Alright welcome back guys, as promised I am returning to my analysis of Philip K Dick’s work and over the next few posts I will be breaking down and explaining the later half of the film Minority Report and how the themes within Minority Report connect to deeper themes throughout Philip’s work that are directly related to the world we live in today.
In addition to this I will be releasing the next issue of The Philip K Dick Files along with upcoming episodes of the podcast interviewing other artists, film makers, and writers who have all been inspired by Philip K Dick and the themes in his work. buckle up guys there is some truly earth shattering things I’m going to be sharing with you all and I appreciate your patience and the support.
As Jon escapes from Witmer and his men in the automated vehicle factory he sets out into the countryside to find the other lesser known creator of the precrime program, Iris Hineman. Again here in this scene we get another nod to the overall theme of eyes in her name, Iris. It’s a fitting name as she seems to have an omniscient all seeing perspective on the story world and also obviously plays the mentor archetype in MR.
Iris in Greek mythology is also known as the goddesses of the sea and the sky, with the ability to move between the world of the Gods and humanity to bring messages to them. She is sometimes depicted as holding a pitcher of water, similar to how Ms. Hineman is here.
Later in art history Van Gogh would paint his famous paintings of the purple Irises. The symbol of the Iris over time began to symbolize a warning to be heeded, as it was named the messenger of Olympus and also symbolized lost love and grief. Could this be a allusion to Jon’s loss of his son?
As Jon recovers from the poison he got from one of the plants that struck him as he snuck into her garden Iris begins to drop a bombshell on Jon and sheds light on what we already had suspected that the precrime program is not as flawless as we are lead to believe.
Iris goes on to explain the concept of the Minority Report, that the precogs are “never wrong but sometimes disagree”. According to Iris, sometimes the precogs see different variations of the future which could throw doubt on whether they really can accurately predict a murder or not, these “Minority Reports” are suppressed within the organization to keep up appearances of the program being infalliable. Jon is told then that the only way to clear his name is to go back to the facility and find his Minority Report in one of the precogs, if he has one that is.
This sets the whole film into a different trajectory and asks a host of questions that create such a interesting premise for the film: If the precog sees an event in a vision does that mean that they are destined to kill that person, or if they are made aware of the vision do they now have the ability to change the outcome?
If Jon is able to now change his decision from killing Leo Crow then that means the government is responsible for keeping the information that is revealed from the precogs from the public in the first place and are responsible for committing people that with the right information could have chosen not to commit the crime.
The second question also brings some interesting thought experiments to mind, why is it that when 3 of the precogs agree on the same vision it is considered a true vision while a minority report is not? Whats interesting is how this idea might overlap with the observer effect in quantum mechanics.
The observer effect states that by the simple observation of a phenomena or situation the act of awareness itself changes it. I’m not a physicist so I won’t bother trying to explain the double slit experiment to you but below I will provide you with a video that provides a better explanation:
So with this noted here, we will return to this in a moment, but first I want to cover another idea I came across from a book called Transurfing Reality by Vadim Zealand. If you are into PKD and the trippy subject matter of his work then you will enjoy this book, and here is a link to an audio version on YouTube that I recommend. It’s quite dense, long and takes several listens to really understand what he is saying, but I will provide some brief excerpts that are relevant to this analysis below.
The Space of Variants
Above is a recent illustration I did that is my depiction of what Vadim Zeland calls The Space of Variants. According to Vadim:
”It is an information structure — infinite data field containing all versions of all events that could happen. You could say that it contains everything that was, is and will be. Space of variations is a template, grid of motion of matter in space and time. Both past and future are there stationary, like frames from a movie roll-film and the time happens only during the movement of an individual frame, in which the present is contained.
Dreams are not illusions in the usual sense. The mind does not invent them — it actually experiences them. Everything we see in reality, is realized variations. And while sleeping, we can see what was not realized, i.e. plays with virtual scenarios and scenery.Dreams show what could happen in the past or can happen in future. Dreaming is a journey of the soul in the space of variations.”
We tend to think that what we are doing is nonsensical when we imagine something as if imagining something is a thing of no consequence but I think Minority Report and PKD’s work in general, which has a sort of prophetic (precog?) aspect to it proves this is not so.
