Before it became a symbol of paranoia about surveillance or a catch-all term for unwanted modern trends, Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (styled as 1984) was, sometimes uncomfortably, simply a novel. George Orwell’s final major work tells the story of Winston Smith, a mid-level bureaucrat in a regime kept afloat by a submissive group known as the proles.

Ingsoc, or English Socialism, blends ideas from both Stalin and Hitler. Winston’s job is to rewrite the past so it matches the Party’s ever-changing official story.

Winston fights back against the oppressive regime in the smallest ways possible, such as being alone, writing, thinking, and finally having sexual relations and love. Of course, it is forbidden. He is involved in a secret relationship with Julia. As a couple, they turn their union into a form of political resistance.

Their love becomes an act that challenges the Party’s doctrine, suggesting that personal desire is a tool for revolt. It brings to mind other dystopian narratives where bodies become battlegrounds, illustrating how personal relationships can subvert authoritarian control. They play with the sinful notion that possibly truth, memory, and love would still matter.

Eventually, they are caught. Torture in Room 101 breaks their spirits and marks the state’s disturbing victory. Winston and Julia betray each other. Written while Orwell was terminally ill in 1947-1948, 1984 shows a world twisted by war, lies, and cruelty, and how easily people can be broken.

The story seems to be rooted in British sensibility, capturing the typical of its culture and history. The portrayal of oppressive institutions reflects the damp, overcast atmosphere associated with classic English literature, and the complex social hierarchy, like centuries-old aristocratic traditions, serves as a backdrop for the characters’ struggles. Additionally, it intertwines disdainful yet exotic sexual encounters, offering a glimpse into the attitudes towards sexuality in a reserved society. The elements make the novel distinctly British, emphasizing issues specific to English culture.

However, Orwell’s critique transcends its European setting, unfolding as a commentary on authoritarianism’s threats. By focusing on the manipulation of truth and individual freedoms, it illustrates fears common to societies worldwide. Such duality elevates 1984 from a culturally specific tale to a work of global significance. It is abrasive, ugly, beautiful, encouraging, and, at last, overwhelming.

While it has frequently been adapted for film, television, radio, and theater, each adaptation faces the fundamental challenge of conveying the book’s unsettling nature. The novel is already harrowing in its written form as it explores totalitarianism and control. However, they become even more disturbing when audiences are confronted with the visual and auditory experiences of physical tortures, humiliations, and dehumanizations that were initially left to the imagination.

When Animal Farm was published in 1945, Orwell had been working hard for a time and the recognition he got was similar to such of being a mass recognition. The commercial success, although late, was definitive, finally came.

1984 was also the book came after it and the world was already filled with the thought of Orwellian pessimism and it was eagerly awaited, hungry for more of the dream of the nightmare to be seen and heard. The first dramatic adaptation was quick to take advantage of the situation. Within a few weeks after the book had been put on sale in the U.S. in June 1949, NBC’s University Theater presented a radio version all over America with the perfectly British David Niven playing, unbelievably, the role of Winston Smith.

The steps of distillation and domestication were hurried up from there. CBS made the novel into brisk fifty-minute television for Studio One in 1953, which was the start of a chain of screen adaptations. The Americanized dystopia version of the novel became the highest-rated Studio One broadcast for the year. The popularity is significant. Audience, then and now, appear to be attracted to the totalitarian nightmare being displayed in places, seeming all too close to home (part warning, part reassurance, and maybe a form of cultural inoculation against the very thing being watched).

Radford’s film is the second in a pair of significant British productions to dramatize 1984. The first one was in 1954, and it also had a very grim England setting. The BBC, then still the cultural high priest of British broadcasting, made a television adaptation with Peter Cushing as the exquisitely fragile Winston Smith. His eminently breakable body foreshadows the later and equally inspired casting of John Hurt by Radford, another actor who seems to be permanently on the verge of being snapped in half by history itself.

