Raoul Peck adds “Orwell 2+2=5” to his stirring list of documentaries on human rights, which includes the Oscar nominated “I Am Not Your Negro,” a film about the life of James Baldwin. Peck has dedicated his career longing to change the way people view history and he could not let a project like ‘Orwell’ slip by without applying his cinematic vision to it. If there was a tribute to the originator of ideas that Peck was greatly influenced by with the sole intent to awaken today’s audience from stupor and indifference, it would have to be this paradigmatic probe into the ‘Orwellian’ concept which continues to resonate almost 80 years after its inception.
In Orwell 2+2=5, the eerily resurging atmosphere of totalitarianism seems taken right out of the pages of the groundbreaking novel ‘1984’. The naive populace who still fancy they live in a democracy or who are blinded by their patronage to a charismatic but ruthless dictator would find themselves mirrored in Peck’s analogy of today’s state of affairs using the same playbook extrapolated by the author Orwell decades ago in his masterpiece.
Orwell had personally witnessed the inner workings of a dystopian society, being guilty even as having been part of modern machinery of oppression in the 1920s as a young colonial police officer in Burma, now Myanmar. Orwell then decided to write near the end of his life, a paragon of a lasting impact. Modern society is rife with cyclical patterns of insidious regulatory reforms that conversely turn into stranglehold of freedoms and liberties.
Since the Spanish Civil War, Orwell’s idea for the novel had been brewing.
The pivotal meeting of the allied leaders Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference of 1944 gave Orwell the impetus to crafting ‘1984,’ parodying the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of Influence’ as had been discussed by so called enemies of fascism. Since then, his foretelling of present day scenarios as wittingly extrapolated by Peck’s film brings forth a call to action that shall never be ignored or disregarded as a nuisance alarm.
The frightening view of a dystopian future is embodied in the author’s distress call. “Everywhere in the world, movement seems to be in the direction of centralized economies, which may deliver the goods in an economic sense, but do so without regard to democratic accountability.”
Histories of failed democracies are never without dire consequences that take its toll on a global scale. Tyrannies of the past are resurging where populists and demagogues jockey for position in tilting the balance of power at the expense of the disenfranchised.
Events that had led Orwell to imagine this bleak forecast echo resoundingly in Raoul Peck’s storytelling. This new documentary from Peck uses a heartrending narration over multi-layered sequencing of harrowing images with borrowed scenes from Michael Radford’s ‘1984’ film adaptation of the same name. The dramatized scenes in black and white are interspersed with documentary footages of recent times which might have numbed sensibilities from regular dosage of exposure to social media; but when reformatted to underscore Orwellian concepts of mind control, the listless viewer might somehow be kindled to realize his or her waning personal autonomy and truth.
In Peck’s perspective, the goal of recounting societal issues and historical events precedes feature elements synonymous with Hollywood entertainment where the tendency is to lull the audience habituated to finding source of escape from reality and not so much to provoke them into confronting issues that beset their lives.
Paradoxically, his chosen medium is used to expose and denounce the very lies and doublespeak that is being brought through the media that surreptitiously promote the ‘boot stomping on human faces’. There will always be issues as foretold by Orwell during his confinement at the infirmary before he died, about a kind of inhumanity that pervades in civil societies which unabatedly tramples on the rights and dignity of man.
‘Orwellian’ as a concept, encompasses an array of control through mass surveillance and suppression of free speech and independent thought. When ‘newspeak’ phrases like ‘legal use of force’ desensitize the public who hear reports of wanton police brutality or when conversely, any criticism of hostilities committed by forces and settlers against residents of refugee camps is quickly labeled anti-Semitism, proliferation of such terminologies through social media distort reality. Suppression of ideas that deviate from what are defined to be true by the ‘thought police’ further legitimize the debraining of citizens into submission.
When we are being bombarded by massive information from all media sources together with all ambiguous euphemisms used as propaganda, we cannot trust language anymore and realize that we’ve been living in an artificial community of so called free men that upholds saccharine principles of democracy. Raoul Peck’s allusion to today’s totalitarian Superstates need no other word to describe the predetermined situation but Orwellian. Big Brother has simply updated the technology, making things more efficient for its unwary users who, by relinquishing control over their lives, eventually turn into 21st century automatons.
The most effective way to control a society, according to Orwell, is to control its language. Imagine the feeble-minded whose thought is shaped by the language of those in power. The general public are wont to obey what they deem is beneficial for the welfare of society, trusting the trustees
to respect their individual rights and believe that the Party is the guardian of democracy. And then they fall prey to some sort of collective amnesia and forget the true motive of absolute power.
All presidents who are holding office yielding totalitarian power masked as democracies anywhere in the world, are propped up by thinktanks and interest groups using doublethink in controlling the masses’ perception of reality, erasing their memory of the past and swaying them to believe in a promising future. The cunning manner of hammering contradictory ideas as epitomized in ‘1984’ pervades through draconian measures used to this very day by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation and denial of truth. This film is unrelenting in addressing Orwellian slogans that never expire: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” “ignorance is strength”. ####