ABSTRACT

IN REVIEW FOR PRESENTATION AT

THE SOCIETY FOR CINEMA STUDIES 2003 CONFERENCE

SPIELBERG’S MINORITY REPORT:

A Case Study on FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

Steven Spielberg’s films exemplify the phallogocentric directives of the Hollywood

narrative which are interpolated from the separatist and repressive persistence of the
speaking subject. Narrative structure in the movies defers to the univocal, linear logic
permeating the culture of subjectivity dominated by Lacan’s Name of the Father.
However, motion pictures, as semiotic expressions, work against the grain of the
Symbolic Order despite strategies to the contrary. Further, the intuitional integrity of
the artist is drawn to the gaps and fissures in the Symbolic order, i.e., the relics of the
uncanny primal trauma if only to add polysemic bite to narrative convention.
Spielberg’s intertextual and maternal expression enunciated in his translation of Phillip
Dick’s short story into Hollywood narrative syntax exemplifies the artist’s accentuation
of the fissures in the Symbolic order always already featured in the alphabetic text. I
link this proclivity for emphasis on extra-logical fissures in the movies to the female
gaze, i.e., the enunciation of FEMININITY. FEMININITY connotes both a distancing from and a
closeness to the word (fe)male and so is acknowledged graphically in my paper in
order to feature the repressed differance in the written word as well as the
(m)Otherness in the concept. As we pursue the graphic and figural aspect of these
words, we become aware of the slippage inherent to written text that lends itself to the
semiotic nature of film. Spielberg has discovered a space in Phillip K. Dick’s alphabetic
text and in mainstream filmmaking that lends itself to post-structuralist FEMININITY.
Moreover, Spielberg, expanding on Dick, (re)produces the space of the primal trauma,
the chora, to a degree that is at once melancholic and maternal, at once
heterogeneous and univocal resulting in the confusion and familiarity that signifies the
(re)presentation of the symbiosis between the Symbolic order and multivalent
(m)Otherness .

My paper explores the intersection of Dick’s alphabetic text and Spielberg’s movie text
which conjures a space transcribed and pulsating with Kristeva’s maternal semiotic.
The novelty of this approach to mainstream filmmaking is my argument that the
enunciation of FEMININITY transcends gender to the degree that it draws on a pre-lingual
repressed and extra-sexual experience. Artists such as Stephen Spielberg tap into this
archaic stage because of the extra-lingual qualities of motion pictures and the inchoate
melancholy of their artistic prerogative.