"1984" film & "Totalitarian Technocracies" discussion

Michael Radford’s 1984 adaption of George Orwell’s 1984 was a surprisingly convincing, well-made, creatively executed portrayal of the infamous dystopia of the novel. In the novel, everything in this dystopian world comes across as dark, violent, brutally controlled, and dirty; the film captures this feeling very well. Radford’s vision does not seem to be only or badly aping Orwell’s vision but recreating it effectively: the uniforms, the unquestioning vehemence of the “5 Minutes of Hate”, the bombed-out, filthy, desolate paranoia of the landscape, all come across as a coherent vision of the novel. The musical motifs of the film add to this feeling of resigned desperation on the part of Winston; the sadness and tragic urgency of the music really bring out the inner workings of Winston’s dampened emotional predicament.

In the essay “Totalitarian Technocracies”, Anthony Burgess’ criticism of George Orwell’s idea of what constitutes a dystopia is almost reversed, and Burgess seems to suggest the world of 1984 is not really bad at all. The proles have cinema, pornography, no laws, no one cares about crime in any socially-shared-responsibility way, there are pubs with beer; Winston is one of the few who have any care that something might be wrong. Winston is a “disaffected intellectual”, almost completely alone with his doubts and misgivings. Even Julia is not interested very much. But Burgess seems to be speaking from almost an emotion of being resigned to terrible conditions, and that the things he says constitute somehow a world and life that is really desirable. Obviously the fact that Winston is able to use his brain in an intellectual way to question the world is why he’s worried about it. And, as Orwell understands, the endless distractions the ‘proles’ have function in a way that most is “Happiness is Slavery”. The scene in the film when Winston goes into the “prole quarters”, and finds the prostitute, whose squalid house is “stinking of dead insects and cheap perfume”, shows how filthy, desperate, miserable the life of a prole is.

Although George Orwell completed the novel in 1948 so couldn’t have anticipated how the future would play out, in a way he had a better handle of the potential realities of destruction than a lot of people today can understand. The world of Oceania is not too much different looking, as shown in the film as grimy, crumbling, with wrecked buildings and mounds of debris permanent features of the landscape, and people forever coated in filth, from the England he was observing in the aftermath of WWII. Noone could have anticipated, as discussed in the Totalitarian Technocracies essay, that science instead of contributing to the welfare of humanity would be used to thoroughly decimate humanity on an unprecedented scale. In this way, that is why, besides the archetypal Big Brother concept, 1984 still functions as a fundamental dystopian cautionary fiction. The film brings human faces and emotion to the potential abuses of power that governments are prone to, as well the black jack-booted soldier knocks the wind out of Julia as she stands naked and helpless. The film does a great job in creating the dark, paranoid, oppressive atmosphere of the totalitarianism contained within the novel.