Here, O’Connor (Michael Redgrave) personifies the brutal state of Oceania, the state that falsifies life to retain a stranglehold of hatred and mistrust on its people. Winston (Edmond O’Brien) and his lover Julia (Jan Sterling) represent people trying to defy that deathly grip through love and trust, only to discover that without truth, there’s no freedom to trust, let alone to love.
Orwell once explained the motivation behind his writing: “There is some lie that I want to expose.” Born in India, he’d watched totalitarianism in action, starting with the British Empire. He published this novel in 1949, after watching the wrecking balls that Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Soviet Stalinism had become. They were all fueled by communist ideals, regardless of their claims to be distinct from communism, or opposed to it. Here, rather unsubtly, Oceania calls its citizens, “comrades.”
Anderson’s film offers clues to teens and young adults who are trying to spot and pre-empt contemporary forms of totalitarianism before they take hold.
Totalitarianism’s big lie is that it claims to uphold truth; instead it disregards it.
When O'Connor asks Winston to explain what he does in the Ministry of Truth, Winston replies, “I revise history.” No, O’Connor corrects him. What he really does is “rectify speeches and wrongly reported incidents.” Later, O’Connor orders Winston to recite a state directive: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” That’s the point, O’Connor says, of new dictionaries, so people don’t call things by their “wrong” names.
New Vocabulary
Today, it’s simplistic to experience totalitarianism in its extreme form of state oppression. Every form of totalitarianism (critical race theory, gender ideology, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindutva, climate alarmism, transhumanism, or DEI demagoguery) begins innocuously enough. It insists that a new vocabulary should replace the old.Witness the insistence on pronouns, or qualifiers, supposedly shaming the “supremacy” or “prejudice” of one race, religion, or sex. Like Orwell’s Big Brother, totalitarians can’t manipulate those who don’t acquiesce to their falsehoods. Control doesn’t precede conformity; it follows it.
Why is O’Connor so invested in brainwashing Winston? Winston is one man, after all. Why do the seemingly inconsequential Winston and Julia matter? Totalitarianism controls the one individual first; if the one resists, it’s harder to control the many.
Everything hinges on choice. Here, even mobs mimic the first man, rising from a seated crowd, pumping his fist, or yelling a slogan.
Target the Family
If Big Brother’s first target is society’s smallest unit, the individual, it’s no surprise that its next target is the family. Here, comrades brag about destroying the concept of love between men and women, then destroying the family as a unit. To them, duty to the party outweighs duty to children, parents, husbands, and wives, the church, and even God.In Oceania, atomic weapons have been abolished, but not war. Only by stoking “continual conflict” can ruling parties maintain absolute power. Oceania’s periodic bomb-raid sirens aren’t meant to protect citizens from others, Eurasian or not. It’s meant to keep them from themselves—their individuality, personhood, and their ability to think and act freely and critically.
Winston knows that Big Brother is watching through the seemingly omniscient camera in his room, before which he must regularly frisk himself clean to prove that he bears nothing subversive. One night, he’s just returned to his room after surreptitiously meeting Julia. Suddenly, an announcer’s disembodied loudspeaker voice hollers an enforced, if premature, lights out: “Remember, even when you’re asleep, Big Brother is watching you.”
But as he turns in, Winston triumphantly steals a glance at the inner wrapping of his cigarette pack. Only he can see the scribbled code words that he and Julia keep exchanging. And in the fading light, he permits himself a barely visible smile of defiance.
Sure, Big Brother and Oceania’s Thought Police loom large. But even within that mental cage, Winston and Julia dare to have thoughts and feelings of their own. This isn’t because they can, but because they must. Their humanity depends on it.
