It's Not Enough to Read Orwell

"George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984 in the late 1940s on the desolate Isle of Jura in Scotland's Inner Hebrides. Tuberculosis ravaged his body, and typing thousands of words a day only weakened him further. His skin flaked off. Blisters burst across his throat. Feverish and emaciated, he endured painful procedures to support his failing lungs, but the treatments were too late. Eventually, in 1950, Orwell succumbed to the disease."

"Close-ups of microscopic tuberculosis bacteria fill the screen in the opening minutes of the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5-images as bold and unnerving as what follows. Directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, the film examines an idea popularized by 1984: that blatant falsehoods can, through propaganda, be accepted as truth. That conceit, along with Orwell's state of mind during his final months, has been scrutinized for decades-by high-school students, biographers, and other documentarians."

"The tuberculosis-bacteria motif underscores this idea. To compare authoritarianism's rise to an infection is perhaps obvious. But as the microbes spread across the screen, the visual becomes almost hypnotic-and, as Peck recently told me, akin to how dictators overwhelm people's abilities to determine fact from fiction. "It's the same story again and again," he said, "and we don't learn.""

George Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950 after writing 1984 on the Isle of Jura while seriously ill, enduring severe physical deterioration and futile treatments. The documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 uses close-ups of microscopic tuberculosis bacteria and archival material from the Orwell estate — letters, essays, and diary entries — to connect the novel's theme that blatant falsehoods can be normalized through propaganda to modern authoritarian tactics. The film traces methods that suppress truth and argues that widespread recognition of those dangers has often produced numbness and complacency rather than effective resistance. Visual motifs equate the spread of authoritarianism with an infective process that overwhelms fact-finding.

Read at The Atlantic