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redirected from Main.NineteenEightyFour

alt title(s): Nineteen Eighty Four
Yeah, pretty much.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Warning - Spoilers Ahead! ...

George Orwell's dystopian vision that introduced the phrases "Big Brother Is Watching You", "thoughtcrime," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" into the English lexicon (but not "doublespeak").

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. The year is 1984...ish. All that's definitively understood is that we are on what used to be the British Isles, a few decades after a Revolution that took place during the global nuclear wars following WWII. The whole world has been split into three superpowers still locked in perpetual hatred: Oceania (North and South America, Great Britain, South Africa and Australia), Eurasia (the Soviet Union, mainland Europe and North Africa), and Eastasia (China and surrounding Asian nations, down to India and the Pacific Islands).

Oceania's rigid society is divided into the Inner Party, the ruling elite; the Outer Party, the white-collar workers who are the lifeblood of the system, roughly corresponding to the middle classes; and the proles, the poor and uneducated lower classes who make up the vast majority of the population, not monitored but 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 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; 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 protector against total chaos. To emphasise the point - as the more cynical say - 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 mindless entertainment and cheap booze, and the Outer Party members survive on a principle called 'doublethink' - the self-denial and belief that the Party line and reality are the same thing.

To that end the Party has moved beyond the social experiments of past totalitarian regimes, and are aiming to completely 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 about an anti-authority concept, let alone express it in words.

There are no longer any laws, but everyone in the Party is hyper-aware that the faintest glimmer of discontent or even individualism, 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 with other Party members for pleasure; women have been literally trained to lie back and think of the Party when — and only when — they marry.

Winston Smith, a seasoned member of the Outer Party, is a secret rebel — although since his dreams of defiance are the mundane ones typical of the common man, they haven't yet been discovered. What finally drives him over the edge into becoming the hero of our story is his constant, instinctive feeling that there must be more to life than the uniformly dull and dreary present and the nightmarish 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 a decisive act of thoughtcrime: writing all of this down in a secret diary.

His heresy next expands to take in a boldly attractive, down-to-earth young woman 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 nice old prole pawnbroker. For a few months the lovers meet and live like a heartbreakingly teenage-like 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. Winston's golden opportunity seems to come in the form of O'Brien, an extremely powerful member of the Inner Party who through various subtle signals to Winston 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 — on the outside at least; but still clinging desperately to the hope that "they can't get inside you." 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, (on purpose, it turns out). 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.


Tropes:

