Given that everything from major political scandals to minor cultural war skirmishes is declared Orwellian, it’s remarkable that we haven’t had a major adaptation of 1984 since its title year. Maybe that’s just because references to the work wildly outpace our collective understanding of it. But it also might also be tricky to top the John Hurt-led film. Celebrating its 40th anniversary today, it remains an effective telling that shows why Orwell’s story remains memorable, even as so many other dystopian sagas have fallen into the memory hole.
Releasing 1984 in 1984 must have made the good people at Virgin Films hurt themselves from all the high-fiving; it’s such a marketing slam dunk that the movie brags about it in the credits. The story is timeless, but the release date becomes self-evident when you hear the Eurythmics’ soundtrack kick in, or when you watch the trailer and hear the words “sex crime” being remixed like the opening of an Ibiza club hit.
While the trailer suggests we’re about to get an unusual rom-com, 1984 is bleak even by the standards of its source material. If it’s been a while, or if you only know Orwellian as the adjective employed when someone of note is banned from Twitter, 1984 stars Hurt as timid bureaucrat Winston Smith. Smith lives in London, now part of a vast super-state called Oceania, where he works at the Ministry of Truth to ensure the record forever matches what the ruling Party declares true.
In an early example, Smith rewrites a recent newspaper headline to state that, rather than holding chocolate rations steady at 30 grams, the Party is generously increasing rations from 20 to 25 grams, a bit of good news that brings cheer to Smith’s overworked colleagues. Later, we see this extend to people being erased from every facet of history.
The obvious lie no one can speak is that, while propaganda from omnipresent televisions perpetually declares that the standard of living is rising, life under the Party is one of scarcity, with apparatchiks like Smith living in ramshackle apartment blocks and forced to scavenge for rusty old razor blades. If flaws and shortages are acknowledged at all, they’re blamed on the perpetual war with other nations Oceania insists is being fought, or on subversive revolutionaries — famously dubbed “thought criminals” — within the Party itself.
It’s a dour film, both thematically and visually — cinematographer Roger Deakins, working one of his first jobs, shot it like a Tarkovsky film only allowed to use grey — and perhaps a bit tricky to follow if you aren’t familiar with the novel. But as shows like Silo and Severance top the streaming charts and the Hunger Games franchise mounts a comeback, it’s also instructive of what makes a dystopian story hit or miss.
There’s the otherworldly jargon you’d expect thanks to Newspeak, the Party’s attempt to dumb down thought by simplifying English to a handful of nouns and modifiers. Unlike much of what gets thrown into dystopian storytelling simply because it’s unsettling, it’s an idea that remains relevant — not to declare that every obnoxious trend is Literally 1984, but the internet inventing “unalived” to dodge algorithmic censors before adopting it wholesale as an ersatz substitute for tragedy certainly feels like an attempt to sanitize the more troublesome recesses of our minds.
There’s also mention of art and literature being reduced to machine-created drivel made only to pacify — draw from that what you will. But while such details are important, 1984 never gets bogged down in semantics. Even the mystery of what’s real and what’s just a Party lie is secondary to its raw humanity. Winston has long doubted the Party, but his cynicism only leads to action when he begins a furtive, passionate, and ultimately doomed tryst with a young woman named Julia (Suzanna Hamilton).
This little fling is a bit explicit by the standards of modern Hollywood, but that’s not idle titillation; 1984 is also blunt about the humanity of sex and the stultifying nature of the Party’s attempt to genetically eliminate the orgasm and reduce reproduction to a purely scientific process. Sure, there’s more to life than sex, but contemporary dystopias can feel a bit ridiculous when characters fight and die for the right to briefly smooch their hot sidekick. 1984’s heroes hold no illusions about launching a revolution, they just want to feel alive before they’re crushed.
When Winston and Julia aren’t in flagrante, they’re making fumbling attempts to grasp what the alien, pre-Party past might have looked like. Again, it’s a long way from a few bad turns to declaring that Orwell’s vision has come alive, but as digital history becomes more precarious and streaming shows disdain for the fate of its own product, you realize that 1984 has survived because it deals with more universal themes than “What if we all lived in a really big bunker?”
The world of 1984 has been analyzed from almost every conceivable angle, but at its core, it’s about how the basics of our collective humanity — language, memory, sex — can be stripped away. Love doesn’t save Winston and Julia, but that doesn’t make their rebellion any less noble. As we gear up for a new wave of dystopian storytelling (and likely, a new wave of every news story, accurately or not, being declared Orwellian), it’s worth remembering that while the oppressive logic of 1984 is powerful, its emotional heart is simple. Forgetting that is far more dystopian than banning people from Twitter.
