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alt title(s): Nineteen Eighty Four
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
George Orwell's
dystopian vision that introduced the phrases "
Big Brother Is Watching You" (not to be confused with the otherwise little-related
reality show, though the show's namesake does come from this book), "thoughtcrime," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" into the English lexicon (
but not "doublespeak").
Warning - Spoilers Ahead! ...
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. The year is 1984...
or thereabouts. All that's definitively understood is that we're on what used to be the British Isles, a few decades after a Revolution that took place in the 'confused fighting' - including at least one 'atomic bomb' drop - following WWII. The world has been split into three superpowers still apparently locked in perpetual enmity: Oceania (implied to take in the Americas and Australia as well, with the UK now renamed 'Airstrip One'), Eurasia (the USSR down and across to North Africa), and Eastasia (China and surrounding Asian nations, down to India and Indonesia).
Oceania's society is divided into the Inner Party, the elite; the Outer Party, the white-collar workers whose intelligence can be of some use to the system, roughly corresponding to the middle class of Orwell's time; and the proles, the totally uneducated lower classes who make up the vast majority of the population, constantly monitored for signs of potential unrest but otherwise left contemptuously alone ('proles and animals are free', runs the relevant Party slogan). There are four major government ministries: The Ministry of Plenty, whose business it is to maintain shortages; the Ministry of Truth, which concerns itself with censorship and propaganda; the Ministry of Peace, whose job is to maintain the perpetual war in northern Africa; and the Ministry of Love, which... is housed in a building which has no windows.
There is no need to give the Party a name, as everyone knows there is only one Party and only one leader, the omnipresent Big Brother. There is no opposition to the Party, as everyone is conditioned through a carefully manipulated mixture of fear and gratitude to love Big Brother as their only bulwark against total chaos. To emphasise the point - as the more cynical theorise - everyone outside the Inner Party is constantly kept on the brink of starvation and exhaustion. Any resultant discontent is easily answered since "there's a war on, after all". The proles are kept sedated with lottery tickets, mindless pop songs and cheap beer, and the Outer Party members survive on a principle called 'doublethink' - the need to believe in the Party line and reality at the same time.
To that end the Party has moved well beyond the social experiments of past totalitarian regimes, and are aiming to quite literally reshape their subjects' ability to perceive the world around them. History is continually rewritten - often outright made up - by the Party so that Big Brother is always right, has always made the right predictions, and always implemented the right policies, for which the citizenry are always appropriately grateful. No evidence to the contrary, in any media, is allowed to remain. As part of this effort, a new language,
Newspeak, is being constructed, with the express intent of removing all 'superfluous' shades of meaning. The ultimate goal is the elimination of the ability even to think an anti-Party concept, let alone express it intelligibly.
There are no longer any laws, but everyone in the Party is hyper-aware that the faintest glimmer of discontent or even individuality, known as "thoughtcrime," might lead to their being "
vaporized." Surveillance cameras, hidden microphones and two-way "telescreens" exist in every home and in every street, spying on citizens, monitoring their every move and showering them with propaganda slogans. Only members of the Inner Party are able to (temporarily) turn their telescreens off. The list of thoughtcrimes includes sex for pleasure; women have been literally trained to lie back and think of the Party when — and only when — they marry.
Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, is a longtime secret rebel, although since his dreams of defiance are the mundane and often petty ones typical of the common man, they apparently haven't yet been discovered. What finally drives him over the intellectual edge into becoming the hero of the piece is his constant, instinctive feeling that there
must be more to life than the uniformly dull and dreary present and bleak future. If the Party can constantly reshape the collective memory, including your very existence, on an ever-changing whim...what meaning is there in anything? As the novel opens, Winston commits the decisive act of thoughtcrime: writing all this down in a diary.
His heresy next expands to take in a boldly attractive, down-to-earth young co-worker of his named Julia, who one day passes him a note that rocks his world:
I love you. Sexually eager and shrewd in all the small day-to-day rebellions, she joins him on secret trysts in an upstairs room he rents from what he thinks is a kindly old prole pawnbroker.
For a few months the lovers meet and live like a heartbreakingly ordinary couple. Partly through Julia's influence and partly out of his own fierce longing, Winston dares to hold on to the belief that the Party can somehow be toppled. The major hope lies in the Brotherhood, a rumored underground organization seeking to overthrow Big Brother, which the masses have been trained to yell curses against in the daily "Two Minutes Hate."
Winston's golden opportunity seems to come in the form of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party who through various subtle signals to Winstson appears to be harboring rebellious thoughts of his own.
Alas, it's only a cruel delusion: soon after Winston and Julia believe they have enlisted in the Brotherhood through O'Brien, it is revealed that the Party had known of their defection all along. Winston is imprisoned for weeks and then tortured under the watch of O'Brien into believing that
two plus two make five, because Big Brother says so. Gradually Winston becomes the perfect Big Brother devotee, except for the fact his heart remained free. That spark is smashed out from him for once and all by a scarring visit to the dreaded
Room 101. He betrays Julia, and with that relinquishes the last of his humanity. After his public confession and release, while awaiting his inevitable assassination, Winston realizes that he loves Big Brother.
In spite of it suffering from a bad case of
Twenty Minutes Into The Future, as the title alone testifies,
Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the best and most horrific
dystopian works ever.
The BBC adapted the book for television in 1954 with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Questions were asked in the House of Commons when it was alleged that one viewer had actually died of shock while watching.
Two film versions were made, in 1956 and (appropriately) 1984. The 1956 version changed the ending, completely ignoring Orwell's point. The brilliant and depressing 1984 version of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt as Winston and Richard Burton in his final role as O'Brien is far more true to the original novel, but is often compared unfavorably to Terry Gilliam's surreal dystopian movie
Brazil (which came out one year later, in 1985), which takes a much more subversive and blackly humorous view of Orwell's themes. According to IMDb,
Tim Burton is working on another adaptation of this movie.
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