Revisiting 1984

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen"

With that famous first line, George Orwell began his novel about the bleak dystopia he had imagined the world in 1984 would be, back in 1949.

I read the book Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1985, having picked up a cheap commemorative paperback edition from PekanBuku at UM. It is available these days online on the Internet. Till now, it remains my favourite among the few Orwells that I have read, together with Down and Out in Paris and London, even though Animal Farm is generally considered one of the best books of the 20th century.

In the year 1984 they made a movie based on the book, starring John Hurt, Richard Burton and Suzanna Hamilton. I managed to catch it when it was shown on RTM (or it could have been TV3), a couple of years later. I think I still have a mouldy VHS recording of it stored somewhere under my bed back home in Subang Jaya.

The clocks were striking nineteen last night when I sat down at the QB World bookstore cafe in Kemang, Jakarta, sipping the remaining half of my Bintang beer, waiting for the curtains to roll for QB World's regular Sunday night art-movie treat: Nineteen Eighty-Four. It brought back a flood of memories.

First, the haunting soundtrack by Eurythmics. Strictly speaking, the album by Eurthymics bearing the same title shouldn't be called the movie's soundtrack as hardly any of the tracks were used in the movie - more like music and songs inspired by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some of you might remember the hit Sexcrime and the hypnotic Julia.

The casting for the movie is superb: who could have played a better Winston Smith than John Hurt? And having the great Sir Richard Burton as John Hurt's character's mentor-turned-torturer, O'Brien was a real coup. It was also Richard Burton's swansong - he passed away after completing the movie in 1984.

Big Brother, Ingsoc, Newspeak, Thoughtcrime - these are some of the intriguing elements of Orwell's vision of a totalitarian society where the state of Oceania is in perpetual war with either Eastasia or Eurasia in the tripolar world of 1984. Though the collapse of Communism in the 90s brought about a sense of optimism and temporarily erased our fears of an Orwellian future, the recent paranoia of governments towards terrorism has led to states enforcing Big Brother-like type of surveillance and policing of its citizen. Orwell's reminder still bears relevance today.

The movie, like the novel is an extremely bleak one. However its basic plot of an Adam, Winston Smith(John Hurt) and an Eve, Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) searching for an Eden away from a dehumanized society where one can be free to love and live like normal human beings is a theme that has been used many times by science-fiction writers. One is reminded of George Lucas' THX 1138 (starring Robert Duvall) and Logan's Run (starring Michael York).

Nineteen Eighty-Four, the movie, is a masterful adaptation of Orwell's book by director Michael Radford. I cannot see how Orwell's vision could have be filmed any differently. The sets, the cinematographic palette and the casting are spot-on. Even though the movie depicts a "futuristic" society, there's no Matrix sleekness here nor showy Star Trek-like vision of utopian worlds with gleaming corridors and beeping electronics; instead the sets and locations of Nineteen Eighty-Four are reminiscent of a war-ravaged Europe of the 1940s, with gadgetry that could have been inspired by relics from the Smithsonian Institution.

Movies, books and music are capsules of memories. Watching Nineteen Eighty-Four again brought everything back to me: the late eighties when I was a carefree student with no inkling of where my life would lead; not knowing that I too would someday find my Orwellian future in the cubicle catacombs of the corporate world, where any spark of individualism is akin to Thoughtcrime.