Minority Report part 8: government experiments

Stargate and secret government experiments in Minority Report

After Jon evades the pursuit of the spider robots he makes his way into the pre-crime facility and successfully takes Agatha out of the facility and is able to take her to a hacker on the blackmarket who is able to access her memories and its at this point we see that Jon has no Minority Report.

Jon finds the memories of Agatha’s mother being murdered but no Minority Report of his own and so Jon is forced to go find Leo directly. Jon is a character that is by all means trying to evade a future fate that by all his efforts to avoid it will lead him directly to it.

Child Abuse in Minority Report

As Jon explores the apartment complex where Leo is, all of the signs and synchronicities lock into place at a increasing rate as Jon gets closer to collapsing his timeline into the timeline where he kills Leo Crowe and Agatha pleads for him to turn back.

As Jon enters Leo’s room and sees the stack of photos on the bed he finds the photo of his son, with Leo. It becomes apparent that Jon’s prayers for finding what happened to his son have been answered and he now seems to be standing in front of the person who abducted his son and thus his motive changes from that of a cool headed detective to a vengeful father.

The sheer mass of the photos on the bed are almost cartoonish, and clearly speak to something being set up. Who would leave a mass of photos of themselves with children on a bed unless they were expecting to be found? Its a odd scene, at first but to me what’s interesting about this is that it is the most clear and obvious nod to the other theme in Minority Report which is that of child abuse.

We are told in an earlier scene by the oracle character, Iris Hineman, that all of the pre-cogs were children of addicts of the drug Neuroin which allowed them to have this precog ability. As Iris explains the pre-cogs that are used in the pre-crime department are the children that survived the pre crime program and were deemed useful.

What this pre-crime program is that the pre-cogs went through is not detailed, but the result that we do see is horrific. The pre-cogs we see are just the few who survived the government pre crime programs and they are all subjugated to subhuman existences of living their entire lives in a limbo state between waking and dreaming in a pool that provides basic subsistence for them as if they are parts of a machine.

When Jon takes the Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer into the pre-cog room to introduce him to the pre cogs we see that even though Witwer is shown to be the antagonist to Jon, in this scene he is the only person who has a real human response to the human rights violations going on in front of him. The detectives on the other hand all idealize them as religious symbols or dehumanize them as “information filters” as Jon calls them, and Wally infantilizes them as if they are a substitute for real relationships that he can’t have.

This lack of willingness to see the humanity and the abuse of these pre-cogs, is a good illustration of the psychological concepts of projection and repression. We tend to dislike the things about ourselves that we unconsciously see in others and repress the negative emotions that we don’t like about ourselves behind veils of intellectualizing something that we know is not moral.

The irony of this scene being that all of the people in this pre crime unit that are supposedly doing something for the good of the public is all built off of the suffering and exploitation of children. Jon having lost his own child is subconsciously aware of this and we see this veiled repressed emotion come up in his conversation with Witwer when he mentions the loss of his son.

The logic of society In Minority Report then is pathological, and we see examples of this throughout the movie. On the surface much like in Blade Runner we see the narrative is heavily controlled by the government that constantly feeds the narrative of a utopian world where as the real lives of the people in these worlds is that of complete subjugation to a uncaring and unfeeling machine of society that denies your freedom for the safety of the whole.

Arthur Koestler was one of the writers that Philip often remarks of in his Exegesis journals and in the book Darkness at Noon he sums it up well:

The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same
time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to
choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he
should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish
good and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and
treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a
wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could
not be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheel
should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was
somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

I would also say this theme of child abuse connects Spielberg’s work with the work of Stanley Kubrick, who also explored this theme of child abuse in The Shining. Here’s a link to one of my favorite film analyst’s, Rob Ager, on Child Abuse in Kubrick’s The Shining.

The Stargate project

The use of secret government projects on unsuspecting victims in Minority Reports world is only briefly mentioned to us but actually strikes me as very familiar to the CIA and DIA remote viewing program called the Stargate project.

The Stargate project was a response by the US government in the 70s to the Intelligence they had collected on the Soviet Union on their experiments on “psychotronic” research. The US government at this time began to investigate the phenomena of remote viewing, the supposed ability for one to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance or pre cog.

The US government denies any results that would lead someone to believe that remote viewing is possible, however there has been a outspoken statics professor who was involved in the Stargate program who has been talking publicly about her involvement in the Stargate program over the last decade or so named Jessica Utts.

Jessica claims that psychic abilities were proven to be real through the Stargate project and and says that the research done at Stargate has shown that this pre cog ability is actually real and verifiable through the scientific method. Whether this is true or not is beyond the scope of this article but below I have linked a talk with Jessica Utts for those who want to investigate further.

There is also a declassified file on the Stargate Remote Viewing project from the CIA that mentions Jessica Utts as a researcher on their website that you can find here.

Conclusion:

We are reaching towards the end of this analysis, the next article being the final one before I move onto the next analysis which will be talked about in the next article.

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