What price security?--A review of Steven Spielberg's Minority report.

Do you believe your dreams will come true? Would you believe another person’s dreams? In 2054, we will not only believe in the predictive power of dreams, we will rest a whole crime-prevention strategy on it. This is the premise of Minority Report, a summer science fiction offering from director Steven Spielberg with actor Tom Cruise in the role of the detective involved in running the program. He and his colleagues collate the dream material of the “precogs”: three genetically modified individuals who can “see” future homicides in their dreams before they occur. Armed with this knowledge, the “precrime” unit can arrest the would-be murderers before they act, and hold them in “containment.” The death penalty has been abolished. The system seems to work; there has been no homicide in Washington, D.C., in the past six years. Precrime is just about to go national. Is this beginning to sound professionally familiar? Since the 1970s, psychiatry has become preoccupied with the identification and prediction of future danger—especially the prediction of violence by persons who have mental disorders. There is a nice metaphor in the film in which people convicted of a precrime are kept in some sort of suspended animation, or containment. Of course, one can argue that sentencing the violent psychopath has long been seen as containment only, with little or no treatment offered. Psychiatrists are invited to give expert testimony about future risk in relation to commitment and sentencing. In parallel, the “science” of risk assessment has developed, so that psychologists become the contemporary precogs, using specially devised instruments to anticipate violence before it happens. The use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) as predictor of future violence is a case in point. The film is painstakingly made to create a visual depiction of the dystopian future. There was a threeday brainstorming session with 23 leading futurists to get an authentic depiction of a not-too-distant future in which people still use cars (although they run vertically along skyscrapers). The retail chains of today can be easily recognized. The film’s palette is deliberately kept blue but soulless, the film stock treated through a special bleach-bypass process to blanch the flesh tones from just the faces. The graininess of the film adds to the heaviness that goes with its theme but also imparts a texture, so that the viewer can almost feel the film with his or her fingers. All this creates a more classic film noir look. Spielberg himself said that he “wanted to create the world and then just take it for granted.” However, the film shows things we are facing now: retinal scanning, facial recognition, and the ever-growing intrusiveness that allows everyone who matters to know everything about buying habits, our fantasies, and us. In the film the advertisements call out to us by name, the wrong name as it turns out, because Tom Cruise’s “new eyes” belonged to someone else. The whole matter of the eyes-and-vision metaphor is perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s influence from A Clockwork Orange. In 2002 things are no better on this side of the Atlantic. The British Government has a new mental health bill in parliament that justifies detention solely on the grounds of perceived risk. The possible wrong (and harm) that is done by involuntary detention is justified by harm avoidance, not by its benefit Dr. Sarkar is a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and Dr. Adshead is a Consultant Forensic Psychotherapist at Broadmoor Hospital, Crowthorne, Berkshire, UK. Address correspondence to: Sameer P. Sarkar, MD, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Broadmoor Hospital, Crowthorne, Berkshire RG45 7EG, UK. E-mail: sameer@spsarkar. fsnet.co.uk