  • Adaptation Decay. What happens when the C.I.A. makes their own film version of 1984? It doesn't turn out well.
  • Airstrip One: Trope Namer.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Given that the Party's doctrine is that of Alternate Reality Interpretation, and that the viewpoint character is repeatedly mind raped in the end, it can be argued that we don't know what really happens post-Room 101. All that can be trusted is what Winston sees with his own eyes up until the cage snaps shut.
    • Also, since he doesn't leave Airstrip One, we have no clue as to the state of the world - is Oceania real? Is it the entire world? Is there a Brotherhood after all? Nothing can be taken for granted, even the Info Dump book that pops up halfway through (especially the book, given that one of the Inner Party members claims credit for its authorship, and hands out copies).
    • A common suggestion is that the 'scholarly' appendix on Newspeak is written in a manner that deliberately subverts this Downer Ending, given that it is written in the past tense....
      • It should be noted that when 1984 was to first be published in America, the publisher wished to remove the appendix, but Orwell refused to have it published without, saying that the book would have to be reworked if such a large chunk was to be cut out. This incident, along with a few hand-picked statements of Orwell around the time the book was written, form the basis for including the appendix into the work.
      • We explicitly never do learn if there's a Brotherhood or not. An alternate, admittedly optimistic interpretation would be that the Brotherhood did exist and that O'Brien was part of it, and that Winston and Julia's capture and death were in fact due to the latter's refusal to give up everything for the Brotherhood.
  • Author Tract: Orwell was never the slightest bit shy in admitting that he wrote primarily in defense of democratic socialism and against totalitarianism.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: The whole point of this book is that moral and/or ethical standards are irrelevant to realpolitik, and thus the good guys never will remake the world in their image. Ever.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: Trope Namer.
  • Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Winston against the Party's dictatorship.
  • Card Carrying Villain/ For The Evulz: In discussions with Winston during his "re-education", O'Brien drops all pretense that the Party is out for anything other than pure, unrestrained Power. See the page quote for a sampler.
  • Complete Monster: O'Brien. Obviously, the Party itself is the Complete Monster of political systems.
  • Crapsack World: Perhaps one of the best known examples of the trope. Oceania may be bad, but the implication is that the two other superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia, are almost exactly identical. Eastasia's policy is actually translated as 'death-worship'. The three states are ALWAYS at war with each other, nobody ever winning. If you live in one of the areas the three states are always fighting over, you are a slave to whoever has power over the area at the current time.
    • Emphasised at one point during a rally, when the Party, having always been at war with Eastasia, suddenly has always been at war with Eurasia. As in mid-speech (the speaker is handed a note with the change). And — as Winston notes with horror — his audience instantly goes along with it, because Big Brother is watching them and Big Brother is always right.
  • Doomed Moral Victor: Cruelly, relentlessly, absolutely subverted.
  • Downer Ending: And how...
    • For the protagonists, at least; besides the aforementioned appendix, there just may be a single spot of hope left for the world as indicated subtly by the fact that the proletarian woman's symbolic recurring love song outlasts the popularity of the Hate Song. The Party might fall after all, eventually.
      • And also within the 'Oranges and Lemons' motif. When O'Brien continues Winston's recitation of the rhyme a couple of lines beyond Winston's recollection of it, he exclaims 'You knew the last line!', and O'Brien agrees. But the rhyme as normally told continues a little more ("I'm sure I don't know, said the great bell of Bow", — that is, interestingly, Bow Bells, the Cockney Londoner's central point.) suggesting that the Inner Party is not as omniscient as it believes.
      • The Michael Radford movie ended with a subtler bleak ending, forgoing the bullet to the brain ending, and instead has Winston looking at the image of Big Brother, then thinking, "I love you! I love you!" Meanwhile, the CIA-funded version of ''1984'' had Winston and Julia rebelling in a hail of gunfire. Not surprisingly, the Orwell family and everyone else pretended it never existed. Talk about irony.
      • Talk about scary. If you take a second to consider CIA's methods and compare them to The Party's methods, this attempt at RetGone-ing the point of the book should be highlighted and used to instill Proper Paranoia in people, rather than ignored.
  • Dystopia: No shit.
  • The Eighties: Subverted, Orwell was writing in the 1940s, with the book being published in 1948, and using the year 1984 as a Twenty Minutes Into The Future setting.
  • Electric Torture: And pretty much every other kind of torture you can think of.
  • The Evils Of Free Will
  • Fictionary
  • Freud Was Right: At one point, a character theorises that the Party keeps people in a state of leader worship and war fever though subjecting them to sexual deprivation. All sexual energy is instead diverted to rallies, parades and slogans. This is an overtly Freudian, and to some extent discredited, idea.
