With the film Boys ‘n the Hood, the major changes that had happened in the last quarter of the century was black people getting equal rights, but although still not totally accepted within society in some areas and being poor, education was not the priority of some people. As the next generation grew up they had the previous generation as their role models, jobs were scarce and some people started dealing drugs in order to support their families; and with drugs, crime goes hand in hand.
Although Minority Report is not set in the twentieth century the changes that Washington D.C went through in the space of ten years and changed the city entirely. In fact, it turned into the post modern kaleidoscopic city. The city had surveillance all around the city, with machines that checked the eyes in order to know who you were, they had these machines all over the city, including on the underground. This was done to keep down the crime.
“Post-modern urbanization does not imply total transformation of the urban landscape into something wholly new, for the post-modern city has continuities with its past”². In my point of view this quote means that although a city might of changed physically or emotionally there are still links with the past. For instance in Boys ‘n the Hood, you see the main characters aged around 12 then again at 18. During the early period of the boys’ lives you are shown them walking to a scene of a crime with bullet holes covering the wall and the blood is still on the ground and wall, then the kids go to a different part of the city and see a man lying dead in some bushes and by their reaction it must have been their for days and not a soul did anything about it.
Later in the same film, you are shown a gang gunning down a rival down, with a friend present. What this shows is that although some things changed, like attitudes to schooling and work some do not change at all such as violence and crime.
In Minority Report what changed was the statistic of crime and the complete modernisation, what did not was the politics of the city as it is the capital city. In the film there was an advertisement to convince the people of the city to vote yes for the precrime system in the up and coming referendum. It said
“Imagine a world without murder: ‘within just one month under the precrime programme the murder rate in the District of Columbia was reduced by 90%... Pre crime effectively stopped murder in our nation’s capital.’”³ This quote from the film emphasises the lack of crime in the city unlike Boys ‘n the Hood.
I have also learnt that in a post-modern city that there is a poor non white society within a city of middle class, this reflects greatly in Boys ‘n the Hood also what is shown in the film is that their part of the city is so poor and full of crime that no one wants to live there and the elder generation blames the younger ones for the decline. It had got so bad that a private company had offered home owners a “cash for homes” scheme. The scheme was to offer low prices on homes, regenerate the area and sell new homes for a larger profit. Edward Soja also used an example like this to describe post-modern urbanization.
The urban experience in Minority Report is dominated by the hyper-real, another part of the post-modern city. Throughout the entire film there are adverts that have eye scanners and direct the advert to the individual, and when the lead John Anderton played by Tom Cruise is running from the Precrime unit the newspapers change their headlines instantly to tell the readers of future crime that John Anderton will commit.
So in conclusion the academic work that we have studied can help us understand the portrayal of the different aspects of urban life within cities. All aspects are can be tied together for instance crime and surveillance, work and family and so on. People tend to take films or any other sort of media interaction at face value and not truly understanding what the director wants to say within his film. Different people will view the same two films I watched differently and may disagree with what Soja may have said, but at least with the academic knowledge we posses now, we can take it all in and at least try to look at it from a different angle.
References
¹ Barker, C. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (Sage 2000) Chapter 10 “Cultural Space and Urban Place – The Postmodern City” P305.
² Barker, C. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (Sage 2000) Chapter 10 “Cultural Space and Urban Place – The Postmodern City” P306
³ Minority Report 2002 Twentieth Century Fox Film Cooporation. Scene/Chapter 3 “Clarity”
Bibliography
Books
Barker, C. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (sage 2000) Chapter 10 “Cultural Space and Urban Place” P290-317
Porter, R “introduction” in R. Porter (ed.) (1996) Rewriting the self: Histories From the Renaissance to the Present, (Routledge)
Films
Minority Report. Directed by Steven Spielburg: 2002
Boys ‘n the Hood. Directed by John Singleton:1991
