LITERATURE THROUGH CINEMA

 

In his 1949 anti-utopian novel, 1984, George Orwell coined the word 'newspeak'. Newspeak was a language favored by Big Brother's minions in the fictional totalitarian state of Orwell and the words of Orwell, "designed to diminish the range of thought." Newspeak was characterized by the elimination or alteration of certain words, the substitution of one word for another, the interchangeability of parts of speech, and the development of words for political purposes. To refer to misleading or deceptive bureaucratic jargon, the word has caught on in general use.

Orwell was sure that the decline of a language had political and economic reasons. He presumed that the languages of countries under dictatorships, such as the Soviet Union or Germany, had deteriorated under their respective regimes. Orwell created Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, to illustrate the idea that language corrupts thought. Without a word for freedom, freedom cannot exist. Orwell explains the syntactical arrangement and the etymology of the Newspeak. Newspeak removes words that represent opposing concepts. In so doing, Newspeak eliminates "unnecessary" words, and promotes a narrowing of thought. The idea behind Newspeak is that, as language must become less expressive, the mind is more easily controlled. The government that creates the language and mandates how it is used can control the minds of citizens.

 

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 2 VERSIONS (1956-1984)

The movie 1984 is based on the novel written by George Orwell. Both two movies start the same and continue the same but with some little detail differences. The first movie shows that everything started after the nuclear bomb, but the second version shows that everything started after World War 3. First of all the characters are way different, both from the second version and the novel. O’Brien and Goldstein are renamed as O’Conner and Calidor. The other difference is, in the first version Winston looks more brave and determined, but in the second version Julia was braver and Winston was the opposite of her. In the first version, Julia seems more cowardly and leaves the decisions to Winston, just like the opposite of the second version. And their love is shown differently. In the first version, Winston and Julia share only love, but in the second version, they share strong sexual feelings and passion. Also, torture scenes are not shown in the second version. In the first version, we can barely see the torture scenes, and after a few sessions of torture, Winston accepts everything easily. For the whole movie, Winston looks sane and healthy, even after being tortured. But in the second version, Winston always looks anxious, he doesn’t seem like he’s alive. And also we see the torture scenes for minutes. He suffers and after a long time he accepts what he has been told, but he doesn’t look more alive after all. His body can’t take all that torture, he can even pull his teeth out easily. We can see that psychological pressure on Winston. The second version is darker and shows like there’s actually. And the main differences are the ending scenes. In the last minutes of the first version, they show America as it is now and nothing happened, and the voice narrator says ‘’This then the story of the future, it could be the story of our children if we fail to preserve their heritage of freedom’’. This movie only shows us what the future could be if we don’t pay attention to what we saw in the movie, with ‘’didactic’’ language. The first version doesn’t stick to the novel. But the second version is more stick to the novel, the ending scene either. We see people who are against The Brothers are ‘’cured’’ and zombified. The dystopic world is continuous and shown as real.