In the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, Steven Spielberg and others, it seldom rains but sometimes pours, everybody cares for the environment, and privacy is a thing of the past. But most imagined futures are simply extreme versions of the present, writes Peter Crawley
'I'm tired of the future," says Agatha. A psychic in Steven Spielberg's future-noir film Minority Report, she has more reason than most to be jaded. But as science fiction reacquires its sophistication, symbolism and commentary, not everybody is so blasé.
Agatha is a "pre-cog", a mutant capable of foreseeing future murders, whose traumatic "gift" (which she shares with two others) has kept 2054 Washington DC murder-free for six years. This allows Tom Cruise's Pre-crime Detective John Anderton to arrest and imprison future murderers before anyone is killed.
Minority Report is based on a short story by the extraordinarily fecund and ultra-paranoid late author, Philip K. Dick. "How does one fashion a book of resistance," asked Dick in 1974, "a book of truth in an empire of falsehood?"
Dick's celebrated novels and short stories include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, filmed in 1982 as Blade Runner, and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the blueprint for 1990's Total Recall.
Blade Runner, originally a box-office disaster (trounced by the simultaneous release of a cosier sci-fi movie, Spielberg's E.T.), gained a cult following, particularly among academics. Its depictions of a sprawling megalopolis in perpetual downpour, where indistinguishable androids or "replicants" walk among us, have enthralled postmodern theorists and realised the disintegration of fevered capitalism as prophesied by Marx.
Total Recall expanded on a theme set by Blade Runner - the fabrication and commodification of memories, in a world where people can buy the recollection of a holiday, a torrid affair or whatever one desires. Other bleak future shocks such as Terminator, Strange Days, The Truman Show and The Matrix (also rife with corporate scepticism and cyber-religion) are indebted to Dick's vision of the simulacra - the perfect copy, even better than the real thing.
Like Blade Runner, Minority Report takes such genres as sci-fi, film noir, detective fiction and Greek tragedy and throws them into a blender of film references, cinematic and literary in-jokes, dystopian fantasies and, of course, chase sequences. Its grim picture of tragic futures and hyper-capitalism echoes Terry Gilliam's Orwell-inspired Brazil and his La Jetée remake, Twelve Monkeys, as well as Paul Verhoeven's Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers.
Meanwhile its narrative harks back to art forms of the past. If Anderton is the hero of this new "when-done-it" detective fiction, the pre-cogs are its writers, as their names suggest - Agatha, Arthur and Dashiel.
But Spielberg's references are more complex than such nods towards famous detective makers, Christie, Conan Doyle and Hammett. Anderton is a direct fictional descendent of the very first detective: Oedipus Rex. In Sophocles's cruelly ironic version of the Greek tragedy, an oracle has foretold the murder of Oedipus's father, Laius, by his own son. Later another oracle tells that only by casting Laius's killer from the city, will a devastating famine be lifted.
In both cases, the effort to remove the threat sets in motion the mechanics of the characters' downfall. Anderton believes an incriminating premonition has been faked and tries to find out who set him up. His fate is no less tragic.
Even Sigmund Freud's cited Oedipal complex is subtly enacted (the mother-father-son love triangle has received a sci-fi treatment already in the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future), while references to the tragedy continue throughout the film, insistently drawing attention to eyes.
Like Blade Runner, one of the opening shots of this future noir is an extreme close-up of a single eye. During the action, Anderton is repeatedly asked by Agatha, "Can you see?" while in another scene his mentor coughs during a sentence, halting his line at, "Remember the eyes "
Oedipus's fatal flaw meant he knew the future but could not see the truth of his unwitting present. His self-punishment was to cast out his own eyes. To avoid government retina scans, the fugitive Anderton has his baby-blue peepers removed by a back-street surgeon, after which he must literally see the world through new eyes. "Sometimes, in order to see the light," he is told by one of many 'seers' "you have to risk the dark."
