inspiration came not from the attacks on New York and Washington or Team Bush’s war on terror but the strong showing of Saving Private Ryan (which grossed $216 million and topped the box office for a month during the Lewinsky summer of ’98, when Bill Clinton too was striving to show he was not just a lover but a fighter). Credit the entertainment industry, or at least producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Tom Clancy, with uncanny prescience. Bruckheimer’s Pearl Harbor grossed $200 million in the spring and summer of 2001, but what truly seemed prophetic the day after September 11 was the movie’s blend of blockbuster mega-disaster and historical war epic.
Bruckheimer’s art film Black Hawk Down was rushed into theaters in late December (and subsequently furnished on video to US military bases) to capitalize on the nation’s new bellicosity. Throughout the winter, this visceral spectacle of US soldiers pinned down under Somali fire effectively functioned as an example of virtual combat. Black Hawk Down inspired patriotic sentiment, precipitated European ridicule, and invited anti-war protest, even as it stood in for the American debacle in Afghanistan that never quite happened (and to which reporters had even less access than Operation Desert Storm).
The scenario structures the event. Bruckheimer co-produced Top Gun, the 1986 movie that military historian Lawrence H. Suid credits with rehabilitating Hollywood’s image of the US armed forces. Clancy was the nearest thing the military establishment has to a Homeric bard. The writer had been recognized by the afternoon of September 11 as a near “precog” and pundit supreme for his 1994 novel Debt of Honor’s climactic description of terrorists wiping out the entire US government by crashing their hijacked airplane into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress. The Sum of All Fears, adapted from an earlier Clancy book, opened amid international jitters that the perennial Kashmir dispute might precipitate a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan—resurrecting a cinematic mode more or less dormant since the early 1960s by bringing the Bomb home.2
A week before The Sum of All Fears opened to become the nation’s top-grossing movie, a New York Times Magazine cover story warned of the inevitable nuclear terrorism that was bound to befall American cities. “Not if but when” is how Bill Keller’s remarkably fatalistic “Nuclear Nightmares” began, going on to term the deployment of a high-radiation dirty bomb as “almost childishly simple.” The Sum of All Fears obligingly visualized the possibility of such a radiological dispersion device detonated by foreign terrorists at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, where virtually the entire US government is attending the Super Bowl. It’s the ultimate advertisement for Homeland Security. The president’s men are hustled out faster than you can say “anthrax.” A frenzied attempt at poignant montage presents the American people as goofball cheerleaders, their faces painted in support of their team, idiotically oblivious to their imminent incineration.
In the early 1960s, imagining nuclear war was called thinking about the unthinkable. What’s startling in The Sum of All Fears is that the nuke actually happens—rolling shock waves flinging cars into the air and swatting planes to the ground, a big black mushroom cloud rising over what once was Baltimore as the movie’s surviving protagonists race around the white-light radioactive inferno. As The Sum of All Fears captured its second weekend, US Customs officials called a news conference to demonstrate their bomb detection capability. Meanwhile, the Chris Rock vehicle Bad Company offered a similarly radioactive terrorist scenario played for laughs and on cable TV, Turner Classic Movies topically offered historical perspective with a triple bill of Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and The China Syndrome.
The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence may have officially backed off its announced intention to plant disinformation in the foreign press, but it would seem that Washington takes its cues from Hollywood—as well as vice versa. Attorney General John Ashcroft timed for the Monday morning that followed The Sum of All Fears’ second triumphant weekend his proud announcement that the currently beleaguered FBI and CIA had successfully collaborated on the arrest of one Abdullah al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla in Brooklyn. Already detained for a month since deplaning in Chicago, Padilla was being held as a military prisoner and suspected of abetting an Al Qaeda plot to produce the very scenario The Sum of All Fears so vividly illustrated—the drama of a nuclear device detonated in an East Coast American city.3
Indeed, the attorney general received another timely cue the following month with the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Having been announced on the eve of the millennium, as the Y2K panic was reaching its peak, Spielberg’s science-fiction policier went into production in the spring of 2001 and wrapped that July. Premiering in June 2002, the director’s first post-9/11 release was a tale of precognitive police work that, as many reviewers pointed out, uncannily anticipated Ashcroft’s notions of preventative detention. “The guilty are arrested before the law is broken,” TV spots warned, strategically placed during national and local news programs during the week of Padilla’s arrest.
NEW YORK, JULY 2, 2002
Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report posits a futuristic police force that arrests criminals before they have a chance to commit their crimes. The unexpectedly topical premise, taken from a 1956 story by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick, posits a future in which mutant “precogs” dream of murders before they occur, thus allowing the police to arrest killers in advance of their crimes. Spielberg himself has expressed cautious support for the extra-legality of the current Bush war on terror: “I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9-11 from ever happening again. But the question is where do you draw the line?”4
Adding to the early twenty-first-century feel, Minority Report opens with a zappy, gore-filled “pre-visualization.” Chief inspector John Anderton (Tom Cruise) conducts the flow of images, hilariously accompanied by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” rewinding and recombining the evidence as though fashioning a movie on some telepathic editing console. The three pre-cogs floating unconscious in their high-security amniotic pool are not the only ones troubled by nightmares. The solitary Anderton is a secret dope fiend, haunted by the disappearance of his young son six years before. It is because of the boy’s abduction that the cop has become the poster child for the Washington, DC, pre-crime unit founded by the lordly, Ashcroft-like Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow). But is preemptive punishment a good thing? Inevitably, Anderton discovers that the pre-cogs have determined that he is destined to commit murder, killing someone he doesn’t yet know.
His trademark paranoia aside, Dick’s original story was mainly an exercise in the proliferation of bifurcating possibilities, closer in some respects to imagining a Borges conundrum than an Orwell police state. Spielberg’s movie, however, is less concerned with forking paths of predestination than in the process of exorcizing the past. The concept of the minority report that gives Dick’s story its twist is here something of a red herring—although the screenplay does introduce such other Dickian notions as compensatory drug use and pervasive advertising.
Anticipating the proliferation of online merchandizing, Spielberg imagines an all-too-credible world in which (as with TV ratings) consumers are defined by what they watch. Eyes, in Minority Report, are literally windows on the soul, and the soul is that which yearns for brand-name fulfillment. Every electronic billboard is a consumer surveillance mechanism programmed to recognize a potential customer and deliver a customized personal message. This is most wickedly visualized as Anderton drags a shaking and quaking, madly prognosticating precog Agatha (Samantha Morton) through a shopping mall with the cops in hot pursuit.5
Minority Report is a movie of haunting images and mindless thrills. Whatever its intent, it visualizes (as well as demonstrates) a future where the unconscious has been thoroughly colonized. All human desires are grist for capitalist gratification, just as any criminal thoughts are grounds for state punishment. Although the filmmaker may have wanted to trade legal freedoms for security from terror, his recurring images of thought police drifting down from the sky or crashing through the ceiling into someone’s life have a terrorizing resonance beyond the tortuous permutations of the plot. Similarly, the mechanical spiders that serve as police bloodhounds are spectacularly invasive—a key concept for the
