It was senior year in my television production class that my teacher, Mr. Ruby, showed us this video of Lost creator J.J. Abrams speaking at a Ted seminar. I have watched and re-watched it several times through since then. It is not particularly necessary to watch the entire video (though I highly recommend it) he spends a lot of time focusing on what he calls the “Mystery Box.” The Mystery Box is the term he uses to describe an element of several of his projects; a mystery that is never quite revealed, but serves to push the plot forward. In the case of Abrams, the most obvious example is the island on Lost, but I’ve never actually seen Lost, so instead I’ll focus on one of his other projects. In the Abrams-directed Mission Impossible 3, the plot revolves a team of secret agents trying to recover a stolen weapon known only as the “Rabbit’s Foot.” Throughout the movie, the nature of the “Rabbit’s Foot” is guessed at and mused upon and so the device takes on an ominous persona, and the tension is forced upwards as the heroes try to take it from the hands of the evildoers. The mystery of the “Rabbit’s Foot” is what gives it power and a sense of danger, and so when the device is finally recovered, the audience is able to release that tension, knowing that this weapon of mass destruction is back in safe hands. The function of the “Rabbit’s Foot” is never revealed, but it never has to be. If we know what the monster looks like, we aren’t afraid of it anymore. We are afraid of the “Rabbit’s Foot” precisely because we don’t know what it does.
The other part of this lecture that I love is when Abrams discusses writing, and how a blank sheet of paper is itself a Mystery Box. There’s no telling what ideas can pour onto it and what story will end up being told, which is what makes the writing process frightening, frustrating, and exciting all at the same time.
This is a long clip, especially because I’m just going to focus on a small part of it. This is a scene from the movie Minority Report, directed by my other favorite director, Steven Spielberg. It was reading a biography of Spielberg that first inspired me to seek out a career in film and television. This is one of my favorite Spielberg films, which depicts a future in which police officers are able to observe murders before they occur and arrest criminals before they commit crimes, thereby completely ridding Washington D.C. of murder. The shot I want to focus on here starts at the seven minute mark and depicts a police hovercraft flying over the Jefferson Memorial as the “precops” rush to stop a murder from taking place across the Potomac River. This is a great example of contrast and affinity. Spielberg shows us something familiar in the skyline of Washington D.C. which has barely changed over the last century, and is likely not going to change by the year 2054 when the film takes place. But by placing a hovercraft in the shot, flying above those monuments, he contrasts the familiar with the unfamiliar, the present with the future. This shot makes the future world of Minority Report seem more believable to the audience, and also highlights how unfamiliar technologies, as represented by the hovercraft, are being used in the future to enforce the familiar and never-changing laws and principles that we have in the present, as represented by the D.C. skyline.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avQ9yPQNb3M
One of the things I love about Spielberg is how versatile he is with his storytelling. Minority Report, for example, is an action movie, but it also has a very complex message about fate vs. free will and how much privacy of the people can be taken away in order to protect those same people from harm. These are very active themes which require the audience to come up with their own answers to the questions posed by the film. Conversely, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which is also an action film directed by Spielberg, the theme is much more didactic. In this last scene of the movie, at about the 2:19 mark, after Indy watches the aliens leave with artifacts from various ancient cultures, he says that “knowledge was they’re [the aliens] treasure.” He realizes that this treasure he spent the movie searching for was actually knowledge of human history, art, and religion. By saying this to himself, he’s really saying it to the audience. The theme of this movie, and all of the Indiana Jones movies, is that knowledge is the most important treasure, and greed is not the proper motivator for the search for knowledge. This is evident in the fact that all of Indy’s adversaries meet terrible ends, and Indy himself never actually acquires the artifacts that he searches for.
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