Analysis and reflections of the 1984 novel
The film "1984" portrays a society where the State is imposed on all social levels, interfering in history people and their past, ending by developing a new language, in addition to oppressing and torturing people who rebel against the regime. Apart from that, the constant surveillance of the "Big Brother", imposed by the party (Ingsoc), in which no one escapes their power and omnipresence. The story is portrayed in Oceania, continent dominated by fear and repression against those who want to challenge the power of the regime. One of the axes of your political system is your famous motto:
- War is peace
- freedom is Slavery
- The ignorance is the force
The State was divided into four ministries: Ministry of Truth, which was dedicated to the news, education, entertainment and the artistic field; The Ministry of Love, which was responsible for maintaining the law and order; The Ministry of Abundance that corresponded to economic matters; And finally the Ministry of Peace, which was responsible for war and defense matters.
The greatest enemy of the state was Goldstein character portrayed during “The two minutes of hate, at the beginning of history. This was one of the founders of the party, but became a traitor when breaking with the rules, being sentenced to death, fled and founded the Brotherhood, an organized body of rebels committed to the destruction of the INGSOC party and its structures. Like Big Brother, it is very likely that Goldstein does not exist as a real person, but that he is a propaganda tool used by the party to cause shock and fear in citizens. Goldstein works as a threatening but poorly defined monster that the party uses to keep citizens online and avoid rebellion.
In the movie, the main character Winston Smith begins to question the regime, as well as his actions. Winston is part of the Ministry of Truth, his work is to rewrite the historical facts so that the documents are written according to what the party preaches, inquiring data to manipulate the public. It is important to keep in mind that, in a scene, Winston states: ‘Lie and deny the truth. ‘There is truth and there are non-truths’, a phrase written by Winston in his secret newspaper. When people question these documents, it incurs the crime against thought, being the punishment applied by the thought police, which eliminates the person, since the crime against thought is synonymous with death. Another control device was the innúmeras "telepallas", which allowed people to receive news transmissions always reporting economic growth, decrease in mortality, decrease in diseases, everything that was of interest to the news government. These devices also served to monitor people 24 hours a day in order to monitor private life.
The climax of history occurs when Winston meets Julia, a woman in a good mood who has the same questioning spirit, who reveals, with enough discretion, otherwise she would be arrested, that she possesses feelings for him. Both fall in love, something that is forbidden, seen that Winston was already married. As the relationship was developing, both ask for a transfer of their respective jobs and from there they manage to work in the same sector together.
Love is treated as something that has no value, it is treated as something bad, seen that the party in this sense ceases to be the "center of the universe" of the individual. A couple, when preparing documents for a wedding, cannot demonstrate any expression of. Marriage is an act only to generate children seen that sex was a mislead, promiscuous for the party. After a period, the thought police discover that Winston and Julia have an affective relationship, then they are imprisoned and after several torture and diverse pressures both are denounced that they had questions and a plan to rebel against the party.
This "social architecture" for Foucault (1980), is executed by disciplinary power, which controls individuals through the surveillance of their behaviors, through the modulation of speeches and interference in private life. In a disciplinary society, we are puppets of the oppression of established power, which manages us according to their political conveniences.
It is also important to reflect that, in this society, all are monitored by a great omniscient look, the panoptic, is represented by the Big Brother, who does not lose any detail of the actions of individuals. In this system, there was not even the word ‘privacy’, since all personal information was considered public information. This is the purest and also the control exercised by a disciplinary society, which has to regulate the action of the people, determining patterns of satisfaction and modulating the behavior that social mass must follow. The organizers of this device believe that by imposing this great system of surveillance of individual actions, the main social themes that could put the entire system at risk would be definitely prohibited and would be outside the social field.
The analysis of power relations and their reproduction and legitimation mechanisms in ‘1984” led me to consider that power relations are imposed in different fields of human life, from family to relationships such as work, etc. In this work two types of power relationship are exposed: the subtle and the invasive. I refer to invasive power relations that rebuke dissonant speeches, applying punishments in a physical and abrupt way. These are the institutions mentioned in the category ‘Institutions for the repression of dissonant speeches’. In the work these institutions are responsible for the most ‘graphics” scenes on the action of the thought police, and contribute to the vision of power as a physical / military force.
Leave feedback