By Stuart Mitchner
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” In director Michael Radford’s brilliant, harrowing, appallingly underrated adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), the first words shown on the screen quote Big Brother’s slogan. The closing credits note that the movie was “photographed in and around London during April–June 1984, the exact time and setting imagined by Orwell.”
Writing in 1948, Orwell spun the numbers and came up with the year 1984, spelled out as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Critics claiming that he chose the year merely as the last in a series of working titles that included 1980 and 1982 overlook the way the inverted year echoes the party slogan, which in turn signifies Orwell’s control of a present moment that controls and contains the future as well as the past. Three years after the end of World War II, Orwell wanted readers to view the dystopian nightmare of Big Brother’s England within a conceivable time frame, rather than according to some fanciful 21st century year like, say, 2025.
Blair and Burton
This focus on dates is familiar territory for a weekly column built around the past-present-future of dates, events, births and deaths, films and books, life’s actors and life’s writers. George Orwell is the subject this week, having been born on June 25, 1903, as Eric Arthur Blair. Even so, I hadn’t planned to write about his most famous book until I saw Nineteen Eighty-Four a few days ago on Apple TV+, attracted by the fact that the film of Orwells’ last novel contains the last performance of Richard Burton, who was born November 10, 1925 as Richard Walter Jenkins. I was not about to pass up a chance to see a picture finished only two months before Burton’s death and dedicated to him “with love” — not to mention the chance to see it on his centenary year.
Like Burton, whose failing health and chronic neck pain troubled him throughout the filming (one speech needing 41 takes before he could get it right), Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four while suffering from the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. According to D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life (Pegasus 2023), he finished the novel in January 1949 with death only a year away. In spite of that, he managed a sanitarium courtship that “brought to life” the romance between Julia and Winston at the heart of the narrative; Eric Blair and Sonia Brownell were married, with friends and champagne, in the hospital room Orwell died in three months later.
Loving Orwell
A close British friend once emailed me “What I love about Orwell is his ruthless honesty. Also, in his prose style he gets away from that kind of heartless laconic ‘cool’ that infects writers of ideas who write from within a hegemonic power. He does with that for once and all.” In his essay “Why I Write.” Orwell says, “What I have most wanted to do … is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
You get closer to Orwell’s passion in “Inside the Whale,” his essay about Henry Miller, who in 1936 tried to dissuade him from putting his life on the line fighting in Spain (saying, in effect, “Don’t be an idiot”). A declared admirer of Tropic of Cancer, Orwell described Miller’s outlook as “deeply akin to that of Whitman,” noting that Miller’s most famous book “ends with an especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation. To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.”
Freeing Julia
I began loving Orwell when I read the love scenes between Winston and Julia, so feelingly played by John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton in the film. On both the page and the screen, the essence of freedom in the super-repressive realm of Big Brother is driven home when Julia stands naked before Winston in a pastoral landscape, after stepping out of the absurdly ungainly uniform forced on all citizens of the Party, male and female. Of Julia, Orwell writes, presumably from Winston’s point of view (albeit ending with an echo of the “every grain of soil” passage in the Miller essay): “In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, [Newspeak for English Socialism], doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
Burton’s Boilersuit
At his best, one of the great actors of the 20th century, as he was when I witnessed his performance as Hamlet on Broadway in the summer 1964, Richard Burton’s ability to deliver a kind of ongoing anthology of Orwell’s Party-doctrine prose was truly heroic. As O’Brien, the high-ranking Party member who wins the love of John Hurt’s Winston even as he knows he’s eventually going to be supervising his torture, Burton remains calm, thoughtful, compassionate to the end. It’s his refusal to display the least hint of enjoyment in the spectacle of Winston’s suffering that makes the graphic nature of the scenes bearable. Although Burton’s pain-wracked struggles with his lines may have slowed down the filming, he apparently managed the ordeal with the gallantry and wit evident in his request that his boilersuit (the Party-mandated uniform) be made at Saville Row.
Vincent Canby’s highly favorable Jan. 18, 1985 New York Times Review admits that 1984 is “not an easy film to watch but it exerts a fascination that demands attention even as you want to turn away from it. That the Orwell tale still works so well … also makes it apparent that the novel was always more cautionary in its intentions than prophetic.” Although Canby sees Hurt’s performance as the film’s “center of gravity,” it’s in great part thanks to Burton that he can call writer and director Radford’s “adaptation” as “fine as possible of a work that is far more effective as a passionate, witty political essay than as narrative fiction.” Canby notes that “though the downfall of Winston Smith is compelling, the real subject is language, which can be abused as relentlessly by a kind of tyrannical capitalism as by totalitarian Communism.” Finally, Canby does justice to the stunning production design “from which all the colors of sunlight have been drained. Except in Winston’s occasional dreams or memories, when everything is bathed in an eerie golden glow,” the world of this 1984 is “uniformly blue-gray and beige. It’s as if the state … had vaporized the primary colors.”
Twenty Twenty-Five
Canby’s inadvertently coincidental use of “primary colors,” the title of the anonymous book about Bill Clinton’s triumphant 1990 campaign, brings American politics awkwardly into the discussion. In the “American carnage”/”alternative facts” January of 2017, the term “Orwellian” was becoming the word of the hour, along with 1984’s sudden surge to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. I was already feeling pulled in that direction by Canby’s reference to “tyrannical capitalism.” While Radford was filming in the “real” spring of 1984, Prime Minister Thatcher was undermining British Railways and decimating the National Health while President Reagan was making numerous “debatable assertions of fact” and obsessing on “the Evil Empire.”
Those were the days. Compared to where we are now, we were in Kansas with Dorothy and Toto. Where are we now? Check out David Plunket’s cover (“On Parade”) for the June 23, 2025 New Yorker showing a birthday boy in a toy tank dwarfed on either side by grown-up soldiers.