The production was in the hands of Rudolph Cartier, a Viennese Jew who left Nazi Germany in 1933, and with him, he brought a clear understanding of the aesthetics and mechanics of totalitarianism. Cartier’s sensitivity matched with Orwell’s perfectly, in which a writer whose almost ascetic acceptance of discomfort had provided him with the very experience of how poverty, fear, and war could dismantle the human body and mind. Cartier, as a result, did not turn away, and he let out the rats.

For Orwell, a devoted animal lover, rats had always been the signs of filth, violence, and degradation long before 1984 was born of the symbols. Radford, on the other hand, uses the rodents, but the animals are obviously healthier, cleaner, and fatter because of modern animal-welfare standards. When they are done with a human’s dead body, they do not seem to be very much into slaughter, but like group nesting, much more cuddling than carnage.

Cartier’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was broadcast live with prerecorded inserts throughout two evenings in December, a way of presenting the play increased its feeling of danger and immediacy. Cushing’s scenes of torture, as well as the last frightening appearance of him with no teeth at all (achieved through the removal of his dental plate), were a little too much to endure.

The shortages and propaganda of the novel came into the living rooms of a populace and were still very much in the process of shaking off the effects of rationing, wartime slogans, and a very recent and real struggle against totalitarianism.

Radford’s movie, in contrast, took place in the Britain of Thatcher, a different historical moment, but nevertheless not devoid of its own forms of linguistic manipulation and an erosion of the postwar human-rights consensus. While Cartier faced a memory, Radford dealt with a déjà vu. It was marked by a transition from theausterity of the post-war years to a new era of individualism and free-market policies. Such shifts in societal values provide a backdrop for understanding why audiences from such distinct times reacted differently to 1984, where each adaptation resonated depending on the prevailing cultural and political climate.

According to the BBC, the 1954 television adaptation was highly controversial, drawing a flood of viewer complaints about its subversive content and prompting questions in Parliament concerning its portrayal of totalitarianism. In addition, the publication led to a fiercely divided response among British critics, with intense debate and disagreement over its significance and meaning.

Conversely, Radford’s movie was released with significantly less cultural combustion. It came to a public discourse and was already thinner and poorer, having been previously exposed to the cruelty of the show and the torture of the entertainment in such a way that the public was no longer shocked.

Orwell’s environment was entirely male-dominated: male-only educational institutions, male-only job sectors, and a still Edwardian, middle-class English culture of which restraint was considered the best quality. Yet he was exactly the sort of stoic, hurt, and witty intellectual who got along remarkably well with women, and he did. Across the board, however, he was the rare case of a man who appreciated women for their company, their intellect, and more for their being than just furniture.

He was still living in a culture where sex was a taboo topic for “good” women, i.e., wives. Hence, it is not surprising that in his writings, sex has the connotation of shame, pollution, and discomfort.

Julia is the only character in Orwell’s novels to present sex as a pleasurable and powerful thing openly. In other stories, women seem to be a lot worse off due to sex, losing track of time for weeks just because of the burden of interest in them.

Radford’s film puts more emphasis on the difference between Julia. Her nakedness without shame and her practical approach towards sex give her an amount of power and authority which is still rare for women. The camera focuses on the bodies of Julia and Winston, which are pale, bony, and stubbornly ordinary, bodies that will undergo animal-like suffering, but the complete absence of Hollywood’s sparkle makes them even more sheen.

Radford’s decision to include hazy flashbacks to Winston’s past and his meeting with a prostitute is an attempt to point to totalitarianism’s thorough degradation of females. However, the moments are now less straightforward. From the perspective of the post–#MeToo lens, the Edwardian ideology brought into them can be perceived as voyeurism, which is morally repugnant in a way that diverts instead of uncovering the vacuum of Big Brother’s world.

To put it another way, the film’s almost democratic method of showing nudity (thankfully, not leading to complete frontal exposure of Hurt) remains striking. The clash of batons, uniforms, and institutional violence with the nakedness of two lovers is truly disturbing, but crucially, it disturbs and not more.

1984‘s argument how love could be the force which breaks through the darkness still remains very surprising and exasperatingly true even at such very moment. It is impossible to say how odd, kind, and intellectually dangerous the conclusion was for Orwell to draw at any moment in his life.

