Minority Report

Minority Report, Dir. Steven Spielberg, US, Universal Studios, 2002

Reviewed by Vishvapani

The precogs lie in a pool of nutrients, secluded from intruders in a disinfected laboratory space known as ‘the Temple’. Genetic freaks, they have the unsexed, bleached features of angels and rest in a subliminal trance between waking and sleep, moaning with the pain of the psychic vibrations they pick up from the world. Innocent and passive themselves, they inhabit a nightmare of murder and violence, with a twist that distinguishes their reverie from madness. These are ‘true’ precognitions of future events, murders that really will occur unless they are pre-empted. The precogs’ thoughts are captured electronically, and viewed by the officers of Precrime, the police force that arrests murderers before they act. Chief Paul Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the maestro of disentangling the images, and Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow) is the programme’s Director.

The 2054 Washington DC the film depicts is filled with elaborations of the technology that even now both empowers and neuters us: cars that run on tracks in a huge grid; ubiquitous retinal scans for identification. But beneath this society’s bourgeoise, technologically brightened surface is an underbelly of drugs and violence that must be contained. The propaganda of Precrime, the ultimate antidote to urban anxiety, assures the public, ‘That which keeps us safe, keeps us free.’

The film’s central conceit marries our instinctive lurch for technological solutions to life’s threats with the traditional figure of the prophetic visionary. The precogs are shamanic messengers from the collective unconscious, reminiscent of oracles and the precognitive dreamers of the Bible, Shakespeare, and traditional cultures. Precrime’s alchemy is the harnessing of the perennial visionary capability to scientific control and reliability. But this is not the triumph of science over religion so much as their marriage. The three precogs form a triune ‘hive mind’ and a Precrime officer informs us that they ’are being deified’, adding, ‘We’re more like clergy than cops.’ The ability to predict, when it is apparently perfected, implies a knowledge that is superior to the individual’s ability to choose, and therefore the superiority of scientific determinism to free will.

‘The system is perfect,’ says FBI Agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), who is investigating Precrime. ‘But there’s a flaw. There always is. It’s human.’ In fact the film presents two flaws. One is that the precogs’ visions occasionally disagree and produce a ‘minority report’ that depicts an alternative future. These reports, we learn, have secretly been suppressed in order to preserve public confidence in the system’s infallibility. The second flaw is that the system can be circumvented by someone wanting to commit a murder. They need simply to stage a killing in a way that precisely mirrors one that has already been predicted, so that the precogs’ vision of this crime will be regarded as an echo of its predecessor. From this premise grows the plot that gradually takes the film over, and we discover at the denouement that Lamar Burgess killed Agatha’s mother, using this method to prevent her from withdrawing her daughter from the programme.

Following this line, ‘Minority Report’ gradually dwindles from an evocative philosophical film noir into a conventional thriller. Anderton is an unwitting participant in his superior’s power-games who is sacrificed to preserve the system’s secret, but turns the tables and ultimately exposes the corruption at its heart. Yet Anderton is infected, too, through his desire to eradicate the unruly forces that robbed him of his abducted son. Mourning the lost possibilities of the child’s life he has sought refuge in the foreclosed future of Precrime.

Despite its disappointing lapse into conventional narrative, ‘Minority Report’ is memorable and impressive in its engagement with the image-world inhabited by the precogs. This is also the domain of the irrational and unconscious that lies beneath the surface of Anderton’s life – in his grief and drug-addiction – just as it is beneath the surface of society. It is associated principally with violence, but the precogs – luminous messengers from the beyond – are also more than that

In this respect ‘Minority Report’ develops director Stephen Spielberg’s abiding subject – the domain of fantasy that has been lost to modern culture, and our attempts to reclaim, ward off, contain or subvert its resurgent power. His films attempt to articulate in popular genres the collective imaginings of modern culture through creating powerful and evocative images of its hidden fantasy life. It is no coincidence that Spielberg’s movie studio is called Dreamworks – 'dreamwork' being Freud's term for the process that transforms a thought, wish or memory into the dream image. Where, Spielberg’s films enquire, have we displaced our dreams?

In 'Jaws', Spielberg's first major movie, the shark, beast of the depths, dramatically materialises to terrorise those living on the surface. 'Close Encounters' turns on the image-fascination of ordinary people that is in fact a summons to a meeting with the gods (who descend in their space-ship). ‘ET’ inverts this relationship by bringing the uncanny into suburbia and the world of childhood. In the Indiana Jones films, mystery resides in the lost or hidden realms that are uncovered by the archaeologist-hero. And in the Jurassic Park movies the unconscious forces (embodied in dinosaurs) are tamed and domesticated, yet show themselves unconstrainable. ‘Schindler's List’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ confront 'primal scenes' of modern consciousness – the Holocaust and WW2 – that offer its abiding images of human suffering.

None of Spielberg’s films perhaps sustains a serious and psychologically coherent engagement with the images he is so amazingly able to create, and he characteristically fails to resist milking an image for emotion. ‘Minority Report’ can be seen as a meditation on the power of the image, but it, too, suffers a Spielbergian lapses in its treatment of Anderton’s grief. More seriously, the thriller plot derails the deeper concerns upon which the film touches. Burgess, not Anderton, is the story’s key figure for it is he who first committed the Promethean sin of harnessing the precogs visions, only to find that he must sin again to protect it. Rather than making him a standard establishment villain, a more interesting film might have explored the mixed motives that incited Burgess to suppress violently the threats to Precrime. In potential he is a tragic figure honourably caught between the desire to protect and the dangers of control, but dishonourably corrupted by the prestige brought by his programme’s success.

In the latter perspective Burgess is trapped in the doubleness of sight that is also blindness because it is shrouded by desire. But when is human knowledge ever free of desire? The thriller plot and the discovery of Burgess’ chicanery overwhelms a deeper flaw in Precrime that is hinted at in the notion of the minority report – the disagreement between the previsions that casts doubt on their predictive authority. But a greater instability, towards which the film gestures but which it never grasps, is the inherent ambiguity of the information the precogs provide.

Precrime rests on the premise that the meaning of the precognitions is clear, but the film never confronts the certainty that images from the dream-world must be interpreted before they can become meanings in waking life. This simplification prevents ‘Minority Report’, for all its virtues, from penetrating deeply into the image-realm of dream, myth and the unconscious, which it invokes. Failing this, the film can scarcely offer an image for the waking awareness that floats above the darkness and grapples with the uncertain knowledge it throws up. As Nietszche says: ‘all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown text, one which is unknowable but yet felt’.

‘Minority Report’ aspires not to prediction but to prophecy: to show how our rational, sanitised, technology-saturated society deals so poorly with its irrational, threatening shadow. The film’s closing images show the precogs awakened from their dream and living ordinary lives, and Anderton restored to his once-estranged, newly pregnant wife. But these intimations of natural life’s openness and unpredictability are not fully realised in the neat resolution of the film’s story-lines. ‘Minority Report’ shows Spielberg – the master image-maker of modern American cinema – growing closer to making intelligible his abiding obsessions rather than simply finding images for them. But his populist forms, and perhaps an ingrained imaginative caution, constrain him. As yet, the prophecy is muted.

© Vishvapani, 2006