#rereading 1984

[demi-raven]

In 1984, the imagined hellish dystopian future appears very centered around hanging out at the community centre and participating in community hikes.

[andreai04]

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

[kanefromalien]

i’m actually so obsessed with this photo it’s so fucking funny to me 💀

[externalmemorycomic]

ID: a four panel comic. In the first panel, a wolverine pops his head into the frame, looking concerned. a cat sits on the floor holding a book and wiping away a tear. The wolverine asks “what’s the matter, My? You’re crying!” The cat replies “I’m okay, dad… I just finished reading 1984.” In the next three panels, they hug. The cat asks “is that really our future? A surveillance state with no way out?” The wolverine says “oh, honey… that’s not our future, that’s our present!” The cat starts crying again and screams “AAAAAAAUHUHUHUU” End ID.

[shattered-pieces]

When I think of russia nowadays, sometimes I'm struck with similarities to the Trial by Kafka-- the intricate bureaucracy, the senselessness, the absurdity, the brutality that's both embedded in a rather banal environment (I recall the scene in Torture Camp by Aseev where he's being electrocuted in a police station while outside is a normal looking street) and facilitated by this bureaucracy and the labyrinths of judges and lawyers, that are in reality just cardboard cutouts of a system that isn't designed for justice but for crushing people's bodies and souls.

[theclosetedskeleton]

1984 by george orwell save me

[remembertheplunge]

Writing Outside The Lines

November 9, 1986. Sunday

It’s been a nice weekend of big movement. I’ve been rereading diary entries from August to December 1983. I felt like God looking down: interceding, judging, commenting. And, generally being amazed at the graphic changes that occurred in that time span. The month of August started with me writing …right within the lines and margin (of the journal page) (As in life) I just fit perfectly into everybody’s little boxes. A coffin of conformity. Sufficating.

But then TM (Transcendental Meditation), Tristan Rainer (author of The New Diary) and Rainbow Clan punched in a few tiny air holes. And, I could see pin pricks of blue sky and shafts of hazy light strike and rekindled an ember of self love in my breast. And, I bust loose from the lines. And I’ve been moving to resurrect from that grave and airless place of conformity ever since! 

End of this part of the entry.

Notes: 5/15/2024

I’m posting a photo the page from my 11/9/1986 journal entry in which I demonstrate on the page how I went from writing within the lines on the page to busting through and writing outside the lines. This reflected how I was beginning to bust out of the constraints of my life.

From August to December of 1983, I was married to a woman and was trying to live a very straight existence. But, the 11/9/1986 journal entry reveals that massive change was welling up within me during this period. It would result in my coming out at a Sage event in February 1984 and coming out to and leaving my wife inn July-August 1984.

(Sage was an event that lasted several days. At least 100 of us were guided through different ways of expressing our being. I came out for the first time to a group of strangers during one of the Sage sessions.)

When I review former journal entries, I do kind of feel like God. I know how the story turns out. I see the events of the day I wrote about in the journal entry through the trajectory of events since then. But, unlike God, I can’t change what happened in the past.  I can "intercede , judge and comment” in the journal margins in the hope of integrating the past event with the present continuum.

I was 28 in 1983 and 31 in 1986.

Tristan Rainer wrote “The New Diary” in which she broght a novel approach to the journal writing experience. 

I’m not sure what the Rainbow Clan was, but, if I find out from reviewing the ’83 journal I will blog about it.

[destinationtoast]

I'm listening to Julia by Sandra Newman, a retelling of 1984. The audiobook reader is Loo Brealey, and I keep getting distracted thinking about Molly Hooper. <3

[qiacord]

discord is blocked

[aropride]

i need to read more dystopian fiction . i love dystopian fiction so so much

[possessedbydevils]

I need someone to talk to about the books l read, if you read any of these books that l tagged, please send me a message or an ask

[ellieellieoxenfree]

52 weeks, 52 movies: april

yeah whatever i finally got around to it rewatches denoted with *; bold denotes favorites watched.

straight-jacket (usa) — after a gay scandal potentially threatens to end movie star guy stone’s (matt letscher) career, he’s forced to marry an unaware secretary (carrie preston) to keep up appearances, which becomes considerably more difficult after he falls in love for real.

