Tyranny and Language; Orwell: 2+2=5. My Interview w/Raoul Peck

And a Substack Live tonight at 7pmET with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio.

Orwell 2+2=5. A Movie for Our Times

If you have not yet seen the movie Orwell 2+2=5, directed by Raoul Peck, you are missing out. Peck worked with the George Orwell Estate and integrates quotations from Orwell’s diary, footage of modern and classic authoritarians in action, and scenes of resistance in a seamless and masterful manner. At a time when war is billed as peace, criminals are lionized as patriots, imperialist conquest is justified as “reunification,” and tyranny presented to us as freedom, the relevance of Orwell’s work is hard to ignore. Peck’s film argues via images for the links between past and present episodes of repression.

Here is the official trailer.

Millions still dwell in tunnels of disinformation, and believe that this “upside-down” world —a world Orwell brought to popular understanding years ago— is reality. Today, as autocrats retain elections and opposition parties, it can be harder to discern the truth behind the simulations, until the autocrat’s corruption and hollowing out of institutions advance to a point where he is weakened, and mass resistance begins.

Peck’s film viscerally conveys the nightmare of living in states where (to quote Peter Pomerantsev), “nothing is true [and thus] everything is possible,” and language, which is one of our primary means of communicating with others, is hollowed out too.

Here is my 2024 essay about the unreliability of language under authoritarian regimes, and why poetry has a place at such times in history.

What Happens to Language When Authoritarianism Takes Hold

So does the visual poetry of films, which are able to communicate emotional truths about humanity and can move us to action in hard times. Peck knows first-hand the toll of tyranny. As a child, he had to flee the dictatorship of “Baby Doc” Duvalier in his native Haiti. His family moved to the Congo, where he then lived under Mobutu Sese Seko. Many of his films dramatize the lasting traumas and scars inflicted by autocracies and other states of institutionalized racism and repression.

Raoul Peck. Credit: Matthew Avignone.

There is a running theme in Orwell: 2+2=5 of how dictatorships are experienced on the body, as in the scene about the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Kashoggi. I asked Peck about in our interview, commenting “you remind or instruct viewers that the subjugation of the individual is not just forcing him to recite lies but a holistic orchestration of the body and mind.”

On that subject, one of the most affecting and devastating sequences in the film is the sound of labored breathing as a backdrop for images of Black LIves Matter protesters. It is the sound of death by police brutality, which was the fate of George Floyd. I asked Peck about his use of sound in the film.

Here is my interview with Peck.

The very partial filmography below testifies to Peck’s commitment to make documentary and feature films that bring to public awareness the political, social and psychological costs of state repression. Orwell: 2+2=5 is part of this work.

Lumumba (Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival 2000); I Am Not Your Negro (Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, Audience Award, Toronto Festival and the Berlinale, BAFTA, and César for Best Documentary); Haitian Corner; Haiti: The Silence of the Dogs; Exterminate All the Brutes (HBO-Arte mini-series, produced won a Peabody Award in 2022.