Image via Abrams Books
1984 seemed far away in 1948 when George Orwell wrote the novel by that name. Nowadays, 1984 is many calendar years behind us and yet, the novel remains timely. After all, Orwell’s intent wasn’t to predict the future but describe the present—a world he feared was sliding toward dictatorships whose goal wasn’t compliance but enthusiasm. The rise of hate-mongering national-populists across much of the world shows that we’re still living in that present. After Trump’s inauguration, Nineteen Eighty-Four returned to the bestsellers list.
When Orwell, nearing death on the remote Scottish island where he completed the manuscript, learned of proposals to adapt Nineteen Eighty-Four into a Broadway musical, he remarked that he “doubted if it lent itself to the stage,” but added, “I should think it ought to be filmable.”
In his book On Nineteen Eighty-Four, British writer D.J. Taylor elegantly summarizes Orwell’s life in the context of composing what became, alongside Animal Farm, his most enduring novel. Oddly, the great Nineteen Eighty-Four film has never been made (why wasn’t Stanley Kubrick on it?). It was readily adapted for the small screen for widely watched renditions in the U.S. (1953) and the UK (1954) while film rights fell into sinister hands. McCarthy supporter Peter Rathvon purchased the rights and according to Taylor, received support from the CIA’s Psychological Warfare division and the CIA-supported American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The first 1984 movie (1956) starred Edmond O’Brien as doomed protagonist Winston Smith and failed to win enthusiasm at box offices or among critics.
“It has always been assumed that the novel would merit a big-budget movie to be released in the year of its setting,” Taylor writes. The project fell to British director Michael Radford and starred John Hurt as Winston Smith, Suzanne Hamilton as his furtive love interest, Julia, and Richard Burton as his tormentor, O’Brien. The looming architecture of the University of London Senate House, whose blocky mass inspired Orwell’s description of the Ministry of Truth, became a backdrop in the film. Taylor praises Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for its abstraction of “a number of bygone tyrannies” and performances by Hurt, who “looks half-starved,” and Burton, “grave and sacerdotal.”
The film was respectfully received by critics, broke even at the box office and was better known at the time for its synth-pop soundtrack by The Eurythmics. The great film adaptation of the novel remains unmade, and yet Orwell’s book continues to occupy a distinct presence in popular culture. Even (especially?) people who never read it routinely denounce policies of which they disapprove as “Orwellian” and why not?—as Nineteen Eighty-Four predicted, our screens allow others to spy on us, and digital technology permits history to be rewritten with a few clicks. The strange collaboration between postmodern pseudo-intellectuals and right-wing operatives fosters the posting of “alternative facts” as real. Instead of Big Brother, we are surveilled and manipulated by an extended family of Big Cousins degrading and falsifying language in ways Orwell denounced. Are we living in a post-truth world?