it PAINS me to give this movie a bad review. it really, really does. it has all the ingredients i should like — matt letscher, carrie preston, homosexuality, mid-century american satire — and yet it has all the life and wit of a damp paper towel. letscher appears pained to be in the thing, not so much sleepwalking through the role but actively grimacing through it. carrie preston is usually reliable, but you can see too much of the glue holding her performance together and what should be frothy and campy just comes off as almost embarrassingly try-hard. the chemistry between letscher and adam greer, who plays his communist boyfriend, rick stone, is…well, nonexistent. greer is trying, again, but one person cannot carry a two-person relationship, and stone really isn’t so much of a character as he is a stereotypical hodgepodge of liberal talking points.

straight-jacket was a play first, which shows up in glaringly obvious and detrimental ways — it’s blocked like a play, with stagey sets and shoddy CGI standing in for actual era-appropriate sets. the whole thing feels claustrophobic and limited, and there’s no immersion into the 1950s because the set design only takes us about a quarter of the way there. combining the clumsy, amateurish visuals with characters who spout viewpoints decades ahead of what they should be makes for a jarring experience. (rick, again, is the poster child for this, and i doubt anyone could have salvaged the character.)

it also just doesn’t know what it wants to be tonally. it starts out as fluffy camp, then takes a hard left (ha!) turn into serious social commentary and a shoehorned plea for tolerance and acceptance. rest assured, it does none of these things well, and its preachiness manages to drown out whatever scraps of fun could have potentially been gleaned from the comedy. the dialogue aims for pointed zingers and is instead defanged and limp; the pathos just is creaky and gloopily sentimental. i struggled mightily to figure out who this movie could have been for, and what kind of story it was trying to tell, because i don’t think at any point anyone involved in the production knew, either. it kept trying to take flight, but it’s hard to do that when every level of your story is dead on arrival.

pygmalion (1981) (uk) — linguistics professor henry higgins (robert powell) makes a bet that in six weeks, he can pass eliza doolittle (twiggy), a cockney flower girl, off as a duchess in high society.

the 1938 pygmalion is one of my favorite movies of all time — hiller and howard are lightning in a bottle, and the movie sparkles and crackles and shimmers. this was poised to do the same, because robert powell and twiggy are near and dear to my heart and i would watch both of them read the phone book. (yes, i stand by this. have you seen twiggy in the boy friend? delightful. i adore her.) and i did enjoy it, truly! but not quite as much as i thought i would, which was no fault of either lead. instead, it’s damned slightly by being a faithful adaptation of the stage play, and thus it robs us of some of the more emotionally satisfying scenes contained in other versions. twiggy suffers the short end of the stick here most; she’s a fantastic eliza, but we just don’t see enough of her. when she does get to shine, she utterly nails the role. she starts as a live wire of a girl, chaos and noise, but she transforms into composed steel and ice as she undergoes higgins’ tutelage and begins to realize the magnitude of how he’s used her and how disposable he sees her. i was particularly disappointed that her trumph at the society ball is entirely erased from this version, because it robs us of the power of seeing how effective her transformation has been, but she still takes the limited material she’s given — her confrontation with higgins, which is one of the finest moments in any adaptation — and renders it with quiet, chilling devastation. this eliza is not the hysterical woman-child higgins drags off the streets; this is a woman fully in control of her power and destiny and wise enough to know to keep her anger on a controlled simmer. i loved her restraint here. she doesn’t raise her voice or lash out in anger, but delivers her lines with precise, pointed viciousness.

likewise, when she’s fled the higgins household to stay with his much more agreeable, pleasant mother (helen shingler), she knocks it out of the park. this, unlike straight-jacket, understood the importance of adhering to social norms. eliza here feels like a proper edwardian lady, who understands the roles and limitations placed on her, and she carries herself with a quiet grace and dignity that fully centered the production in its historical context in a way i hadn’t seen to such effect before (even in 1938!).

