Constellations: Minority Report by D. Harlan Wilson

(Auteur, 2022)

Reviewed by Graham Andrews

Of the making of films based upon the works of Philip K. Dick, there has been…well, not so many, of late. I know their titles, as do you, you, and especially you. For the purposes of this review, however, it would be hard not to reference Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and—has it really been twenty years?—Minority Report (2002). And the literature about PDK (for short) threatens to overwhelm the literature by PDK, if it has not already done so. This Liverpool University Press monograph (C: MR ditto) by Professor D. Harlan Wilson (Professor of English at Wright State University-Lake Campus) considers the Steven Spielberg film version of MR, in depth, width, and not-inordinate length (128 pages).

In the beginning was a 10,000-word short story entitled ‘The Minority Report’ (Fantastic Universe, January 1956). Set in an undated post-catastrophe New York City, TMR posits a police-state regime in which three intellectually deficient ‘precog’ mutants (Mike, Donna, and Jerry) foresee every kind of crime before it happens. The pre-perpetrators are duly brought to pre-emptive book. Police Commissioner John Allison Anderton is the middle- and not well-aged creator and head of the Precrime Division. Then Anderton is predicted to murder a man totally unknown to himself in less than a week’s time. One of the precogs rejects this prediction, hence the titular minority report.

Wilson cites Jason Vest’s contention that MR is the best Dick-based film since Blade Runner, ‘in terms of theme, set design, and generic hybridity’ (Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies). Paul Verhoeven meant MR to be a sequel to his Total Recall, melding TMI with a continuation of ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ (F & SF, April 1966), and a hint of Blade Runner. See Constellations: Blade Runner (Auteur, 2016), by Sean Redmond. But Twentieth Century Fox, who had acquired the rights from Carolco Pictures, lost no time in kicking that idea into touch. The film version is primarily set in Washington, D.C., with side-trips to Baltimore and Virginia. Nor was that the only significant step-change. TMR would have made a neat little 25-minute episode of The Twilight Zone, but a 144-minute feature film called for some radical filling out. In a heavy-handed literary allusion, the precogs are now called Agatha, Dashiell, and Arthur, the lost children of drug-addicted parents. And the only crime they can precog is murder. Anderton (see above) is played by Tom Cruise. For me, at any rate, Spielberg’s long-drawn-out ending undercuts too much of what had gone before it.

It may comfort you to hear that Wilson maintains a nimble balance between scholarly erudition and cogent readability, although that can’t be said about some of his critical sources. For one (self-evident) example: ‘Cynthia Weber argues that Minority Report navigates a moral dilemma through ‘a complex series of ‘I’ to ‘eye’ and ‘I/eye’ to ‘we/nation’ relationships […] though the film is obsessed with eyes, one of the first things [it] establishes is that eyes do not provide us with the clearest insights’ (2005: 486).’ I/Eye in the Sky (1957), perhaps, if the Estate of PKD makes no objection.

All of which ties in with Wilson’s essential take on MR: ‘[It is] a film about screens—how we watch and use screens, how screens watch and use us, and how they construct subjectivity and identity. Surveillance has become a virtual art form empowered by media imagery. The central task of this imagery is to propagate a community of docile bodies and good, obedient consumers. Spielberg extrapolates Nineteen Eighty-Four into the year 2054; the masses live in fear of their own desires, truth is only as good as the signage that dispenses it, and electric technologies inform every aspect of urban civilization. Some of these technologies have already been realised since the film’s release in 2002, but the story relies on a science-fictional artifice’ (Introduction: The Primacy of Screens).

Wilson sets out to explore how ‘audiovisual screens—material and holographic, two-dimensional and three-dimensional—scaffold reality, dictate how characters perceive themselves, and portray how they relate to one another within the context of high-tech, media-saturated society.’ Key scenes have been close-read to analytical bits, with the concomitant examination of free will, perception, surveillance (‘of the fittest’), religion, gender, and many other themes that dominate the sub-textual ‘screening’ of the film. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Marshall McLuhan features largely in the text and Monographs (General Bibliography): The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951); The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967); Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). The Monographs (Spielberg) include Warren Buckland’s Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (2006) and The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (2007), by Nigel Morris.

Alex McDowell, the Production Designer for MR, was inspired to create the consumer-recognition electronic billboards by the advent of online-sales Amazon: ‘To be told that if you like this book, you’ll like these other five, is a really good service. It seemed logical to think that would make its way pervasively into culture.’ Having said that, however, Amazon might have picked up the idea from PKD’s underrated novel, The Unteleported Man (1966), aka Lies, Inc (1984).

There is a lot more pertinent information packed into C:MR, a whole lot more than could be unpacked in the space available here. Wilson’s monograph should please those fans of both PKD’s TMR and Spielberg’s MR—not necessarily the same thing, I dare say. P.S. I’d just like to put in a good word for Impostor, Gary Sinese’s flawed but quite faithfully adapted 2001 film version of ‘Impostor’ (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1953).

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.