When I was growing up, the lessons of George Orwell‘s Dystopian novel 1984 were thought to pertain to the Soviet Union. Big Brother was Josef Stalin – controlling the thoughts of his people, punishing dissenters.
If that had been correct, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and freeing of its similarly totalitarian satellite regimes would have rendered the novel irrelevant to our present times. 1984 would have been a mere artifact reflecting outdated concerns of an earlier era marked by sinister eradication of personal liberties. Turns out that’s not the case.
Raoul Peck’s vital documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, which premiered tonight at the Cannes Film Festival, makes it startlingly clear the degree to which we are living in Orwellian times. The parallels between the nightmare of 1984, where Big Brother dictates every facet of life, and Donald Trump’s America have not been properly acknowledged. This film does that. Trump is unleashing thought police – e.g. the order directing the Smithsonian Institution to “remove improper ideology” from national museums – to such a degree that it seems ripped from the pages of Orwell’s novel. A nation that used to be enshrine freedom of speech in its Bill of Rights is seeing those precious liberties ground under the totalitarian boot.
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 goes well beyond just the darkening reality in America. Vladimir Putin, uttering the cruel Newspeak of “special military operation” before unleashing full-scale warfare on Ukrainian civilians, makes an appearance here, as does the military leader of Myanmar, who blithely dismisses any concern for the persecuted Rohingya minority who have been driven into Bangladesh. Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, France’s Marine Le Pen, Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán (a darling of the American right), Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, the grinning Nigel Farrage, head of the UK Reform Party – all the actual and would-be autocrats take a bow to remind us that Orwell speaks to our times as much as he did to an earlier era.
The documentary serves partly as biography of Orwell, who was born Eric Arthur Blair in what is now the state of Bihar in India. Peck, who earned an Academy Award for an equally incisive film – I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin – shows a photograph of Orwell as a baby in the arms of an Indian nursemaid. Most people of his background would never have questioned their privilege, or “right to rule,” but Peck explores how Orwell came to realize that the imperialistic ideology that was his birthright could not pass the test of moral scrutiny. He came to that realization after serving in the British Imperial Service in Burma (present-day Myanmar), where people like him in uniform abused ordinary Burmese without thinking twice.
Peck offers insight into Orwell’s political evolution by drawing on letters, manuscripts and other unpublished materials, with actor Damian Lewis providing the author’s voice. Orwell’s letters also reveal the heroic physical exertion he put in to finish 1984 as his health deteriorated from tuberculosis. The book was published in 1949. By January of 1950, Orwell was dead, at the age of just 46.
The filmmaker uses an animation of tubercular cells periodically in the film to suggest Orwell’s advancing illness. But that visual motif might just as well signify the unhealthy state of democracies around the world, where autocrats have infected the bloodstream of the body politic with despicable poisons as they assert every greater control over the minds and thoughts of their subjects.
Trump’s attempt to bring universities to heel, to punish enemies (see Friday’s story about a nascent investigation into former FBI director James Comey for posting a photo on social media that Trump crowd didn’t like), to deport people without due process of law, to cow the courts by encouraging his supporters to attack jurists who rule against his executive orders, to weaponize the Justice Department – the onslaught seems to have knocked the Trump opposition on its heels, left it struggling to come up with a coherent response to the Trump wrecking ball. In this film, we have the full-throated retort that’s called for.
Trump, incredibly, essentially has managed to rewrite January 6 to serve his own narrative. But Peck shows the true violence of the day, the noose erected on the Capitol grounds meant for the neck of Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence. It’s all the more chilling, then, to hear in the film the president’s new characterization of that day: “These were very peaceful people,” he says in a quote seen in the documentary. “The love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Spoken like Big Brother.
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 is an urgent, indispensable film for our times.
Title: Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5Festival: Cannes (Cannes Premieres)Distributor: NeonDirector: Raoul PeckRunning time: 1 hr 59 min
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