Trollheart

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING! (Yeah, you knew it was coming....)
Interestingly, the phrase is never used in the movie (I can't recall whether or not it crops up in the book, it's so long since I read it), and rather like other well-known utterances linked with films or series --- “Beam me up Scotty”, “Play it again Sam” etc --- these four words, though not used, became synonymous with what is often nowadays seen as draconian oversight by a government on its people. When CCTV cameras were installed in the UK at every major traffic light and other points, the phrase was used. But it's not just that. Other concepts of the movie have also passed into popular parlance, like the infamous Room 101.

In the movie though, Big Brother is watching. Always. He looks out from every viewscreen, benevolent but tyrannical, like a stern father warning his children not to step out of line. I feel that the chances are he does not exist, that his countenance is either an amalgam of personalities and faces, or just simply something made up. Perhaps he does exist as a real person, or did, once. It really doesn't matter: the people think he is real, and their leader, and in the world of the Party that is all that they need. The mere appearance of reality becomes reality itself. As O'Brien explains to Smith, if the Party say he is holding up five fingers when he is holding up four, then he is holding up five. Later, when Smith is rehabilitated, he tells him “The law of gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, it happens.”

The Anti-Sex League is a big part of the effort to destroy the orgasm. Whether or not this is possible is debatable; humans will surely always have the sexual urges they were born with and that have sustained and propogated the race for thousands of years now, but the strongest possible loyalty is to the family and the partner. Many people have written that nothing is stronger than love, but this is in its way not quite true: the reality is that nothing is stronger than sex, which can be amply demonstrated and proved by the amount of men who engage in homosexual sex while incarcerated; men who would never dream of being with another man on the outside, but who cannot resist the primal urges and must satisfy their sexual imperatives any way they can.

So if there is one major obstacle to total loyalty to the Party, it is love, or sex, and the Party intend to do their best to eliminate that obstacle by removing the possibility of orgasm, thus breaking the sexual ties. And yet, would this work? If you could not orgasm, would you still want sex? Surely you would. Orgasm is the height, the achievement, the (excuse the bad pun) climax of sex, but it is not the only reason we have it. If the Party removed the sexual urge completely, then maybe, with everyone sort of androgyns it might work. But men will always be attracted to women (or other men) and vice versa, and it seems that it would be impossible to break that chain.

The Anti-Sex League confuses me though. The Announcer joyously (in her dry, clipped tones which never evince joy but she sounds proud at least) tells us that birth rates are down, but can this be good for the Party? If they want power then surely that should be power over as many people as possible? And if births decline completely, how will they maintain the population? When the current citizens die, who will replace them? Who will worship and obey Big Brother and the Party if there are no descendants of their current slaves? Is the Party not cutting its own throat here?

The effort of androgynising the population have begun already. Everyone wears nondescript grey overalls that are baggy and show no curves or any skin. Everyone is “brother” or “sister”, and expressions are generally dour, listless, uninterested. Defeated. Evidence of this can be seen when Smith first sees Julia and she falls, her arm in a sling. It is completely outside his experience, or else he is too terrified, to go to her assistance, and he only does so very reluctantly and only when she asks. Even then, she quickly shakes him off with gruff thanks and goes on her way. The citizens of Oceania have been indoctrinated to care about nobody and nothing --- not themselves, not their work colleagues, not their friends or their families --- nothing and no-one but the Party should occupy their thoughts. For all the emotion Smith (and Julia) show in that scene he might just as easily be picking up a fallen suitcase or box.

“The Truth is...”
The Truth is what the Party says it is, as we have seen in so many examples now, but none moreso than near the “turning point” of the war against Eurasia (or is it Eastasia? I forget which version we're on), when a suitably horrified commander of the Oceanic forces lists off a catalogue of so-called atrocities that the enemy have perpetrated. There is no evidence of this, no proof, but it serves to give him licence to unleash his troops from the conventional niceties and restrictions of war, the “honour among men”, and allows him to condone, justify and indeed perpetrate every possible atrocity in return, using the age-old cry of “They did it first.”

The chances are that there have been no war crimes committed, but Oceania needs an excuse to up the game, to cut the ties binding them to the normal practice of war, and one would assume, behave in the most animalistic and savage way possible. Nobody back home will blame them, believing the enemy brought it on themselves, and nobody would dare, or even think, to wonder whether what they are being told is the truth. The army hierarchy, direct puppets and representatives of the Party, say it is, so it must be so.

Final Notes:
I find the idea of “Unpeople” both a stroke of genius and unsettling in the extreme. How terrifying, to think that all one's deeds, everything one has written, everything they have achieved can be deleted from the human consciousness so easily. That everyone who ever knew them will profess (for fear of suffering the same fate) that they never met them, never heard of them, and others (mostly dead) will take over their various footnotes in history. As Smith remarks to Julia, we are the dead, indeed.

It also must strike Smith as ironic --- through all the pain and humiliation and fear and desperation as he is tortured and as he faces the horrors of Room 101 --- that someone somewhere is now doing the same job on him as he so casually and thoughtlessly carried out only a short time ago. Faces covered on photographs with other faces, names excised and changed, memories obliterated. There's also no guarantee that the person now fulfilling this task in a tiny cubicle in the Ministry of Truth (perhaps even the one Smith used to occupy) with a bored expression will not him or herself be on the receiving end of this treatment down the line: just another Unperson to be eliminated from the pages of revised history.

Interesting, too, that when Smith orders a bottle of Victory Gin, he almost absently scratches out the face of the “traitor” Party member which, due to some oversight, remains on the label. Despite his own feelings, the duties of his job are so deeply ingrained into his psyche that he automatically becomes anxious that even this remaining trace of an Unperson be destroyed.

I would like to voice a final note on the music in this film. Although a full orchestral score was composed by Dominick Muldowney Virgin opted to use material from one of their own recording artistes, Eurythmics, who had composed their own songs for the movie. As a result, when I saw the original in the cinema, it was prefaced rather jarringly with “Sexcrime (1984)”, a big hit for Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart at the time, but the song does not really suit the overall sombre, dark mood of the movie, with its pop/electronica beats and its synthesised vocoder chorus. It's also placed incongruously before the opening titles, which really makes it look tacked on. Thankfully, the version I used to write this review did not have the song on it, but I remember originally it ruined the setup of the movie for me.

In fact, director Michael Radford was so incensed over the treatment of his score that he withdrew the movie from consideration for the BAFTAs in protest. You can't really blame him: Muldowney's score is far better and really suits the overall tone of the film. But Virgin financed it and as ever, money talks.

AND ISN'T THAT...?
With a very minor role in the movie, almost a non-speaking part, the waiter at the Chestnut Tree Cafe is played by Roger Lloyd Pack, whom we all know better as Trigger from “Only fools and horses”.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018