|
|
Tuesday, December 3, 2002
Minorities Report
By Kevin John
In the future that Steven Spielberg's Minority Report posits,
a phalanx of criminal investigators can see a crime before it's
actually committed, using an elaborate visual policing system called
Precrime. Clearly, Spielberg intended a cautionary/paranoid tale. But
his conception of crime ignores how government rule has already spun
out of control in the present.
When Precrime is first introduced to us, it's not through a routine
session. Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is investigating a
precrime of passion. A crime of passion, we're told, is a crime with
little premeditation. So Anderton only has a brief window of time to
stop the crime from taking place. But let's look at where and with
whom that crime will take place.
The precriminal here is a white man who has just found out his wife
is having an affair. He lives in a middle-class neighborhood with 2.5
kids. And, again, his murderous rage supposedly hits him in the spur
of the moment. I would never claim that no institutional forces are
at play in white, middle-class neighborhoods. But I bet those forces
would come to the fore more readily if this precrime were, say, a
drive-by about to be committed by a black man in an inner-city
ghetto. And one subtle way to ignore that institutional factors have
any bearing on criminal activity is to situate crime as an
irrational, barely interpretable impulse that wells up from within a
person at a moment's notice.
Given Spielberg's stance against institutionalized thought control,
it's difficult to see the narrow view of crime as a shortcoming. In
fact, someone like film theorist Peter Lehman might find it quite
beneficial. As Lehman states in his 1981 essay "Looking At Look's
Missing Reverse Shot: Psychoanalysis and Style in John Ford's The
Searchers": "Important artists frequently let more into their
films than they can handle...Their films are thus more likely to
glaringly reveal the tears and fissures — the symptoms that
cannot be controlled."
Lehman's example is the mistreatment of the Native American character
Look. At the very least, Lehman contends, disturbing, racist moments
in The Searchers allow us to contemplate racial tensions at
large. For instance, The Searchers, released in 1956, could be
said to lay bare the tensions that would boil over at Little Rock
just a year later where a lesser film would make no room for such
contemplation.
Indeed, I found Minority Report to be enormously engaging on
an intellectual level because it allowed me to contemplate racist
conceptions of crime whereas films like Orange County,
Eight Legged Freaks and Signs infuriated me for sending
(and failing to examine) the same oppressive ideological message I'd
seen in countless other films valorizing the nuclear family. But
there's a sense in which Spielberg missed a golden opportunity to
analyze precisely how criminal activity often leaves a trail leading
back to socioeconomic constraints.
John Ford may have had more nerve and intelligence than most, if not
all, of his contemporaries. And for this, "we would do well...to not
simplistically condemn The Searchers as a film or John Ford as
a man because of the disturbing treatment of Look," as per Lehman's
suggestion. But what are we neglecting in a rush to reserve
condemnation of a film or director? And in our supposedly more
permissive era, couldn't Spielberg have displayed even more nerve and
intelligence in Minority Report? In a film with so few
minorities (although why is Anderton's black female ally at Precrime
pregnant? and, while I'm at it, why do the Precogs who predict the
crimes float in a tank of amniotic-like fluid resembling the pod
prisons of The Matrix and countless other sc-fi films?),
concerning ourselves with Spielberg's greatness seems like a minor
priority indeed.
TOP
|
