Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

"One day Winston, we will meet in that place where there is no darkness." George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

I was with John Hurt last night, eating in a studio commissary. This in itself is a little unusual, as he died on January 25th, 2017, of cancer. He was seventy-seven.

(In actuality, he was SIR John Hurt, CBE. He was in a number of my favorite films: ARIA (1987), which is my favorite film, THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980), and ALIEN (1979), as well as the parody film SPACEBALLS (1987). He was in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978) as well. Just an all-around great actor, sadly missed.)

The gist of the conversation was that I should, upon awakening, watch him in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR again, as it "Was one of my greatest roles." I tended to agree. I defy anyone to picture Orwell's Winston Smith without seeing the gaunt and lined, aged face of Hurt as the embodiment of the doomed, suffering slave-man from "Oceania", Orwell's totalitarian state that is a parody of post-War England, as much as it is of the fascist and Soviet regimes of the era (Stalin primarily). The plot of the novel is familiar to most. Oceania is a state wherein the masses of people are controlled mentally, spiritually, and physically by the jackbooted thugs of a totalitarian regime from a nightmare. Half-starved by rationing, monitored constantly by "telescreens" (a technological capacity that did not exist when Orwell wrote his predictive novel), under constant threat of being "denounced" to the "Thought Police" by the minions of "Big Brother", a character who may or may not exist, or have existed, at some time in the past. However, whose image stares down from every poster, from the telescreen, all the time, so that that unsmiling, mustachioed face becomes a part of the subconscious of the suffering masses of the two chief class divisions: "proles" (proletariat) and "party members" (the equivalent of white-collar workers).

Propaganda via the telescreen, the cinema, and the "Two-Minutes Hate" (which is centered around the supposed scapegoat of ALL problems, "Emmanuel Goldstein," who seems a nod at Nazi anti-semitism, and who may or may not exist), condition the people to disdain and even give up sex; to continually cheer, clap, and hail every new pronouncement of the "Inner Party" as a great victory; to believe in a "war" that is taking place, alternately between Eurasia and East Asia (the enemy keeps changing unaccountably), and to live impoverished drab lives of want and privation, in slum-like dwellings where they are monitored constantly, even by their children, who are all seemingly involved in a Hitler Youth-like scouting organization (being brainwashed, of course, as "spies").

No criticism of Oceania, Big Brother, or the State apparatus is tolerated. As Winston observes, "Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death." There are telescreen programs aired constantly of accused "thought criminals" and revolutionaries offering up streams of phony confessions. Their executions are filmed and broadcast.

Winston (Hurt) works in the special sector wherein those that have been "vaporized" (i.e. "erased from history because of unorthodox or heretical beliefs, or just falling out of favor with the State) are, by modern parlance, "canceled": ALL memory of them edited out of old newspapers and the press, and then the redacted version is sold and disseminated as "facts." The mental fog of cheap gin, misery, and propaganda that most live in suddenly clears one day when Winston realizes he has concrete proof that the Party's pronouncements are lies. Instead of "memory holing" (burning in an incendiary oven) this piece of evidence, it inspires him to begin a diary; not in itself an illegal act, but one that, as it says in the novel, would most likely be punished with a sentence to a forced-labor camp. Because of the odd architecture of his rooms, he can write in them while sitting beside the telescreen, assuming thus, that he is beyond their view.

He becomes obsessed with the young, attractive Julia (Suzanna Hamilton), at first out of hatred for the sexless, passionless, party member she represents, and then, discovering her as a revolutionary, a renegade, begins a passionate affair with her, in a small attic room over a shop in the proletarian quarters. There, they "make-believe" they are in olden times: drinking black market coffee, making love, and eating black-market food, as well as Julia dressing up with make-up and perfume.

It is not long before they meet the aged and dour "O'Brien" (Richard Burton in his last film role), an "Inner Party" member who gives Winston a disguised book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which purports to be the handbook of "The Resistance," which O'Brien explains, "If Emmanuel Goldstein himself fell into the hands of the Thought Police, he could not give a list of his agents [...] No such list exists. They (Resistance members) know there is no possibility of change in their lifetimes." They are a lone wolf organization.

Winston absorbs the book, gleaning some truth for the first time in his life (which has been marked by the tragic deaths of his sister and mother, and the horror of the rats they lived with in his childhood home, vermin that were everywhere), and begins to understand why society is always kept at war. ("To maintain the structure of society, and keep it on the brink of starvation [...] to use up surplus goods from production"; all of which is true to our society as well. "The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.")

