Thoughtcrimes

I watched Thoughtcrimes this morning and was thoroughly entertained. It's a USA Network original movie starring an attractive young woman of partial Indian descent, Ravi Nawat, who I gather is on some popular teen soap or other.

She plays Freya McAllister (apparently, the part that's not Indian is some sort of Irish Viking), who, on the night of her high school prom, develops profound atypical schizophrenic catalepsy.

Or that's what the psychs call it for the next five years. But you know and I know that what's really happened is that she's a telepath. The voices she hears are other people's thoughts, and the reason she's sunk deep in herself is to shut the voices out. Soon enough, the NSA shows up and takes her under its wing for training, and then deployment against a rapidly-developing assassination/terrorist plot.

The plot ends up being a little lacking in appropriate intricacy, but the characters and their actors are appealing, the script never goes too far, and there's a refreshing lack of evil in the secret government overlords.

But, mostly, why I enjoyed this film is because its roots are exactly where mine are.

See, when I was growing up, my dad had a complete collection of Analog Science Fiction from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. I've read Thoughtcrimes before, or at least stories in exactly the same territory; they were practically my introduction to science fiction and certainly part of my Golden Age. John W. Campbell Jr., editor of Analog, had a habit of asking his favorite writers for stories about things he thought would interest his readers, and one of the things that SF readers would find interesting in the 1960s was ESP research. So James H. Schmitz gave us Telzey Amberdon, and some other author gave us "I Was a Teenage Secret Weapon" (an ironic piece about the maladroitness of the teenage years, in which the protagonist has the power to induce maladroitness in others--and is parachuted into Russia with no instructions), and other stories of telepaths, telekinetics, and teleporters galore.

Probably the closest match to Thoughtcrimes was a series by Randall Garrett and another collaborator (Lawrence Janifer, maybe?) about an FBI agent assigned to find and nursemaid America's secret weapon in the Cold War, a dotty old woman convinced she's Queen Victoria, who happens to be the highest-functioning telepath in the world. The attitudes and situations of Thoughtcrimes are straight out of those stories (although Garrett was primarily aiming for humor).

Actually, there is one difference of some semiotic significance; in the Garrett series, loss of the telepaths to the other side was always a threat, a function of its Cold War environment. Here, the terrorists fill the primary threat role just as the Soviets did, in terms of providing a plot that must be stopped, but because theirs is an asymmetric antagonism rather than the Soviets' role as opposite, there is no threat of losing the telepath; the terrorists could not exploit her.

In a 30,000 word novella, the rough equivalent of this story, there would have been enough room to expand on Freya's training (here, a bare few minutes, montage of course, suffice to take our heroine from catalepsy to full control), maybe give a few words on why her telepathy expressed itself when it did, explain how the NSA doctor developed blocking and what predecessor telepaths were like, and show the rest of the kind of exposition that would be tedium on television but which fills in the blanks to make a written story complete.

If you should happen across a rerun of Thoughtcrimes, I recommend the film; it's worth your two hours.

Posted by Greg at October 18, 2004 9:20 AM | TrackBack