1984

Books Forum

Thread open to discuss 1984, the book by George Orwell.



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Been a long time since I've read it.... Animal Farm is fresher in my head...

Aren't they making a movie 'bout it now?

A movie based on 1984? We don't need it... we LIVE it. They're watching US RIGHT NOW!

I USED to own a copy of 1984 that I bought for a college class... but someone borrowed it (aaa---HECK---choooo!) and never returned it. I'd love to read it again. I remember loving it and it freaking me out.

How did I know when I saw you posting in this thread that you were going to say that. It's packed away still with half of my stuff, dangit.

A movie would be cool, but that Orwellian future is already here, for sure.

-HECK!

Because I ask for it, like, every time i see you .

There was a bit of 1984ishhhness in V for Vendetta... well, I thought anyway.

They already did a film on it in the 80's. I thought it sucked. The book was way better.

It would be a hard book to put in movie form, as most of the writing is on what Winston is thinking, not on what he is saying or doing.




Modern pop culture is mostly caught up in the Big Brother aspect of 1984, I.E., the government spying on you. To a lessor extent, popular culture is interested in the torture parts of the book.

In general, if you say Big Brother, or 1984, most people think of an oppressive government that is spying on you, and/or that tortures people.


However, I came away from the book with something else. I saw in it, the way that many people, myself included, think. The way we can believe two totally different viewpoints at once.

Or doublethink.


Winston's job was to change the newspapers, or record files, whatever they were, into what the new "truth" was. And even though he was the one changing the past, he believed the new lie and the old one as well, at the same time.

I went through an experience in church, where they made massive doctrinal changes, but would say that "this is what we believed all along". After I read 1984, I saw parts of Winston in myself, as that I believed two things at once on a lot of stuff. Since reading the book, I have done a fairly decent job of weeding that way of thinking out of my mind, but sad to say, there are still some things that I can't shake, can't stop myself from doublethink.


to use a cheap example, take the Bill Clinton, "I never inhaled" lie. I have no doublethink on that issue. I know it's a lie, that no one would put a MJ cig to their mouth and not inhale. It was a political lie, designed to deflect an embarrassing truth. So, no doublethink there.


On the flip side, I knew a minister once, I was up front by the podium and he walked up and asked this other guy if he had heard this certain sermon tape. The minister then told the man that he had not had time to listen to it, what was it about?

The man told him. Later in church, as the pastor was speaking, he told the congregation that he HAD heard the sermon tape, and that it was a good tape, and he gave a few points on it.


To this day, I have doublethink on this issue. One part of me believes what I saw and heard, and that the minister was a bald faced liar.

The other part of me believes that maybe I messed up and heard something wrong, that it's me that got something mixed up, because why would a minister lie like that about something so small and insignificant?



Winston doubted himself. He saw and heard truth or lies, like that Oceania was at war with one super nation, then the next day after if was changed, and they were at war with the OTHER super nation, he doubted himself, he did not understand what was real and what was false, if he was being lied to, or if he remembered wrong.

That's an interesting story Whidden. On the one hand, you trust what you heard: he didn't listen to the tape, then suddenly he had. However you feel that you misheard, since enough time has gone by that you can't be sure.

But don't think like that... think of it this way: why would the minister have asked for a quick run-down on the tape if he'd listened to it? You should follow that fellow around and taunt him for being such a putz.



I found a page on imdb about a 1984 movie being made for 2007. But I can't view details because I'm not a pro user or something.

Well, until reading the book, I never knew I thought like that, it was like a mental defect, I was so close to it, I never saw it.


After reading the book, I saw I thought like that on a lot of things and have since tried to weed it out of my life. But I'm only 95% weeded, I still need some hedge trimming. And some phosphorus for my roots.

I do it too, but just 'cause I'm paranoid.

Like every time I send an email with an attachment I have to check it ten times to make sure I sent the correct attachment. Otherwise I won't be able to function correctly.

Like I said, that's just paranoia. Something that just isn't an issue in 1984

Speaking of room 101 and the books ending, it was true horror.

There is no hope in the book, none at all. Winston knows he will be caught, he knows that he will do little or nothing to hurt or stop Big Brother and the system that he represents, he knows it is all going to end with torture and death,


but the one small ounce of hope is that Winston will hold on to what he knows, that in itself is the victory, that he knows the TRUTH, and he will keep it till the end.

However, the last four words of the book are horrifying, as we see that this final hope and wish that he was holding onto was destroyed by the party, the wish that he would hold onto the Truth, and even though tortured and dead, he would go out with the knowledge of what was going on in the world.

But sadly, all of it, his love for his woman, his hatred of the system, his revelation that the world he lived in one was one big lie,

all destroyed by room 101 and the cage of rats.


In the end, HE LOVED BIG BROTHER.


A sadder ending to a book I have never read.

Old George was a bit of a pessimist.

Realist, man. He was a realist. *takes another puff*

Nay, he was a spiritualist optimist with a defeatist personality. Poor bugger.

