Most of the commemorations were predictable, but who would have anticipated that Steve Martin and Jeff Goldblum would appear in a comedy sketch in which the disco mecca Studio 54 became “the Ministry of Nightlife”? Or that Oceania’s slogans would be deployed to advertise carpets? “WAR IS PEACE,” began a press ad for retailer Einstein Moomjy. “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. And our crisp new Sisal-like look in wool broadloom is $19.84 a sq.yd. At $19.84 it’s well worth watching, Big Brother.” The craving for a connection, any connection at all, to Saint George got a little desperate. TV Guide figured that Orwell’s empathy with the working man would surely have endeared him to the sitcom Cheers. “Big Brother meets the band with the Big Balls,” raved Musician in a review of Van Halen’s unrelated album 1984. The magazine of the British Tourist Authority outdid them all with the audaciously dishonest headline “The Orwell/Animal Farms/1984.” The story concerned livestock husbandry near the River Orwell.
It’s hardly surprising that Orwell fatigue set in while the year was still young. “Can we be allowed to forget George Orwell for a minute or two?” sighed James Cameron in The Guardian on January 3. The Spectator’s Paul Johnson complained that the excesses of the Orwell industry had become “a kind of Orwellian nightmare in themselves.” Liberal Party MP Alex Carlile mocked colleagues who used “the already hackneyed analogies with the attempts of George Orwell to predict what might happen in 1984.” Even Snoopy flopped on top of his kennel in a Charles M. Schulz strip, exhausted by “thinking about all the George Orwell jokes we’re going to have to listen to in 1984.” Orwell had graduated from literary hero to ubiquitous celebrity, while Nineteen Eighty-Four had mutated from a novel into a meme.
Inevitably, much of the Orwelliana focused on Nineteen Eighty-Four’s alleged status as prophecy. Writers in The Futurist queued up to whack it like a piñata: “As a forecaster of the actual world of 1984, Orwell is so wrong as to be drummed out of the company of forecasters—or even to be made into an ‘unperson’!” crowed the editor.38 Isaac Asimov insisted that Orwell would be “proved wrong” about computers and space travel, neither of which happen to feature in the book. An ad for Olivetti Computers had a similarly nonsensical take: “According to Orwell, in 1984 man and computer would have become enemies. But his pessimistic outlook was wrong.” In fact, Orwell wasn’t even trying to foresee technological progress in functioning democracies. But you’d need to have read the book to know that.
One person who didn’t was the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik. On New Year’s Day 1984, he orchestrated an international satellite-linked multimedia television show to celebrate the power of the medium to foster communication. Contributors included Philip Glass, John Cage, Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Beuys and Salvador Dalí (whom Orwell once described as “a dirty little scoundrel”). Its sarcastic title was Good Morning , Mr. Orwell. “Big Brother’s screaming but we don’t care,” sang Oingo Boingo in “Wake Up (It’s 1984).” “ ’Cause he’s got nothing to say / Think of the future, think of the prophecy / Think of the children of today.” Paik told The New York Times: “I never read Orwell’s book—it’s boring. But he was the first media communications prophet.” Paik seems to have assumed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a novel about television.
One newspaper asked Orwell’s son, Richard Blair (now thirty-nine, like Winston Smith), what his father might have made of Orwellmania. “I believe,” he said, “that he would have been very dismayed by the way that people have interpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
How can a novel be “wrong”?
