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administration, neoconservatives both within and without the current White House have a core
belief in the creative power of chaos, an eagerness to not simply contain the evil that they see, but
to roll it back. As with the eventual fall of the Soviet Union, going on the offensive with a steady
pressure will force these ultimately weaker (both morally and militarily) adversaries to fold. Once
we have defeated all our enemies, replacing our adversaries with friendly regimes built in our
own image, the United States will preside over a secular version of the thousand year peace. And
thus at the heart of the administration’s radical reinterpretation of imminence is a confident sense
of certainty, a “moral clarity,” a profane analog to Precrime’s prescient foreknowledge.
In two scenes at the end of MR, Spielberg poses the pivotal dilemma between choosing
freedom or safety, both personal and societal, the resolutions of which explore the moral ambiguities
and uncertainties behind the intersection of determinism and free will. The first is Anderton’s
confrontation with his destiny, the precogs’ vision of his murder of Leo Crow, when he and Agatha
find themselves in Crow’s boarding hotel room.
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Crow is not there when they arrive, but Anderton
discovers a trove of Polaroids of young children; including one of his son, Sean, establishing Crow
as his son’s pedophilic abductor. In a flash, he feels a homicidal rage enveloping him:
You were right. I wasn’t set up. I’m gonna kill this man. There is no minority report – I don’t
have an alternative future…. Every day for the last six years I’ve thought about only two things.
The first was what my son would look like if he were alive today. If I would even recognize him
if I saw him on the street. The second was what I would do to the man who took him.
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It’s an odd twist, from Anderton’s certainty in his own innocence, to his certain knowledge that
the precogs’ previsions were right – and thus that the system works.
But Agatha suggests otherwise: “You still have a choice. The others never had a chance
to see their future. You still have a choice.” Just then, Leo Crow enters the room; and Anderton
rises to confront him. In anguishing detail, Crow confesses to having both kidnapped and then
killed Anderton’s son. Writhing on the bed, Agatha at the moment of truth again implores
Convention