Dennis Biba

What responsibility does future knowledge entail? And isn’t knowing the future already a contradiction in terms? Steven Spielberg explores these questions in his film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report (1956). And comes to a very intuitive – perhaps too intuitive – conclusion. In my review of Terry Gilliam’s 12 monkeys, I pointed out the similarity to the ancient tragedy of Sophocles‘ Oedipus, a film that shows how difficult it is to recognise causalities. Both Gilliam’s and Spielberg’s films deal with paradoxes of prevention (avoiding possible dangers) and preemption (avoiding imminent dangers), two concepts that cannot be clearly distinguished from one another. In 12 monkeys, a plague that has already broken out is to be stopped by time travel; in Minority Report, the aim is to prevent a murder that is still in the future. Both films take an extremely ambitious approach to the subject matter, but in very different ways.

Washington D.C. in the year 2054: John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, works for the police in the Precrime department – a programme for investigating future crimes that has been running in the city for six years in the test phase and is soon to be introduced throughout the country due to its success. However, it is not an omniscient computer modulation that lifts the veil of the future, but three so-called ‘precognitives’ (precogs for short), dozing under the influence of drugs in a pool. The precogs‘ dream visions can in turn be translated into video footage and analysed by specialists. Anderton is one of these specialists, trained to determine both the scene of the crime and the course of events from the confused and overexposed video snippets. The policemen are given the name of the future perpetrator engraved on a wooden ball. Precrime seems flawless; the only thing that matters is the investigators‘ speed and powers of deduction in order to arrive at the scene of the crime in time to prevent the crime, often before the murderers themselves know that they are going to kill someone. Anderton’s world view is shaken, however, when one day he finds his own name on the wooden ball. In 36 hours, according to the Precogs‘ vision, he will murder Leo Crow, a complete stranger to him. Is the system flawed or will Anderton, like the tragic Oedipus, become a murderer and bring about the catastrophe in the first place by trying to prevent it?

This much can be revealed: Leo Crow will die. What is exciting is not his death, but the circumstances that lead to it. Because while it initially appears that Anderton is heading towards an inevitable fate, the audience learns from the inventor of Precrime Iris Hineman that the precogs can also make mistakes, namely whenever discrepancies lead to so-called Minority Reports. The crux of the matter is that the precogs are not mistaken in the case of Anderton. Like 12 monkeys, the film shows an epistemological problem here, namely the problem of how knowledge about the future is organised in the process of mediation. Although the precogs‘ knowledge is not false, it is fragmentary and decontextualised; the individual pieces of information must first be interpreted by experts. According to the thesis, seeing is not synonymous with recognising, as the circumstances that lead to certain events are often not illuminated. Thus, seeing, overlooking, blindness and being seen are also motifs that are omnipresent in the film in the form of eyes, iris scans and surveillance cameras. From subtle allusions such as the speaking name Iris Hineman to drastic scenes at the ophthalmologist (please don’t try at home!), everything refers to the tricky relationship between perception and cognition.

On the other hand, the film contrasts the fatal determinism of Oedipus with the idea of a conditional future in which the individual can very well influence the course of events (within the scope of their own possibilities). The linear one-way system of antiquity is here transformed into a picture of the future that is determined by paths of probability. Knowledge of the future is thus not delegitimised, but merely relativised – talking about the future means saying that certain events will lead to other events with a certain probability. And it is precisely here that Minority Report perhaps ends up making things too easy for itself: for despite all the problems that also pervade the preemptive jurisdiction linked to Precrime (i.e. the conviction of people who have not (yet) committed a crime), it cannot be denied that within the fiction of the film, Precrime provides relatively reliable knowledge of the future, not absolute, but probabilistic knowledge. And those who know about the probable catastrophe cannot shirk their responsibility. Precrime exemplifies the well-known trolley problem, the philosophical dilemma of being forced to act between different ethical systems. Those who decide not to intervene in the course of events nevertheless make a decision that can have fatal consequences. The film, which refers to the motif of seeing at every turn, ends up closing its own eyes to the future in favour of the liberal ideal of the self-determined citizen. While SF stories such as Frank Herbert’s Dune series, for example, show the whole tragedy of knowledge of the future, conditional futures and the dilemmas between consequentialist and deontological ethics, Spielberg (in contrast to Philip K. Dick’s original, incidentally) has opted for an ending that perhaps makes too great a concession to Western cinema audiences.

Steven Spielberg (2002): Minority Report [Film]. USA.