He is literally in charge of rewriting history. Winston’s job is reviewing old newspapers and altering inconvenient articles to align with the current party orthodoxy. Orwell understood that in dictatorships, the most horrible places have names that are the bland antithesis of their function. We meet Winston (John Hurt), a party functionary who works in the ominously named Ministry of Truth. The novel and film each do an exquisite job of putting society under a microscope and examining how it has allowed itself to degrade into bestial lunacy. It’s truly sickening to see something that, much like 1976’s Network, was seen as nightmarish, broad satire when it was filmed, but feels like simple reality today. Ingsoc party members scream at a giant television during the daily Two Minutes Hate. They are encouraged to watch reverentially at first, as Oceania’s noble workers and soldiers are shown, but then to scream and jeer and shout as footage of their enemies appears. The opening of the film is a brilliantly horrifying demonstration of Orwell’s famous Two Minutes Hate, a political ritual in which the population is made to purge themselves by communally viewing a brief propaganda video each day. When alliances shift, and a former ally becomes an opponent, the official media simply speaks as if the opponent has been the same since time immemorial, and the populace eagerly parrots back the lie. The country exists in a state of perpetual war with either Eurasia (once the Soviet Union) or Eastasia (once China). Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in the hellscape of Oceania, a dystopian Britain existing decades after a far-left socialist revolution brought the Ingsoc party (short for English Socialism, which the film unfortunately does not explain) to absolute power. An Ingsoc party official gives a rousing propaganda speech.
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