Thoughts: 1984
Posted: 2025-05-12
An assortment of random thoughts I had regarding the book 1984 by George Orwell.
Is there something wrong with me if I think the torture part is the most interesting?
The book struck me as extremely bland and unimaginative.
Jules Verne could imagine us shooting people to the moon with a cannon in 1865; but all Orwell, in 1948, could imagine happening in 1984 was basically 1948 stuff but with bad tobacco and bad alcohol.
Take the helicopter thing for example. A helicopter, flying out your window. Getting close enough to see inside. Seriously? Those are some damn amazing pilots then, able to fly so low, navigating apartment complexes without hitting a single thing.
Let's rework this. How does a huge chopper fly between buildings? It's a tiny chopper. How do people fit inside then? They don't. They control the tiny chopper from the ground. If there is no one inside, how do we spy on people? Attach a camera to the tiny chopper.
Congratulations, you just imagined up a drone.
All we did was ask ourselves simple questions with simple answers. You see, this is not the hard part. The hardest question to answer is, "how do I portray totalitarian state surveillance?" Orwell answered it with "have helicopters fly out your window." That is a decent answer. Now go a couple steps further and ask yourself the three questions I asked earlier. No, he didn't do it, resulting in a half-assed comedic chopper.
You might say, "why are you so preoccupied with tiny details? You're missing the point of the book!" What's the point of the book? The message? You can condense it into a single slogan, "totalitarianism bad." You can write an essay. But this is a book. You're trying to craft a world that looks real. The world needs believable details to make it feel lived-in. This does not look real. The author described Winston's daily life pretty much, but for the vast majority of the people, the proles, we hardly get anything from their perspective aside from Winston's own remarks, which, although can be taken as the author passing true information to us through him, paints them as collectively stupid and irrelevant. This is the farthest thing from a believable world. I cannot imagine anything similar happening in real life. So what's the point of warning us away from it?
Winston is not likeable at all. He is a real fucking loser who fantasizes about beating and raping women. I can't root for him against the regime like that.
Room 101. The most horrible place. Where they torture you into complete submission for real. Where they… dump a cageful of rats on your face. Look, I know it's supposed to be your worst fear. But imagine a grown-ass man whose greatest fear, the thing he fears more than anything else, more than fear itself, more than losing Julia… is… rats. Winston can't be real. Let's laugh at him. Call it the two-min humiliation.
Say my worst fear is, uh… eldritch horror. Or missing out. FOMO. What are they gonna do to me?
Also what's wrong with clocks striking thirteen? Everyone should be using 24hr clocks. Tofu demands it.
It also reminded me of that New Concept English story where a clock was broken and this guy tried to fix it, but made it strike thirteen at one o'clock instead.
It bothered me so much that Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv all had 3 syllables, while Miniplenty had 4. He couldn't have went like, "Minimuch" or something?
An aside: since it's a book, there's no pronunciation provided, but I can't help imagining the stressed syllable to be the last one, e.g. mi-ni-TRUE. Gives it Uighur vibes. I've yet to listen to an audiobook or something to see how other people pronounce it.
It also bothered me a lot that "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" isn't ordered correctly. The society has war, slavery, and ignorance, and they want you to think you have peace, freedom, and strength; so it should've been "slavery is freedom." Again, it makes the book look really lazy. Because it fucking is.
The two-min hate is really healthy, actually. It lets off your stress in a harmless way by directing your frustration towards someone you'd never meet, instead of your wife and kids. Gives you a fresh start to the day, and wakes you up. I'd love to yell at Vriska for two minutes every morning; if only everyone else would also be doing it with me so I wouldn't look like a lone idiot.
Also the infodumping. Pages upon pages of infodumping where it's literally the contents of a book Winston is reading. Just go write an essay, please, at least then no one would've convinced me to read this lame excuse of a book.