I don’t have a lot of patience for Spielberg’s movies set in the future. Spielberg in the past means Indiana Jones (mostly for better) Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun, 1941, Munich, The Fabelmans. Spielberg in the present means what I think must be his best work, Jurassic Park, or the film that is currently tops for Spielberg in the discourse, Jaws, or his most beloved, E.T., or Duel or War of the Worlds. Spielberg in the future gives me hives. Ready Player One singlehandedly disqualifies Spielberg from any conversation that might call him the greatest director of all time, I cannot find the genius in A.I., and Minority Report only has one thing I like in the entire movie.

For decades, the concept of doublespeak was the running stand-in for language in Dystopia. One must think in ambiguous ways in order to express ambiguous ideas so that no one can definitively obliterate you. In the Trump years, which will last for years to come, everyone but Democrats has come to accept that the language of Dystopia is what Jean-Paul Sartre said about anti-Semites before George Orwell thought up doublespeak. To paraphrase, Sartre states that anti-Semites do not speak with the intention of argument or truth, but with the intention to mess with their opponents and invalidate argument itself. The anti-Semite and the fascist, who make up one of those nifty Venn diagrams which are almost one circle, work on the same principle. This line from Minority Report is my favorite statement from the language of Dystopia, a language that both of us speak.

It’s not a line which is said with particular emphasis, or, to put it a little differently, it’s not said by Lois Smith in a way that’s supposed to make Hineman seem arch or too knowing. This is what makes it a great dystopian line. Hineman is a Syme for Minority Report, a character to blithely evangelize Newspeak. On its face, this is obviously a ridiculous line. If three people are never wrong about their movie facts, but one of them disagrees with the others and says that Steven Soderbergh directed Minority Report, then clearly those people must be wrong at least once. But the line, read more in the spirit of how Hineman presents it, is suggesting that the Precogs are together always right. One may not think so; the others might not be up to the standard of Samantha Morton, but in troika they are always correct. Both of these statements can be accurate, but in Dystopia what is accurate is not always what is true.