Dineen and I saw Minority Report last night. We both agreed it was a well-done, suspenseful, and thought-provoking movie about free will and the nature of both humanity and reality.
I noticed one, thing, though. For a city long known as the "Chocolate City" for its majority demographic, the Washington, D.C. of 2054 as portrayed in the movie contained very, very few black faces. Of the three I can recall, two were cops. Had the D.C. of the future, saved from the scourge of murder by the Pre-Crime Division, been emptied of blacks? Is that what Spielberg is trying to tell us?
I don't think so. There appear to me to be a couple of dynamics at work. First, Spielberg seems afraid to cast any of the bad guys as black. In a city that is majority black and largely poor, the only murderers we meet are rich and white, except for their pawns, who are poor and white. Perhaps some of this was dictated by the original story, which I haven't read, but it's clear that the one demographic it's still very safe to characterize as evil or flawed is rich, powerful white guys.
Second, there's the Hollywood demographic conundrum. If the D.C. of the future were at all like the D.C. of today, this film would have mostly black faces - good, evil, and somewhere in between. And then it would be seen as a black film. After all, few folks outside D.C. know its demographics; would people in Peoria go see a "black" film even if it was demographically correct?
Interestingly, Bernard Goldberg noted the same type of slant in the news media in his book, Bias:
One especially egregious incident involved a 1995 news story on Alabama's reinstatement of inmate chain gangs. A CBS crew flew down to shoot footage of these gangs, whose laborers expressed reactions like, "It makes you feel like a slave" and "This makes you hate." A strong piece, the segment simply displayed what the news crew found. However, CBS producers balked at running the story, because 19 of the 20 convicts filmed were black. Even though the ratio accurately reflected chain gang conditions in Alabama, CBS authorities felt such a portrayal would make them appear insensitive, as well as bolster cliches about black criminals. It never occurred to the producers to question why the Alabama prison system was convicting black men in such multitudes--a query which may have actually led them to meaningful, ground-breaking investigative journalism. Instead, their "solution" was to distort reality by requesting more white convicts on film next time.
It looks like this movie has fallen into the same trap - forget about reality, not just in the science fiction sense, but in the demographic sense as well - because when doing a movie so focused on crime, you've got to be sensitive above all else. Maybe that's why a movie called "Minority Report" contains very few minorities at all.
Posted by wasylik at June 30, 2002 10:45 AM