More spectacularly visual, however, is the way that sci-fi plays with the mechanics of cinema, projecting the process of film-making into the content of its movies. The selling of "experience" in Total Recall and Strange Days is not dissimilar to shelling out to see a movie. Blade Runner's flying cars feature "lens flare" halos encircling their lights, a special effect that avows the presence of a film camera.
Similarly, an early scene in Minority Report depicts Anderton manipulating and exploring fragmented, non-chronological evidence recorded from the pre-cogs. It is described as "scrubbing the image". Using gloves with laser guides while the opening strains of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony undulate, he separates out random moving images, which he then places into order - scanning, panning, jump-cutting and creating a montage of evidence as a time line scrolls below.
Physically, Anderton resembles a conductor, but his task is that of a director, editing the rushes from the camera eye (pre-cogs) into a final, convincing cut. Spielberg, a master-manipulator, has filmed himself a doppelgänger. (Even the use of Schubert is a playful reference - it was the Austrian composer who coined the term for "spectral double".)
SCIENCE fiction and film noir were politically and culturally loaded movements. Film noir emerged immediately after the second World War during a shift in US gender politics (when men went to fight in the war and women replaced them in the workforce), while the severe Hayes Code monitored its content. Convoluted, investigative narratives, covert symbolism, defeatist tones and femme fatales mark the genre.
Later, the sci-fi of the 1950s reflected a "reds-under-the-bed" paranoia of the cold war. The birth of the B-movie lensed threats of invasion from alien or unnamed enemies, radioactive monsters or armies of identical children.
Habitually, sci-fi offers more insight into contemporary concerns than the future. Minority Report's scriptwriter Scott Frank (whose adaptations include Get Shorty and Out of Sight) seems more aware of this than anyone.
It seems incredible that, less than a year ago, Tim Burton "re-imagined" the 1968 film Planet of The Apes as a disjointed mess. Last August, the director told The Irish Times: "Anybody can rattle off the issues of the late 1960s. Ask what the issues are today and you'll get 20 different answers from 20 different people."
What a difference a day makes. It may be inadvertent, but Minority Report brings into sharp focus the concerns of a post-September 11th world, in which the "war on terror" and the tensions of forsaking civil liberties to preserve freedom have complicated ramifications.
In Washington 2054, privacy is a thing of the past. Thoughts can be read, people are retina scanned at almost every doorway - on subways, at their workplaces, or in shops - and advertisements call your name as you pass by.
This grim indication of a partnership between government and corporations, shows advertisements using the same retina scan technology to identify potential consumers. "Hey John Anderton, you look like you could use a Guinness," suggests a holographic billboard.
The preponderance of product placement is wryly amusing - Lexus (currently advertising a non-existent car designed for the film), Nokia, Bvlgari and Pepsi are clearly untroubled by the curse of Blade Runner, where Atari and Pan Am dominated Ridley Scott's megalopolis in 2019, although they went bust years before it could happen.
Other predictions don't seem a far cry from reality. CCTV records your movement from street corner to street corner. Internet "cookies" and robots store personal information and monitor buying and viewing habits. E-mails and web pages address customers by name and "helpfully" suggest new products according to electronically recorded tastes.
While Blade Runner's costumes recall the 1940s - whescience lost its morality forever - Minority Report's designs for architecture, fashion and entertainment are intriguingly conservative. Clothing suggests that 2054 is in the grip of 2002 retro-chic, while films and TV shows are repeats from the 20th century, and music is invariably classical.
Similarly naïve is an ever-present bright sunshine (12 Monkeys, Terminator and Total Recall are less optimistic) and the faith that the environment will be a future priority. Combustion engines are a thing of the past - presumably the US has finally accepted the Kyoto Protocol.
Meanwhile, an ongoing dilemma in Minority Report concerns the arrest of suspects before any wrong-doing has occurred, while the method of incarceration makes a joke of the Geneva convention. Perhaps we should think back to last month's foiling of a "dirty-bomb attack" in Washington, an attack that did not get past the planning stage.
As dystopian deadlines such as 1984, 2000, 2001, 2019 and 2054 rush inexorably by, we're reminded to forget about the future. It's already here.
Minority Report is on general release
