I've been rereading George Orwell's novel 1984. I read it almost every year, although I think I skipped it in 2008. Every reading opens the book up more for me, but this particular reading has given me new insight: I attribute this my own mental maturity, but also the benefit familiarity brings - I am less worried about the plot, since I know how it ends, therefore free to examine other aspects of the book. And, for curiosity's sake, in a highly unusual state of insomnia, I watched the British film adaptation, Nineteen-Eighty-Four on Netflix's Watch Instantly service, notably starring John Hurt as Winston Smith, the protagonist, and Richard Burton (you know, the guy who married Liz Taylor 43.6 times...) as O'Brian, "Winston’s seducer and betrayer, protector and destroyer," according to author Thomas Pynchon in his 2003 introduction to the novel.
There are many reasons I love this book and reread it so often. For starters, I find Orwell's writing to be superb. He is able to be both concise and poetic at the same time; I think it is for this reason that the screenplay is fiercely loyal to the book's dialogue (more on the film later). Orwell's political leanings are fascinating: he went to Spain and involved himself in their civil war by joining the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification or the POUM — Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista to "fight Facisim", which he later recounted in his book Homage to Catalonia, an amazing work. I find 1984 book to be important politically and historically, as a sort of warning bell, ringing alarms of the danger of totaliarianism, indoctrinisation and blind obedience.
Pynchon's introduction has some wonderful insight about Orwell's possible intention regarding the message behind 1984 (note that George Orwell is a pen name for Eric Arthur Blair): "There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger—his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith “believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945...” Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for his son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted—a faith so honorable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed."
The first time I read it, the very idea of constant government monitoring and dissolution of free will were appropriately terrifying; that was in 1998. Eleven years later and I am still unsettled by these ideas, but it is other elements of the novel which have caught my attention and thinking about the novel in the context of the movie helped me analyze them. For one thing, (spoiler alert!) the end; Winston is caught by the Thought Police and taken to the Ministry of Love where he is... well, it depends on how you think about it. He's punished, tortured, and reprogrammed (think Woody Allen's movie Sleeper) but, according to O'Brian, he's rehabilitated, or healed. With that in mind, one could say that Winston's conscience, this thought crime throughout the book, is the actual torture. Namely, his memory is to blame. He drinks, eats and smokes the disgusting, government-produced food and narcotics, knowing, but not quite remembering, that a better, purer, quality form of these products once existed. He and his fellow party members (party actually denotes a social class) drink oily gin and tasteless coffee, eat processed meat-like foods and smoke cigarettes that are packed with tobacco dust. His knowledge of good food and freer times is not helping him; in some ways, you could see his capture and reprogramming as a good thing. When the book ends he no longer thinks about the terrible gin he's drinking and his only concerns are with the the party's politics, not the memories that once haunted him. The first time I read 1984, I was disappointed that Winston and Julia's acts of subversion with the underground resistance movement are all for naught - the underground is as much a product of the party as the shitty gin everyone drinks. This time around, I feel sorry for Winston and can't help but empathize with the relief he feels, yes relief, at being reprogrammed by the Ministry and sent back into the world to be a loyal cog in the party's machinery. His memories and knowledge are gone, his love for Julia betrayed and destroyed; Winston is not happy, (happiness is not an option or even desirable) but content; his mind is eased.
I can identify with this. Take, for example, the television show House. Everyone I know loves this show and I understand why: Hugh Laurie is a good actor (I also find him kinda hot, rowr!) and the surly character he portrays is very appealing. But every time I watch it, some sort of Right-wing message is written into the script and I turn off the show in utter disgust, deeply and personally insulted. I watched one starring Mira Sorvino - I love her and was very excited to watch that episode. Barely fifteen minutes into it, House and his team of teenage gymnast vigilantes (oh, wait, that's the Mr. T cartoon, sorry); House and his team of doctors are brainstorming Mira's mysterious illness, with, as the format goes, very little information to help them. They suspect some sort of venereal infection because she's on the pill, inferring that all women who take the pill are promiscuous sluts. Seriously. I'm probably not remembering the plot exactly right, but I do know, without a doubt, that that was their point. Um, excuse me?
The other episode involved a revelation that a star baseball player was smoking the demon marijuana, whereupon one of the doctors went on a holier-than-thou rant, equating the athlete's indiscretion with injecting toddler's with heroin or something equally horrific. Great. First of all, all crimes are not equal and drugs differ, as do their uses, abuses and potency. Second of all, baseball players endure a grueling physical season, if a player is smoking pot, it's probably to deal with the pain. Third of all, FUCK YOU. Rant aside, it is this sort of uber-consciousness that makes it very hard for me to watch most television, which sort of sucks because sometimes I really need mindless entertainment. It's not always healthy, mentally-speaking, to be hyper-aware; Winston's relief at being purged of his memory is highly understandable, however terrifying the notion.
With all of this in mind, I watched the film, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, expecting to be disappointed. While I wouldn't call it a good movie, or even necessarily recommend it to a friend, it has some very strong points. The sets were wonderful, they truly captured the bleak, war-torn, crumbling feel of a London under the grip of a totalitarian regime. And the casting is superb: John Hurt was born to play Winston and Richard Burton brings real sophistication to O'Brian, a very complex character, considering his relatively minor role; Suzanna Hamilton is exactly how I had pictured Julia from my very first reading. But, I also felt that the filmmaker was at odds with himself. He clearly was trying to bring certain horrors to the forefront, yet de-emphasized some wonderful element that make the book so rich. Children, for example. In the book, Orwell goes out of his way, very early on, to explain that in the world he imagines children are not innocent, but lethal. Being young and impressionable, they swallow the party rhetoric fully and are therefore ruthless and violent. They turn their parents in to the Thought Police, relish public executions and use their party conformity as a sort of rebellion by targeting the adults around him as enemies of the state every chance they get. In the movie, the children are stoic, calm and forgettable, I was very disappointed by this. But, as I mentioned earlier, the dialogue was lifted directly from the book, which impressed me, and overall I think film captured the mood very effectively. Nonetheless, I would recommend the book over the film, the detail alone is worthwhile; the film is purely visual, it hasn't the time to serve the content satisfactorily.
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