Warning: this essay contains spoilers for the movie Minority Report.
You can’t run, John!
One of the fundamental questions Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report poses is whether or not individual autonomy weighs more than the collective good. This question is particularly apparent in the finale, which, albeit conclusive, roots itself on a rather open-ended question:
Why exactly was PreCrime disbanded?
The most obvious answer assumes that once Lamar Burgess’s murderous past to establish PreCrime was uncovered, the public moral outrage was too much of a PR nightmare to deal with (presumably, PreCrime was funded on taxpayer’s money). However, such an assumption would be far too simplistic and naive, especially given America’s notorious history of violating human rights in the name of homeland security (think Guantanamo Bay, for starters). No, to assume that one woman’s death would sufficiently rouse public protest against a seemingly perfect system that creates a utopia of safety is, sadly, too naive of a notion to be sufficient a reason. Instead, let’s consider the alternative reason why PreCrime was disbanded – the possibility that innocent people may have been wrongly jailed.
While this second reason may seem obvious to the viewer, consider that, like many things hidden away from the public, PreCrime’s internal function was unknown to many outside its precincts: in one scene, a man giving a tour to school children claims that the three precogs – Arthur, Dashiell, and Agatha – have their own rooms with toys, books, and exercise equipment, and that they must be kept in isolation because they are too sensitive to normal environmental stimuli; in reality, the precogs are kept in a narcotic state in an isolated, antiseptic room, never quite awake nor quite asleep, just so they can function 24/7 for PreCrime to predict any potential murder at any given time. So while the tour scene is a small one (and more of some background dialogue while we see John Anderton paralyze his own facial muscles to look twenty years older), we can assume that, like the naivety and outright ignorance of the touring school children and the tour guide, the general public in Minority Report really has no idea the intricate, internal workings of PreCrime beyond its ultimate result – that it stops murders from happening, and the numbers show.
So now let’s assume that once Burgess committed suicide and (presumably) Anderton testified to everything that happened – how PreCrime works, who Ann Lively was, why and how she was murdered, why he was set up by Lamar – would the reasons for individual autonomy and innocent until proven guilty still hold? Somehow, I find myself doubting either reason: Anderton states that there has not been a single murder in D.C. ever since PreCrime was established; additionally, most crimes after the establishment of PreCrime are spontaneous crimes of passion, which means the PreCrime officers more or less caught the perpetrators in the act of murder, as can be seen in the opening sequence of the movie. This means PreCrime 100% is efficient on paper – something unheard of in the real world. So would anyone dare to suggest disbanding such a system if there was even the slightest, most minute chance someone may have been jailed unjustly? Somehow, I find that very doubtful.
While the chances of a minority report (when one precog disagrees with the other two in a prediction) are never stated, we can assume that it happens infrequently enough that the original creators of PreCrime would design the system to erase said minority report (note: Wally, the caretaker of the precogs, only erases echoes, aka the instances when the precogs visualize past predictions. Presumably he does not manually erase minority reports because that could possibly lead to error, which PreCrime touts as non-existent, which means the erasure of minority reports is likely done by a computer). Even then, only a handful of people would know that such a mechanism existed – Anderton, himself the head police officer of PreCrime, did not know of this until consulting with the retired Dr. Iris Hineman, the other co-founder of PreCrime – so until the revelation about Burgess, it’s highly unlikely that anyone knew how to manipulate the PreCrime system to commit murder undetected. PreCrime, despite its intrinsic human error, is a perfect system.
You could argue that PreCrime was disbanded on the basis of human error, given it was touted as an absolutely perfect system. However, if you put it in perspective, there really isn’t any system that’s truly perfect: random error is inevitable, and the goal of a system designer is to minimize (ideally eradicate) systematic errors as much as possible. In this case, PreCrime is possibly one of the best systems you could ever ask for: minority reports (analogously random errors) are known to exist to only a few people, and beyond that everything is controlled with perfect, surgical precision.
The most feasible reason for PreCrime’s disbandment, then, must be because of the potential corruption of the upper echelons of PreCrime – the systematic error, per se. When Burgess’s motives and means of securing PreCrime became public, it became very clear that, with the right position, power and knowledge, anyone could manipulate the PreCrime system and commit murders any which way they want. Of course, such a manipulation takes quite the planning and proper time span – I could only imagine the intricate steps Burgess took to kill Ann Lively without being caught, or what sum of money he must have offered Leo Crow in order to imprison Anderton before the truth about Lively’s death and the inherent, systematic flaw of PreCrime became apparent – so presumably, Burgess wanted to silence Anderton and anyone who could potentially uncover the truth about PreCrime and minority reports before such knowledge became untraceable with subsequent generations (this assumes, of course, that the existence of minority reports was never documented and was known only by the co-founders of PreCrime). We could infer, thus, that Burgess effectively wanted to create the ultimate utopian country when PreCrime became a national establishment.
However, once it became apparent that the systematic flaw of PreCrime was not the minority reports themselves but in the way it dealt with random flaws (by erasing minority reports instead of allowing the PreCrime officers to consider alternative futures of the supposed perpetrators and/or victims), the disbandment of PreCrime was inevitable because such a systematic flaw not only rendered PreCrime as an imperfect system, but that such imperfection meant that this system itself could not justify its lack of “innocent until proven guilty” judicial processing. Even if hundreds of potential perpetrators were caught in the act of committing murder, it also means that those who were convicted of pre-meditated murder (those not caught in the act), regardless of their murderous potential, were jailed without due processing, thus violating their own civil right to testify in court. PreCrime is nothing short of an autocracy – a utopic one, but autocratic nonetheless.
Minority Report ends on a rather unique note. On the surface, it argues that individual autonomy and civil rights outweigh the needs of a collective – Arthur, Dashiell and Agatha are eventually released to live out the rest of their lives in peace in isolation – and that misdemeanor can only be rightly punished after the fact because the future, no matter how accurate a prediction may be, is never absolute. The more interesting implication stems from the fact that PreCrime, once its flaws become apparent, is no different than an autocracy, yet until its disbandment is fully supported by the American public. The remaining question lies once again in the question regarding the balance between individual autonomy and the collective good, and at what cost we are willing to sacrifice to fulfill the needs of one side of the scale; unsurprisingly, Minority Report argues for the former (it’s an American film after all) and ends on a rather hopeful, humane tone as well.
Everybody runs.
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Old Writing on Minority Report and Recommended Reading:
The Metaphysics and Paradoxes of Minority Report – originally posted on October 12th, 2010
Is there a Minority Report?, or: What is Subjectivity? – Matthew Sharpe, PhD