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From: cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re: _1984_  (spoiler)
Message-ID: <304@kontron.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Jun-85 20:36:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: kontron.304
Posted: Fri Jun 28 20:36:20 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Jun-85 00:28:49 EDT
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Organization: Kontron Electronics, Irvine, CA
Lines: 42

> 
> 
>                  _1984_
> 
>            The book vs. the film
> 
> 
> 
>      The film _1984_ has an unfortunate difference in emphasis from the book.
> Orwell stressed the intellectual brutality of IngSoc and its language,
> how the main character fought that brutality by simply (and illegally) main-
> taining his diary, and through that diary the integrity of his own mind.  
> There are strong hints throughout the book that the affair with the girl 
> was set up merely to destroy his capacity to figure out when he was being
> lied to.  (It worked.)
>       The film, on the other hand, stresses the physical and psychological
> brutality of of the system.  They won't let him shave or make love.  They
> torture him because he asks questions and thinks for himself.  The film is
> very true to the book in many details, but what's left out is Orwell's 
> story of a man struggling to articulate his own ideas while being bombarded
> with flashy rhetoric intended to dupe him otherwise.

I agree there is a difference in emphasis between book and movie --- I
think because it is much easier to show physical and psychological brutality
in film than to explore the intellectual destruction.

>       I came away from the book convinced that Madison Avenue was just a
> candy-coated version of IngSoc. I came away from the movie relieved that 
> I'd never been tortured here in wonderful democratic America.  
> 

I think you trivialize the nature of Newspeak when you compare it to 
advertising.

If the only relief you felt after the movie was that you'd never been 
tortued, I think you may have missed something in the depiction of how
boring and dull life under IngSoc was.

And your apparent sarcasm "wonderful democratic America" suggests that you
need to spend more time studying totalitarian regiemes around the world.

>                                                   Cheryl Stewart