To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 00:11:13 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] Fw: a review of 'Minority Report'
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: keith2444 at aol.com

Philip K. Dick's Minority Report was outrageous, horrifying -- and about
50
years ahead of its time.
By Jeremy Lott
http://reason.com/hod/jl061702.shtml

In more ways than one, the June 23 release of the Steven Spielberg-Tom
Cruise movie Minority Report could not have been better planned. Based on
a
1956 Philip K. Dick short story of the same name, the upcoming flick has
already managed to capture a political and cultural moment in the way
that
Wag the Dog illustrated the Clinton administration's foreign policy
misadventures and The China Syndrome caught concerns about Three Mile
Island.

Given what Minority Report is about and the moment it illuminates, the
Bush
administration is unlikely to give it gushing reviews. The paranoid
premise
of the story is simple enough: In the far-flung future, crime has been
abolished by preemptive arrests. The use of advanced technology and
severely retarded human beings with precognitive abilities ("monkeys")
has
enabled the creation of a "pre-crime" police force, which rounds
criminals-to-be up and tries them for crimes that they would have
committed
in the future. Once they are found guilty -- not if -- they are either
sent
to detention camps or exiled to frontier planets.

In Dick's version, most of the public has accepted this arrangement
because
it works. It has eliminated murder and most other forms of crime. As one
character puts it, "Punishment was never much of a deterrent, and could
scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead." The criminals,
on
the other hand, grasp at one "basic legalistic drawback"-- the fact they
didn't do anything. John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise in the movie) is
the founder of the pre-crime unit. He brushes off concerns about the
system's effect on its convicts as "absolutely metaphysics. We claim
they're culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they're
innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent." But so what?

The rub comes when Anderton himself is accused of murder. The resulting
conflict is a classic Dick conundrum: Was Anderton set up? Could the
monkeys have made a mistake? If he was set up, what does that say about
the
system? And, results notwithstanding, isn't there something wrong with
punishing people for things they didn't do? It's the stuff from which a
great movie could be made.

Early indications, however, lead one to doubt that director Spielberg has

quite grasped the absurdist nature of Dick's story
http://www.revolutionsf.com/article/1211.html , much less its
canary-in-a-coal-mine implications. In a June interview with Wired
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html , the director
explained the changes he's made to Dick's story. He's replaced the
author's
detention camps with cryogenic freezing units where the "guilty" are kept

for the duration of their sentences. Spielberg insisted that Minority
Report is not his most cynical movie because "It's not cynical to want to

believe that ... they could stop people from killing in the future. ...
[I]t went from being a cynical story to being a movie about wishful
thinking."

Artists are not often the best judges of their own work and this goes
double for artists who adapt other artists' work. But Spielberg's
ambivalence about the implications of his new film dovetails nicely with
the current American mood these days, and with the recent actions of the
Bush administration.
According to a recent Matt Drudge leak
http://www.drudgereport.com/dpc.htm
of a New York Times story, Spielberg has declared himself "on the
president's side" in Bush's efforts to "root out those individuals who
are
a danger to our way of living." (One of Spielberg's fellow executives at
Dreamworks, however, has called Attorney General John Ashcroft "scary.")
see http://www.reason.com/0206/fe.bd.john.shtml

But the rooting-out that Spielberg says he supports is, of course,
pre-emptive. The Justice Department has detained hundreds of suspects for

months on immigration and other charges and stonewalled any requests for
details on the identities or whereabouts of said persons. On the
international scene, much ink is currently being spilt over the
government's claims to the right of "anticipatory self defense." see
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/000/810hjeu
p.asp

Combining the two concerns is the case of Jose Padilla (a k a Abdullah al

Muhajir), the so-called Dirty Bomber who was arrested on May 8. Padilla
has
been classified as a "enemy combatant," to avoid the necessity of either
charging or releasing him. He is being held indefinitely at the request
of
the Justice Department. From what little that has been released of
details
surrounding the arrest, Padilla may have traveled to foreign countries
and
talked to some people with terrorist connections about what it takes to
put
a "dirty bomb" together. A paucity of publicly examinable information,
however, did not stop people in the Pentagon, Justice Department, and
other
branches of the administration from speculating that, though said plot
was
"in its initial stages," Padilla might have had Washington D.C. or
Chicago
in mind as targets.

Or he might not have. Padilla is currently being detained by the U.S.
government, not for crimes committed -- at least not crimes that the
government is willing to publicly charge him for -- but because of crimes

that certain officials think he might have been likely to commit in the
future. This Phildickean move to a pre-emptive posture may very well be
effective, but it raises real concerns that what Spielberg supports as
"our
way of living" will be altered. That is the issue that the release of
Minority Report should draw into a tight, and perhaps uncomfortable,
focus.

Jeremy Lott is Reason's 2002 Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern.

.

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