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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...
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 drugs, 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 the piece 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, 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, an extremely powerful member of the Inner Party who through various subtle signals to Winstson appears to be harboring rebellious thoughts of his own.
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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