I would love to join in on this thread because we're reading this book in class right now, but I don't want to run the risk of coming across something that I haven't read yet, so I'll just wait for a couple weeks.

I just finished this book.

Throughout this book I got more and more engrossed in what I was reading. I really thought that Winston was going to started something, that he was going to do something drastic against the government. When he and Julia were caught I flipped out and was so taken off guard by the hidden telecreen and Mr. Charrington, and I knew that Winston would never be able to publicly revolt against Big Brother, but I still hoped that he would be able to keep his private defiance intact. With all that O'Brien had said about altering the face, and how Mr. Charrington had so masterfully made himself look twice his real age, I thought that Winston would be made to look like an Eastasian prisoner of war and publicly hanged in front of the cheering masses that he had wanted to free. But even that fitting end wasn't what happened. No, Winston lost his sanity and loved Big Brother. A most awful and depressing ending to such an otherwise phenomenal book.

I got so drawn into the book that when I read the last paragraph I got so angry that I chucked the book across the room. Twice

A true horror ending. Even Stephen King don't end his books like that.


Poor guy, his only hope was to keep the knowledge in his own mind of what the truth was, and in the end, they took that and his love for his woman and turned it into something ugly. Love for Big Brother.

Room 101 was terrible. To think that the Party would go to that extent is no surprise, unfortunately. The concept of room 101 makes me wonder in the same way that the concept of a Bogart makes me wonder. What if you don’t know what your greatest fear is? If you don’t know, and if you’ve never had to face it, then how does the Party know what it is? They can make you face something that you are very afraid of, sure, but if you yourself don’t even know what your greatest fear is, then how can they make you face that? And if the thing you are facing you are only very afraid of, not deathly afraid of, then how can they make you so terrified that you will do whatever they want to escape the awful thing in the cage? I suppose in those cases room 101 just isn’t used. I mean—why pull out your hidden card if you know there’s a chance it won’t win the game?

Okay, now that I've had a day to digest and mull over the book, I've decided that the ending that was used was the only ending that could have worked.

George was trying to wake people up. Snap them into awareness. You can't do that with a happy ending, because people don't spend days dwelling on and dissecting a happy ending. And if Winston had triumphed over Big Brother, then what would be the point of the book? People would say, "Well, this is all very unnerving and is happening now, but look at the end! Winston won by doing what he had been doing all along, so why don't we just follow suit?"

What's weird is that he was a Socialist, with Communist leanings. In fact, I think he was a communist almost, but he detested Stalin.


1984 is a rant on Stalin like Animal Farm was, and totalitarianism. The book was popular during the cold war, because the politicians saw it as a anti communist book, and that was a big part of the reason it was put in the school system, so American kids would read it and hate the commies.

Have any of you ever read any of the documents of Comintern, which was a coalition of Communist countries such as the UN is a gathering of countries. The Comintern used Newspeak in everything they said. We believed, us American, that we would never fall to Newspeak. We would be more intelligent than the Comintern, but it appears that we have become more and more like the Comintern.

Pipofamom was telling about Madam Mau in China. She was very popular and went on a trip around China and photographs were taken of the journey. Then later Madam Mau fell from favor and she was airbrushed out of the pictures, like she was never there, and everyone who saw the pictures just accepted that she was never there.

I wonder what she did to make them angry with her?

She was very political when some important people thought that she should be a housewife instead. When her husband died those people arrested her.

Whidden, have you ever read to the part where Winston is manipulating the truth in the newspapers and turning them into lies?

It seems like our public relations department. They take a news segment and turn it into something utterly different than what was written or said. I remember during September 11, 2001 there was this segment on the news where Arabic people were dancing in the streets and waving flags because the World Trade Center had collapsed. It was horribly distorted by the media. The people were truly celebrating another holiday and the people were not Afghani.

yeah, by all means, quote away.

Your story about the local weather is classic Whid. They do that kind of crap here from time to time too, but typically with the stockmarket folks. Never noticed anything similar in Australia, but it coulda happened.

The worst I ever saw, was ABC news back in the 80's. Reagan and Sam Donaldson got into a mini shouting match on the White House lawn, and I saw it on NBC or CBS, one of them.

After Reagan zinged Donaldson, the crowd cheered. (bunch of republicans i guess )

I turn it over to ABC to see what they have to say, and ABC shows the clip of what happened, then the video still shows, but the sound of the crowd cheering is magically gone. They edited it out, to make it look better for their reporter.


Happens all the time, sneaky people all around trying to pull a fast one on us.

I work in a place called Didcot in Oxfordshire. George Orwell's grave is just 5 miles away from my office in a village called Sutton Courtenay. It's such a modest grave for a literary giant.

Animal Farm is one of my favourite Orwell novels.
Blair's Labour government epitomised this book. They turned into the pigs, having promised so much at the beginning of Labour's first term in office.

Preston.

it's on my life list of books to read before I die...