I watched a film version of this story. I don't remember any of the background of it other than it was about a totalitarian society. We had to read the book for English class. It seemed at the time I read it far less entertaining than Animal House, another requisite. It might have been Freshman English in College where I had to read these books, I don't remember. I know I had read them both. I don't recall seeing a film version of Animal House but I have now seen 1984 in film with Richard Burton as the ultimate inquisitor. The main character is played by an actor named John Hurt but it's not the Hurt of later on with the blonde hair, it's a British chap with a pinched face and thin body. He suffers a great deal on the path to enlightenment. His crime is that he has a love affair. He also smokes like a chimney and coughs a lot. His country is at war, continents against continents. You don't get to see the other continents but you begin to assume they must all be like the main character's home base: everyone in uniform, everyone tuned into all the state broadcasts, a few bombs going off, pretty much like World War II only it takes place in 1984.
That it takes place in 1984 is the postfuturistic element of the film version. 1984 has come and gone. 1984 was the year I came back out West after living for about fifteen years on the East Coast, mainly in Washington DC but for a few years on the Eastern Shore in Maryland. I was a part of the counter culture while I lived in DC, at the last. On the day Ronald Reagan took office, I was leafleting on Pennsylvania Avenue. I ran into a good friend of mine, Eileen, who was wearing furs and had been socializing with Senator Warner and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. She wasn't with them, of course, she was with Harry, her longtime beau. Eileen had lost her husband in the South China Sea during the onset of the VietNam War. His plane was shot down. I stuffed a leaflet into her hands and went down the block. She was eagerly awaiting Reagan's motorcade.
At no time during that time leading up to 1984, did it ever feel to me that we were on the downward path portrayed in the story. We hadn't gotten there because there I was prodding the story line with the kind of rogue mirth that anarchists are good at. We had elected a competent now government official to lead us and so he did. He wasn't on the radio too awfully much, certainly not broadcasting from loudspeakers at every lightpole. He didn't have Richard Burton characters washing our braincells with torture for us. He had a few little debacles to deal with, one of which was Desert Storm that gave more than a few people that fought there a kind of curious heat rash sort of condition that was assumed to have been caused by biowarfare agents, though one hasn't heard too much about it since that time. I got to wear whatever clothes I chose to wear and there was the element of mirth again in the little demonstrations we conducted in places like Farragut Square. You would have certainly been hauled off had you done that in the story.
I wouldn't say I'm championing our freedom here, certainly. I would say I pushed the envelope all the way across the desk by the time 1984 rolled around in real time. I had been there and done that in terms of being who I wanted to be in those years. Well, I still am but there's the other part of it: if we didn't have stories like 1984 to predict for us where our predilections for power might get us, we might actually get there, as they unfortunately found out probably in Stalin's time, and Hitler's. But we haven't had that gory mess around for while and the strange thing is we don't hear about it until it's a nasty pimple on the butt of the planet.
I would say that the United Nations is always on the spot when a situation becomes tenuous. The problem with that is those troups that go in for the United Nation on peacekeeping missions don't have enough manpower or anything else to really stop what goes on. The United Nation is hamstrung by its Joint Security Council because it's always a matter of warring with itself. So there again, 1984 isn't quite here but if we don't keep that delicate balance Madison was so fond of, we might surely experience it firsthand and wouldn't that be lovely.
1984 more than anything depicts the societal death of love. You might think it persists, but the story line goes along with the romance of its main character and the little nymphette he befriends who tells him she's done 'it' hundreds of time with hundreds of men, although that behavior is definitely frowned upon by the bureacracy they are saddled with. A little thing like promiscuity isn't so much overlooked as it is begnine
(bee nine) I don't have my thesaurus along at the moment...it's one of the main symptoms of the rot of the society itself. We'll just give our bodies for the pleasure of it, which might be argued happens today although the AIDS scare put the fear of God in a few of us profligates, I should think. Burton then tortures the main character after giving him a tract on the aesthetics of the proletariate to think for themselves, which he finds quite sufficient to persecute the already suffering man with some quite graphic torture sequences, always to bring the person back to the cognizance that the state is all. Indeed, in that society, it is all...the sum of life we would know it, were that our 1984. The petty little behaviors of the couple, renting a secret room, sharing coffee and sugar as all things are rationed out, taking naps together, seem almost mundanely routine until the brain police burst through the door and both are hauled off to the interrogation rooms.
