Word: winstons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...techniques of government self-perpetuation are different. Our leaders don't torture U.S. citizens, although they explicitly support torture of innocent citizens in many other countries. There isn't enough domestic spying to threaten freedom of thought, although there is enough to warrant concern. But just like Winston, we have been convinced we love a Big Brother, a vague compendium of patriotism and a particular ethical model of selfishness and greed. We believe we have won a victory, just as Winston does...
...narrative, Nineteen Eighty-Four is simple to the point of banality. Complexities of plot and psychology are, as George Orwell understood, inimical to the cautionary tale. He deliberately cast his main characters--Winston Smith and his lover Julia, the doomed spiritual and sexual revolutionaries opposing the Stalinesque exactions of Oceania--as archetypes of the ordinary. They are a modern Everyman and Everywoman pitilessly propelled forward into a future that seemed all too possible in 1949, when the novel was published. The recent passing of Orwell's prophetic date has not rendered their lives or their fates much less plausible...
John Hurt, for example, plays Winston as if he were suffering the last stages of consumption; repellent in his grayness and enervation, Hurt is oddly compelling too. As Julia, Suzanna Hamilton plays her harshly lighted love scenes with a nakedness, both physical and emotional, that is astonishing in its neediness. By making the romance more explicit, Radford gives it a pathos and a symbolic weight that are, if anything, more affecting than in the novel. Finally, the late Richard Burton as O'Brien, the couple's betrayer and interrogator, gives a last performance that is all silky corruption, perfumed malice...
...propaganda in black and white, never color, and their shape is that of antique sets. At the Ministry of Truth, no one has ever heard of the microchip. The height of sophisticated communication is represented by the pneumatic tube and the dial phone. And when O'Brien tortures Winston into submissiveness to the state, his instruments are the old-fashioned table with leather straps and electroshock. All of this matches perfectly the external world through which Winston and Julia stumble: it looks like a vast, bombed- out housing development. Cameron thus carefully upsets our common visual assumptions about things...
...large cast of characters are happily categorized. Chronicler Evelyn Waugh offers seedlings of his farces: "Alastair . . . at some stage in the evening lost my waistcoat. Audrey made declarations of love to me, and Richard to Elizabeth and I to Olivia. I do not think Black Torry seduced anyone." When Winston Churchill's son is operated on for a benign tumor, Waugh decides, "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove...