1984 screening

What a brilliant film! Everything about the film helped to reinforce the topic of the lecture which I found helped me to memorize the terms by seeing them, for example Chris talked about filtering language to cut out forms of resistance by abolishing certain words; which means if there is no word for the emotion or idea it cannot be expressed. This was shown through Winston's job in which he looked through newspaper articles and reported anything that could be construed as resistance. In addition the final part of the film part of the film where Winston is asked during his reprogramming how many fingers he is holding up and Winston replies the correct answer but the questioner wants him to admit that it is 5 by replacing the word five with four. This reinforces the principal that if you control words and language you can control what people think and say.

At the end I was left questioning what had happened because I felt it was a bit obscure, which was created by the scene where Winston writes the sum two plus two but leaves the answer blank. This I believe does indicate that Winston is eventually brain washed as he hesitates to put the answer, indicating that his mind set has changed as before he would have put four without hesitating.

Another thing that could be inferred is that this film bears a strong resemblance to Lang's 'Metroplis' which shows the robotic conditioned workers in uniforms drifting along to work. This was also Hitler's favourite film and it is easy to see that he based some of his ideals of a perfect Germany on the film, therefore the programming of people it seems has actually been translated from screen to real life. An issue I think Orwell foresaw happening in the modern age.

1984

This lecture I found to be incredibly interesting from an English students perspective, because although books produce emotion within readers through emotive language I never considered it a form of manipulation before; which programmes the reader to feel a certain way or be persuaded to see something from the writers point of view.

I also felt this connected well to the lecture on Freudian philosophy for example writers manipulate language to express their views and insecurities, which shows some evidence according to Freud of people dealing with core issues through language, as that is what makes up their thought processes and shapes their ideologies. Projection is the term I would associate with this form of manipulation, just a reminder for those who have forgotten, projection is a way of dealing with a core issue a sort of defense mechanism which causes the subject to push their issues onto others in order to deal with it themselves and make others feel equally bad. This is the term I would use because the reader is having to endure the projection of ideas by reading a text which results in manipulation, as their perspective may be changed after reading that text.

In addition I felt this novel connected really well with Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' as the reference of using language to programme and control people's behaviour is a prominent theme in Huxley's novel. For example by playing certain things to children in their sleep and banning literature and art, anything which would encourage people to think for themselves and manipulate them to think differently which in the novel was considered dangerous. It also has communist undertones as well which is shown through the worker's alienation towards the products they have forged. Therefore these two novels share certain parallels which I would recommend other people take a look at.