We probably didn't know people did such things to one another until it became patently obvious they did so during World War II. Then there were stories about what happened in Korea, and Viet Nam, and all the places in between where people are caught in the middle of a quasi-jurisdictional dispute, like which tribe is the better tribe to be from. Not that history is not replete with versions of torture, the Spanish Inquistion comes to mind, a little game we played in parochial school, Romans and Christians, being another. Rather, it was more vivid, more widespread, more insidious in World War II and the immediate time after it, that made us aware that there were dark forces in the world that we must be ever on guard against.
So I thought it was my duty to be a counter culture person, work in a cooperative art gallery, do art programs in the schools, protest whatever sword rattling our government was promoting, host events that culminated with myself and several other people doing a mime in front of the White House with red rubber noses on. The Cuban ambassador happened to be driving by that day. He actually got out of his limo and took the time to shake our hands. I wouldn't say it was the highlight of my experiences back East, but I would say that due to those little catalysts of time and energy, we wouldn't be likely to experience 1984 as the book and film portray it. We've got a little more mirth and ambiguity than to be pigeonholed in our bureaucratic cubicles, wherein we bow down and murmur yes God when the superior's superior happens to breeze through. We allow just enough irreverance to make life tolerable. We don't get around to wearing uniforms so much as we consign our clothes when we realize the quality and effort that are in them, and the fact they can be worn another season or four, by someone who didn't have the pleasure of shopping for them retail like we did. We're becoming pretty good recyclers, and hopefully, through that and our alternative energy efforts and our healthfood diets, and our spiritual pathways, we'll keep on growing our versions of Victory Gardens and walking when it's only a few blocks. We're not totally motorized yet and probably we won't get there where machines do everything for us. We haven't lost our heart, I just wish we were a little more romantic, that's all...1984 portrays the death of love, I don't think it's at all dead but we're probably just a little more promiscuous than we should be and a little less tolerance of difference than might oughtn't be good for us. We could use a rough polish for sure, but we love stuff, even if it's something like American Idol, where we pick a winner and follow him to the last round. We have simple passions: ice cream, nice cars, our families...but we need to remember the lesson about love: that's when you know the society has died...when they outlaw it...
(oh, and that's something for the readership to ponder...exactly what love is outlawed today? hmmm, I wonder...)
That it takes place in 1984 is the postfuturistic element of the film version. 1984 has come and gone. 1984 was the year I came back out West after living for about fifteen years on the East Coast, mainly in Washington DC but for a few years on the Eastern Shore in Maryland. I was a part of the counter culture while I lived in DC, at the last. On the day Ronald Reagan took office, I was leafleting on Pennsylvania Avenue. I ran into a good friend of mine, Eileen, who was wearing furs and had been socializing with Senator Warner and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. She wasn't with them, of course, she was with Harry, her longtime beau. Eileen had lost her husband in the South China Sea during the onset of the VietNam War. His plane was shot down. I stuffed a leaflet into her hands and went down the block. She was eagerly awaiting Reagan's motorcade.
At no time during that time leading up to 1984, did it ever feel to me that we were on the downward path portrayed in the story. We hadn't gotten there because there I was prodding the story line with the kind of rogue mirth that anarchists are good at. We had elected a competent now government official to lead us and so he did. He wasn't on the radio too awfully much, certainly not broadcasting from loudspeakers at every lightpole. He didn't have Richard Burton characters washing our braincells with torture for us. He had a few little debacles to deal with, one of which was Desert Storm that gave more than a few people that fought there a kind of curious heat rash sort of condition that was assumed to have been caused by biowarfare agents, though one hasn't heard too much about it since that time. I got to wear whatever clothes I chose to wear and there was the element of mirth again in the little demonstrations we conducted in places like Farragut Square. You would have certainly been hauled off had you done that in the story.
