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Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1984)
Dir: Michael Radford
The last time I saw John Hurt, he twisted my heart until it practically exploded with his, “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I … am … a man!” speech from The Elephant Man. I really hadn’t counted on him coming back to stomp my fragile nucleus to paste, but with his portrayal of doomed citizen of a fascist hell, Winston Smith, in the film version of 1984, he put the little vessel right through the meat grinder. This movie is so dark and bleak, that just thinking about it now makes me queasy. I watched it through an epic hangover, so I was especially susceptible to begin with, but that doesn’t really detract from the film’s potency. When George Orwell wrote this book about the elicit aims of the Bush administration, and their propaganda-based, neo-fascist regime, he was indubitably … alright, kidding. The book was written in the forties. But what a great blueprint it gave that little Yosemite Sam fucker and his bloodthirsty cronies. Come to think of it, it’s extremely doubtful that Bush himself ever read this book. “The words are so small, and there are so many of them on every page. Where are the pictures? What do you mean I’m holding it upside-down?” Good thing they turned it into a movie. I can easily picture him watching it in the mid-eighties, all sketched out of his pea, on blow and Wild Turkey. He probably yawned a lot through what he took for an inspirational drama, but thought that the sociopath bureaucrat, O’Brien (Richard Burton) was a total badass. I’ll bet the notion of cameras in every home and office, linked directly to government agents seemed killer. If he had been at all politically minded at the time, he probably would have called his dad, “have you heard of this movie? What a great idea! Let‘s stay the course!” Back then, however, fascism was probably as foreign a concept to lil’ Bush, as was Christianity. In 1984, he was still two years away from sobriety, and was likely soft at work, sinking a petroleum company that had been handed to him by family friends. What an ass. Regardless, the greatness of this movie should not be subverted. It is a fine interpretation of the novel. It manages to create the same cold air of futility that the book breathes so readily, and it doesn’t skimp out on the tragedy either. Much of the statistical information and the geographical details are avoided, but this really doesn’t detract from the story of a low-level government employee learning to resist his society’s ruling party, which has essentially outlawed free thought. For Smith, the act of falling in love, melts the façade the ruling party has instituted in his country. Unfortunately for Smith, and the rest of us, love doesn’t always conquer all.
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