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That also means that we should once again take up Michael Radford’s film adaptation, which was filmed and released in 1984 (it follows several early adaptations, including a 1953 episode of the American TV anthology series Studio One, a 1954 BBC Sunday Night Theatre episode, and a 1956 feature film).
So, as Gopnik noted, we have to go back to 1984 because it tells us so much about what is happening now. The first week of Trump’s Presidency, after all, introduced the concept of “alternate facts,” the kind of logically contradictory, but politically appealing doublespeak that dominates the rhetoric of Orwell’s novel.
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Not surprisingly, Trump’s shocking election in November 2016 sent Orwell’s novel rocketing up the best-seller lists, as people immediately recognized that the terms Orwell had introduced into political rhetoric- newspeak, Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime-were more real than ever, lending credence to the idea that Orwell’s nightmare vision of a totalitarian future-in which free thought is banished, war is perpetual, and everyday people, fed a nonstop diet of lies, historical revisionism, and propaganda and kept under constant surveillance, have become automatons of the state-wasn’t limited in imagination, but frighteningly prescient. We have to go back to ‘1984’ because, in effect, we have to go back to 1948 to get the flavor.” Writing in The New Yorker in late January 2017, essayist Adam Gopnik confessed that he had never been a big fan of George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian classic 1984, having found it “too brutal, too atavistic, too limited in its imagination of the relation between authoritarian state and helpless citizens.” However, only a week of Donald Trump’s Presidency was enough to change Gopnik’s mind: “Because the single most striking thing about his matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be. Stars: John Hurt (Winston Smith), Richard Burton (O’Brien), Suzanna Hamilton (Julia), Cyril Cusack (Charrington), Gregor Fisher (Parsons), James Walker (Syme), Andrew Wilde (Tillotson), David Trevena (Tillotson’s Friend), David Cann (Martin), Anthony Benson (Jones), Peter Frye (Rutherford), Roger Lloyd Pack (Waiter) Screenplay: Michael Radford (based on the novel by George Orwell)