On April 4, 1984, in the fictional state of Oceania, a low-level civil servant named Winston Smith begins to write a diary. In the repressive, dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel 1984, where history is constantly erased and rewritten and individual expression is punishable by death, putting pen to paper to explore one’s innermost thoughts is truly a subversive act.
Thirty-three years later to the day, over 220 people filled a local independent arthouse movie theater to watch the 1980s film adaptation of Orwell’s mid-century novel to commemorate the beginning of Smith’s subtle rebellion against a totalitarian government.
As Smith struggled on screen to preserve some semblance of love, empathy, and hope in the face of a brutalizing political regime, the local audience was challenged to ask itself two critical questions: What are the parallels between this fictional 1984 and the real 2017? And how does one ensure that the actual United States government never slips into the suffocating, repressive dystopia of Oceania?
The gathering Tuesday night at Madison Art Cinemas was part of a national event, as nearly 200 arthouse movie theaters throughout the United States and Canada screened the movie adaptation of 1984 and held community conversations about issues of oppressive government, artistic freedom, and the political and cultural need to tell the truth.
Thomas Breen photo
Gorlick.
Madison Art Cinemas, which is run by longtime Westville resident and New Haven movie theater veteran Arnold Gorlick, was one of six Connecticut theaters to take part in the event. In addition to screening 1984 before a capacity crowd of 225 people, Gorlick raised a gross of over $3,300 in ticket sales, most of which he pledged to donate to the local not-for-profit Integrated Refugee and Immigration Services (IRIS) after taxes and film rental.
The night’s post-screening talkback, led by Yale historian Beverly Gage, focused on the history of political repression in the United States over the course of the 20th century. The night also included a pre-recorded introduction and 15-minute excerpt from an interview with British director Michael Radford about the making of the film 33 years ago and the resonance of 1984 today.
“The idea of an art cinema as opposed to a mainstream cinema is that we more consistently appeal to the adult mind,” Gorlick said during a separate conversation, on an episode of WNHH’s Deep Focus about the 1984 screenings. “We want people to come to a movie and think, and then to have a dialogue.”
In the world of 1984, such an encouragement to think critically and engage in honest conversation with one’s peers is unimaginable. Government surveillance is constant and unwavering, represented by the omnipresent visage of Big Brother, a stern mustachioed face looking out from posters on every crumbling wall, from telescreens in every claustrophobic cubicle. There are no laws in Oceania, but everyone lives on the brink of criminality, for the chief transgression in such a state is thoughtcrime: to think, however momentarily, about the injustice of a government that lies, kills, and maintains a state of perpetual war against a faceless enemy and its own people.
“Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think,” Smith writes as he reflects on the mindset required to survive amidst such totalitarian chaos and duplicity. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
After the screening,Gage spoke before the audience about how watching 1984 brought three dates in American history to mind: 1917, the 1940s, and today.
“This week marks the 100th anniversary of the United States’s entry into the First World War,” Gage said as she identified this country’s early embrace of some of the troubling political strategies identified in 1984.
It was in 1917 that the United States first started experimenting with mass organized propaganda to gin up popular support for the war, and with internment camps for Austrian and German immigrants deemed enemies of the state. It was 1917 that saw the passage of the Espionage Act that began to formally criminalize political dissent, and that saw the political resurgence of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Screenshot from Michael Radford’s 1984.
The second date that came to mind was the late 1940s, in the wake of the devastation of World War II and on the cusp of the Cold War, which is when Orwell wrote the book.
“What strikes me in thinking about him writing in this moment of the late 1940s is how unstable things seemed to be,” Gage said. “How dark the future looked like it might be, and how much this work was really a cry against what Orwell saw as these forces of darkness rising in the world. The Western powers had just gone through a great war allied with the Soviet Union against the ferocious enemy of Nazi Germany, and then suddenly, just a few years later, these same Western powers were firmly in a cold war against the Soviet Union.”
The third date in question, and the one that had brought audiences out to arthouse theaters throughout the country on April 4, was the present day.
“A lot of people have been looking to works of dystopian literature to try to understand what is happening in 2017,” Gage said. “People are looking for guides for the world that we may be heading into.”
Throughout the book and film versions of 1984, Gage saw uncanny parallels to 2017: a top-down, deliberate destabilization of the truth, the notion of perpetual war as a pretext for limiting liberties at home, and the idea of what it means to be involved with a resistance.
A capacity audience waits to enter the Madison Art Cinemas for National Event Day screening.
“We do need to be careful about throwing around metaphors of fascism and authoritarianism,” Gage said, noting that dystopian novels like Sinclar Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here envisioned Congress fired and the population herded into internment camps well before the two-month mark of an authoritarian president’s rise to power.
Thankfully, she observed, we’re not there yet.
Gage: Congress not fired yet.
“But what I do think that we see in 2017 are certain tools and certain resonances, particularly in the use of media, the rewriting of history, and the very self-conscious rejection of certain kinds of authority and expertise that are outside a kind of self-created reality. And those things I think are really worth paying quite a lot of attention to, not so much because we’re heading towards some fascist existence, but because they are tools of statecraft that have been tried and tested before.”
Learn more about the origin and mission of this event by listening to the below audio interview with Gorlick, Yale film studies grad student Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, and Avon Theatre film programmer and National Event Day co-organizer Adam Birnbaum.