Summer Questions

1.    I believe Oedipus is definitely responsible of his own fate. It is his curiosity which curses him in the end, as it starts with Oedipus wanting to find the murderer of Laius, and making their punishment as exile, which is what he begs for at the end of the play. His curiosity hits him again, when his wife Jocasta tells him Laius was to be killed by his son from the oracle of Delphi, but Laius' son was cast out of Thebes. Oedipus wants to hear more of the story and where Laius was murdered and is shocked to hear that he was murdered at a three way crossroad, as he says it is possible that he is the murderer of Laius. This leads to Oedipus sending for the only survivor of the attack, leading to the ultimate end of Oedipus.

2.    He is seen as a good king in the beginning. He seems to care for Thebes and its people and is sorrowful that they are going through a plague. He asks the oracle of Delphi for help and learns that the murderer of Laius is the source of the agony. Oedipus wants to rid the city of him, showing great care for his kingdom. However, he seems to be a bit short tempered when it comes to things he does not want to hear. An example of this is when Tiresias tells him he is the murderer of Laius. Oedipus banishes him from his sight and accuses Creon of treason and attempts to concoct a false story of the two trying to overthrow him as king.

3.    Its ultimately Oedipus's curiosity that leads to his downfall. By finding out more and more of his past, he starts digging himself into his own grave. In the beginning of the play he states that Laius's murderer shall suffer exile, and accuses Tiresias as blind, yet in the end of the play, he stabs his own eyes causing blindness, and begs for himself to be exiled from Thebes by Creon.

4.    I believe The Minority Report refutes the idea of having an inescapable destiny. In a scene where a worker is telling John about the precogs, he learns that one of them, Agatha can have a vision of the potential murderer not killing is victim. These thoughts are always discarded because it is the minority report. This shows that even if something may or may not occur, it doesn't because you ultimately prevented it. Another good scene is when John rolls a ball off a table of some sort, towards Mr Witwer. Witwer catches it and John explains that the ball could have dropped, but it ultimately did not because he chose to prevent the ball from falling. In other words, it is the person's choice of what their own fate is or even what the fate of other things are.
5. In the precogs, eyes represent their recognition of future events. While not being physically a big theme in the movie for the precogs, they have an inner sense of vision of possible future events, setting up the plot for the entire film. For John, eyes represent identity. He scans them every time he goes to work and enters the building and even in his job, when examining possible visions that Agatha has, he learns that someone replaced their eyes to bypass the eye scanner, making the man's identity an anonymous one. In the film culture, eyes can mean or represent many things. They can represent the feelings of the person, they can signify identity, like in The Minority Report. Eyes can also signify knowledge.
6. In the movie, technology is almost completely relied upon to convey the truth or
news. Nowadays, we are almost the exact same way with computers. Many rely on computers, ipads, or other electronics to get information about daily events. Although, the information gained in the movie is of greater significance at times, its still basically the same idea. The way modern day technology is going, I think it could end up some what similar to the movie, where houses contain lots of technological features. A lot of
things used in the movie are used in modern technology as well, such as voice recognition and commands and touch screen. There is reason to believe that in 44 years, technology could definitely be advanced to the level displayed in the film, as 10 years ago, touchscreen and the word iphone was looked at as unlikely or way ahead technologically, but here we are with these things viewed as a commonly used object.