"If you want a vision of the future, imagine classrooms of teenagers being made to read Orwell's 1984 forever"
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin.
The debt that Orwell owed to Zamyatin is obvious to anybody who knows the text, but Orwell did write a review of WE, which you can read HERE
WE did get made into a very earnest but quite faithful television film for ZDF in 1982. Here’s the link, which you’ll have to watch on your own Youtube accounts owing to some rather alarming , early 80’s full-frontal nudity. It seems to only have been transmitted once, which is quite surprising as it’s not bad.
Here’s a mystery. A complete film of WE seems to have been made by in Russia by the Armenian Film Director Hamlet Dulyan. According to Wikipedia, “The project was initially announced in 2017. Despite the post-production having been completed, the film's release on 1 December 2022 was cancelled. No new information has been available since then.” There is, at least, a trailer…
…which maybe not all of you can see, depending on where you live. Incidentally, if you search for “WE Film” online, you can easily land up with a fairly recent production about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. If you see Madonna, you’ve gone too far.
Orwell read and reviewed WE in the Tribune in 1946. Link to the review HERE.
One - David Karp.
David Karp’s novel, written thirty years after the Zamyatin and published four years after 1984, is still readily available. Although not as well known as the Orwell book, or even the Zamyatin, it is better written than either.
If our plot summary was a bit on the rambling side, HERE is a more concise one.
David Karp’s earlier novel, “The Brotherhood of Velvet” was made into a surprising good “made for TV” movie, which impressed a teenaged Gav no end…
I think I might have put a clip from this film up before, but it’s well worth your time, anyway.
Other Matters…
We also talked a lot about an Orwell essay called “England, your England”. If you’d like to read it, HERE it is.
One of the drawbacks of making everybody read 1984 in school, (apart from the huge drawback of Keir Starmer instead of Corbyn, that is), is that everybody then falls into the carefully prepared trap of Surveillance Capitalism without even noticing.
This ‘splainer has been carefully edited together to cause epilepsy in Whippets, but it does make a good point and even offer a way out….
Lastly, I suppose I should point out that David Karp is NOT the same David A. Karp, author of “Is it me, or my Meds?” , although you can see how I thought it was, surely?
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