Gender Traits in Minority Report - paper 2

During the class discussion on minority report when were comparing the story and the film I had a thought. It didn’t really occur to me until that day, even though I had seen the film and read the story, that essentially the film split the Anderton character from the story into two separate characters. Anderton and Lamar Burgess. I decided to develop this idea into my second paper but thought it was a kind of interesting take on how gender can be played with even without changing the characters actual sex (i.e. male to female). Here is the idea behink my paper:

In the film adaptation of Minority Report, Anderton’s character is in essence split into two separate characters of himself and Lamar Burgess to resolve the issue of this “doubleness” that is faced in the story version of Anderton. The book creates a very complex and dualistic Anderton while the film creates two separate characters to minimize this duality and show the internal complexity of the Anderston character externally through two separate people.

In the film, Anderton and Burgess possess certain distinct and opposite characteristics of the story version of Anderton. The film version of John Anderton is the “masculine” side of the story’s Anderton character. His character is based around stereotypically “masculine” traits such as high levels of self confidence, action oriented and physically demanding solutions, and self preservation over self sacrifice for the group. In the movie, Burgess encompasses the more “feminine” characteristics of constrained confidence, less physical and action based solutions, and prioritizing the pre-crime system and the safety of other citizens over his personal well being. Splitting of the Anderton character for the film simplified the main characters and resolved some of the “doubleness.” This film version allowed for a hyper masculine Anderton and a more action based plot in addition to making the characters less complex for mass consumption.

The idea here is that they author and the directors were able to play with gender traits (masculine versus feminine) and yet all of the character were of the same gender. It was interesting for me when I was analyzing these characters to decide which characteristics were socially assigned to “masculine” and which were assigned to “feminine.” Also, how they were able to incorporate these characteristics into characters that were all of the same gender. I really liked writing this paper because it allowed me to look at gender in terms of traits rather then actual genders (i.e. male or female). It also allowed me to look more in depth at characteristics that were not as blatant as some of the things we had discussed in other books such as in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and her desire to have children to be truly feminine or in Maurice and the struggle between being a man/masculine and needing to get married to fit into society and being gay.