Changing the Future

In both the society in Minority Report and in Oceania, the government attempts to prevent crimes from taking place. In both cases, they are attempting to control their society to mold it into what they want it to be. In 1984, they were preventing people from turning against the party by charging people with thoughtcrime. In Minority Report, they were preventing murders. They are given images that portray elements of the crime and using those, they need to find the scene of the crime and prevent it from happening. When they do this, they charge the person with future murder. Just as in 1984, they are charging the person with something that hasn’t happened yet.
They are both changing the future. In 1984, one of the party slogans read “who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell 32). They control the past by changing documents and rewriting history, therefore they also control the future and what people interpret as accurate. In Minority Report, they only change the future. They do not need to go back and change the past because they have already prevented murders from taking place. Anything else that happens that passes them by they cannot change. They are only given control over the present and over the future. However, it could be interpreted that whoever controls the present and future controls the past, because the future becomes the present which becomes the past.