In the Universe of Cassandra: The Ancient Topos of Clairvoyance in the Futuristic World of Minority Report (2002) (original) (raw)

A Fourth "Minority Report": Film, Literature and the Foreseeable

In analysing adaptation, the first rule is to look for equivalencies between the "original" and adapted text, the book represents an event this way and the film another, but this is only the beginning of the analysis. For the difference between the texts is not simply one of directorial or authorial choice, it is also determined by cultural value, technological changes and, most importantly, the nature of the medium itself. In this article, I take as my subject the adaptation of the short story Minority Report into film and use this to speculate on the limits of each medium. I do not limit my analysis to the adaptation of the story but to those concepts embedded in the story which have themselves been adapted into narrative form. This is central to the understanding of science fiction texts, which often speculate on the future through exploring the limits of scientific and philosophical concepts. The works of many science fiction authors are generated by the concept itself rather than character, plot or setting. In Minority Report, the concept is precognition and its use in law enforcement. The examination of how precognition is adapted into film and book is further complicated by the fact that science fiction itself functions as a form of precognition. There is a certain reflexivity involved in the representation of precognition, where we are shown images of the future within a medium that is itself creating a future world. In following the representation of precognition from one medium to another we also have cause to reflect upon the medium itself and how it delimits the precognition. Each medium develops different techniques for speculating upon and articulating a conception of the future. Film adapts the literary description of events into a visible world. In Minority Report, the broad meaning of precognition in the book is restricted to the concept of foreseeability, where the future is visualisable, rather than predicted or foretold. To highlight the cinematic function of the foreseeable, I adopt Henri Bergson's criticisms of the belief in a foreseeable future. Bergson's critique allows the experiential aspects of foreseeability-what does it mean to experience an actual future-to be contrasted with the structural features of cinematic narration. Through examining the experiential aspects of future prediction, the article broadens its scope to include an examination of the expressive limits of cinema, unlike logico-scientific examinations of precognition where the emphasis is generally on the