1984, not the fun one with Gremlins and Van Halen. 1984 as in the classic piece of literature from the 50s. Unfortunately what is old is new again and the dystopian world of 1984 is once again relevant thanks to Donald Trump everyone else.

We read the book as millennials which I think is important to remember. We’ve grown up with touch screens, wireless communication, and an invisible data cloud, everything groundbreaking in the past 17 years we’ve been able to accept without second thought simply because we know nothing else. Those not in this bubble of sweet ignorance however, have more context. They have seen drastic changes in how the world works, but even more importantly they have seen how quickly these changes can occur. It is a haunting thought that our world as we know it could end with the push of one single huge button, and we could one day find ourselves under the total control of 🍑, or someone even worse. What we need is someone to stand against him and unify those who still want the earth to exist after the year of the dotard. What we need is to lock her up.

*End Of Tangent*

After Reading 1984 we had to create a cut out paper representation of an assigned character. Our (Teva, Tom, and I) character was Emmanuel Goldstein. We had to capture the traits of our character as well as their role in the book using symbolism and visual metaphors. It was a little tricky to represent Goldstein in a paper cut-out because he represents different things to different people seeing as how he is not definitely a real person. This was made slightly easier when we wrote a formulaic poem in his honour.

 

Emmanuel

Hideous, grinding, venomous, perverse

Brother of the rebellion

Love of speech, thought and the press

Who feels anger, hysterical and betrayed

Who needs attention, saboteurs and spies

Who fears the thought police, the party and big brother

Who gives hatred, inspiration and honesty

Who would like to see freedom of speech, thought, and assembly

Resident of the telescreen

Goldstein

 

We decided to show the following sides of Goldstein as they are what we decided were the most important;

Goldstein is a rebel, “He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party”(chapter 1). We tried to bring across the rebel and traitor in him in three ways, through the snake around his neck, the clenched fist of rebellion and his book “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical collectivism”. His appearance on the two minutes of hate are also an important part of his persona. Goldstein is described as a jarring figure, his voice was like “some monstrous machine running without oil”(chapter 1), discordant and ugly, and his face “somehow inherently despicable”(chapter 1). To bring across the two minutes of hate we put a clock on his chest set to 11:00, for his voice we cut out disfigured music notes and for his face we made ugly and angry eyebrows. Despite his role as a rebel it is suggested that Goldstein is just a fictional character created by “The Party” to control the population of Oceana and even if he is not their creation, they use him to further their own goals and plan on making sure “Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever”(part 3 chapter 3). In an effort to show his servitude and lack of control, we glued on a ball and chain around his ankle and edited his brain in a cage.

After reading 1984 and studying the idea of a dystopia through discussing and synthesizing other texts I can say that I’m glad the world didn’t fall to communism. However I was still left with a question about the idea of a dystopia. What is it called when someone from the outside looking in, interprets a society as a dystopia when someone on the inside sees it as a utopia? Ms. Willemse answered this with the clever comparison to a cult, where the people on the inside don’t realize they are in a cult. This really helped create the image in my head that I used to answer my question. Anyway, thank goodness Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl Ad was right 😀…

…😳

 

 

 

 

posted from my iPad