Contunuing
our series on SF from classic British TV. After looking at Nigel
Kneale and Rudolph Cartier's work on the pioneering BBC TV SF series
'Quatermass',
we shift to
their adaptation of 'Nineteen Eight-Four'
You
could be forgiven for regarding Kneale and Cartier’s choice of
follow-up to the successful 'Quatermass Experiment’ as
an eccentric one. While much of the early part of George Orwell’s
classic dystopian novel ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’
is given over to a man writing a diary, this later develops into
scenes of him reading a book. It’s central question is not whether
the totalitarian regime will catch dissident
Winston Smith, which is rather assumed to be a foregone conclusion,
but whether it can get inside his head and make him love Big Brother.
As the old saying goes, you can’t photograph thought. So how do you
dramatise thoughtcrime?
In
fact the BBC had bought the rights to the book very shortly after
publication, and Kneale and Cartier had quite distinct advantages
over other adaptors. Though working a good six years after the
novel’s publication (in 1954), they perhaps found it easier to
reproduce the spirit of the book than the later versions. The Jewish
Cartier had to flee his native Austria after the Nazi take-over, and
lost family members to the Holocaust. Which, somewhat needless to say, might well have
sharpened his feelings about totaliarianism. However, despite this
dramatic sequence of events, it would have been more his later
experiences in Britain that informed this adaptation.
Though
the novel takes place in a scenario of perpetual war, Orwell wrote it
after hostilities were over. And, like many others during theat
period, he had become convinced that it had stratified the possible
outcomes for history – into socialism versus totalitarianism. Hence
his book is still steeped in ration-book austerity, the smell of
boiled cabbage and ‘careless-talk’ style paranoia. (Aspects of it
now seem dated to us, such as the Anti Sex League. They stopped
trying to censor sex a long time ago. In fact nowadays it’s their
favoured ruse to try and sell us shit.) Kneale, and to a lesser
extent Cartier, would have been similarly steeped in such a spirit.
Rationing, for example, did not end until shortly before the
programme was broadcast.
Added
to which, they perhaps had the advantage of irony. Orwell had based
Smith’s work at the Ministry of Truth on his own experiences at the
BBC, and prophesised the widespread adoption of TV (or ‘televisor
screens’). Producing an adaptation not just for
the BBC but on television therefore gives
proceedings both an edge and a fillip. (It’s perhaps a peculiarity
of British society that such apparent contradictions empower artworks
as often as they emasculate them. As cultural commentator Martin Barker has argued, the best
children’s comics of this era were produced for the most
conservative publisher – DC Thompson.)
Perhaps
more importantly, television of this time was by necessity ‘talky’.
Though the programme begins with one matte painting of futuristic
horror, any attempts to ‘sex up’ this cautionary tale would have
run into an intractable Anti Sex League of budgetary constraint. If
Orwell wrote long passages of conversation to explain the concept of
‘newspeak’, that’s exactly what is put up on the screen.
Admittedly,
the sheer interiority of the book still causes problems. There’s an
early point where Smith joins in a workplace chant of “we love Big
Brother.” His thought voice then gets overdubbed – “I hate Big
Brother.” You can see what they’re trying to
convey, the way our own thoughts can take us by surprise. But it
feels clumsy, even if we’re to accept that this is the first time
Smith ever thought such a thing. Similarly, if typically for the era,
the acting frequently veers to the melodramatic.
Nevertheless,
the adaptation commendably displays both a feeling for and
faithfulness to Orwell’s book. It may well be the best filmic
representation of the book and certainly eclipses Michael Radford’s version (released, with typically limpid
literal-mindedness, in 1984).
Of
course Kneale is too smart a writer to attempt to literally hold up a
book before a camera. Though I last read the book a long time ago, I
was still struck by a number of large and small divergences. Take for
example the scene where Smith is called to his neighbours’ flat to
fix the sink, which is used to demonstrate the party’s effect upon
the young. In the book he is challenged by the son with a toy pistol.
Told at school to watch out for spies the children are now
playing at this, using it as an outlet for their
bullying instincts. (“Like the gambolling of tiger cubs who will
soon grow into man-eaters.”) In the TV version they are led by the
daughter who is in earnest in challenging Smith.
Like Abigail in 'The Crucible' she is old and
smart enough to have worked out that such claims give her power, that
adults can be taken away merely on her word.
This
also places a more sinister twist upon a later scene where she
denounces her father. From the book we assume he must be ‘guilty’
of his thought-crime, in this version it’s more than likely she set
him up. But this altered version is most likely to be in itself an
adaptation, taken from a very similar scene in Brecht’s ’Fear
and Misery in The Third Reich.’ (Cartier would go on to
adapt Brecht’s ’Mother Courage’ in 1959.)
