Orwell 2+2=5

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Raoul Peck, the director of the acclaimed I Am Not Your Negro (2016), delivers a deeply moving and intellectually sharp account of recent history and the contemporary world, drawing on the life of George Orwell (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) and his most famous—and perhaps most distorted—novel: 1984 (1949).

Science fiction forms the backbone of the film. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, in their audiovisual adaptations, feed a torrent of images drawn from documentary and fiction alike, weaving together dystopia and contemporary barbarism into a sustained essay-film. The multiple adaptations of 1984 for cinema, television, radio, and theater provide the refrains of the symphony of images and sounds orchestrated by Peck, while excerpts from photojournalism and television news cement the cruel face of dystopian fiction surpassed by reality. This constant movement between fiction and documentary, far from disorienting the viewer, sharpens the perception of how closely contemporary barbarism resembles—and is at times indistinguishable from—the dystopian imagination.

One of the film’s most intellectually provocative moves is its treatment of Orwell’s “Newspeak” as a heuristic tool rather than a literary trope or poetic license. This is epistemologically delicate terrain. There is no scholarly consensus on the extent to which natural language decisively shapes the political organization of human societies, notwithstanding the findings of sociolinguistics and structuralist semiology—including Barthes’s own formulation of the subject who speaks or is “spoken” about by discourses that precede their own existence. What the film presents, particularly in its final third, is essentially a catalog of euphemisms: a “stimulus package” as cover for bailing out financial criminals and a “military operation” as a sanitized label for territorial invasion. These are real and important examples. But the film risks conflating the existence of euphemism with the more radical—and unproven—claim that language itself restructures political reality, thereby naturalizing Orwell’s fictional device as empirical diagnosis. The argument would be stronger, and more faithful to the complexity of the subject, if it engaged with the limits of its own linguistic determinism.

Orwell 2+2=5 is one more essay-film that demonstrates—happily or otherwise—the growing prominence of science fiction in the contemporary political agenda and the genre’s susceptibility to both capitalist co-opting and genuine critical subversion, as in Orwell’s own hands. But the film could have been even more powerful had it resisted a certain relativism endemic to the present moment—most visibly expressed in the unfortunate “horseshoe theory,” the thesis that the extremes of political Left and Right ultimately converge. They do not, and Orwell himself recognized this at key moments in his life and work.

The film handles with considerable skill, drawing on Orwell’s writings and his two most notorious novels (Animal Farm and 1984), the exposure of Western crimes. Footage of Nazi SS officers being executed by the Red Army in the aftermath of the Babi Yar massacre is among the film’s most harrowing moments. Yet for each crime committed by Western fascist leaders and the film scores a significant point in showing that even within democracies the “serpent’s egg” can hatch—Peck inserts references to non-Western governments: Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Donald Trump ultimately emerges as the quintessence of Orwellian evil. But none of these governments are alike or straightforwardly comparable, and leveling them as equivalent distorts more than it illuminates.

The film’s predominantly Western vantage point—acknowledged in some of Orwell’s own recorded comments reproduced by Peck—becomes its most visible limitation. A lone image of Xi Jinping at a military parade floats without context or commentary; one is reminded of Chris Marker’s observation in Letter from Siberia (1958) that a cinematic image is inseparable from its context or voiceover. In this light, certain silences become difficult to ignore: Hiroshima and Nagasaki—unparalleled in the history of mass destruction—go unmentioned. The storming of Brazil’s Praça dos Três Poderes on January 8, 2023—strikingly similar to the Capitol insurrection that features prominently in the film—is also absent. The parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff (2016) and the forced removal of President Evo Morales in Bolivia (2019) receive no mention. Nor does MINUSTAH’s role in Haiti, a significant omission for a filmmaker who is himself Haitian and served as his country’s Minister of Culture. The film does make one pointed and welcome gesture: the inclusion of Brazil’s Marinho media dynasty among the moguls and tech billionaires constituting the architecture of twenty-first-century authoritarianism.

Alfredo Suppia is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil, where he teaches Brazilian cinema, scriptwriting, film theory, and science fiction film for both undergraduate and graduate students. He is the author of books such as Brazilian Science Fiction Film: A Critical History (NYC: SUNY Press, 2024), and Atmosfera Rarefeita: A Ficção Científica no Cinema Brasileiro (São Paulo: Devir, 2013), in addition to numerous articles on Latin-American cinemas, world cinemas, and world science fiction cinemas.