Thoughts on "1984"

Recently I rediscovered a longstanding fascination with Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, “1984.” I must have been fairly young when I first read it, maybe not more than ten or eleven years old. Some of it must have sailed straight over my head, just as the other adult novels I read at the time did. Still, I understood enough to compare certain aspects of Orwell’s nightmare vision with the world I saw around me.

At that time I was in junior high school. Although it was a public school and no physical punishment was allowed, our lives were closely regimented. The Assistant Principal, Miss Cahill, was a tyrant worthy of the Thought Police.

She was a blue-haired old lady, in the days when rinses intended to spruce up gray hair turned a woman’s tresses to an unmistakable and unpalatable shade of blue. Rumor had it that she ran her English class like a prison camp. Everyone in the class had to click his pen at exactly the same moment. I guess she’d never recovered from the gradual demise of the fountain pen. If a pen or pencil dared to roll off a desk during Miss Cahill’s lesson, the resulting sound as it clattered to the floor would earn its owner a trip to detention.

I had the good fortune never to end up in her classroom, but Miss Cahill presided over the cafeteria in the same arbitrary and capricious manner that befits all petty tyrants. When she wanted silence, she put two fingers in the air, and everyone else had to put their fingers in the air also. Had I been slightly older, I would have raised only one finger, the one most fraught with emotional significance. As it was, I frequently substituted the Nazi salute. No one ever noticed.

Miss Cahill punished students for their “attitudes,” driven by some inchoate gut feeling that they were not sufficiently submissive to her orders. Time and again I heard her assign students detention for having the wrong look on their faces or because she didn’t like their “attitude.” Orwell had a Newspeak word for this: Facecrime.

I wrote a revolutionary tract urging the students to rise up and fight back, to reclaim our rights to have our faces look any way we wanted, and to talk throughout the lunch period instead of a meager 15-20 minutes until we got the flying fickle finger salute of silence. But I never distributed it. Copying wasn’t so easy back then: you had to use a mimeograph machine or layers of carbon paper in your typewriter. It wasn’t worth it to me. However I rejoiced when once, Miss Cahill pushed us too far and the students fought back, shouting and jumping up on the tables in defiance. We were squelched, but like Winston Smith, I felt for a moment that perhaps the great rebellion was going to succeed. Miss Cahill did flee the cafeteria crying, her hair-trigger nerves shot by our loud defiance. But, as in “1984” our revolt failed.

In any case, I had to recognize that no matter how much Miss Cahill resembled an agent of the Thought Police, the stakes were not nearly as high.

For years, I misinterpreted the ending of the book, believing that Winston was shot to death right there in the Chestnut Tree Café. It took a long time to realize that although physical death was not far away now that he’d fully capitulated, the bullet spoken of was a metaphorical one. His soul and his capacity for independent thought had been blown out as surely as if by a bullet.

So why, then, is such a depressing novel so fascinating to me? I enjoy the beginning, Winston’s rebellion and his affair with Julia. Our modern world has turned out partially like “1984” with a large helping of “Brave New World” added to the mix.

Today, we can be observed through the Internet. There are cameras galore in public places, watching our every move. We’re given the impression that they are used to protect us from terrorism and criminality. To an extent I am sure that’s true but the potential for misuse is huge.

Cookies and spyware watch our activities online. The government in recent years has tapped phone lines with no warrants, and has demanded that bookstores reveal the buying habits of their patrons. A new technology observes you as you watch advertising and adjusts the ad to your gender and age. We’re told that the technology can’t yet recognize the individual watching but is that really true?

Winston would surely find a great deal of modern technology to be frighteningly familiar and even more advanced in some of its spying capabilities.

Falsification is of course possible as evidenced by the epidemic of identity theft. Could the government misuse our personal information? Sure it could.

Can we protect our privacy? At this point, probably not.

As for the affair between Winston and Julia, I don’t see evidence in our modern world that any governmental entity desires to break down the emotional ties and loyalties between friends and family. In the private sector, though, our family lives have often come into conflict with the demands of our jobs. Doesn’t it break down family ties when employees are expected to work overtime, travel anywhere and everywhere, and miss family events in order to give all of their energies to the company? They can’t arrest us or torture us, but they certainly can deprive us of a means to make living, and that’s a serious enough consequence, especially now.

In “1984” sexuality was to be denied and the ultimate goal was to destroy it, abolishing the orgasm and breaking the family unit up so that children would be artificially conceived and then raised by the State. The artificial production of children was achieved in Brave New World but instead of abolishing the sex urge the power elite chose to allow it but to trivialize it. Loyalty to any one person would be “bad for production” and so people were strongly encouraged to be promiscuous, having as many partners as possible and viewing them all as simply recreational companions to whom they owed no exceptional loyalty. In a sense our own society has taken that route, without it being necessarily planned as a way to keep workers “stable” and untroubled by any family stress.

However, romance, love and joyful sex certainly do exist in our world of 2009, and Winston and Julia would be delighted to learn that this is not a crime, at least not in America. There are other places where people are not free to choose their own partners, and where sexual love with a “wrong” partner can be punished by death, such as in the case of “honor killings” of women and girls who are even suspected of illicit or forbidden involvement with men.

So, they would have their work cut out for them, bringing the importance of individual freedom and self-determination to the front and center.

I may have seen the “1984” movie before but I barely remembered it, and it seems a false memory now because I seem to recall watching it in the apartment where I grew up. It isn’t possible that I saw the 1984 version there because we moved out in 1971. I may have seen the 1954 version with Peter Cushing. I watched that one on YouTube the other day and found it dreadful. It was dated and so old-fashioned. The lovers never removed an article of clothing (except for the checkered sash Julia wore- which was supposed to be red, according to the book). The acting was substandard and the whole thing had the feel of a primitive science fiction movie. In fact, that’s what it was.

By contrast, I loved the 1984 version with John Hurt and I have already watched it several times on YouTube. This one was filmed during the exact time period of the book’s setting, from April to June 1984. Clever indeed! Moreover it is extremely true to the book. Everything was dingy, gray and half broken down, just as Orwell described. Winston’s flat in “Victory Mansions” was one step above a slum. No one decorated their homes with anything the least bit personal, so their living quarters were completely soulless.

John Hurt did an excellent acting job. He was completely believable as Winston. His face had a sad and vulnerable look to it even when he was happy with Julia. While not handsome he had a peculiar brand of beauty (as Winston said of the immense prole woman hanging out her wash beneath the secret room, that was his style of beauty).

It’s a fascination I don’t fully understand but I have returned to it from time to time. Could anyone have stood up to the horrors of Room 101? And once the words were spoken, were they really so indelible? Could love be squashed so easily? It’s true that young people in cults have often been brainwashed to believe that their parents are evil, just trying to lure them away from some obscure “truth” with their protestations of love. So maybe it is possible. However, deprogramming suggests that the process is reversible. Could Winston and Julia have been deprogrammed to rediscover their love for each other? It’s possible, but in their world, no one had any interest in doing so.

Just as much as the day it was published, and maybe more so in our modern world where the internet sees all, “1984” stands as a warning and a call to resist the forces that would find it convenient and rewarding to crush the human spirit while making us believe we are living a “new, happy life.” May we always recognize encroachments on our freedom to love, freedom to think and feel, and freedom to remember the past as it was. May we always remember, that 2+2=4.