Screening Prophetic Machines: Preemption, Minority Report, and the Problem of Multiple Endings.

"Screening Prophetic Machines" argues that director Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known a...

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Publicado en:Science Fiction Studies Vol. 46; no. 3; pp. 571 - 595
Autor principal: Acherman, Marc
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: University of California Press Nov2019
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      aug:
        au: Acherman, Marc
      su:
        Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946-
        September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001
        Utopias in literature
        Motion picture industry
        Jameson, Fredric, 1934-
      sug:
        subj:
          Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946-
          September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001
          Utopias in literature
          Motion picture industry
          Jameson, Fredric, 1934-
      ab: "Screening Prophetic Machines" argues that director Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine. It observes that the film hyperbolizes this policy through the science-fictional tropes of the "prophetic machine," which fuse preemption's speculative logics, traumatic affects, and excessive responses with contemporary media, screens, and surveillance to figure the American War on Terror and its ideological foreclosure of alternative futures. While acknow-ledging these parallels, however, this essay complicates criticism that proposes Minority Report inadequately critiques or even uncritically reproduces Bush-era ideology. Instead, it locates Minority Report's politics in cinematic form, claiming that the film's multiple possible endings suggest an array of possibilities for both narrative and prophetic closure that, when understood to be in tension, subvert assertions of preemptive certainty. Drawing from Fredric Jameson's work on utopian fiction, this essay thus examines how preemptive discourse and cinematic form converse in the film, and ultimately contends that Minority Report, because of its resistance to narrative closure, redirects attention from metaphysical discourses of fate and inevitability to the potential dangers of misplaced trust in interpretive authority.
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