes an eye shape on the screen; Joanna takes up with a blind man to whom she can reveal more of herself than she could with any sighted person; The Eye's phrase for security clearance at his embassy is "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder". Another image is that of wings. Wings can be associated with angels, several of which we see in the course of the film, but any set of wings - the pigeons The Eye lives with in the belfry in San Francisco for instance - are part of this image set. The Eye is Joanna's guardian angel, and thus every set of wings is reinforcing The Eye's presence in the narrative. The last of these images is the least well developed and thus the most ambiguous. Antlers and horns are seen in several instances in the film. They seem to represent an animalistic nature. They are most overt in Alaska. They eventually come to symbolize a survival law of animals, whose tooth and nail fight for life in the face of adversity can be excused from moral considerations. Joanna is the animal in this case fighting for survival, and shooting her guardian angel in the end .
<11> All of the films discussed in this special issue of Reconstruction transgress our ideas of frontier in some sense. Of the larger themes dealt with are the Western, Science fiction, Sports film, Racism, female beauty, and Social insanity, among others.
Works Cited
Elliott, Stephen, dir. Eye of the Beholder. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999.
Speilberg, Steven, dir. Minority Report. DreamWorks Pictures, 2002.
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