Orwell: 2+2=5 - An Experiential Doc About How 1984 Became 2025
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B+
Orwell: 2+2=5 is an almost furiously driven, overstuffed documentary about George Orwell, torn between telling the tale of the author himself and making a case for him as a prognosticator of our modern world.
The title, a key point in Orwell’s opus 1984, is a demonstration that the author understood the concept of “gaslighting” even though it would not catch on in the lexicon for decades. A lie, repeated often enough becomes the truth. And if Big Brother insists 2+2=5, then it is.
There is one example of it in our modern world that still sits vividly in my memory weeks after screening Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 at the Toronto International Film Festival. An army general in military-run Myanmar insists in front of the camera that the Rohingya people do not exist, that there is, in fact, no such thing.
This would be news to the U.N. and Human Rights Watch who’ve denounced the treatment of the predominantly Muslim ethnic group as ethnic cleansing, and to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who’ve crossed into Bangladesh.
But in Myanmar, the lie is truth.
Myanmar, the then-Burma, plays a key role in the evolution of ideas that led Orwell to write Animal Farm, and, practically on his deathbed, 1984 - both classic warnings about the danger of authoritarianism and the dehumanization it demands of those who live under it.
Orwell was born and spent his childhood in India, a place where a British middle class family of modest means could live like royalty under the Raj.
But it was his five years as a police officer in British Burma that began his thought processes about racism, colonialism and the importance of strict authority to the powers-that-be.
Peck (of the James Baldwin doc I Am Not Your Negro) juggles dramatized bits (including a gentle lecture about 2+2=5 by Orwell to his young son in a car – “They will try and make you believe that it is five. That’s alright,so long as you understand it is always four.”), with Orwell’s filmic “voice,” provided by actor
Damian Lewis, reciting from diaries and from sections of 1984 and Animal Farm.
But all this is preamble to the tying-together of Orwell’s warning with today’s reality, one unimaginable by the author. Certainly, one of the biggest dangers facing our society is the death of truth. AI, social media, conspiracy theories, etc., means that a carefully researched truth is no better than “truth” made of whole cloth. Anything can be claimed to be a “hoax,” from the Holocaust to vaccines to the moon landings to election results. Meanwhile, privacy has been erased by our digital footprint and the sharing of information, while video cameras dot the urban landscape.
This is where Peck gives free reign to a rapid-fire array of images and snippets of talking heads connecting Orwell’s imaginings and today. Among the former, some compelling scenes from the 1954 and 1984 movie versions of 1984, starring Edmond O’Brien and John Hurt respectively.
From there, it’s pick your war-poison, Ukraine, Gaza, 9/11 and Colin Powell’s famous falsehood at the UN, supposed vial of anthrax in hand, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass-destruction.
It is a barrage of image and ideas that goes by so fast that the filmmaker is able to slip in some subjective notions that can go by unnoticed. In a rapid-fire segment of modern-day “Newspeak,” terms like “collateral damage,” Peck includes, “anti-semitism” as a euphemism for “Protesting the actions of the Israeli state.” This is reductive, and reflects the fact that the truth is often complex (requiring more than one thought on a subject), while untruths tend to be simple and easy to absorb.
Orwell: 2+2=5 is food for thought for sure, practically an all-you-can-eat buffet of thoughts. As a statement, it is all over the map. But as an experiential representation of Orwell’s warnings-come-true, it is worth seeing.
Orwell: 2+2=5. Directed by Raoul Peck. With Damian Lewis. Opens in select theatres, including Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox, Friday, Oct. 3.