A new invention, certainly one of the most curious of our fertile era, was produced last night at 14 Boulevard des Capucines … We have already collected and reproduced the spoken word; now we are collecting and reproducing life itself. One will, for example, be able to see our loved ones move about again, long after we have lost them. (Le radical, 30 December 1895).
You married the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world, Kanye West. (Robert Kardashian, 2020)
Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet. By night, he sinks into the past. In his cluttered apartment, where cereal boxes talk to him and neuroin inhalers litter the floor, John makes his way over to his computer desk. His hand wavers over a set of clear disks: “Sean at home playing with toys,” “Sean 5th birthday,” “Sean at the beach.” He takes this last one and inserts it into the machine. Projectors fizz to life, coloured light fills the room, and Sean appears. “Hi daddy,” waves the holographic image of John’s son, and steps out of the two-dimensional wall-screen projection, into the room itself. Sean wants to show off his running skills. “Keep your knees up like that,” grins John encouragingly. “Keep your knees up like that,” echoes the recording of John playing from his speakers. He knows this one by heart.
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John takes another hit of neuroin and selects another disk: “Lara and John.” He closes his eyes as the high washes over him. When he opens them, a woman in a ghostly white dress has appeared. “John, put the camera down,” she mock-scolds, but she’s smiling. John gets up and walks towards her, so close he could touch her. “Sweetie, why don’t you put the camera down,” she repeats, “and come and watch the rain with me?” Now John’s smiling too. He physically flinches as the image is abruptly replaced by a text notice: END OF FILE. Lara has left him, Sean is missing, presumed dead, and John is alone.
This scene, from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, is a remarkable demonstration of the spectral nature of the moving image in the digital age. Then again, the cinema has always been haunted, even since before it was the cinema. At the end of the 18th century in Europe, for instance, the magic lantern — an early image projection device, and precursor to the motion picture — was put to use in the phantasmagoria, the so-called ghost shows, public entertainments in which spectres were conjured to terrify audiences. The early shows resembled séances, where showmen would promise to bring back the spirits of audience members’ dead loved ones.
This kind of morbid marketing stuck around into the early years of cinema and beyond. In Georges Méliès’ trick films, devils, skeletons and ghouls dash about the screen, and people materialise out of thin air. But the presence of the undead could be felt in even the most mundane movies. The first press reviews of the Lumière Cinématographe in 1895 already picked up on the challenge to mortality posed by the medium itself. “When this apparatus is on sale to the public,” read the verdict from La poste, “death will cease to be absolute.”
Cinema’s promise of resurrection is uncanny, but it can also be cathartic. Spielberg had already self-reflexively approached this theme in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The narrative similarly concerns the loss of a son, Martin, who has contracted a rare disease and now lies in suspended animation, much like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) — or perhaps like the apocryphal tale that Walt Disney himself is cryogenically frozen in time, awaiting sufficient developments in medicine so as to be brought back to life. Martin’s place is taken by David, an android boy who struggles to earn his adopted parents’ love. When Martin unexpectedly awakes, David is cast out on a journey to become a real boy. This is Pinocchio for the age of mechanical reproduction — indeed, in one of the film’s most horrifying scenes David is confronted with a stockroom of mass-produced, Disneyfied Davids. He was, we discover, a simulacrum of another missing son, that of his tortured creator. David throws himself into the sea.
Two millennia pass, and David is discovered by his mechanical descendants, now evolved beyond human comprehension. They read David’s memories, which flash across their faces as moving images. Finally, they watch on some sort of screen as David is reunited with his mother — or, at least, a reproduction of her — and at last finds peace. Artifice, virtuality, cinema — whatever you want to call it, Spielberg understands that this is a space to play out desire and loss. But in Minority Report, which likewise imagines a film-as-memory interface as means of posthumously reuniting parent with child, Tom Cruise’s John finds no catharsis in this possibility. Quite the opposite: John’s virtual resurrection of his son is his repetition compulsion, the lonely and painful reliving of his trauma. His screen watching becomes synonymous with his drug usage; he’s addicted to both.
We like to imagine early film audiences as poorly adjusted to the rapid-fire image of the cinema, as gullible Victorians fooled into thinking the train might really crash through the screen and into the auditorium. Except — whisper it — we ourselves want so very badly for our images to come to life. From John Anderton’s position in front of the hologram, his wife and child appear in three dimensions, strikingly lifelike. But Spielberg positions us at an angle; unlike John’s front-on perspective, we see the trick for what it is. Light melts off the image, uncannily warping Sean’s figure. As John approaches Lara, the camera circles around him, and the holographic image becomes a convex surface, literally hollowed out of the human presence John desperately craves. We see it’s an illusion, he knows it’s an illusion. And yet, all the same, John mimes along to his conversation with Sean, and he approaches Lara as if to take her in his arms. John knows the train isn’t coming towards him, but he can’t help but hope it might. Film’s promise of life after death is too important for him. Anything to bring his son back, even just for a moment.
Maybe it’s no surprise that John treats moving images like they’re in the room with him. His job, after all, is all about accepting films for the real thing. Minority Report’s plot concerns the existence of the precogs, three psychic mutants whose powers of prophecy allow the Washington, D.C. “Precrime” unit in the year 2054 to prevent future murders. In the Philip K. Dick story Spielberg’s film is based on, precognition comprises of the precogs “babbling” to one another. In the film version, precognition goes from the linguistic to the visual — the precogs’ forecasts manifest as moving images, projected onto a giant screen.
