Locative Media & The City

Did anyone notice during the scene where John (Tom Cruise) visits the containment center to find out about Ann Lively, that it is a Panopticon model? The building appears to be round, which is evident from the hallways that surround it where John enters. The warden’s center is in the middle, located at a high level. When he pulls up all the bodies in containment, they all are visible and circle around the warden’s station, exactly like Bentham’s Panopticon prison described by Foucault. The inmates in containment are both visible and unverifiable. Of course, it could be argued that the entirety of Minority Report is a Panopticon model society. Every person is always being watched, coincidentally, by the organ they use to watch others. Even those in power are being watched, as we see when the system turns against their own, John. Foucault says, “Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged.” In the scene where the pre-crime agents invade the dilapidated building and release the spider-like creatures, it becomes evident that everyone is behind these “light bars,” of sorts. There is no escaping being watched; the technology sees your warm body before the human eyes. Privacy is nonexistent; when the pre-crime agents or spiders enter into private space, the residents barely even seem to notice their invasion of privacy anymore. Foucault also states, “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.” The bodies of the pre-cogs and agents distribute the power, and the pre-cog reports (and agent’s abilities to stop the crime before it occurs) determine the fate and powerlessness of the individuals within the society.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I was reading in a book for another class (the book is called Narrative in Virtual Reality) and came across this passage, which struck me as a somewhat poetic instance of Panopticism:
“One of the passages in fiction that I find the most scary is a scene from Emile Zola’s Thérése Raquin. It also plays on the idea of entrapment. Thérese and her lover have murdered Thérése’s husband and now live together with the mother of the victim. The mother-in-law comes to realize who has murdered her son, but she suffers a stroke and is unable to speak or move. The end of the novel describes the deteriorating relationship and growing torture of the two lovers as they suffer the unbearable presence of the silent, hostile gaze of that woman trapped in her own body. I read it as a teenager, and I still shudder when I replay it in imagination”