In his latest documentary, the BAFTA and César winning documentary filmmaker provides the audience with a road map, in the form of George Orwell’s groundbreaking writing, attempting to break us free from the chains of misinformation and totalitarianism. Whether we use it or not, is ultimately our choice. Or is it?
In his 1949 dystopian futuristic novel 1984 George Orwell wrote the following: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” Today, thanks in part to failing to absorb the power of Orwell’s statement completely, in all its wisdom and prescience, we are living the era of ‘2+2=5’ in all its horror and destruction. Our sitting US President calls for the complete obliteration of a country after starting a war that was never explained and worse, never approved and resulting in a cataclysm for the entire Region. All the while, we sit and watch from the comfort of our homes, discussing it all on Threads.
Raoul Peck is a groundbreaking, award winning filmmaker hailing originally from Haiti. It’s important here to note that because, although Peck grew up and went to school in places all around the First and Third Worlds, his connection to Haiti helps explain his long standing cultural activism through cinema. Leaving your country of birth at age eight to escape, with your family, a totalitarian despot dictator like Papa Doc Duvalier will do that to a person.
I’ve personally loved Peck’s work since I watched his cinematic portrayal of American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in the 2017 film I Am Not Your Negro. That documentary later brought me to a chance of interviewing Samuel L. Jackson for HuffPost and has been a part of every favorite film list since then. In fact, when I searched for my piece on Google, good ol’ AI reminded me of the below.
Peck’s latest is quickly becoming the kind of film I quote on a daily basis, often to the astonishment and confusion of those around me. You have to watch the film to truly understand it all and accept Orwell’s persona as a mentor and guide to your own liberating thoughts. Because first and foremost, what Orwell advocated through his writing was listening to our free will, and the often overlooked ability to think for ourselves. Something that, with the advent of social media and panic inducing headlines guiding the mainstream media, we seem to have lost.
But, Orwell: 2+2=5 seems to point out that we never really had it to begin with, this free will to think for ourselves, and only some exceptional human beings have possessed this crucial quality throughout history, sometimes at great risk to themselves. Orwell (nee: Eric Arthur Blair) was plagued by tuberculosis and eventually died from the disease at the young age of 46, perhaps the result of a life lived large and outside of the norms. In Peck’s film, Orwell (voiced by renowned British actor Damian Lewis) speaks to his adoptive son Richard and tells him to steer clear of those who insist “two plus two equals five.”
“Always know that two and two are four.” he says to young Richard, “some people will tell you that two and two are five. They are called governments… big corporations.…They will torture you… they will bribe you… ”
In hard times, we need to have the courage to say that “two and two equals four.” Sometimes it’s all the voice we can find.
Told as a cinematic essay, part biography, part readings from Orwell’s diaries — Peck worked in collaboration with the Orwell Estate — with historical footage and cinematic references from the various films based on the writer’s work thrown in, Orwell: 2+2=5 is the kind of film that needs multiple viewings and a sky-wide open mind to be fully absorbed.
I walked out of it devastated, and this was even before the Iran invasion by the US president and his deranged allies. That moment in time, when I watched the film in a plush London screening room more than a month ago, seems moons away and ages past, an almost idyllic era that we can now no longer recapture. So I was surprised when I emailed an acquaintance and film programmer later telling her how distraught I’d felt about the film, and she wrote back calling it “too heavy handed”… I backed off my praise of it after that, and in that moment, realized how challenging it is to hold steadfast to the idea that “two plus two equals four” when faced with a different opinion. Imagine doing it when the person disagreeing with you holds all the power.
We throw the word “prophetic” around a lot, especially in cinematic circles, but Orwell truly was a prophet, one whose self-coined terms like “Big Brother” have become part of our everyday jargon, even titles for popular TV shows. In Orwell: 2+2=5 Peck reinterprets the material, drawing out of it parallels with our present along with prophetic, here I go again, glances into our not-to-distant future.
Like, for instance, quoting from Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ which provides an even deeper understanding at the man behind the words. “I do not think that one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development” Orwell wrote, “His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own –- but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.” Revolutionary ages like his own? I wonder what Orwell would think of our world today, where more countries are at war than ever before, fighting with even bigger toys to annihilate us all than have ever existed before. I wish I could have thought of this paragraph when my colleague called the film “too heavy handed.”
From Orwell’s colonial upbringing, he was born in Motihari, then Bengal, now in the Indian state of Bihar and brought up by an Desi nursemaid, to his steady decay due to his chronic illness, Peck follows his genius throughout, steadfast and respectful, showing us all that we have missed by not listening to Orwell’s warnings. Yes, we read the books — which include 1984 and Animal Farm, as well as essays like ‘A Hanging’ — in school, probably, and watched the various films based on them, likely, but did we ever really take Orwell’s writings as seriously as we should have? It seems, if we watch Peck’s latest cinematic masterpiece, that the sad answer to that question is a loud, resounding “NO”.
One last and necessary big up to the film’s editor, frequent Peck collaborator Alexandra Strauss, for condensing a documentary which could have easily been five hours long (and still watchable, I’m sure) into a two hour wondrous gem that makes the viewer crave for multiple viewings.
Orwell: 2+2=5 will be released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on the 27th of March, by Altitude Films.
All images courtesy of Altitude Films, used with permission.