  • Genius Bruiser: O'Brien.
  • Genre Blind: Winston.
  • Heel Face Mole: O'Brien.
  • Hope Spot: Pretty much the entire second part.
    • In the third part there is one caused by a typo: after Winston is released, he at one point subconsciously writes "2 + 2 = ", hinting that he may not have been completely conditioned. According to the foreword of one of Penguin Book's recent editions of the book, this is actually a typo that has spread to several translated editions. What he wrote was "2 + 2 = 5". Talk about a downer.
    • Or was it?
  • Huge Holographic Head
  • Ironic Nickname: The Ministry of Truth (the past is rewritten), The Ministry of Love (torture and brainwashing), The Ministry of Peace (in charge of the armed forces), and The Ministry of Plenty (rationing).
  • Ironic Nursery Tune: "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!''
    • Similarly "Under the spreading chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me."
  • It Was His Sled: Some editions even put the incredibly important final four words on the back of the book. For the record, they are: "He loved Big Brother."
  • Light Is Not Good: "The place where there is no darkness" is not a place you ever want to end up. Ever.
  • Malevolent Mugshot
  • Meaningful Name: Winston Smith, from "Winston Churchill" and "Smith", The Everyman. Julia from Romeo And Juliet. Emmanuel Goldstein from "Bronstein" Trotsky's given surname, and anarchist Emma Goldman who was prominent in Orwell's time.
  • Mind Rape: The last third of the novel may be the the most disturbing and prolonged Mind Rape ever put to paper.
    • The Party is subjecting the entire Oceanian population to a form of Mind Rape, with the goal of making them mindless and obedient like cattle.
  • Misaimed Fandom: If you think Orwell was solely attacking Dirty Communists, you've missed the point. Fascist totalitarian regimes can grow from other political movements as well.
    • Also, it's worth mentioning that Orwell was a Socialist himself, splitting off from the main group due to his part in the Spanish Civil War (in which the Moscow-backed Communists ruthlessly crushed a grassroots anarcho-syndicalist movement, where the common people where doing by themselves what the party bureaucrats had promised the "worker's state" would do) and considered himself to be a democratic socialist until the end of his life. To paraphrase the man "The Bolshevik socialists destroy everything the socialist movement originally stood for, and do so in the name of socialism." Orwell himself said that 1984 is his nightmare, an inversion of everything socialism meant to him, as seen in the USSR. However, the point above is valid too. Orwell said as well "I have always been against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism."
  • Misaimed Marketing: The extremely famous 1984 Super Bowl Ad for Apple Computers.
  • More Than Mind Control
  • My Girl Is A Slut
  • Neologism: Invented terms like "Big Brother," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" and popularized "unperson." Just look at all the tropes this book has named...
  • New Speak: Trope Namer.
  • Nightmare Fuel Unleaded: The idea that if you do anything wrong, you're not only killed, but erased from history and nobody will remember you. And Room 101, where all your fears come true, a literal Nightmare Fuel Station. Before that, you're imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, where a terrifying mix of the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique and More Than Mind Control are inflicted upon you until your mind is broken down to rock bottom on before you're completely rebuilt as a mindless devotee of the Party.
    • Your Mileage May Vary, of course, but this troper started crying during the speech about distilling the English language, excising all expression but pure content. Doubleplusungood.
  • No Sex Allowed: Subverted and averted. The proles seem to have the ability to have intercourse freely, and all intercourse within the Outer Party is strictly regulated only for the development of children. There's a lecture in a part of the book talking about trying to remove the orgasm to prevent any pleasure being derived from sex.
    • Unfortunately for women, it's a bit of a Double Standard: Since the science of the time believed the male orgasm and sperm ejaculation were one and the same (this troper cannot recall whether that is still the view), the Party's scientists were only working to eliminate the female orgasm. No mention of any attempts to make the male sex act unpleasant (or even just "neutral"). Then again, someone's gotta wear the boot, right?
  • (Not) Banned In China: With a heaping helping of Completely Missing The Point.
  • Only Sane Man
    Winston: Sanity is not statistical.
    • O'Brien later convinces Winston that he is more like the "Only Insane Man".
  • Paranoia Fuel
  • Peace And Love Incorporated: Minitrue! Miniluv! Minipax!
  • Ret Gone: A major theme. Internally lampshaded, most notably when Winston realizes that by destroying an utterly incriminating photograph of Party opposition members together, he is essentially removing that part of their lives from existence. It is, after all, his job.
  • Room 101: Trope Namer.
  • Secret Police: The Thought Police.
  • Shadow Dictator: Big Brother.
  • Shoot The Shaggy Dog
  • Sinister Surveillance
  • Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped
  • Strange Syntax Speaker: Newspeak, though it isn't used often in the novel.