Orwell didn’t say much about Nineteen Eighty-Four, but what he did say, very firmly, was that it was not a prophecy. A satire, a parody and a warning, yes, but not that. As he spelled out in his 1949 statement to Francis A. Henson, “I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe . . . that something resembling it could arrive.” Clearly, it had not. The West had been debased and distorted in many ways by the machinations of the cold war, but it had not become an equivalent despotism. By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Absent that development, the launch of the Apple Mac was neither here nor there. If you were selling a product in 1984, whether it was a personal computer or neoliberal economics, then it was obligatory to say that Orwell, the avatar of pessimism, was wrong, but that wasn’t an argument; it was a catchphrase. When The San Francisco Chronicle asked Ursula K. Le Guin (who had received more than forty invitations to speak at Orwell-related events) to assess Orwell’s clairvoyance, she demurred: “I am not in the prediction business.” Science fiction, she said, uses metaphors for the “here and now,” so how can it be right or wrong about the future?39
It’s worth pausing to note what an extraordinary achievement it is for a book to define a planet’s journey around the sun. The year 2000 was always going to be a major event, but 1984 only became a banner year because one man decided, late in the day, to change the title of his novel. If Orwell had stuck with The Last Man in Europe, none of this would have happened. As George Steiner wrote in a good, tough New Yorker essay, “never has any single man or stroke of the pen struck a year out of the calendar of hope . . . Will “Nineteen Eighty-Four” fade from immediacy and mass awareness after 1984? This is, I think, a very difficult question.”
On April 4, 1984, the date of Winston Smith’s first diary entry, the London Times carried news of the British miners’ strike, then just a month old. Protesters were evicted from the women’s peace camp at the Greenham Common airbase. A Silicon Valley engineer went on trial for conspiring to sell missile research data to Polish agents. A short news item covered a screening of the 1954 and 1956 versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four at London’s National Film Theatre, beneath a picture of a glum-looking John Hurt on the set of the latest adaptation.
Sonia Orwell had died of a brain tumour on December 1, 1980, exhausted by a bitter legal battle to regain control of George Orwell Productions, the company established by Orwell’s accountants in 1947, and by thirty years of living in her late husband’s overwhelming shadow. She was sixty-two. “I’ve fucked up my life,” she told a friend towards the end.
A few weeks before her death, Sonia met a Chicago attorney and aspiring film-maker named Marvin Rosenblum, who had saturated himself in Orwell’s work in order to charm her into selling him the film and television rights to the novel. After several conversations, during which he “spouted Orwell like a fountain,” Rosenblum succeeded. Over the next three years, he found no shortage of interest in remaking Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984 but he couldn’t nail down a director and producer who would abide by the contract’s prohibition against “the Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey genre of science-fiction.” Not until October 1983 did he reach an agreement with British director Michael Radford and producer Simon Perry, fresh from the success of their World War Two drama Another Time, Another Place. “We had to guarantee that the movie would come out by the end of 1984, so we had to get started right away,” the seventy-two-year-old Radford told me in London’s Chelsea Arts Club in the summer of 2018.
The film-makers moved fast. By Christmas 1983, Radford had written the screenplay and Perry had secured $6 million from Richard Branson’s fledgling venture Virgin Films. The two men agreed that Winston Smith could only be played by John Hurt, the consumptive British actor who always looked as if he had a bad cough and a worse conscience. “He was the perfect Winston Smith,” said Radford. “This hungry-looking, haunted character. He was very athletic, actually, but he could contort himself.” Fortunately, Hurt was a fan who had wanted to play Winston ever since he read the novel as a student in the 1950s. “The great thing about Orwell,” said Hurt, “is that he backs up what you yourself instinctively feel.” Former child actress Suzanna Hamilton was Julia, while an open casting call for potential Big Brothers in The Guardian led Radford to Bob Flag, a club comedian
with “very penetrating eyes.” Casting O’Brien was not so easy: Sean Connery was busy, Marlon Brando was too expensive, and Paul Scofield broke his leg. It wasn’t until weeks into the shoot that Radford lured Richard Burton out of retirement in Haiti for what was to be his final performance before his death in August. According to the director, Burton wore the only boiler suit ever to be tailored in Savile Row. “He was an extraordinary actor,” Radford said. “The only thing I did with him was keep taking him down, softer and softer.” Burton began to find O’Brien’s insane logic unnervingly seductive. “You know, this really is frightening,” he told Hurt, “because I’m seriously beginning to believe that what I’m saying is correct.”
