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Given how Gilliam had to fight with the studios over his ending to Brazil, one can only imagine what the studio executives must have thought of this film. Michael Radford deserves credit for sticking to the depressingly downbeat atmosphere of the book, offering a bleak and depressing future which is completely soul-destroying and devoid of any energy. However, the film itself merits a lot of discussion. There are people far more qualified to do that than I am, so I’ll spare you my ramblings. Still, I’m not here to discuss Orwell’s legendary text. There’s been a lot of debate about we passively absorb information these days, and it just illustrates how far Orwell was ahead of his time. At the same time, it’s interesting to note how the film has the inhabitants of this world passively absorbing media, be it video or sound, droning away in the background like a constant hum. The “war on drugs” and the “war on crime” might sound just a little more reasonable, but they are similarly distracting terms. It’s simultaneously a little funny and a little depressing to hear the announcements from “Big Brother” declare that the state is winning “the war on production”, in an age where it has become all too common to stage a war on a concept for a cheap soundbyte. Throughout the book and the film, there are countless allusions to these old regimes, such as the black uniforms of the soldiers and the “thought police”, the flags and insignia and even reference to “the ninth Three Year Plan”, recalling Stalin’s similar initiative.
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A lot of this is foreshadowed in his own writing on the history of the mid-twentieth-century, such as his essay Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, which articulated his “2 + 2 = 5” idea years before he would use it in his novel. Inspired by what he witnessed in Germany and Russia, 1984 just takes things that were already occurring and placed them within the context of a post-apocalyptic Britain. Of course, the sad thing is that Orwell wasn’t necessarily writing fiction. In a world that is celebrating “the triumph of will over the orgasm” to the point where the state wishes to abolish the family unit to the point that, within a generation, nobody will be able to conceptualise it, that makes Winston a threat, and guilty of “thoughtcrime”, that most rebellious of acts.
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Winston begins to get a bit curious about things and how they work, daring to kep a diary and even fall in love with a follow individual. Hell, most of us even recognise that famous Apple commercial.Īnyway, the story is that of Winston Smith, a man who works censoring newspaper articles. Indeed, Orwell’s depiction of a completely hopeless fascist future pretty much defined what a soulless futuristic dystopias should look like. Hell, most people will even have encountered other concepts like an “unperson” or “doublespeak” or “we are the dead” without ever having any direct interaction with Orwell’s core text.
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It was, after all, this book which introduced concepts like “big brother” or “room 101”. Even if you’ve never heard of or picked up the book, Orwell’s cynical and depressing world view has filtered through pop culture osmosis into our collective subconscious. Welcome to an edition of Big Brother where every room is a "Diary Room".Įveryone knows the story of 1984.