Much more so in the case when he was practically killing himself with an isolated life on a small Scottish island, smoking nonstop, and writing through nights which were already short because of his tuberculosis, his lungs, and the pain which came with it. The more he got physically weaker, the more the link between flesh, feeling, and thought seemed to become more and more clear, and the probable renewed belief in love as the world’s tempering power was born.

Orwell, who had been a schoolteacher, gave out his lesson at a time when totalitarianism was retreating, even if the threat of nuclear destruction loomed ever closer. Hollywood might have considered Radford’s version too dark to be acceptable, but nevertheless, at its heart, there is generosity and hope, which lots of people have seen in Orwell, such as funny, knowingly miserable, fiercely intelligent, physically fragile, and complex.

The truth and the power of expression were entwined in Orwell’s fixation, and even Radford’s film could not escape the influence. By the 1920s and 1930s, Marxist jargon was already becoming really off-putting even for leftist there were a few exceptions, and Orwell never gave up on the Left (he even fought for it in Spain), yet he was conservative when it came to the purifying of cruelty and mass murder through Stalinism’s wordplay.

He loathed any politics and took the form of violence no matter what the costume was, and 1984 transformed such disgust into undeniably human instead of abstract doctrinal.

Radford intensifies it through the immersion of the film in the Ingsoc imagery and paraphernalia, creating a scenario where everything is mentally dead. The V-shaped salute of Big Brother’s followers can almost be overlooked. It is a sign that is reminiscent of passionate ideology but is taken from a poorly prepared 1980s boy band. In addition, the Boy Scouts, Mussolini, and even The Great Dictator came to mind. The V salute seems to be the most unrealistic of all military movements and has made the soldiers look like they are surrendering.

On the other hand, Radford has compensated for the soldiers sporting old Red Army helmets, which have been painted black like the Nazis. It is a smart, economical visual joke that implicates both Stalin and Hitler in the same breath.

Radford stepped into it, which was still glowing from a small triumph. Just a year before, he was highly praised by critics for his debut, Another Time, Another Place, a love story during the war which was boiling with lust and discomfort and was, once again, revolving around a couple who were pushing the boundaries of their universe. His skill to turn Jessie Kesson’s book, to do it in no time, and to create such powerful even with a very small budget made him a choice for the dark world of Orwell.

He remained extremely faithful to the source, handing over a complete script in the agreed three weeks. Radford’s love for the Nouvelle Vague is seen in different ways. On one hand, it gives parts of the production a raw, nearly documentary-like immediacy, while on the other hand, the more inward-looking recollections seem less firm. His inseparable collaborator, Czech director Jana Boková, contributed to the film’s mood, giving him a close view of the nihilism that prevails when political brainwashing has worn off, and there is nothing worthwhile left in its place.

To portray the passionate and sensual Julia, Radford chose former child actress Suzanna Hamilton, who brings a unique moment of power and boldness into a part that only developed in Orwell’s book. The movie portrays her character as being seduced by a more liberated conception of women’s longing and power, a conception which is very close to death. She is a very different character from Hurt’s Winston, whose physical weakness and gentle voice are made even more conspicuous by his situation. He is a heavy drinker, pre-raddled, and he is stumbling through love and suffering with a tiredness tangibly.

Hurt had not yet become a standard leading man in the full sense of the word. The presence of Hamilton and Hurt maintains the Hollywood allure at a distance and at the same time, they preserve the rough and disturbing truth of Radford’s 1984. Their interaction places the whole film on a truth that glamour could never bring about.

Agent Provocateur and torturer O’Brien’s role went to another calculated risk, which is the fading lion himself, the one and only Richard Burton. It was to be Burton’s last film, and he specifically had difficulty remembering his lines, but he managed to strip off the last layer of his art. His ravaged face, the echo of such once-attractive purr of a voice, and the naked and manifest disintegration of his manhood, he breathes life into the parts which, in other cases, would only be nothing more than arguments and tortures, with an almost Shakespearean gravity.