When Radford first read the book as a teenager, he knew “exactly what it looked like. There’s a lot to work with.” Orwell’s book contains several unforgettable set-pieces, and his use of news broadcasts and posters for the purposes of storytelling and world-building is still part of the standard toolkit for films about near-future societies. “The telescreens were the big shock for me,” said the director, who used back projection to create the illusion of gargantuan screens. “They dominated everything, as television does. But it was great to be able to say two things at the same time.” Immersing himself in the history of propaganda, Radford designed his own salute, flag, logo and anthem, and based one of the broadcasts in the film on a genuine wartime reel scripted by the poet Dylan Thomas for the Ministry of Information. “I used to say to people that this is a parallel universe: a 1984 envisaged in 1948,” Radford said, explaining his use of archaic technology and retro fashion. To create the film’s chilly, desaturated look, cinematographer Roger Deakins used an innovative process. Usually, silver nitrate is bleached from film reels to make the colours pop, but Deakins left it in. “The important thing for me was to create a world that people believed in,” said Radford.40
News of the film reignited David Bowie’s interest in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He met with Radford and Branson to discuss writing the soundtrack, but Bowie kept talking about “organic music” and nobody else knew what that meant. It certainly didn’t sound like the potential hits Branson wanted, so he got cold feet and turned instead to his own Virgin Records pop duo Eurythmics—a contentious hiring that Radford only learned about when singer Annie Lennox rang from a studio in the Bahamas to ask him why he wasn’t there. Radford and Branson’s heated row over whether to use the Eurythmics’ ill-fitting synth-pop (“Sex-sex-s-s-sex-s-sex-sexcrime”) or Dominic Muldowney’s score spilled onto the news pages and provided excellent publicity for a film that wasn’t an easy sell.
“The thoughts in the film industry were that it wasn’t going to be successful because it didn’t have a happy ending,” remembered Radford. “And also it wasn’t really a book—it was essentially a gigantic essay. They said, ‘Your audience is going to be over thirty-five and will know who Orwell is. It’s going to be small.’ But it was huge and it was fifteen-to twenty-year-olds. Why?” He laughed. “Because it was so completely about despair. Young people love despair.”
Perry said at the time, “We were lumbered with an indescribable duty to get it right, for all time.” Radford’s film looks and feels much like the reader imagines Nineteen Eighty-Four should look and feel. This fidelity means that, Eurythmics aside, the film hasn’t dated. But at the same time as Radford was making it, other artists were integrating Orwellian concepts into brand-new dystopian visions that plugged straight into the mood of the 1980s: V for Vendetta, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brazil.
It would not be accurate to say that director Terry Gilliam was inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four while he was making Brazil, because he hadn’t read it yet. He was inspired instead by the idea of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it had permeated the culture: “general knowledge that was in the atmosphere, the stuff you get from college and talking about 1984.”
When Gilliam started developing the idea in the late 1970s, one working title was The Ministry. Another was 1984½: a dual homage to Orwell and Fellini to convey the film’s dance of fear and fantasy. “Brazil came specifically from the time, from the approaching of 1984,” he later told Salman Rushdie. “It was looming . . . Unfortunately, that bastard Michael Radford did a version of 1984 . . . so I was blown.” You can get a sense of the film’s unique tone from the fact that Gilliam also considered The Ministry of Torture and How I Learned to Live with the System—So Far before settling on Brazil, after the song that winds through it. They sound like titles for three totally different films.
Clearly, Gilliam had picked up some important ideas from Orwell second-hand. The passive bureaucrat Sam Lowry ( Jonathan Pryce) and flinty truck-driver Jill Layton (Kim Greist) are roughly in the mould of Winston and Julia. There is a Ministry of Information which uses “Information Retrieval” as a euphemism for torture. And the name of the official form 27B-6 is a playful reference to Orwell’s final London address, 27b Canonbury Square. Gilliam’s target, however, was not totalitarianism. There are no fanatics in Brazil, no dictator, only the managerial pencil-pushers and card-punchers who keep the machinery of the state turning. The seed was sown when Gilliam read a document from the seventeenth-century witch trials which listed the prices the accused had to pay for their own torture and execution. The absurd cruelty of turning state violence into a business inspired a satire on remorseless, self-justifying bureaucracy—the plot is set in motion by a clerical error at the Ministry.
