Wednesday, January 1, 2025

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR @ 40

The clocks have just struck thirteen in London, the capital of Airstrip One and aging Winston Smith outer party operative is grinding through another day at work. It's not all bad, though, as he exchanged a look with that nice inner party O'Brien man and you can never underrate that. Then again, it balanced out with a poisonous glance from that young anti-sex horror who is probably thought police. It's the mid-eighties and what used to be Britain has become a nightmare of oppression under a totalitarian regime waging eternal warfare with Eurasia ... or is it Eastasia? Whatever, if it were just the paranoia, made worse by the two way tele screens in every room that, unlike everything else, never seem to break down, he might have a chance at getting through a day without almost collapsing.

Michael Radford's adaptation for the cinema was produced and released in the year itself. He presents a London of Orwell's imagination that looks like the 40s if they'd never been repaired. Apart from inner party dwellings and the ministry buildings, the city is dirty and in constant slow decay. When the sense of self-fulfilling power is clarified, it is evident that none of this will improve. That which stands to fall shall fall and the Party will maintain. An anaemic colour pallet and dour score (more on that later) make the claustrophobic daily life we see feel interminable. Winston frequents old shops in the prole quarter, buying things from a past he wasn't part of like an unused plain paper bound diary. He knows this itself could doom him but considers his life past the point of struggle. The liaison with Julia (not counting that as a spoiler when it's an earl plot point) is similarly flavoured with the nostalgia of the long dead.

John Hurt as Winston was already progressing to a status as a craggy master of his art, always bringing (even to Caligula in I Claudius) a puzzled sadness to his characters who, even at the top of their game knew at moments the great ruling futility of sentient life. Suzanna Hamilton, on the other hand brings a fire to Julia. She makes her blue-grey boiler suit sexy, especially when showing how much restraint she needs to keep herself from napalming everyone around her. She shows intelligence and cheek behind an expression calculated to look party-first. And then there's Richard Burton as the inner party O'Brien who brings a quiet control to the oppressor in chief. It is his voice that, after decades of alcohol and more recently developing illness, delivers the line: "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." It's almost a whisper but there is such solid bass below it that the strength of the sound alone would kill the fight in the strongest of us. Hurt's agonised, degraded Winston on the torture table can only respond in whimpers. If you only heard the audio of these scenes, you wouldn't sleep for days.

George Orwell's nightmare scenario became a synonym for governmental smothering and as the year approached, media pundits played spot the overtone, using terms like newspeak to augur democracy's close of play. Orwell tells the story from the perspective of the lowest of the middle stratum who can observe the elite inner party as well as the self-defeating consumers of the proletariat. By day he alters public memory when a citizen becomes an unperson or an economic prediction falls short, changing media reports in news archives. Sometimes he creates war heroes to cover public disgraces. In case you thought that all you had to do was get better at your job there in the Ministry of Truth, consider Winston's colleague Syme whose fevered enthusiasm for shrinking the English language in the Newspeak Dictionary is only singling him out for erasure. Don't slack off. Don't be too eager.

Radford's script wisely avoids the clumsier of Orwell's imagined future. Anyone who composes a story for the future will invent terms that sound too contrived to ever be uttered by people. Partially, this is intentional alienation, to press the point of a future setting. While the scarier terms like Artsem (artificial insemination) and  Ingsoc (English socialism) make it through, awkward formations like rocket bombs or telescreens don't. All terms get shortened with use (fridge, bike, TV) with very few exceptions. Radford just leaves them out as their function is already clear.

If you haven't read Orwell's novel, I'd recommend it. Not only is it an effortless task, however severe its events, it is one of the most articulately formed and interwoven warnings against totalitarianism ever written. This film is not the only one made of it but, of those I've seen, I prefer it. The intention was source fealty and, within reason, that happened. 

Oh, I need to interrupt for a second. This film was largely funded by Virgin a corporate entity that commissioned a electropop score from duo The Eurythmics. While it's serviceable, it does none of the harder work that Dominic Muldowney's already finished music does. I clearly recall the song Sexcrime being played between the last cinema ad and the start of the film and friend Sarah's look of crushed embarrassment. It sounds like a Eurythmics song but in that context also sounds like someone trying way too hard. The Muldowney score is generally the one you'll hear if you see this film but for a while there, the broadcast version had the other one, as though a few bars of contemporary pop would lift, um, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The story is claimed by each end of politics as a warning against the other. Yes, the original intent of the movement that began Ingsoc is along Marxist lines but the criticism of Marxism through this is shallow and point-missing. No one getting the hell beaten out of them by political prison staff takes a moment to think, "well, at least they're lefties". The funniest response to this film that I heard at the time was of a student council pollie who joked that the only thing he liked about it was that the good guys win. 

Anyway, by the point of the setting, whatever principles drove the initial motion have long been abandoned and hold no visionaries nor thinkers. O'Brien is a ruler of reality. He and his inner party are doing what they must because they are able. There is no point beyond retaining power over a confused population. If that isn't a lesson that this bastard of a year needs I don't know what can be.

Then again, we live at a time when a film like Civil War can get ridiculed for suggesting an alliance between California and Texas without anyone stopping to consider that the point might be that conditions had become so dire that these two odd bedfellows would need each other. O'Brien's tests of Winston's compliance, demanding that his responses be genuine, just kept reminding me that the approach of the past decade where the phrase fill the zone with shit can win elections. Freedom is slavery. War is Peace. Ignorance is bliss. Orwell's tale is a powerful one but I wonder if, now, it might not just feel more like a celebration. The good guys win, they just aren't who you thought they were. Well, that's what they're telling you.




No comments:

Post a Comment