powell, of course, is magnificent, and he relishes the chance to play higgins. higgins is one of the great roles to me, conniving, brilliant, thoughtless, condescending, full of swagger and bravado. he is an awful man but a great character, and powell inhabits him fully. when he and twiggy spark off one another, they’re delightful together. unfortunately, we just don’t get the chance to see them do it often enough. many of the major bones of the story are intact — the ‘gin was like mother’s milk to her’ line is as screechingly funny as always; the aforementioned post-society ball confrontation twists the knife. but we don’t see much of the actual training and eliza’s struggles to learn; we see higgins and his colleague, pickering (ronald fraser) celebrate their success at the ball, but eliza’s actual achievements remain frustratingly off-screen. it feels very appropriate to shaw to give us an adaptation about a woman coming into her full power and still sideline her in favor of giving us more from the men.

still, frustrating flaws aside, this is a real treat to watch for me — two of my favorite stars in one of my favorite plays. it won’t dethrone the 1938 masterpiece, but still glad i was able to get my hands on it. thanks, random amazon seller in the UK. you’re a real one. cadejo blanco (guatemala) — after her sister goes missing, working-class sarita (karen martínez) infiltrates a gang to figure out what happened to her.

there is a scene late in this movie where a young gangster — much like other members of the gang, most likely in his mid-20s at best — tells the protagonist about a criminal he knew growing up. the man stole vehicles, caused chaos, and terrorized the neighborhood, until the day he was found shot in the middle of the street. his death was unmourned; the cops did nothing to apprehend the shooter. the neighborhood, instead, greeted the news with a profound sense of relief.

that, the gangster tells her, is the fate that he knows waits for him. there is no one who will grieve his own early demise. he has no purpose in life other than to fight for an uncaring boss who will just find another warm body to replace him if and when he’s killed. it is an utterly crushing, tremendously powerful scene. he’s a gangster but he’s also just a boy. he’s too young and gangly to be considered a man yet. he’s still figuring himself and his life out, and he’s horribly aware of his own fragile mortality and the limited amount of time he has left.

and the rest of the movie is a miserable, dragging, tonally inconsistent slog around it. it is over two hours long, for some godforsaken reason, anchored by — i’m sorry, but it’s true — a flat, emotionless lead performance from karen martínez. martínez is admittedly a non-professional actor, so asking her to shoulder basically the entire movie is a tall ask, but she’s not up to the challenge. she has some great moments, such as when she corners the rich boy who keeps her around as a side piece and tells him that he’s going to cover for her while she heads off on her quest to find her sister, or she’ll spill all of his dirty sex secrets to his upper-class friends, but she doesn’t convey the emotional range needed for someone who’s heading into almost-certain death. and sarita faces some truly horrific stuff as her gang infiltration progresses, none of which ever quite lands. not all of this is martínez’ fault, because much of it does lie with the writing/direction/editing/cinematography. there’s not really a sense of urgency or dread that ever comes through. things happen, but that’s…it. i say this with the same tone i would use to say that breakfast happened for me this morning. it was a thing that occurred, without emotion or energy. the plot unfolds, but i never quite felt anything about it. sarita’s sister going missing should fill me with something. the violence (of many stripes) she faces should rouse horror or pity or anger in me. it doesn’t. it’s there. it exists. it just sort of…is.

it’s just boring, is the cardinal sin, which is insane considering the subject matter of the movie. but i kept hovering my mouse over the progress bar and asking how in god’s name i still had another 45 minutes to go. remember when you were in elementary school and each minute felt like it lasted twelve days? that was me with this movie. utter drudgery.

but hey, guatemalan spanish is beautiful, so that’s balm in gilead.

the lady assassin (vietnam) — a kidnapped upper-class girl joins forces with a trio of female assassins masquerading as tavern owners to take revenge on visitors.

this movie might be the dictionary definition of ‘i didn’t say it was good, i said i liked it.’ i cannot in any way defend it as a good production — the plot is nonsensical, with more than a few heavy dollops of fanservice; the fight choreography should credit the wires used as an extra cast member; the characters aren’t exactly rife with personality or understandable motivations beyond ‘kill everyone.’ and yet i fucking loved this movie. fucking adored it. it’s ridiculous, it’s idiotic, and it is a fucking blast. it has no pretensions about what it is, which is 75 minutes of beautiful girls in color-coded fancy dresses killing people, having vaguely homoerotic encounters, and playing hands-free beach volleyball (because why not). it has a melodramatic subplot that is best left discovered by the viewer, but it, like everything else in the movie, is dialed up past 11. it’s deliciously campy, but also, if you let yourself get swept away by the nonsense, it’s also oddly sweet and affecting.