Gilliam’s satire is epitomised by the terrorist outrages which replace Orwell’s rocket bombs as a means to keep the populace on a permanent war footing. The director frustrated interviewers by saying that even he didn’t know if the terrorists were real or agents of the state. “The Ministry needs terrorists whether they actually exist or not,” explains Sam’s boss Mr. Helpmann in an early draft of the screenplay written by Gilliam and Charles Alverson. “If they didn’t exist, the Ministry will create them . . . once the system started operating it proved to be totally self-generating . . . fuelled by an abundant internal supply of paranoia and ambition.” Oceania, too, requires a steady supply of criminals, guilty or not, because “purges and vaporisations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government,” but Gilliam reworks that notion into a crazed joke.
The opening title card locates Brazil “somewhere in the twentieth century.” Like 1984, it blurs the present and the future with the 1940s, by way of wartime propaganda posters, art deco design, pneumatic tubes and clunky technology. In fact, both movies employed the same location scouts. “We used a lot of the same locations,” Radford remembered. “We’d keep finding traces of Brazil but I had no real idea what he was doing at the time.” The two films were like estranged twins: Suzanna Hamilton auditioned for the part of Jill, while Jamie Lee Curtis was considered for both Jill and Julia.
Gilliam’s quasi-homage to Orwell became a mixed blessing once the film was finished. Frank Price, the president of Universal Pictures, had been a story editor on the 1953 Studio One version of Nineteen Eighty-Four and considered Brazil nothing more than a bad rip-off. Film critic Judith Crist dubbed it “1985,” while The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael described it as “a stoned, slapstick 1984.” Of course, a stoned, slapstick Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four at all. Gilliam’s lifelong habit of kicking against the pricks, which included a famously acrimonious battle with Universal over the final cut of Brazil, inoculated him against pessimism. The ending may have been too downbeat for Universal, but by Orwell’s standards, the fact that Sam dies before he capitulates is pretty idealistic. Gilliam told Salman Rushdie that Sam becomes a hero when he stops being a cog: “To me, the heart of Brazil is responsibility, is involvement—you can’t just let the world go on doing what it’s doing without getting involved.” That is also the heart of V for Vendetta.
Orwell had a glancing familiarity with superhero comic books. In 1945, he received a package of comics published by DC and Timely (the precursor to Marvel), which introduced him to the likes of Superman, Batman and the Human Torch.
He was not a fan. “Quite obviously they tend to stimulate fantasies of power,” he wrote, “and in the last resort their subject matter boils down to magic and sadism. You can hardly look at a page without seeing somebody flying through the air . . . or somebody socking somebody else on the jaw, or an under-clad young woman fighting for her honour—and her ravisher is just as likely to be a steel robot or a fifty-foot dinosaur as a human being. The whole thing is just a riot of nonsensical sensationalism.”41
Orwell might never have changed his mind, but by the 1980s, as Judge Dredd demonstrated, comic books had become a potent vehicle for left-wing satire. Writer Alan Moore first came up with the idea of a freakish terrorist battling a totalitarian state in the roiling year of 1976. Six years later, he and the equally pessimistic artist David Lloyd launched V for Vendetta in the British anthology comic book Warrior and set it fifteen years in the future. Assuming (wrongly) that Margaret Thatcher’s unpopular government would lose the next general election, Moore imagined Labour adopting a policy of unilateral disarmament that spares Britain from a nuclear war that devastates most of the world. But the havoc the war wreaks on the climate and food supplies makes Britain easy prey for a new fascist movement, Norsefire, which seizes power in 1992 and dispatches political enemies and undesirable minorities to concentration camps. One of those enemies, transformed by a scientific experiment in the series’ only major concession to superhero norms, escapes and becomes the anarchist terrorist V. Lloyd, who conceived V’s Guy Fawkes mask, called it a comic for “people who don’t switch off the news.”
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