This week in the NYR Online, Geoffrey O’Brien reviews Steven Spielberg’s latest science fiction movie, Disclosure Day. Twenty-four years ago, in a season that seemed to predict the future—like this year, the summer of 2002 also featured a Spider-Man movie, a Star Wars movie, and a Christopher Nolan movie—O’Brien reviewed another Spielberg sci-fi epic, Minority Report.
Prospero on the Run
Geoffrey O’Brien
Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report” which was first published in the magazine Fantastic Universe in 1956, posits a future America in which crime has been virtually abolished through the employment of mentally retarded people—”gibbering, fumbling creatures, with…enlarged heads and wasted bodies”—who possess the wild talent of seeing crimes before they happen. Wired to a network of computers, the “pre-cogs” transmit visions of future events, on the basis of which future criminals are arrested and incarcerated in a vast detention camp.
The story’s tricky but oddly perfunctory narrative hook—the director of the Precrime program is himself fingered by the pre-cogs as a future murderer—provides the occasion for a run-through of paradoxes associated with prediction, particularly the notion that knowledge of how things will turn out makes it possible to change the outcome. The “minority report” of the title refers to a dissenting pre-cog’s variant vision of the future, proven wrong by the concurrence of two majority reports, a situation which is likened to the use of multiple computers to verify a solution. Of the story’s relevance to actual problems of cybernetics or to the laws of probability I am not competent to speak; to a lay reader it has more the effect of a discussion of mathematical theory overheard in a dream.
With its background of postwar devastation and a murky, top-secret contention between military and civilian branches of government, its concern for the fate of thought criminals, and its troubling linkage (under federal auspices) of brain damage and computer science, “The Minority Report” is a dream—a bad dream—straight out of the 1950s. Written relatively early in Dick’s prolific career, it offers only rudimentary traces of those virtual realities and industrially marketed simulacra characteristic of his remarkably influential later fiction. Also suggestive of the 1950s is its no-frills prose style, which evokes a perfectly dull future devoid of exoticism or poetic resonance: “Cold, light rain beat against the pavement, as the car moved through the dark streets of New York City toward the police building…. Helplessly, Anderton watched pedestrians hurrying along the rainswept sidewalks. He felt no strong emotion.” We might have stumbled into the middle of The Pre-Cog in the Gray Flannel Suit.
The movie that Steven Spielberg has made from this by now somewhat distant source is couched in a style far removed from Dick’s flatly functional prose. Its first reel is as bravura a display of style as Spielberg has ever offered, as we watch a movie-within-amovie of adultery, jealousy, and homicidal rage being assembled from the visions of the pre-cogs by Tom Cruise and his team of Precrime techies who must race against time to find within these images clues to the location of a murder before it is committed. The rapid cutting between the “real” events, the stylized, fragmentary visions of the pre-cogs (a trio of semidormant prophets lying on their backs in a glassed-in pool), and the zooms and enlargements effected by Cruise with a mere wave of his hands to the tune of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, each image interlarded with billowing layers of reflections and superimpositions, is a relentless display of the futuristic technology on which it comments: even the smoke and mirrors have smoke and mirrors. Spielberg seems to want to make a catalog of his own devices, to lay bare the inventory of tricks available to him, in a mood compounded of exhilaration and dread.
If I can do this, he appears to suggest, then the future that the film is about has already arrived. Unlike the other Dick-derived films of recent decades—Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall—Minority Report is not so much a work of elegiac or satiric anticipation as it is an acknowledgment that it is already too late to turn back. Even if the screenplay raises moral issues about free will and advance knowledge, insisting somewhat stridently that one can always choose a better course of action, the dazzling and enveloping stylistic maneuvers imply that such independent renunciation is henceforth likely to occur only in the movies. The technology is just too powerful for the characters to assert an existence apart from it. The very notion of background and foreground is obliterated by a visual field in which the people are little more than swirls of information oscillating among other analogous swirls. If Spielberg’s last film, the much-underrated A.I., culminated in a tragic apprehension of human limitation, Minority Report charts a more self-contradictory path. At its strongest it unleashes mythic forces that it then tries to contain with relatively flimsy last-reel fix-ups; it’s as if the Cumaean Sibyl were uneasily cast in a remake of The Fugitive.