Alas, the kindly prole shopkeeper, in whose upper room they have had their dalliances, is Thoughtpolice, and Winston and Julia are brutally arrested. O'Brien was Thoughtpolice all along, not a revolutionary, and tortures Winston.

Winston begins to lose his mind to a point that is almost dream-like and surreal. BEFORE facing what is in "ROOM 101." (Hint: "The worst thing in the world", at least to the victim, gleaned by the Thoughtpolice from constant surveillance through the telescreen.)

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is not a happy story, and no one will leave it feeling that humanity is awash in the milk of human kindness. It may engender terror or despair in the future. But, are we not living in Orwell's world, to a great degree? In fact, in some ways, is our situation not...somewhat worse than he predicted?

I don't mean starvation per se, as most in our society are adequately fed, even obese, from the chemical food additives and bad medications that are proffered by huge corporations whose wealth and power put them beyond the reach of accountability.

We have endless 24/7 "news" propaganda, entertainment diversions that never stop, an entire worldwide internet of useless, mindless, and confusing false drivel, and, you can take it for granted, we are tracked and monitored every hour of every day by someone, somewhere. We live false lives in front of social media cameras; "Nothing is real, everything is permitted."

We have prosecuted an endless succession of Middle Eastern wars, costing trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, the growing "wealth gap" is greater than at any time since the "Gilded Age" (roughly the late 1880s to early 1900s). People face eviction and homelessness, lack of adequate care, and violence is an ever-growing epidemic. The Ruling Class is seemingly indifferent to these disparities. Some claim they WANT the situation to proceed as planned.

It is an age of over-sexualization ("Pornosec," is where Julia works in the novel of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR), of overstimulation, diversion, emptiness, surveillance, propaganda, "fake news," and mass opinion-making over trivial affairs. Patriotism is still applied rigorously as an apparatus of mass control, and mass violence is now common and expected.

People who deviate from the norm, who prod certain "sacred cows," are "canceled"; that is, cut out of the social media platforms and "organs" and publicly pilloried. Celebrities who make social gaffes are roundly expected to make "confessions" as if they had committed a grievous sin. Words such as "democracy," "equality," and "Social justice" are thrown around as if these abstract concepts had some sort of concrete meaning or interpretation.

I, personally, lost an entire account of over ONE HUNDRED books I was offering through a POD company, simply because I dared publish ONE book that was heretical, unorthodox, and had a bad reputation. That it was most likely this book (that was, by the way, 130 years old) I take as a given. However, I was never actually specifically TOLD what book it was the company objected to. I was just given a baseless, one-sentence "denouncement" or accusation, and had my account closed. Now, let's talk about FREE SPEECH, and how much you have. I would argue that, ironically, in this day and age when EVERYONE can have their own electronic platform, that, in reality, you virtually have ...NONE AT ALL. The owners of what the Soviets called "the Organs" can cut you off, silence you at any time, without any explanation, and for trivial reasons. Thus, as J.G. Ballard once prophetically observed, "In the future, everyone will be living in a TV studio"; and he was correct. (He said this in an interview in the pages of V. Vale's alternative culture journal Re/Search magazine, way back in the early 80s.) It will hardly matter, however, as no one will be allowed to have anything of any importance to say.

Or, at least, anything that contravenes the "official narrative" of events, or what is put out there as fodder for the masses by the Ruling Class (our "Inner Party" or Big Brother). Everything else will be "shadowbanned", "canceled", or suppressed in some way.

It would be easy to turn this into a book about the hypocrisies and outrages of our dystopian present--it's much like a mixture of Orwell and Huxley and Wells and Ballard, and perhaps, in our age of AI, even a bit of Fritz Lang, Yevgeny Zamyatin, or Karel Capek. But then this essay could go on much longer and would go far afield of focus on a film. ("It may already have done so," laughs the Author!) Suffice it to say that NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is a film that will mark you deeply, as true an adaptation of Orwell's brilliant, visionary piece as any that has ever been achieved. It is brutal, grim, and uncompromising; its realization of the novel's look and feel--putative "world"-- is flawless. Even the stirring soundtrack will not fail to move you.

Thank you, Mr. Orwell. Thank you, Mr. John Hurt. Together you have given us a vision of the nightmare breathing down our necks. As O'Brien told Winston Smith, "One day, Winston, we will meet in that place where there is no darkness."

May that blessed day come sometime soon. After that, we will have the freedom to say, "Two plus two equals four."

Truly.