Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

124 The Social Optics of Race
the other characters possess this ability.” Echoing the visual setup of Minority
Report, Foster notes: “The [Matrix] films then define a new ideology of
transparency, associated not with the unthinking acceptance of surface appearances,
but with the ability to see through such realistic illusions. While
immersion in the illusion naturalizes appearances, Neo’s ability to perceive
their constructedness naturalizes that ability as a function of the unaided
critical faculties of the human mind, independent of any technological
prosthesis or interface.” 50 Wood argues that the scenes depicting the “detecting
wall” are demonstrations of interactive media that have more in common
with digital games, MUDs and MOOs, and other immersive environments
that are more frequently studied. Indeed, if photography as a mode of identifying
and categorizing criminals was characteristic of the early twentieth
century’s efforts to regulate “the new world of mobility and rapid circulation...in
which signs of class and occupation have moved below the
threshold of immediately recognized conventional signs to reach the level
of unintentional—and often unrecognized—symptoms,” we can assert that
interactive digital surveillance video functions in a similar way at the turn
of our own century. Tom Gunning’s brilliant essay “Tracing the Visible Body:
Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema” explains the ways in which
photography became part of a complex of identifying techniques that “became
necessary in the new world of rapid circulation” and helped to create
“an archive of information on individuals which became the basic tool for
the assertion of control in modern society.” 51 The assertion of control in network
society involves privileged, transparent interfaced relations to immersive
digital environments. This hypervaluation of the transparent is echoed
in the visual setup of Minority Report. As Wood notes: “The plastic boxes of
computers and plasma or tube-screens familiar from the late twentieth and
early twenty-first century have given way to clear Perspex curves and flat
screens on which the image is visible from either side,” 52 and the filmmakers’
use of bypass bleaching, choice of camera lens, film stock, and postproduction
manipulation result in a visual field that appears cool, silvery,
washed-out, desaturated, and colorless. This seems particularly appropriate
in a film with an extremely occluded relation to racial politics and its place
in dataveillant societies.
Anderton’s performances at the interactive detecting wall strongly mirror
another much-commented-on scene in Blade Runner, one of several
resonances between the two films. In the scene in which Deckard uses an
Esper imaging computer to see into a photograph he has taken from a repli-