Minority Report Report

+++ There may be spoilers below. +++

My first impression was disappointment. The film was too long, it strayed too far from the Philip K. Dick story on which it's supposedly based, and Spielberg turned that story's "big idea" (what if we could stop "crime" before it happens?) into a melodramatic and sentimental morality play with a stupid (but definitely Spielbergian) "family-friendly" ending. While I agree that the original Dick story was, um, shall we say, crude in its lack of character development,* Spielberg overcompensates by inflating the film's individual and interpersonal power struggles beyond all proportion, thereby obscuring what could and should be the more important social and existential questions of whether "a perfect system" is possible, or even desirable. Anderton (the main character, played by Cruise) does question the value and validity of the pre-crime system, but mostly he's the grieving dad/cop fighting his own personal demons. Anderton's boss, Director Burgess (played by Max von Sydow) does show us how power corrupts and demonstrates once again how little we should trust our elected leaders when they tell us they're taking away our rights for our own "protection," but mostly Director Burgess is just a power-mad old man determined to hang on to his pet project at any cost. In other words, the film introduces the big questions, but instead of really taking viewers to the dark core of our own society where those questions could be considered in serious and meaningful ways, Spielberg chose to stay in a relatively happy place where everything seems as it should be in the end.

That was my first impression. But two days later, I'm wondering if maybe I was too harsh. Good stories require good characters, right? And a major Hollywood film is never going to be too subversive, is it? Nearly all of the reviews I've read (NY Times, Salon, Kenneth Turan in the LA Times, and Roger Ebert) more or less praise the film as a soon-to-be classic, and I'm fairly sure they're right. (The friends I saw the movie with disagreed, and they're more movie-buffy than I am, so.... One of them also pointed out something I haven't seen in any review: The three pre-cogs (the people who can "see" the future), Agatha, Dash, and Arthur, are all named after famous writers of detective fiction -- Agatha Christie, Dashiel Hammet, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)

The reviews are interesting in themselves -- especially Ebert's. He's the only one that got (or mentioned) the Agatha reference, but he was also the only one to say that the movie's vision of the future is "optimistic." To be fair, he's comparing this film to "Blade Runner," and the future world that film depicts is dystopian, indeed. Still, I can't think of a much worse future than one where advertising follows you nearly evereywhere you go and speaks to you by name, where holograms greet you at store entrances and tell you (and everyone else around) what you bought last time you were there, where police and government forces can track you anywhere and everywhere you go (partly via the advertising that follows you...), and where those forces can shut down your vehicle and lock you inside it so they can apprehend you, or snoop around in your apartment while you're not home to collect evidence to use against you. This hardly seems more "optimistic" than the world of "Blade Runner," it's just more consumer-friendly maybe. Besides, the issues the film raises probably would have been better handled by an even more dystopian vision....

That aside, the film does a couple of things the story doesn't, and that's not necessarily all bad. First, the film humanizes and personalizes the precogs. In the short story, the precogs are little more than physically deformed mutants hooked up to machines and babbling endlessly. The story does not address them as characters; it does not question whether they enjoy what they're doing, or whether they might have had productive lives if they hadn't been pressed into the service of the Precrime system. But the film does raise those questions. in the film, the precogs are fully-developed physically, and they are developed as characters via the way their caretaker thinks of them. Spielberg even put in some scenes w/ that caretaker expressing something like love/desire for Agatha in a way that forces us to ask whether she is being abused in more ways than are apparent in the fact that she is being held more or less captive because of her precognitive abilities. The apparently evil Danny Witwer also mentions that if there's a flaw in the system, it's a human flaw. By making the precogs more human, the film seems to emphasize their fallibility. These more complex and fully human precogs complicate the ethical dilemma over pre-crime in a way that certainly distracts from the main question, but which is interesting nonetheless.

Second, in the film, the Precrime system is dismantled in the end, whereas in the short story, it appears to continue, more or less unchanged. I was disappointed in the story for this reason because it seems inconsistent w/Dick's critique of systems of social control. However, this was one of his earlier stories (written between 1954 and 1964 when Dick would have been in his late 20s or early 30s), and from the little I've read I'd say his politics were kind of all over the map. Besides, the story reads as more of a thought exercise than a fully developed idea; like much of Dick's fiction, it seems like it was written to raise questions, not answer them. Furthermore, it may be more useful for the short story to allow the precrime system to continue (despite showing us all of the problems with that system), than to end it and leave us thinking that we're safe from the dangers such a system would entail. Viewed this way, the story's ending seems appropriately Phildickian.

Another important way the film differs from the story is in how it treats human agency. The film suggests that if we could predict the future, then we could change it. When Cruise is about to kill someone, Agatha keeps repeating, "You can change. You can change!" The short story troubles this idea a lot more, leaving the question much more open. In the story, humans certainly can change their minds, but the precogs can also revise their visions to see the new future based on those changes. Thus, the short story gives a stronger suggestion that no amount of information could ever keep you safe.

This last difference is not trivial in light of Shrub and Co.'s recent "strike first" policy. This question about whether we could ever know enough to prevent crime or "terror" or whatever "evil" you want to talk about, whether we can ever have enough information to change the course of events, is crucial. Yet, the more urgent question remains whether it's ethical to punish someone who has not done anything wrong, just because you suspect he/she will do something wrong in the future. The impulse behind this is rotten at its core -- the idea that perfect security is possible, or that it can be obtained without addressing the underlying causes of crime, terror, what have you. And the reason that rotten idea needs to be exposed as such is that Shrub and Co. are currently using it as an excuse to create even more of a police state/world than we had before.

I'm likely to change my mind as I give this more thought (and maybe see the movie again), but at the moment I guess I'd say that Minority Report briefly opens up some important questions about security vs. liberty, but because it buries those questions in personal struggles, its typical viewers probably leave the theater too distracted to really think about the ways in which our own current political dilemmas are similar to, and different from, those depicted in the film.** Specifically, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld are not Anderton-like cops with the best intentions, nor is George W. Bush a Director Burgess-like powermonger whose lust for power is irrational and apparently inexplicable. Yet, Ashcroft and Rummy are constantly trying to get more information under the pretext of "protecting" us, and Shrub has proven he'll stop at nothing to protect his interests and the interests of his global corporate sponsors. Is this ok with you?

According to Paul Williams, a friend of Dick's, "His goal was to pierce through the veil of what is only apparently real and get at what is real."*** That's true, I think, and I guess what I'm saying is I don't think Spielberg's film does that well enough.

*In his introduction to The Minority Report, the collection in which the eponymous story appears, James Tiptree Jr. says of Dick, "His people do not interact as much as they deliver monologs [sic] to carry on the plot, or increase the readers awareness of a situation." So true, especially in "The Minority Report."

**Of course, this assumes that the typical movie-goer could ever be encouraged to consciously analyze the interplay between entertainment and politics. While people obviously do "learn" things at the movies, the question is whether they're ever really conscious or critical of what they're learning. Are you? Am I?

***See "Casting a Timeless Shadow" for more about Dick and the movies.