I wouldn't say I'm championing our freedom here, certainly. I would say I pushed the envelope all the way across the desk by the time 1984 rolled around in real time. I had been there and done that in terms of being who I wanted to be in those years. Well, I still am but there's the other part of it: if we didn't have stories like 1984 to predict for us where our predilections for power might get us, we might actually get there, as they unfortunately found out probably in Stalin's time, and Hitler's. But we haven't had that gory mess around for while and the strange thing is we don't hear about it until it's a nasty pimple on the butt of the planet.
I would say that the United Nations is always on the spot when a situation becomes tenuous. The problem with that is those troups that go in for the United Nation on peacekeeping missions don't have enough manpower or anything else to really stop what goes on. The United Nation is hamstrung by its Joint Security Council because it's always a matter of warring with itself. So there again, 1984 isn't quite here but if we don't keep that delicate balance Madison was so fond of, we might surely experience it firsthand and wouldn't that be lovely.
1984 more than anything depicts the societal death of love. You might think it persists, but the story line goes along with the romance of its main character and the little nymphette he befriends who tells him she's done 'it' hundreds of time with hundreds of men, although that behavior is definitely frowned upon by the bureacracy they are saddled with. A little thing like promiscuity isn't so much overlooked as it is begnine
(bee nine) I don't have my thesaurus along at the moment...it's one of the main symptoms of the rot of the society itself. We'll just give our bodies for the pleasure of it, which might be argued happens today although the AIDS scare put the fear of God in a few of us profligates, I should think. Burton then tortures the main character after giving him a tract on the aesthetics of the proletariate to think for themselves, which he finds quite sufficient to persecute the already suffering man with some quite graphic torture sequences, always to bring the person back to the cognizance that the state is all. Indeed, in that society, it is all...the sum of life we would know it, were that our 1984. The petty little behaviors of the couple, renting a secret room, sharing coffee and sugar as all things are rationed out, taking naps together, seem almost mundanely routine until the brain police burst through the door and both are hauled off to the interrogation rooms.
We probably didn't know people did such things to one another until it became patently obvious they did so during World War II. Then there were stories about what happened in Korea, and Viet Nam, and all the places in between where people are caught in the middle of a quasi-jurisdictional dispute, like which tribe is the better tribe to be from. Not that history is not replete with versions of torture, the Spanish Inquistion comes to mind, a little game we played in parochial school, Romans and Christians, being another. Rather, it was more vivid, more widespread, more insidious in World War II and the immediate time after it, that made us aware that there were dark forces in the world that we must be ever on guard against.
So I thought it was my duty to be a counter culture person, work in a cooperative art gallery, do art programs in the schools, protest whatever sword rattling our government was promoting, host events that culminated with myself and several other people doing a mime in front of the White House with red rubber noses on. The Cuban ambassador happened to be driving by that day. He actually got out of his limo and took the time to shake our hands. I wouldn't say it was the highlight of my experiences back East, but I would say that due to those little catalysts of time and energy, we wouldn't be likely to experience 1984 as the book and film portray it. We've got a little more mirth and ambiguity than to be pigeonholed in our bureaucratic cubicles, wherein we bow down and murmur yes God when the superior's superior happens to breeze through. We allow just enough irreverance to make life tolerable. We don't get around to wearing uniforms so much as we consign our clothes when we realize the quality and effort that are in them, and the fact they can be worn another season or four, by someone who didn't have the pleasure of shopping for them retail like we did. We're becoming pretty good recyclers, and hopefully, through that and our alternative energy efforts and our healthfood diets, and our spiritual pathways, we'll keep on growing our versions of Victory Gardens and walking when it's only a few blocks. We're not totally motorized yet and probably we won't get there where machines do everything for us. We haven't lost our heart, I just wish we were a little more romantic, that's all...1984 portrays the death of love, I don't think it's at all dead but we're probably just a little more promiscuous than we should be and a little less tolerance of difference than might oughtn't be good for us. We could use a rough polish for sure, but we love stuff, even if it's something like American Idol, where we pick a winner and follow him to the last round. We have simple passions: ice cream, nice cars, our families...but we need to remember the lesson about love: that's when you know the society has died...when they outlaw it...
(oh, and that's something for the readership to ponder...exactly what love is outlawed today? hmmm, I wonder...)
