2+2 = 5. You probably recognize this false operation, imposed as an evidence test in Orwell’s 1984, the novel by George Orwell published in 1949. A documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck takes on the entirety of our contemporary world, it seems, in a single two-hour documentary. A brisk journey, with somewhat average intellectual and political rigor, through archives, texts, images from newspapers and TV, commented on anachronistically by Orwell’s words. All to prove the political acuity of the English writer and his work: the problem is that the film’s ambition – I would even say its grandiosity – is also a form of regrettable simplism: here is a film that talks about everything and therefore might end up being ultimately about nothing.
Indeed, we notice a flaw in the origin of this documentary, which combines several projects. One, biographical, to tell through images who George Orwell was. Born into a family of the English petite bourgeoisie, steeped in aristocratic values without the means, left young for the colonies, returned shocked by the caste system, his socialist leanings, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the publication of Animal Farm, his retreat in Scotland, and the writing of 1984. This aspect – probably the most interesting part of the film – is unfortunately too allusive to truly understand the political flaws and contradictions of the character, brushed aside by the demonstrative logic that overshadows it, since the aim is to show, even if it means forcing it, that Orwell had understood everything that was happening to us in 1946.
What is happening to us is thrown at us on the screen in the form of an ultra-fast montage of unedited images – a few seconds of an amateur film showing arrests in Burma, Trump being adored in a stadium, France 24 on Ukraine, a refugee boat not being rescued, people moving in a shopping mall – all under Orwell’s voice-over and interspersed with film clips: adaptations of 1984, but also the cream of cinematic dystopia like Brazil, Minority Report, among others.
The problem is the obviousness of the parallels claimed authoritatively by the film: between the bombings of 1945 in Berlin, those in Gaza, and those in Mariupol; the faces of Putin, Trump, Orban, or a former Philippine president; Nazi military parades, hooligans in a stadium, far-right European rallies; Trump’s lies, the use of the term “antisemitism,” how traditional media handle the news. All compacted, concentrated into a kind of huge anxiety ball that ends up producing nothing but anxiety. The danger documented here resembles a morbid stack of Godwin points. In essence, Raoul Peck makes a prophet out of George Orwell, and turns totalitarian drift into a great Evil, extracting the writer and his thoughts from politics and turning them into a greatly exaggerated moral lesson.
The film is paralyzing, and I would even say that it produces the opposite effect of what it intends to create. It becomes increasingly clear, as you watch, that all these images succeeding one another do so arbitrarily; a whirlwind that alienates much more than it liberates, that certainly does not remove reality from the grand media spectacle and does not produce any critique. I have always found that 1984 is one of those references misused and stripped of their meaning, disarmed by a misuse of their concepts, which ends up rendering the grand words of fascism, totalitarianism, post-truth, meaningless. I have a feeling that Raoul Peck’s documentary adds to the long list of works that shout loudly but are not heard.