From Vadim’s perspective what we are doing when we imagine something is us perceiving into a dimension of reality that is independent of space and time and as we observe something in this space we begin to bring it into our own direct experience the more we pay attention to it as it builds a kind of momentum that ends with it physically manifesting into our experience in this dimension of life.
So you probably are already see what I’m getting at: The precog when it gets a vision is peering into the variant space and seeing this potential future, but what exactly is the effect that is taking place by observing this event in the first place?
Again why is it that it takes 3 precogs having the same vision for it to be considered a legitimate vision, but if only one of them sees it it is considered false and becomes filed away as a Minority Report? Is it because 3 precogs seeing the same vision means that it will more likely come true?
Does that mean that in some sense by the precogs envisioning this scenario are they themselves creating a situation that otherwise may not exist? It definitely seems to be that once the precogs see the vision it immediately begins to take form as more and more people observe this vision, since Jon immediately shows the vision to the precrime council to confirm they are all seeing the same vision.
The Future is out there
When we go and look at the personal journals of PKD in Exegesis, we will see there that he has some interesting thoughts on this. If you pick up the book and do a search for precog this is what you will come across:
“suppose we imagine everything in the present like a stage set, with actors; however, in the wings wait the set and actors for the next scene. These latter, dimly discerned, will inexorably push everything on the stage off eventually. It is not the prior act but the next act which exerts the force; conceive of the present as fragile or unstable, and this pressure “from the wings” becomes inexorable. Logically, this is as plausible as the idea of cause-and-effect from the past operating as force on the present.
Also, if as Dr. NK says, time is energy entering a material system, perhaps it enters from the future — is the future; i.e., time has more charge, more force in the future, drains out into the spatial reality of the present, and at last dissipates down into the drain-off slot which is the used up past.
This is a disturbing new view but oddly enough it coincides with my dream experiences, my precognition of events moving this way from the future; I feel them inexorably approaching, not generated from the present, but somehow already there but not yet visible. If they are somehow “there” already, and we encounter them successively (the Minkowski block universe; events are all already there but we have to encounter them successively) then this view might be a correct view of time and causality.- “
Page 121, Exegesis of Philip K Dick
Philip mentions the idea of Minkowski’s block universe theory which is something that was inspired by Einsteins special relativity theory and Minkowski essentially comes to the conclusion we think of time as something that proceeds linearly however according to his theory its much more like space.
Just because we are not physically experiencing Pluto or Mars in our physical vicinity does not mean that they dont exist at the sometime as our physical surrounding space does. Likewise the future exists as a real reality and it is slowly pushing itself into our experience and this is how we experience time.
So once a vision is accepted as real, then do the actors seen in this vision have the free will to act differently or by the mere observation of the vision are they compelled to act out this scene almost like actors in a play? In that case doesn’t that mean the only free will that one has is which “sector” of the Variant Space one puts their attention onto?
It’s this last question that is of interest to me, we do not pick our lot in life we are often born into situations that we would say is not ideal. However we do have the ability at any given moment to change how we perceive a circumstance or an event in our lives, and this is ultimately the only freedom we have, when we change our perception of something the thing itself changes. The particle becomes a wave.
Perception is reality
It becomes clear that precrime is not as clear cut and the truth is messier than we are lead to believe. With Jon being aware of his impending crime of murdering someone does he now have the freewill to change his actions and thus change his destiny? If so, then what about those who have been imprisoned for their crimes, are they not at a disadvantage of not knowing what reality they are in?
In a sense we could say that much of Philip’s work such as The Man in the High Castle, is his own Minority Report in a way.
So what is reality? And what happens when you have a government body that is essentially controlling information and keeping it from the public has the ability to decide what is real and what isn’t? This all goes back to a original quote by Philip k dick that I will end this article on:
“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing”- Philip K Dick
Interested in seeing my Philip K Dick short story comics? I’ve adapted his public domain short story “The Hanging Stranger” and “The Golden Man” into comics you get for FREE below. (I do not ask for money as these stories are not mine however, feel free to donate to support my project as it takes quite a lot of my time and thank you for reading):
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