Metacinematic motifs abound at Precrime HQ. John Anderton’s job comprises of “scrubbing the image,” analysing the precogs’ visions to determine the perpetrator of the crime. He is a director, instructing his team to “capture” images, before arranging them into a coherent narrative. The lights dim as he begins his work. The precogs function as both his screenwriters and fleshy projectors. He has producer figures who appear via video link and who must give him the go-ahead to start a given project. He even accompanies his work with a score: Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. (Anderton waves his hands about to control the images by gesture; for Spielberg, the job of the director is somewhere between conductor and surgeon.) In the film’s opening scene, he is essentially tasked with making a trailer for the murder his team is about to prevent. The ethical dilemma of Minority Report concerns the virtual image and its relation to the real — is the film that Anderton constructs representative of reality?
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Minority Report is a film about screens and eyes, about what we see and how we see it. Its world is saturated with moving images: video calls, self-updating newspapers, cereal boxes with animated cartoons. In a VR arcade, citizens indulge their deepest, darkest fantasies: sex, success, murder. “Actual” murders appear on all manner of surfaces; precog Agatha’s recorded vision of the drowning of one Anne Lively — who turns out to have been her mother — travels from screen to screen throughout the film. And, most memorably, public advertisements use iris scanners to invasively personalise their content to viewers; “John Anderton,” calls an affable voice in a shopping mall, “you could use a Guinness right about now!” (All of this feels decidedly less sci-fi than it did in 2002.)
As with the ghostly projections in John’s home and the haptic images he manipulates in his office, what’s stressed here is digital moving-image culture’s increasing immateriality. The screens in Minority Report are transparent, their content seamlessly transferable from one empty surface to another. In the case of the holographic advertisements there is no screen — or rather, the screen is the world entire, anticipating the screen-bodies of the advanced Mechas in A.I. But perhaps just as important is that, Anderton’s small workplace audience notwithstanding, these are all profoundly solitary modes of consuming moving images. From nostalgic home movies to targeted advertising, the collective viewing of the cinema gives way to the individualised and individualistic viewing of modern life.
The most chilling manifestation of this is glimpsed in Precrime’s version of mass incarceration. Those arrested by the project, to prevent the homicides they did not yet commit, are “haloed,” placed in suspended animation, sent to a panoptic containment facility where they are interred indefinitely. To the outside viewer, screens wrapped around their faces play their alleged crimes on demand. On the inside, as the creepy warden explains, “It’s actually a kind of rush. They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true.” In short, the experience simulates the central aspects of popular cinema at present: spectacle, nostalgia, wish-fulfilment. Purgatory is reimagined as an eternal movie played to an audience of one. It’s here that John Anderton finds himself when he is inevitably accused of murder, and it’s here that numerous critics have speculated that he stays for the remainder of the film; John’s happy ending — in which Precrime ends and he finally gets to watch the rain with Lara, now pregnant again — may be no more than his haloed fantasy.
We’ve been surrounded by ghosts since the invention of machines for capturing and displaying movement photographically, with each development potentially deepening our imagined connection to the departed. In 2016, Jang Ji-sung lost her daughter Nayeon to cancer. In 2019, Jang was reunited with Nayeon; using a VR headset, she was able to see, talk to and even touch a reanimated rendering of her daughter in real time — a private moment captured as public spectacle for the South Korean TV documentary Meeting You. A year later, Kanye West shared his birthday present to his then-wife Kim Kardashian online: a hologram of her deceased father, celebrity lawyer Robert Kardashian. Zombie Rob was lambasted for the ways in which it blatantly manipulated Kardashian’s voice and image to suit West’s own agenda.
Such digital necromancy — or perhaps just ghoulish kitsch — is moving into the private sphere, too. 2021 saw the popular genealogy site MyHeritage introduce its DeepNostalgia feature, which allows users to animate photographs of their dead relatives using machine learning technology. In 2022, they added the feature Deepstory, which additionally enables users to create a video in which these animations speak a script submitted by the user. There’s now a whole growing field of grief tech, or thanatechnology, that helps people build avatars of themselves or loved ones that can be called upon after their deaths to stage encounters that never happened in life.
We’re clearly well beyond Minority Report and back into the realm of A.I., in which David settles for an artificial declaration of love, an elaborate reconstruction of his mother designed to provide comfort in the face of loss. How would John Anderton react to such an offer? Can these staged interactions provide a space for healing, or are they merely modern phantasmagoria, masking the rawness of grief beneath layers of technological showmanship? And what happens when the photographic image is supplanted by animation and our memories become malleable, subject to the whims of algorithms?
In Minority Report, the moving image is a cursed thing, a tool of the surveillance state and the profit-hungry corporation, and a reminder and harbinger of death. Film traps John Anderton in the past, in the trauma of Sean’s disappearance, and possibly in a fantasy of redemption too. And it traps the precogs in the past and future, in memories of murders long-ago and soon-to-come. In the film’s final shot, the camera slowly weaves its way through a scene of nostalgic, pastoral bliss: the three precogs, released from their enslavement to the Precrime operation, sit in a sunlight-dappled cottage reading books — paper books, I should say, to match their woollen jumpers and wooden floors. This is, a voiceover by Cruise confirms, “a place where they could live out their lives in peace.”
Saccharine, critics called it. Schmaltzy. Typical Spielberg. But look closer, scrub the image, and you’ll notice that Agatha, sitting apart from the other precogs, holds in her hand a small, clear disk — a screen — on which plays the vision-memory of her mother’s drowning. Spielberg keeps things ambiguous: does this offer catharsis, or is Agatha doomed to virtually relive the loss again and again? The moving image might help heal us of our ghosts, but it won’t let us forget them.
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CINEMA YEAR ZERO 