Future Schlock

From the first press report, I’ve been convinced that the nation’s No. 1 movie, Minority Report, is really a deliciously twisted, kind-of-subliminal marketing campaign created by the nation’s ad vertisers and ad agencies to show off.

The film is infused with ad symbolism—the scene where Tom Cruise literally chases his own eyeballs, for example. Talk about your inside baseball.

And advertising itself—talky, intrusive, one-on-one, omnipresent—is virtually a central character in the film. Abetted by retina-scanning technology, ads for all sorts of real products and services literally call out to Cruise by name as he hurtles around (in a Gap store, in one instance) trying to avoid the Precrime cops he used to lead.