George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984 in the late 1940s on the desolate Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Tuberculosis ravaged his body, and typing thousands of words a day only weakened him further. His skin flaked off. Blisters burst across his throat. Feverish and emaciated, he endured painful procedures to support his failing lungs, but the treatments were too late. Eventually, in 1950, Orwell succumbed to the disease.
Close-ups of microscopic tuberculosis bacteria fill the screen in the opening minutes of the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5—images as bold and unnerving as what follows. Directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, the film examines an idea popularized by 1984: that blatant falsehoods can, through propaganda, be accepted as truth. That conceit, along with Orwell’s state of mind during his final months, has been scrutinized for decades—by high-school students, biographers, and other documentarians. But Peck builds out a bigger argument, using material provided by the Orwell estate—including the writer’s letters, essays, and diary entries—to trace the authoritarian tactics that can suppress truth and lay out what he sees as a disturbing pattern: one of wide-scale complacency in the decades after Orwell’s death. Generations of readers have recognized the prescient warnings of 1984. Yet according to Peck’s film, recognizing that reality can resemble Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece has led to numbness, rather than meaningful change.
The tuberculosis-bacteria motif underscores this idea. To compare authoritarianism’s rise to an infection is perhaps obvious. But as the microbes spread across the screen, the visual becomes almost hypnotic—and, as Peck recently told me, akin to how dictators overwhelm people’s abilities to determine fact from fiction. “It’s the same story again and again,” he said, “and we don’t learn.”
Peck grew up under multiple authoritarian regimes. At 8 years old, he and his family fled Haiti after François Duvalier, the dictator known as Papa Doc, began his rule. Around the same time that his family moved to the Republic of the Congo, that country’s first democratically elected prime minister was assassinated; the following coup placed the despot Mobutu Sese Seko in power. To Peck, Papa Doc and Mobutu followed the same playbook: “They attack intelligence, they attack universities, they attack science, they attack the press,” he said. “They attack every institution that can be a bulwark against them.”
Those memories shaped Peck’s approach to Orwell: 2+2=5. A more traditional exploration of Orwell’s fiction might turn to interviews with scholars of his work to unpack his resonance. Peck instead explores the idea cinematically, as he did in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 deconstruction of James Baldwin’s work: He creates an impressionistic collage, featuring scenes derived mostly from Orwell’s writings—which are recited by the actor Damian Lewis—or from relevant archival footage.
The documentary, Peck said, is intended to convey his frustration that Orwell’s name has too often been flattened into an adjective, and 1984 into mere speculative fiction. In one scene from Orwell: 2+2=5, Apple’s well-known Super Bowl ad—in which a model hurls a sledgehammer at a Big Brother broadcast—plays on a giant billboard above a busy street as passersby completely ignore it. Perhaps in an effort to unflatten Orwell’s warnings, the film points out what it sees as contemporary parallels to Newspeak, the uncanny English used throughout 1984 to prevent the articulation of abstract concepts. (Rather than say something is “great,” Newspeak uses the word plusgood. A more insidious example would be calling any ideas that go against the ruling party “thoughtcrime.”) Peck argues that some world leaders have seemed to embrace the practice of twisting words: In one sequence, he displays a modern glossary of terms—peacekeeping operations, campaign finance, illegals—that he implies obfuscate thornier realities.
While constructing the documentary, Peck thought of Orwell as “a fighting companion,” he told me—a guide rather than an encyclopedia of insights to pull from. He structured the film according to the three tenets of the ruling government in 1984: “War is peace,” “Ignorance is strength,” and “Freedom is slavery.” Then he found pointed visuals to illustrate those ideas. A clip of George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq, for instance, rolls as the first chapter begins, to emphasize how even nontotalitarian countries can use conflict to stoke nationalistic fervor. A graphic charting the slew of banned books in the United States illustrates the power of ignorance, while a montage of security cameras in public spaces underlines the notion of freedom as an illusion. Peck also adds newsreels of world leaders delivering speeches, footage of war zones past and present, and scenes from futuristic Hollywood films, to emphasize the reach of Orwell’s ideas throughout time.
The film, as a result, can feel overstuffed. But even when he incorporates discordant images, Peck keeps a close eye on Orwell’s vision. For example, he uses AI-generated art during some sequences about the misuse of technological innovation; the moments come off as jarring at first, but they successfully evoke Orwell’s description in 1984 of a world in which records and books are produced “without any human intervention.” And the ending of Orwell: 2+2=5, in which Peck knits together recordings of protests—of Russian citizens lining up outside the dissident Alexei Navalny’s funeral, of women demonstrating over the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran—brought to my mind a line from Orwell’s essay “Why I Write”: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
Peck told me that he resisted noting every parallel he saw between Orwell’s words and today’s reality, because he didn’t want to turn the documentary into an ongoing history lesson. (To go into the editing bay and, say, incorporate news reports of the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel being taken off air “would be the trap,” he told me.) If anything, Peck hoped that the film’s density and wide scope would illuminate how frequently the past’s most painful moments repeat themselves. Knowing that many dictators have come to power through familiar means isn’t enough to stop them, the film argues; a democratic system needs “to be renewed and reinforced every day,” Peck said, through a commitment to truth. Such pursuits may be the only way to shake off intellectual paralysis—the only way to remember what 2+2 actually equates.
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