Dystopia Now! In ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,' Director Raoul Peck Shows How ‘1984' Author Foresaw Today's Authoritarian Drift — Cannes

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'Special military operation.' 'Department of Government Efficiency.' 'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' 'Alternative facts.'
We live in a time when governments use lexical distortions to manipulate public opinion – the very thing author George Orwell captured so cogently in his dystopian novel 1984, where the futuristic regime adopts 'Newspeak' and other authoritarian techniques to stamp out independent critical thinking.
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The time is ripe then to reexamine a writer who, though he died 75 years ago, foresaw how leaders of today would gaslight their own people to impose their will and squash dissent. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck takes on that task in his new documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, premiering on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.
'A man that died in January 1950, to be that accurate about what is happening today — you better take a second look and try to learn even more from him,' Peck tells Deadline. For his examination of Orwell and his thought, the director drew upon the writer's personal archives.
'The estate allowed me to have access to everything — to published, unpublished [work], private letters, unpublished manuscripts. And that's something, especially in today's world where buying a chapter of a book costs you a fortune,' Peck says. 'It was a gift to be able to have access to everything. It was the same gift I had with James Baldwin' (focus of Peck's acclaimed film I Am Not Your Negro).
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 traces the writer's effort to complete 1984 in the late 1940s as tuberculosis took the last vestiges of his health. He was hospitalized regularly as he worked on the manuscript on the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. The film also dials back to experiences much earlier in Orwell's life that formed his humanistic worldview. In private writings – voiced by actor Damian Lewis – Orwell describes growing up with the ideology common to a Briton of his background (he described himself as 'lower upper-middle class'). He was educated at Eton but instead of following the common path of his classmates to Oxford or Cambridge, he joined the British Imperial Service, working as a colonial police officer in Burma (present-day Myanmar).
'The key to who he became was in Burma. He realized he was there as an imperialist,' Peck observes. 'He was there as a European and doing the worst things a human being can do to normal people — not to combatants, not to communists — to normal people, 'Coolies,' farmers. And he did not like himself. He did not like what he was doing, and he was doing it for the Empire. That was the big break. And he never was able to reconcile that. And he knew he had to keep his critical mind always, no matter who's the boss, no matter who is the king, no matter who's the president, he needs to keep his critical mind.'
He threw his lot in with working people, chronicling life on the lower economic rungs in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s, documenting his experience in Homage to Catalonia (1938).
'The thing that made him interesting to me beside his books, besides his ideas, was the fact that he lived through those things. He wrote from his experience, his own personal experience, not from any intellectual awareness of anything. Not that I'm against that, but there is a sort of credibility that can only be gained from going through those things yourself,' the filmmaker says. 'And this is something he did very frontally, very decisively, and trying to live among the poor, among the disinherited, because that was important to him to feel before he writes, to understand before he can write and to verify what his instinct was. And by the way, he didn't do it from a superior point of view, but he criticized himself as well. He put himself under his own analysis, and he did that very early on.'
Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, but he abhorred the sort of mind control exerted by ostensibly socialist or communist regimes like the USSR and its satellites. Animal Farm, published in 1945 as the Soviet Union was clamping its pincers on Eastern Europe, and 1948 – published at a time when Stalin had drawn the Iron Curtain between East and West – illustrate the moral depravity of the powerful who exert dominance over the powerless. But, as Peck believes, Orwell has wrongly been interpreted as relevant only to an earlier time of Stalinist totalitarianism.
Forcing people to accept that 2 + 2 + 5 (as happens in 1984) – how different is being forcefed the lies of Putin that he unleashed hell on Ukrainian civilians to 'denazify' the country? How different is it from Pres. Trump attempting to rewrite reality by describing the January 6 attack on the U.S. capital as 'a day of love'? Orwell saw, as shown in Peck's documentary, that totalitarian regimes engage in 'continuous alteration of the past.'
'Orwell has been put in a little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,' Peck comments. 'But you hear what he says in the film, authoritarians don't all only happen in faraway countries. It can happen as well in the U.K., in the United States and elsewhere. So, the scope [of the film] was from the get-go very wide. For me, it was not just an anti-Trump or anti-whatever agenda.'
Peck was born in Haiti but as a child he and his family fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to escape the dictatorial regime of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, an authoritarian who enjoyed the support of many successive American governments. That high level hypocrisy – America, the shining beacon of liberty, propping up a dictator – made Peck as acutely sensitive to the abuse of political language as Orwell.
'When Kennedy or Nixon or Johnson, were talking about Haiti, supporting a dictatorship, and the word democracy was in every speech, how could I reconcile that?' he questions. 'You are supporting a guy who has killed thousands and thousands of people, who is keeping his people poor, who is corrupt, where there is torture. So how do you reconcile that? Very early on, I was always suspect of certain words that people were using.'
Ultimately, what Orwell was about is asserting the dignity of individuals, especially the downtrodden, against forces of exploitation, be they economic and/or political. He's as relevant to our times as he was to the mid-20th century.
'When you encounter a thinker like Orwell, and you feel, wow, he gets it. He gets what the 'other' is, he has empathy,' Peck says. 'He looks at everybody as a human being, whether you are poor, rich or Burmese or British or a worker in a kitchen in Paris, he sees you first as a human being. And that's very rare. That's very rare.'
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