Majority Report

Back when Spielberg was a kid in the suburbs, Dick was already conjuring up worlds in which individuals are surrounded by political, psychological and cosmic forces that threaten to devour them. One of Minority Report’s pleasures is its Dick-like portrait of a 2054 Washington, D.C., that looks like an eerie extension of present-day America in its domination by corporations, in its inescapable invasions of privacy and, most urgently, in its idea of a squad of Pre-Crime fighters devoted to arresting criminals before they‘ve done anything. This is the sort of idea that would delight John Ashcroft, whose self-righteous, loose-cannon behavior, the Washington Post recently reported, has even begun to spook the White House. Fifty years ago, Dick had the guy pegged.

But unlike his source, Spielberg is no radical. The other night at the Minority Report premiere, he told Channel 5 News that what happens in his movie is also happening in life: ”We’re giving up some of our freedom so that the government can protect us.“ He didn‘t sound particularly torn up about it, but that’s hardly surprising. For just as A.I. found the crowd-pleasing Spielberg out of sync with the forebodingly icy Stanley Kubrick, watching Minority Report, we feel the conflict between the cult novelist‘s subversive interiority and the DreamWorker’s embrace of Hollywood spectacle. Where Dick‘s work crackles with paranoia and a desire for freedom, Spielberg is far more excited about showing off his futuristic world -- vertical freeways, mechanical spiders that scan eyeballs during ID checks. He finds this stuff cool. This, too, separates him from Dick, who was profoundly skeptical about technology and big-budget entertainment. I imagine him howling when Tom Cruise’s character walks down a runway lined with holographic ads for Lexus and American Express. As one whose work is about shuffling levels of reality, Dick could only shudderingly admire Spielberg‘s deftness in using a satirical depiction of advertising in 2054 to plug present-day products.

In the world according to Dick, people struggle to transcend shadowy forces they can never really escape. In the world of Spielberg, they can and do escape. By turning Dick’s ironic little story into a gargantuan thriller celebrating free choice, Spielberg has been true to his character: He‘s transformed something dark and scary into something softer and more comfortable. And while this might suggest that Spielberg has triumphed over Dick, because more people will see the movie than will ever read any of the books, this seeming triumph gives Dick the last laugh: Minority Report is actually more fun than the original story -- Spielberg will always report to the majority -- but Dick’s minority reports have the authority of a lonely human voice crying out in our high-tech wilderness. We live in his world now.