“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world. Lies will pass into history.”
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, wrote those words in a 1946 essay titled Politics and the English Language.
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| This film concludes as shoppers in a typical American mall are blind to the three key tenants of George Orwell's 1984 that surround them: War Is Peace, Ignorance Is Strength, and Freedom Is Slavery. |
Director Raoul Peck’s biographical quasi-documentary also is equal parts disturbing teller of truth … although, as Orwell himself would have cautioned, whose truth?
This film should be required viewing by every adult in these United States. Many will embrace it willingly, attuned to the terrifying, clear-cut path that both Orwell and Peck have blazed, illustrating the current world-wide slide from democracy into fascism.
As for those who would prefer to ignore or dismiss its message, perhaps they should be strapped to chairs with their eyes held open — as with Malcolm McDowell, in 1971’s A Clockwork Orange — and forced to watch … if only to see themselves, and their hatreds, laid bare.
Peck’s film is by no means perfect; his pacing is too leisurely at times, and his enraged, wide-ranging reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. The result can feel overwhelming.
Virtually all of the narrative text in Peck’s film comes from Orwell’s written words — from his books, essays, personal letters and diary entries — as somberly read by Damian Lewis. The timeline of Orwell’s life — from early childhood to his death in January 1950, only half a year after 1984 was published — is intercut with clips of events from the early 20th century to mere months before this film was completed.
Some of this real-world footage is horrifying; one photographic still, in particular, is gut-wrenching. Other bits are scary for an entirely different reason: the blandness with which despots spread lies and distort reality.
Peck also inserts telling scenes from numerous big-screen versions of 1984 — mostly the 1956 Edmond O’Brien and 1984 John Hurt adaptations — along with similarly telling sequences from 2018’s Fahrenheit 451, 2002’s Minority Report and 1985’s Brazil.
It quickly becomes clear that we now live in an era of Orwellian “Newspeak,” which he defined as “political language designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable.”
Peck’s accusatory brush is broad, encompassing and deftly illustrating searing, real-world examples of the three Newspeak mantras fueled by “Big Brother” in 1984:
• “War Is Peace,” accompanied by (among others) footage of Russia bombing Ukraine, as a “peacekeeping operation”; George W. Bush’s 2002 “justification” for invading Iraq; war footage from Spain, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Bangladesh and numerous other countries; and the horrifying January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by insurrectionists, which Donald Trump later described as “Love was in the air.”
• “Ignorance Is Strength,” highlighted by a staggering list of the books being banned throughout the United States during the past few years, accompanied by Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism: “History is something to be created, rather than learned.”
• ”Freedom Is Slavery,” with its Rogues’ Gallery of über-billionaires — Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Silvio Berlusconi, Vincent Bollore and Michael Bloomberg, among others — who control vast media empires specifically designed to “protect the status quo, and prevent the common man from becoming too intelligent.”
Of the latter mega-rich, even in the 1940s, Orwell wrote, “Their existence is unjustifiable. They’re parasites.”
(Frankly, I’m surprised this film is available via Amazon Prime.)
Orwell came by his beliefs the best way possible, by learning to abhor his very upbringing. He was born in 1903 in India, to middle-class British parents who had moved there in order to become faux aristocrats … thanks to the abundance of cheap local labor. Orwell admits that he came to hate his younger self, for his complicity in “enjoying” that status quo.
His political reawakening came after he “moved back” to England, particularly during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent years leading to World War II, when his essays and nonfiction works became increasingly analytical, critical and cautionary. He spent 1942 and ’43 working at the BBC, mostly — in his words — “to keep the propaganda less disgusting.” He left that position to concentrate full time on writing, but he would produce only two more novels: 1945’s Animal Farm and 1984 (which he might have titled The Last Man in Europe).
He move to Scotland’s Jura Island in 1946, to begin work on 1984: a process increasingly hampered by his failing health, due to a long battle with tuberculosis.
Peck amplifies Orwell’s fears by bringing this film up to the modern day, and the way that AI enhances the spread of lies and disinformation, exemplified — at one point — by “deep fake” photos showing President Trump (supposedly) surrounded by admiring African-American supporters, against his frequently inane sound-bites. (“I’ve been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”)
Perhaps most chilling of all: on camera interviews with average MAGA-embracing American men and women who simply deny reality. (“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that.”)
“We have a situation in which a significant percentage of the population doesn’t vote [and] is tuned out entirely” notes author/activist Robert W. McChesney, adding “It’s what we call depoliticized. We have a rate of depoliticalization in the United States that must make a tyrant like Indonesia envious: ‘How can I get one of these vegged-out populations?’ ”
“Social media fuels hatred by design, and for profit,” cautions 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa. This is followed by a terrific congressional takedown of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, as he fumbles his way through penetrating questions put to him by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during October 2019’s House Financial Services Committee Hearing.
Peck leaves us with one strong ray of optimism.
“My chief hope for the future,” Orwell writes, “is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code.”
This film concludes with stirring footage of massive anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations here in the United States, and throughout the world … along with still images of men and women of every possible race, creed and nationality, staring quietly into the camera.
Their unspoken question: What happens now?
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