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From: kelvin@ut-sally.UUCP (Kelvin Thompson)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: _1984_  (spoiler)
Message-ID: <2107@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Jun-85 23:15:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2107
Posted: Fri Jun 14 23:15:38 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Jun-85 00:26:49 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 55



                               _1984_

                          by Kelvin Thompson

 _1984_ is a bad, utterly depressing, anti-humanist movie.  The producer
 of the movie has claimed that at its heart the movie is a love story, but
 in truth it is a relentless attack on the nobility of the human
 condition.
 
 To be sure, the plot of the movie does have the broad outline of a love
 story.  A man, John Hurt (_The_Elephant_Man_, _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_),
 meets a woman, played by an unknown British actress, and they embark on a
 difficult relationship.  Unfortunately, the "difficulty" in their
 relationship is that they live in a futuristic, totalitarian society
 which forbids love.  (It is unfathomable why the movie is entitled
 _1984_, when it is so obviously set in the future.)
 
 Certainly there is nothing wrong with telling a story about forbidden
 love (consider Zeffirelli's _Romeo_and_Juliet_), but _1984_ relegates the
 love story to a secondary status, spending more time depicting the
 dehumanizing influences of the society.  The viewer can take only so many 
 of these scenes -- involving dingy surroundings, tired, gray workers, and
 discussions of the decimation of history and language -- before he gets
 bogged down in a sense of utter despair, hardly the mood a romance is
 supposed to engender.
 
 And all that is before the movie gets *really* depressing.  Eventually
 the lovers are caught and carted off to prison (ironically called the
 "Ministry of Love").  The audience never finds out exactly what happens
 to the woman, but we see all too clearly what Hurt undergoes.  It turns
 out that the authorities don't merely want to make Hurt pay for his "sex
 crime," or to make him publicly repudiate it, they want him to actually
 loathe the love he felt for the woman.  This calls for especially extreme
 torture, and the audience sees every second of it.
 
 These prison scenes also give the writers a chance to really cut loose
 with their anti-humanist, Skinnerian philosophy.  Between tortures Hurt
 and his jailer, the late Richard Burton (_The_Wild_Geese_), talk about
 the society they live in, and Hurt loses every debate. Time and time
 again Hurt raises a point about love or kindness or hope, Burton bats it
 down, and writers choose not to have Hurt raise a counter point. 
 Finally, after a particularly brutal torture (which the viewer is all but
 forced to look away from) Hurt gives in and truly renounces his love for
 the girl.
 
 The final scene removes any remaining doubt that this might be even a
 tragic romance.  The two former lovers, freed after their
 "rehabilitation," meet.  They are distant, indifferent to one another,
 and after trading inanities they go their separate ways.  Finally, in his
 closing lines, Hurt proclaims that his love has shifted to Big Brother,
 the leader of the entirely un-romantic society he lives in.  The final 
 hope for tenderness has received its final kick in the face.