The face of Big Brother was a result of a poll held by the left-leaning Guardian, and the one which came out on top belonged to Bob Flag, a comedian, clown, and actor. In hindsight, there is a flawless sign for a time when leaders were more concerned about their theatrics than their core values, and hence, they were all of the same kind. It also hints at the intentional dramatization and grotesque absurdity of rulers like Mussolini and Hitler, who were so skilled at posing and gesturing, which they did with precision.

The opening scene of Radford is now akin to a snapshot of the audience at a talent show or a far-right rally. The loudness has only gone up on both shores of the Atlantic. What was perceived as distorted and barbaric in 1984 has turned into the requirement for entertainment to be called “gripping.” Public discourse and the celebrities and pundits it raises up are acting like the inconspicuous, troublesome kids who destroy, burn, or wreak havoc just to get seen. Room 101 has transformed into a TV format just like Big Brother did. It goes without saying.

The dull, gray, and brown colors of the film remain an aesthetic that the British have weirdly liked. Even at such a point, the Brexit disaster is unraveling slowly (probably over a generation), our media “Little Brothers” are trying to portray World War II as such a cute, enjoyable ordeal with all its bombings and rationing, as well as the dark and colorless setting. The future has always been uninviting, but we clung to a weak belief, and it was our duty to rule, and such was our dull cuisine should be given to all the civilized nations.

The biggest change that Orwell and, therefore, Radford could not foresee was the emergence of computers and digital propaganda. However, the heavy and outdated vacuum-tube technological devices along with extensive administration in the novel 1984 are able to reproduce and circulate “news” with precision. The regular and systematic airing of public confessions and self-accusations, although strange to us, is, in fact, only so because we have been overexposed to the performative shamelessness of the Right and underexposed to the ritualized shame of the Left.

I know for sure how, in the case of the U.S. and most of the world, Britain represents nothing but a disaster. We keep revisiting the times of pies, even longing for the rationing that characterized the everyday life of the past.

Meanwhile, the Indonesians are experiencing their own, albeit less severe, disillusionment. A catastrophic disaster in Sumatra has revealed the most widespread intimidation of critics, both public and private. It serves as a reflection of the themes Orwell explored, such as the manipulation of truth and the suppression of dissent. The Indonesian government’s control over public discourse and the curtailment of freedoms mirror the very surveillance and language control Orwell warned of, extending the shadow of his dystopian vision into contemporary reality.

The media reflects the same feeling of dystopia that Orwell described, how public discussions are more and more controlled by governmental orders and dictate what can be talked about, and the press is free but with a sword hanging over its head, ready to fall in case of legal actions or worse. Indonesia has ranked worse in the global index of freedom of the press. Besides, intimidating actions, which were seen as physical, bureaucratic, or just for show, have helped to weaken the spirits of the critics.

Orwell, being a great writer, was very indiscriminate when it came to his appetite. It is the same as having a very picky and sensitive sense of smell; he would still go for the most rotten, unsafe, and grotesque food. He ate everything, and he was even more obsessed with eliminating waste and punishing any indulgence of pleasure. 1984 is, in truth, a realm of mortification of starving body and starving soul.

The distorted moral universe, the constant humbling of everyone considered wrong, the soulless and mechanical pleasures of porn are just another night of scrolling through feeds, flipping channels, or watching selected horrors on TV. Still, a dim sparkle is there to see, even in such a dull dystopia. It is possible for us to mute the whole scenario like Orwell does and believe in the coming of spring to a certain place with no shadows, and how love, which is of flesh and messy, would dominate over the repression.

References

  • Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2009). George Orwell’s 1984. Bloom’s Literary Criticism.
  • Cartier, R. (Director). (1954). Nineteen Eighty-Four [Television Broadcast]. BBC.
  • Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge.
  • Leitch, T. (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford University Press.
  • Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Secker & Warburg.
  • Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language. Horizon.
  • Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg.
  • Orwell, G. (1968). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Vols. 1–4). Harcourt, Brace & World.
  • Radford, M. (Director). (1984). Nineteen Eighty-Four [Film]. Virgin Films.
  • Rodden, J. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell. Cambridge University Press.
  • Stam, R. (2000). Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. In Film Adaptation (pp. 54–76). Rutgers University Press.