A journey through gloomy and devastated landscape

Amit Sengupta

“You are a slow learner, Winston.”
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” — George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell wrote 1984 in July 1949. July 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of this classic and dark literary documentation of a totalitarian society. In this society all privacy is public, your body, mind and soul is dedicated to an omnipresent power. Propaganda, war and fake news is camouflaged as doublespeak, newspeak and double think. Love can only be expressed manifestly for the state and the ruling party. Love here is banned. It is prohibited between man and man, woman and woman, woman and man. You can only love the Big Brother.

Emaciated and starving babies must watch a big screen to satiate their patriotism, where people are hanged as a public spectacle. Even a word, a sketch, or a thought, dream or fantasy can land you in a torture cell with rats, an interrogation chamber, or in front of a death squad. Or, you can just simply disappear. Your thoughts and ‘thought crimes’ are monitored, manipulated, controlled. Your mind does not belong to you. You know that the ministry of justice is actually the ministry of injustice, and the ministry of truth is nothing but lies and untruth, but you better believe in what the omnipresent power tells you. This is a nation-state where war is peace, ignorance is knowledge, and freedom is slavery. 

This is a society in which the person who “controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past… The best books are those that tell you what you know already…And if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself…” This is the perfect utopia of a totalitarian state where two and two is five. And, where, Big Brother is Watching You, 24/7, even when you are asleep.

Film as moving as the book

The book became a dark film as vivid in its depressing suffocation as Orwell’s prophecy of how dictators can create a herd like society where the sinister and the diabolical are posited as beauty and honesty. All meanings are turned upside down, all differences become sameness, everyone should obey the command, all should follow the authoritarian line. A child will spy on his father and mother, a wife will inform on her husband, and you never know if your lover is a fanatic party cadre or a hidden rebel, as in this film.

In that sense this film has a striking resemblance to the post-depression, post-World War I movie by Charlie Chaplin — Modern Times. Set in a crumbling and decadent capitalist system in the West with mass unemployment stalking the land, where all labour is exploitative and oppressive, here, too, in the automated and mechanical work stations and underpaid sweat shops, you are watched even when you are in the washroom. This was Chaplin’s spoof on capitalism. Indeed, between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Franz Kafka’s The Trial, 1984 moves in a multiple spiral of complete denial of freedom in a society where the Surveillance State can pick up a burnt message from the fire place which says: I love you.

The film, 1984, moves through the dark and devastated landscape and the collective catharsis of hate politics in a public space where all should chant in unison in praise of hate. This is like the mass burning of books amidst Nazi songs in fascist Germany. This could be a totalitarian Stalinist society; this could be the concentration camps and gas chambers of a Nazi state; or, this could be the highest form of technological surveillance as in late capitalism in the West. 

Exposed! 

Edward Snowden broke the code and exposed how the National Security Agency monitors and spies on all citizens in America, and in the rest of the world, especially in ‘enemy’ countries. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning proved to the world that the invasion of Iraq was not for the weapons of mass destruction; that the tens of thousands killed as if in target practice was basically driven by blood for oil and the gigantic profit needs of the war and arms industry. Totalitarianism has many tentacles, from Stalin to George Bush and Donald Trump.

Indeed, the protagonist in the Orwellian movie does find love at last. Love as redemption in the time of cholera. However, he has to pay a heavy price for it, and so does she.  Because, this is both time-present and time-future, and 1984 can very well be 2019.

As Orwell writes in 1984, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”