  • Strawman Political: The entire point of the book. Big Brother is the Strawman Totalitarian. He's also a Strawman Communist or a Strawman Conservative depending on what aspects of IngSoc you focus more on.
    • Actually, Big Brother is both a Strawman Conservative and a Strawman Communist. Also, Communism can be, and usually is, very socially conservative... Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortions. A number of Marxist theorists once considered homosexuality to be a Capitalist decadence. Just because American politics tends to believe there is a trade-off between economic capitalism and social liberty (i.e. tax cuts vs. gay marriage etc), does not imply that this actually is the case. 2-dimensional political spectrums exist because economic capitalism and social liberty are independent variables, not a tradeoff.
    • There's a sort of Lampshade Hanging on this when O'Brien explains that, unlike previous totalitarian regimes in history, the Party is knowingly out for power for itself without any delusions of Utopia Justifies The Means.
    • Orwell's Trotskyist sympathies come out in this book, as in his other works. Big Brother is a Strawman Stalinist, whereas if he'd been a Trotskyist, none of this would have ever happened.
      • Not quite: Orwell thought that the USSR under Trotsky would have been only slightly less repressive.
  • Super Fun Happy Trope Of Doom: Played very un-comedically with the Ministries.
  • The Treachery Of Images
  • Tropes Are Not Bad: It's an Anvilicious Writer On Board Author Tract. It also happens to be a really good book.
  • Truth In Television: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea seems to have taken many many cues from Orwell. In the bad way. Christopher Hitchens, after his visit to North Korea, described it by saying "it was as if someone had taken 1984 and said 'Can you make it as much like this as possible?'"
    • Even going so far as to build a giant pyramid building. And by law, North Korean libraries may not stock books older than fifteen years - the books must be re-edited and reprinted. Wonder where they got that idea...
    • During the Stalin era in the USSR, children had to paste new pages into their history books as the official view changed. If any classmates were taken away and "vaporized", the kids had to scratch out their faces in all yearbooks.
    • No matter where you live, and how highly you think of your own, oh so great, country, fact remains: It is making as good use of this as possible, but it's far more subtle about it than the above examples... And it's continuously getting worse. Ever heard of a VeriChip? Do yourself a favor and google it.
  • Twenty Minutes Into The Future: Although apparently this was a case of Executive Meddling , Supposedly Orwell wanted to call and set the book in 1948, but got told he couldn't, so just switched the last two digits around to arrive at the new date/title. The fact that Winston himself isn't sure what year it is is remarked on several times.
  • Two Plus Two Makes Five: Though George Orwell used it before in essays, this is the book it's most remembered from.
  • Unperson: Trope Codifier; Josef Stalin used the term long before this book was written.
  • Unreliable Narrator: In a stage adaptation This Troper directed, the story up until Winston's arrest is read from his diary by a team of four Miniluv interrogators... which makes one wonder how some of the scenes in his diary were written.
  • We Will Use Wiki Words In The Future: One of the main purposes of Newspeak; condensing words makes it easier to utter them automatically without much thought, and to make communicating against the party impossible.
  • Why Did It Have To Be Snakes: Winston is terrified of rats, which is used against him in the most horrible way possible in Room 101.
  • Working Class People Are Morons: The proles are completely useless and indeed, according to Goldstein's book, the poor lower classes always have been. What makes this even more intriguing is that Orwell never bothers to explain why this should be the case; readers are expected just to accept this as fact.
    • This appears to progressively become Truth In Television. One of the most prominent clues to this is that so very, very few appears to notice that 1984 itself is subtly starting to become Truth In Television.
    • Who said Orwell actually believed it to be the case? Anything and everything in the book might be a complete lie... that's part of the point. Also, Goldstein's book-within-a-book was apparently written by the Party and contains an unknown combination of truth and falsehood.
      • The Proles aren't stupid, just uneducated and kept in a sedated state.
      • The Proles are actually allowed to be happy, unlike the Outer Party members; all they need is Bread And Circuses.
  • Writer On Board
  • Xanatos Gambit: Goldstein's Resistance seems to be set up by the Party itself in order to identify possible dissidents. This also has precedent in real life, as the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, did the same thing in the '20s when the party was cementing its power over everyday life.
  • Zeerust: The Ministry of Truth uses 'novel-writing machines' to keep churning out low-grade literature to keep the proles busy. You can tell who works in the Fiction Department by the oil-stains on their overalls.
    • Also, the practice of putting memos in offices in pneumatic glass tubes that go between departments. Instead of sending the memos in e-mails.
      • Although, in hindsight, e-mails would imply some form of internet, which would have required another set of restrictions by the Party.

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