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‘When you are on a sinking ship,’ George Orwell wrote in 1948, ‘your thoughts will be about sinking ships’. He was describing the way fascism occupies the thoughts of those under its thumb, muting all other concerns, whether personal, political or trivial. Members of the Way-Too-Online Generation can certainly relate. After all, we now all carry tiny anxiety machines around in our pockets, creating a sense of hyper-awareness to the world’s atrocities that allows precious little room for comforting distractions.
In his documentary-cum-video essay Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck juxtaposes the British writer’s words with a flood of the same distressing images inundating our social media feeds, from Ukraine to Gaza, South America to the United States. The film’s anti-mathematical title refers to a concept explored in Orwell’s most famous book, the dystopian sci-fi milestone 1984, of how despotic regimes reshape objective truth to their whims. It could just as easily be called Doomscroll: The Movie.
The point, of course, is that the ship has been sinking for a long time, and Orwell saw the iceberg coming from a century away. Born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, the author grew up in colonial India as part of what he called a ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family, spent a regrettable stretch participating in ‘the actual machinery of despotism’ as a member of the imperial police in Burma, then dedicated his career to not just critiquing totalitarianism but outlining its playbook.
Drawing from Orwell’s books, essays and correspondence — recited here by actor Damian Lewis in a gravelly, ASMR-ish near-whisper — Peck, who’s made ruminative docs about other prescient figures including James Baldwin and Karl Marx, makes the case for Orwell as the preeminent oracle of the decline of western democracy, a seer who foresaw everything from the exploding wealth gap to ‘alternative facts’ to the use of A.I. as a disinformation tool.
But Orwell wasn’t a prophet, just keenly observant, and the idea that he was correct about most things isn’t particularly revelatory for anyone with even a glancing familiarity with his work. After all, your name doesn’t become shorthand for technofascist surveillance states for nothing. Indeed, the phrase ‘Orwellian’ has been invoked plenty of times over the last decade to describe the rise of right-wing movements across the globe, going back at least to the first Trump administration.
Obvious though the conclusions may be, however, it does not dilute the film’s potency, particularly as a work of collage. News and archival footage collide with reconstituted talking heads, demagogic speeches and a swathe of movie clips, from the numerous adaptations of 1984 to Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom to M3GAN. At times, the glut of ideas bulges against the two-hour runtime, making for a dizzying, overstimulating experience. But Peck has a wicked way of connecting dots across history: at one point, the public hanging of a dozen Nazis in a Ukrainian square jump-cuts to Trump supporters brandishing prop gallows at the Capitol on January 6. ‘Most people approve of capital punishment,’ Lewis-as-Orwell intones, ‘but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job’.
Much of Orwell: 2+2=5 is about the past predicting the present. What, then, of the future? In the final minutes, Peck finds hope in worldwide acts of protest, from America to Russia to Sudan, and in the words of 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who argues that only the ‘swarming disregarded masses’ contain the power to beat back tyranny. Never mind that, in the conclusion of Orwell’s book, Smith himself is successfully brainwashed, praising Big Brother and acknowledging the new math. Surely, collective resistance is the key to a better world. But maybe the ship has already sunk.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Mar 27.