I recently re-watched the 1984 movie 1984, with John Hurt and Richard Burton, and I forgot how depressing it is. I’ve read George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four (written in 1949), several times, and it’s not as painful to read as the movie is to watch, until the ending. Director Michael Radford did a commendable job bringing dystopia to the screen. The reason the ending of the book is more devastating is because a movie can’t compete with a book which allows you to live in a character’s head, and living in Winston’s thought throughout the book made his ultimate defeat devastating. The absolute totalitarian power of the state is reflected not just in Winston’s outward obedience to the dictates of Big Brother, but in the end actually falling in love with Big Brother; he realized 2+2 can in fact equal 5. He was in every sense a broken man. An all powerful state can do that, but only to a man who has nothing outside of the material world in which to appeal. That’s what makes the movie, and the book, so depressing, but so hopeful for those who refuse to accept the worldview assumed by it.

I read somewhere that Orwell was an agnostic or atheist, and it’s clear from 1984 his worldview had no sense or awareness of the transcendent. Those who inhabit his dystopian world are products of this world alone; there is no other world, no spiritual reality to which they can appeal, or believe in, or hope for. That’s what makes it so depressing, and so enlightening. For those who have nothing to hope for beyond this material existence, Big Brother holds all the cards. That’s why Karl Marx, the scumbag (he was not a good man) founder of the communism, had as his first goals in his Communist Manifesto to rid the world of religion and the family. Those are the primary two sources of challenge to the power and tyranny of the state. It doesn’t surprise us, then, that in Orwell’s 1984 there is no religion or family (I’d have to watch/read it again to know if there was any reference to God or religion at all, but I think not; the family, though, was clearly an enemy of Big Brother).

The torture scenes near the end of the movie are pathetic, Winston begging his tormentor, the not long for this world Richard Burton, that he’ll do anything to make him stop. Winston has nothing to appeal to outside of the self, outside of the Party or Big Brother, no authority by which he can say they can kill his body, but they cannot kill his soul. There is no soul if all we are is a conglomeration of atoms, so begging is the only hope. I have no idea how I would respond to torture, likely not well, so I’m not “judging” Winston, only saying that without the transcendent, without eternal hope, without Jesus, we have no power against Big Brother. With it, tyranny will never last.

Watching the movie reminded me of another story with a very different ending, the 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’ll never forget the power of the ending, as Uncle Tom is getting beaten to death, literally, and he’s praising Jesus! The slave given the job of administering the fatal beating says something to the effect, I don’t know who this Jesus is, but I want to know him! It also reminds me of another movie about totalitarianism with a very different outcome, Tortured for Christ, about Richard Wurmbrand, the founder of The Voice of the Martyrs. The torture scenes in that movie are also painful, but not at all pathetic. One scene I remember distinctly, the guard administering the torture (I think it was a cringeworthy beating on the bottom of Wurmbrand’s  feet as he was hanging by a rope) had a confused look on his face as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, that the prisoner was almost at peace with his beating. No wonder the hope we have in Christ is the greatest fear of totalitarians of every stripe.

I should mention the very 1984 vibe of the last two COVID years. I came across a bumper sticker that I thought was so apropos of our time that I bought it and put it on our car: Make Orwell Fiction Again. I remember laughing out loud when I first saw it. Whatever one thinks of this virus, the response of much of our government and public health agencies has been nothing short of Orwellian. Those of us on the political and cultural right feel like this is the case more than those on the other side, but Big Brother would be proud of our business, cultural, and governmental elites. I just read a piece by journalist (a real one) Emerald Robinson about the so-called COVID vaccines, and I think ending with a paragraph from it will make my case:

How many thousands have been banned or suspended already by Big Tech for questioning the COVID vaccines in our supposedly free nation? How many of your civil rights, your constitutional rights, can they trample before your very eyes? America is no longer a constitutional republic: it’s more like a corporate oligarchy where Big Pharma and Big Tech and Big Government tell you every day what you’re allowed to do on Zoom calls from the CDC with Dr. Fauci. They’re not even pretending anymore. This is something like Day 575 of “15 days to slow the spread.” Our so-called civil servants and elected officials are never going to give up their new “emergency powers” on their own. They mean to rule over us, and everybody knows it.

And we won’t let them now, will we.

 

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