Raoul Peck’s latest documentary certainly has timeliness going for it. There is of course a rise of authoritarianism around the world, a set of schemes that are aided and abetted by digital disinformation and the ever-diminishing distinction between true and false. When we reach for some kind of shorthand with which to describe these situations, it stands to reason that “Orwellian” is one of the handiest adjectives available. The society Orwell warned us about — forced docility of the populace, global surveillance, and a vibes-based regime based on anger and fear — has come to fruition, and it stands to reason that Peck might want us to go to the source and consider George Orwell’s 1984. But as always, context is everything. 1984, much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was written as speculative fiction and a warning about the collapse of democracy. What are we to make of the fact that an elite political class chose to regard those books as if they were Plato’s Republic, not as cautionary tales but as schematics for the new world order?
Orwell: 2+2=5 is a primer, among other things, articulating the development of Orwell’s political thought and how it led him to spend the final years of his life writing 1984. The film is organized around a voiceover (courtesy of Damian Lewis) reciting a series of letters Orwell wrote to family and friends. This is a structure that makes sense, even if it doesn’t add a great deal to Peck’s analysis. One of the primary critical problems of our moment is the sheer enormity of late capitalist fascism, the sense that if you try to pull at one string you end up tangled in another. The Trumpists call this “flooding the zone,” hitting the population with so many angles of assault that righteous anger soon gives way to confusion and, eventually, defeat. Orwell needed a format just to allow Peck to move through the deluge of shit coming at us from all directions. But apart from offering a template, this aspect of the film doesn’t necessarily help us understand the dilemma Peck is diagnosing. In the beginning, the letters detail Orwell’s disenchantment with English colonialism, having served as a police officer in British India. But beyond this, Orwell himself doesn’t have as much to tell us as his literature does. Compare Orwell to Peck’s James Baldwin film I Am Not Your Negro, and the differences are stark. Orwell’s words are not galvanizing in the way Baldwin’s were, at least not as presented in the film.
What does work in Orwell is Peck’s skill at juxtaposition and critical montage. The filmmaker draws on no less than three different film adaptations of 1984, and a couple of versions of Animal Farm. They concretize Orwell’s concepts, and more importantly they create a context for a wide range of news footage from totalitarian movements across the 20th and 21st century. The value of Peck’s approach is that it demands that we see equivalences in places that the dominant media insists are wholly distinct. Of course he shows us Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and Pinochet’s Chile and Kim’s North Korea, but he also refers again and again to Trump and the MAGA movement. We see concentration camps from World War II, and then Peck cuts immediately to the abuse of deportees in El Salvador. Where the sane-washing pundits insist that we cannot call MAGA fascism, Peck insists that there’s nothing else you can reasonably call it.
But while this bluntness is appreciated, it also points to the difficulties faced by 2+2=5. By trying to tackle the different ways that contemporary fascism distorts reality, Peck ends up with a film that is just a bit shallower than it ought to be. I mentioned mass media sane-washing, and it’s important to understand why it happens, and why the fourth estate along with the broader political class has stood by while liberal democracy is crumbling around them. Yes, as Orwell tells us, it is a class-based phenomenon. The wealthiest people on the planet and the global corporations they run always put profit above all else. The left-right distinction, especially in the Western democracies, obscures the much more fundamental conflict between the rich and everyone else. But there is also an affective level on which contemporary politics operates. Journalists and politicians are not oracles. They are professionals, and they only know how to do their jobs in a particular way. Again and again they fail to rise to the occasion, because either they don’t know how or simply cannot wrap their brains around the new order that wants to eradicate them and all they think they represent.
So this raises the question: what is Peck’s film intended to do? It certainly explains what is happening around us, and can reassure us that Trump, Putin, Xi, and the others are trying to gaslight us. Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness looks at the world and wonders, “Am I wrong? Have I always been wrong? Am I insane?” Orwell reminds us that we are not. But apart from that admittedly cold comfort, what can Peck’s film tell us that we aren’t confronting on a daily basis? At the conclusion, Orwell tells us that roughly 85% of the human race is comprised of “proles,” people for whom the present system is oppressive and untenable. He shows us images of Maidan, and the Iranian women’s protests, and the Black Lives Matter marches. People, Peck argues, have the power.
But it’s difficult not the feel like Orwell is recommending checkers maneuvers in a deadly game of chess. What, short of permanently deleting the Internet, is liable to get the masses out in the streets? And what would happen when we get there? Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans, and in his letters, he acknowledges that he was lucky to survive and escape. Most of his comrades were imprisoned or killed. This is an inconvenient fact that Peck cannot confront directly. If we must revolt, a lot of us are going to be killed, locked up, and/or tortured. We live in the most self-centered, atomized civilization that has ever existed, and we are told, obliquely, that we can resist fascism only by placing ourselves at immediate risk. Even Marx understood that no one would place themselves in that level of danger unless the status quo itself were a guarantee of eminent death. With this in mind, warnings like Orwell’s, Atwood’s, or Peck’s are wholly inadequate, because we cannot or will not act to prevent fascism “before it’s too late.” In this regard, freedom does not equal slavery. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
DIRECTOR: Raoul Peck; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: October 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
Comments are closed.