The new Orwell: 2+2=5 documentary, directed and written by Oscar nominee Raoul Peck, uses Orwell for Peck’s centrist/liberal propaganda, which qualifies as high irony. Nevertheless, seeing the movie is still interesting, for the actual documentary parts about Orwell, his writing and his life. Plus the Ralph Steadman stills from his illustrations of Animal Farm.
The documentary features actor Damian Lewis narrating from Orwell texts, mainly 1948 and Orwell’s letters, while using clips from different movie versions of 1984, Animal Farm and a couple bio-pics about Orwell’s life. The main structure is how Orwell was dying from tuberculosis while writing 1984, on his farm on an island in Scotland. With still photos and personal history from childhood on, the film does a good job of showing how and why he ended up in the British military and seeing the effects of colonialization from the bad guys’ side. If the movie were just about Orwell, which is what I thought I was getting into, I would’ve said the filmmakers had done a great job.
But the filmmakers also splice in clips from world-news atrocities from the second half of the 20th century, and from contemporary world news, with excerpts from speeches by what they consider the evil-doers. George W. Bush lying us into the Iraq invasion is in there. And Netanyahu from only last year when Israel's Final Solution went into full genocide mode. And Trump. For the filmmakers, Trump is the symbol of Big Brother. Which I think Orwell would laugh at. Trump isn’t smart enough to be Big Brother. But for the filmmakers, the January 6th protesters are the equivalent of the people gathered in 1984 for the daily “Two Minutes Hate.” Curiously, they do feature the moment when protestor Ashley Babbitt gets shot by Capitol Police—the only person killed that day. I’m still unclear if the filmmakers meant including her killing as an “on the other hand,” or as a warning/FAFO moment to Trumpers. Or if they just wanted some kind of sensationalism to keep things interesting.
Early in the film—and the point where I almost walked out—the filmmakers try to situate Orwell with the Antifa movement. It’s true there was an Anti-Fascist movement in the late-1930s, but this is when there was a real Fascist movement, and party, before World War II, under Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, which preceded WWII and where Orwell fought. As for the past and present Anti-Fascist movements, I present the quote from Italian writer Ennio Flaiano:
There are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists.
Orwell: 2+2=5 quotes Orwell’s letters as him saying he fought under one of the many smaller communist, along with anarchist, groups of foreigners and Spaniards against the Franco forces. What Orwell says in his memoir Homage To Catalonia though, is that he fought as a member of an anarchist group. That is, Orwell identified as an anarchist. And it was when the Russian (ostensibly) communist army take-over of the entire operation—"betrayed” it—which pushed Orwell into really hating communists. English-language readers might also go back to Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls for another perspective on what happened. Ever since, anarchists and communists have had an antipathy, dislike, and/or hatred of each other. This movie doesn’t go into it, but later in life, when Orwell was trying to put the moves on Celia Kirwan, who worked for a semi-secret propaganda branch of the British government, he gave her a list of writing and people in the movie industry who identified as communists, known infamously as “Orwell’s List” and which some claim helped spawn the Red Scare and McCarthy Trials of the 1950s, but that was going to happen anyway, and the list didn’t name anyone who wasn’t already publicly identifying as a communist.
The darlings of (white) liberals, the Black Lives Matter movement, get featured as the good guys. Along with the dancing nurses during the Covid lockdowns. And the mask-wearers. The Palestinians too, which I’m okay with. I don’t have a set place on the political spectrum anymore, because I’m with liberals against the Zionists. But then the filmmakers go into Ukraine Good, Russia Bad mode. In another seeming slip, trying to make Russian President Putin appear as a Big Brother type, they feature a clip of him calling for the de-Nazification of Ukraine. I would like the literal Ukrainian Nazis gone. It’s unclear if Peck just didn’t do a simple google search which would turn up mainstream media articles up until about 2018 talking about “Ukraine’s nazi problem.” Or was someone in the editing room slipping in these little “whoopsie” moments without Peck (or the mysterious producers) knowing?
A big part of propaganda, as Orwell said, is simply leaving things out and/or erasing them. While Bush and Trump get called out (I’m not a fan of either), there isn’t one mention of Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton or Biden (or whoever was a running the Biden administration while Biden was off having dementia and sniffing young girls’ hair). In another weird moment, the filmmakers use clips of independent journalist Laura Poitras’ interview with Edward Snowden, while he was on the run from the US government in Hong Kong, which might ruffle some liberal feathers, since they were told by the Obama administration that he was a Bad Guy because he revealed that our government was spying on its own citizens. Obama was the president who made assassination by drone standard practice, even if civilians—like wedding parties, or even American citizens—get killed in the process. And who was also the Deporter-in-Chief to Latinos. And who bombed so many brown people that the military ran out of bombs.
But for liberal filmmaker Peck, it’s Trump, Trump, and Trump. Trump tells lies. So does every other president and politician. What freaks out many in Washington is when Trump says what no one else does. One example: when he said live on camera that the US government (“we”) was in Syria for the oil. Leading many viewers to say, “Wait, we’re in Syria? When did that happen?” Big Brother wouldn’t have done that.
As another example, Peck uses the time The New York Times printed a full page of Trump lies. Peck doesn’t go into any of them, just accepting that the Times is a bastion of truth. Orwell would point out that you could do the same for the NYT: you could print a page of their lies—they were right in lock-goose-step with Bush’s Iraq invasion, as they are for every other US government act of violence. See what they’re saying about Venezuela these days (and for decades).
The subtitle of the documentary, one of Orwell’s ideas from 1984, which Peck keeps returning to is how “The Party” will get people to believe that 2+2=5. Not just say it, but actually believe it. It is a key idea of Orwell’s—as he writes elsewhere in that novel, and the quote which continuously makes the rounds in Red Pill Twitter:
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Director/writer Peck seems to think that only politicians like Trump (and Putin, and Netanyahu) are capable to doing this to us, unable to even consider that all politicians—with their puppets in the MSM—do. Or try to. Again, I’d present as evidence the messaging/propaganda around Ukraine and the Covid lockdowns. Or how about JFK, or 9/11? The recent Charlie Kirk assassination? Does anyone believe the FBI narrative on that? Peck’s so ignorant of how pervasive our own Big Brother Narrative is, that I wonder if he knows what he’s doing. Everything about Orwell in the movie—all of Orwell’s words—seem to point that out. Orwell’s thinking, his words, deconstruct the narrative forced on him. That’s why you might want to watch this movie.