information on the movie is limited. it plays like a wuxia satire, really leaning into the overeating and the extremely dramatic moments, but i don’t know if that was the intention behind it. i know it was a box office smash in vietnam, but is almost unheard of in the west (i ordered my copy from a specialty distributor in the UK for a song), and the few people who have seen it seem more critical than anything else.

these people are stupid and wrong and have no joy in their hearts. i’m an expert and i can thus tell you that this movie, if you open your heart to it and let it take up idiotic residence, will change your life for the better. i’m not really sure what to tell people to sell them on it. either you like hot girls with swords or you don’t. either you like fun or you don’t. either you understand that a movie does not have have legitimate artistic quality to be good, or you’re a buffoon. watch the lady assassin. it’s a good time.

other viewing

stomp! shout! scream! (usa)

mean mums s2 (new zealand)

song of summer (uk)

working girls (usa)

the thirty-nine steps (uk)

the prince and the pauper (1937) (usa)

yes, madam! (hong kong)

tattoo (iran)

who framed roger rabbit (usa)

beverly of graustark (usa)

pride (2014) (uk)

quiet on set: breaking the silence (usa)

super mario bros: the search for princess peach! (japan)

rikky and pete (australia)

naz & maalik (usa)

in person (1935) (usa)

spirit of wonder: miss china’s ring (japan)

weird: the al yankovic story (usa)

lights in the dusk (finland)

sordid lives (usa)

adorables (belgium)

the wind phone (japan)

cartoon all-stars to the rescue (usa)

evil bong (usa)

super troopers* (usa)

utama (bolivia)

dredd (usa)

wings (1966) (russia)

while the city sleeps (usa)

h is for happiness (australia)

dillinger (usa)

dune (1984) (usa)

trópico (guatemala)

breath (2018) (australia)

the divine order (switzerland)

[gothic-chicanery]

This is so nitpicky but tiktok censorship terms are not like 1984 newspeak. Very different goals and while they both have censorship in common, the specific forms and outcomes are very different.

TikTok censorship to me is very much making people acceptable to advertisers which means everything has to be ‘family friendly’ and there can’t be a hint of anything controversial so people self censor.

Newspeak doesn’t have any connotations of palatability politics, it’s more like. As many words as possible are removed so people can’t communicate with any nuance. I saw a post a while back that pointed to the way newspeak functions as more akin to how conservatives collapse gay and trans identities with pedophilia by kinda making it all a blanket “sex crime”

[sweetvoidtheorist]

Winston canonically says he loves O'Brien and Big Brother we love a bisexual icon

[trutletruffle]

so I just finished rereading 1984 and one of the things that stood out to me that I didnt remember quite as much from the first time i read it is the agony of newspeak? like i dont know quite how to put it. but every time it’s mentioned i just get this awful sadness because its so aware of the beauty of language but it has no appreciation for it. its so aware of the way that the language/s you speak change and contribute to how you think and feel and express yourself and the whole concept of newspeak makes this plainly clear yk. but its just so destructive the whole point of this new language is to destroy peoples very capacity to create art, their capacity to be human and its so awful and sad. 

anyways after more thought i dont even know if newspeak should be considered a language? like all languages shape the way you think about things based on what words exist but newspeak is just on whole other level. like all languages have synonyms and superfluous words with different shades of meaning and words that aren’t strictly necessary but allow and contribute to the creation and appreciation of beautiful things but newspeak is created to directly destroy all of this. like this is a language created to dehumanize everyone who speaks it and it’s horrifying.

i dont even know what im getting at anymore languages are so cool and gorgeous and i love useless highly specific words and we shouldnt get rid of them. make more words.

[localatheistchurch]

sometimes I feel like there's no more good books to read. like yes, there are plenty of books in this world and I'll never have the time to read most of them, but the books I pick up are becoming less and less good the more I read. I used to like almost every book I read but now I read only a handful of good books a year and a half of them are rereads. I'm so sad because I genuinely have to force myself to finish a book when I genuinely used to love to read