I vividly remember reading 1984 on a cross-Taiwanese train and feeling its weight. My mind formed a thought it would have decried before: “This is a very dangerous book.” What did I mean by that? Orwell’s novel is viscerally powerful and full of ideological concepts that would prove a grave danger to certain types of government. It embodies the political in the way only art can, and the effect can be that readers embrace the wrong ideas or measures. Just look at the way Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has become a romanticization of adultery in recent decades. The Anna of the novel is no heroine and does nothing to merit imitation. But she is a fully drawn character written with enough pathos and passion to lead modern readers to sympathize with her worst actions.
Make no mistake: art is dangerous. I would wager anything you can dream up on earth can be used in terrible ways.
But education can strip it of its power. As much as we may complain about a certain work’s “manipulative” techniques, manipulation is exactly what we want from art. We come to a book or a play or a film asking to be made to feel something or understand something or see something more clearly. We put ourselves in the work’s hands to be manipulated. After all, manipulation is far from pejorative; what I pay my chiropractor to do is to manipulate my body to align and strengthen the bent and broken bits. At its most redemptive, that’s what art does. That’s what we want it to do.
It’s almost ironic that we only start labeling a work “manipulative” when its manipulation is obvious. In other words, we are saying something like, “I can see through these schemes but weaker minds cannot.” (And, hey, there’s no lie there.) But that’s just it: the dangerous manipulation is the one that you can’t –– or refuse to –– see. If you know the rules and tools of the art form, and if you engage with it knowing it is an invitation to manipulation, then you can spot the lies. They hold no power in the light. That’s why art education and thoughtful cultural engagement are vital!
Last night (an odd Easter selection), I finally watched the acclaimed film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four made in 1984. Starring John Hurt as Winston Smith.
I know that at the time it was made, they had almost no choice but to model Oceania after the Soviet bloc. Everything is rubble and ruin. But I don’t like that choice. It shouldn’t be so obviously coded as failing and evil. That’s the point of Oceania, right? It is a dystopia hidden beneath a utopia.
The film went for tone over information, and I got the sense of “bad socialist dystopia,” but (again), I don’t think that’s true to the book or the strongest choice. The movie leaves images of terror and sadism in your mind. But the book is more about ideas. (Remember those dangerous ideas?) The film briefly addresses Newspeak and Thoughtcrime, as well as the true purpose of the war, but it doesn’t (for instance) use the terms Ministry of Truth or Ministry of Peace that I noticed.
Bottom line: the novel is a powerful masterpiece, but the film trades in established cues of corruption—from Nazism to Communism—that seems like a shorthand which leaves out much of the true terror of ambiguity. This is a kind of horror movie, while the book is something much richer and more dangerous. Still, a great, overlooked performance by Hurt and a wonderful score from (Did you see those coming?) Eurythmics!