Dick’s story plays with the idea of multiple future time-paths, something like Borges’s garden of forking paths. In its early stages Minority Report—with its casual interaction of present-tense humans with three-dimensional talking archival holograms and liveaction prophetic visions—suggests the idea of a movie in which past, present, and future can unfold simultaneously. Tom Cruise’s Precrime “theater of operations” could be seen as the ultimate film studio, capable not merely of imitating but of intervening in reality, and getting its inspired script concepts not from a bunch of contract screenwriters but from a captive team of seers, throwbacks to the most ancient oracles, who soak endlessly in a high-tech aquarium (called, appropriately, the Temple) complete with an infatuated, half-mad scientist-companion. These early scenes of the lab at work have a charm that must be autobiographical, since they amount to a metaphorical description of Spielberg’s daily routine making movies. In that light, it is easy to imagine that considerable personal anxiety underlies the notion (suggested by Cruise’s fate after the pre-cogs identify him as a murderer-to-be) of the director shut out from his own studio—barred from using the equipment that he has so incomparably mastered, accused, as it were, by his own creation.
Prospero on the run: except that Prospero in this version is a damaged man in perpetual mourning for his mysteriously vanished six-year-old son, separated from his wife, and addicted to a drug that he buys from a drug dealer with empty eye sockets. The revelation of those dreadful holes is part of an elaborate pattern of eyerelated motifs summed up in the female pre-cog’s repetitive question: “Can you see?” In the world of Minority Report, public security is maintained by random eye-scans, and criminals have their eyes replaced in order to elude the scanners; crime is suppressed by the transmutation of the pre-cogs’ inner visions into electronically reproducible form; the memories of past anticipations are downloaded electronically from the brains of the pre-cog seers. The symbolism looms portentously—was it to invoke the totemic presence of Ingmar Bergman that Max von Sydow was cast in the picture?—but with undeniable effectiveness.
By the time Tom Cruise is having his eyes surgically removed by a grotesque doctor-and-nurse pair holed up in a generically sleazy tenement apartment, the symbolism has veered into the realm of a horror-movie creepiness that Spielberg has never—or at least not since Jaws—explored with quite such enthusiasm. Like the best horror movies, this segment derives its effect more from what we don’t see than from what we do, but the power of suggestion is sufficient to conjure up a mood of deep unpleasantness from which the rest of the film wants in some sense to escape, just as the spectator wants unquestionably to escape from the clamps that pin Cruise’s eyes open in preparation for his operation. The film seems to gain a cumulative power—laced with grotesque humor—the deeper it drives its protagonist into darkness.
While the blindfolded hero (he must wait twelve hours for his replaced eyes to heal) submits to uncontrollable inward visions—like home-movie playbacks—of his son’s disappearance, police investigators unleash small electronic eye-scanning spiders into the tenement where he’s hiding out. We are given an aerial view as the spiders swarm through the building, “reading” the eyes of tenants as they quarrel, make love, or sit on the toilet, their activities scarcely interrupted by the incursion.
The whole episode is a kind of giddy parody of an early 1930s movie in the Street Scene or Dead End mode (complete with camera angles worthy of Busby Berkeley). The tenement itself is a retrograde reminder of a vanished pre-techno world of milk bottles and peeling wallpaper, while the electronic spiders—like all those symbolic eyes—evoke nothing so much as the made-for-Hollywood surrealism of Dalí’s designs for Hitchcock’s Spellbound. (In a similar way the slimy and cynical eye doctor and his aging peroxide-blonde companion seem to have crawled out from an obscure Graham Greene novel adapted into a Bela Lugosi movie.) This ought to be indigestible but it’s exuberantly sustained, as if to show just how many moods and cultural references and potential plot turns Spielberg can telegraph from one shot to the next. Like much of Minority Report, the sequence has an air of willful gaudiness seeking constantly to surpass itself.
“Put the camera down,” a hologram of Cruise’s estranged wife tells him only half-jokingly in an early scene, in a three-dimensional home movie retrieved from happier days, to be endlessly replayed in his moments of drugged, anguished leisure. The voyeuristic nastiness of, say, the camera-obsessed killer in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is not so far away, and a good deal of the fascination of the movie’s early scenes lies in wondering just how far the director is willing to push things. One so wants Cruise to live up to the seedy aura of these first scenes, to be less of a hero than he must finally become to satisfy the requirements of the chase thriller into which the movie gradually evolves.
The tone shifts with a needlessly protracted flight-and-pursuit sequence—all soaring and swooping and dragging through the mud, sliding through burning tunnels and crashing through floorboards—that seems designed chiefly to wake up anyone who might be dozing over his popcorn. The computer-game wizardry continues with an elaborate but empty scene in a car factory, with Cruise and his pursuers fighting it out on the assembly line to the point where Cruise ends up built into the car and driving it off the line, a variation on an unrealized Alfred Hitchcock gag intended for North by Northwest, realized in the manner of a James Bond punchline. But then changes of emotional register seem almost the point here: each episode resembles a movie in itself—the suspense plot, the marriage plot, the technology and ethics plot, the mystical wonder plot—so that the cynicism of one scene is contradicted but not annulled by the hopefulness of another.
Read the full review for free on the Review’s website here.