However,
the deeper and more problematic alterations are to the political
aspects of the book. Though, as in the book, the
‘counter-revolutionary’ Goldstein is depicted as resembling
Trotsky, the adaptation’s main approach to the politics is to leave
them out. As in the book, this tension is conveyed through Smith’s
relationship with Julia. While Smith sees their affair as a
springboard towards political rebellion, Julia sees it as
their rebellion – they love each other and not Big Brother, and
that is enough. (It would be interesting to know how, with
homosexuality then still illegal, a contemporary gay audience
responded to their clandestine affair. Smith’s description of his
joyless, businesslike marriage sounds almost like a ‘beard’,
while Julia’s ability to “tell” deviance equates to ‘gaydar’.)
Orwell’s
own stance could be said to be ambiguous, implicitly siding with
Smith’s political yearnings but then making his denouncing of Julia
into his breaking point. But the adaptation almost explicitly
suggests that Smith’s notions of rebellion are chimerical, and that
Julia is right in her first instinct to shun contact with the
underground.
It’s
reminiscent of another Julia from contemporary fiction. In Waugh’s
’Brideshead Revisited’ (1945), Julia Flyte
breaks off an affair with Charles Ryder because it would be “ a
rival good to God’s”. Things are merely inverted here, for
this Julia, for here that is the precise reason
for going ahead. In Kneale and Cartier’s hands, ’Nineteen
Eighty-Four’ becomes almost a secularised theological
story, all about their love versus the love for Big Brother. Kneale
and Cartier have not done anything so crass as to turn the book into
a love story with a political background. But they have set up a
story which counterposes love against politics, rather than one
politics against another. Love ceases to be a form
of freedom buts something paramount, and their affair holds the stage
to itself.
There
are a number of factors which could have led to this. One of these is
the already-discussed interiority of Orwell’s novel. Goldstein’s
book, for example, is quoted from only scantly and becomes more a
totem than a source of political information, while Smith’s diaries
are collapsed into the four words “I hate Big Brother”. The love
story was simply easier to dramatise, a more attractive target.
Another
might be the six years that passed between book and adaptation, in
which a newly forged post-war consensus appeared to make Orwell’s
political predictions obsolete. (We got neither the predicted fully
fledged totalitarianism nor socialism but, in a very British fudge,
bits of both.) But ultimately, you can’t help but reflect that
Kneale was a less political writer than Orwell and was consequently
less engaged by the political themes.
Does
this matter? In one sense, no. Kneale is free to adapt the work as he
sees fit, which includes shaping it to his sympathies. (As a fan of
Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’, which borrows highly liberally
from Orwell's original, I could hardly claim otherwise!) But, in
another, yes. In an incident both famous and infamous, a group of
right-wing MPs submitted a Commons motion effectively condemning the
BBC for broadcasting such a programme. (Though, in a piece generally suggesting the show's controversy to have been overstated, Oliver Wake debunks any suggestion this motion
ever reached debate stage.) Less well known, if admittedly covered by Wikipedia, is that amendments and counter-motions were
drafted to defend broadcast, which included the following: "many
of the inhuman practices depicted in the play ’Nineteen
Eighty-Four’ are already in common use under totalitarian régimes.”
Like
the saying goes, with friends like these... As
mentioned when covering Atilla the Stockbroker's song 'Down On Airstrip One', written on the cusp of that auspicious year,
Orwell had gone from prophet to hostage. Perhaps it even started with
that very motion. If he hadn't deigned to write the book the British
establishment wanted him to, it just needed reflecting in their
distorting mirror. Fear what's over there coming over here! Pay no
attention to that little man behind the curtain...
Of
course, on a prosaic level, the counter-motion's words are
correct. But they could not be further removed
from Orwell’s purpose, which was to demonstrate
how easily Britain could slide down such a road –
how far, in many ways, it was already along it. Though Big Brother
himself may resemble Stalin, adding to the antipathy between Orwell
and Stalinists, the book is quite explicitly located in a Britain
locked in with an American superpower. So thickly is the book steeped
in Britishness, that even the most cloth-eared adaptations tend to
retain this setting. This version even starts with the description of
“one man’s alarmed vision of the future, which with dangerous
ease might be brought about”.
(For
that reason I would half-seriously suggest that the adaptations most
true in spirit is the 1979 Dead Kennedys track 'California Uber Alles', which uses
collage-like black humour to insert Orwell's dystopia into their
contemporary California, where “the suede denim secret police...
come for your uncool niece”.)
But
that afore-mentioned opening matte painting shows the pyramid-like
Ministry of Truth towering over familiar London landmarks such as Big
Ben. Perhaps the problem is partly hindsight becoming a slippery
slope. It’s impossible for us now not to see in it the germ of
Dalek spaceships in Trafalgar Square, and all those so-familiar
images of alien invasion. By sidelining Orwell’s politics, and
centering the theology-of-love question, Kneale and Cartier have left
the door open to such readings. This is unfortunately the most common
way for the book to be read today, which in short is to
mis-read it.
However,
despite that serious but single failing, ’Nineteen
Eighty-Four’ is a compelling and effective piece of drama
which is both more effective and far more faithful to Orwell’s
vision than most subsequent versions. It's doubleplusgood!
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