The Secret Agent and Orwell
If you're not fond of the sight of blood, you might think twice about seeing “The Secret Agent.”
Blood is the glue trying together the chapters of this Brazilian political thriller just nominated for four Academy Awards after winning the best-actor Golden Globe for Wagner Moura.
Blood is both symbol and metaphor … not to mention literal, as gallons of the stuff flow through the fast-paced action. It comes from numerous donors, including one gnarly shark. Sharks, and the movie “Jaws,” are another recurrent theme for writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho.
Marcelo Alves (Moura) is not a secret agent. Instead, he is a one-time university professor forced underground by Brazil's military dictatorship of the 1970s after defying a ruthless industrialist trying to appropriate one of his patents.
Now Marcelo is living in limbo in the city of Recife at carnaval time, hiding under an assumed identity in a halfway house for leftist enemies of the state, awaiting forged documents so he and his young son can flee the country.
So rather than a badge of James Bond-style prowess, “Secret Agent” is, instead, a label bestowed on him by the authoritarian regime. A label, like illegal alien. Or domestic terrorist. Or a very nasty person …
Filmmaker Filho paints the screen with washed-out primary colors and other details of '70s culture. Marcelo (that's no longer his name) drives a rickety yellow VW bug through streets teeming with revelers in front of gaudy storefronts. The line blurs between mardi gras hedonism and the frightened vigilance and other sorts of paranoia pervading life 24/7.
Bullying oppression goes hand-in-hand with wall-to-wall corruption. The hired hitmen on Marcelo's trail are in cahoots with – or no different from – the father-and-sons goons running the police force. The journalists entrusted with reporting “the news” have to resort to coded urban legends like “the hairy leg,” a disembodied appendage that attacks LGBT+ lovers in public parks, rather than reporting the actual police brutality that leaves its victims in hospitals and morgues.
Moura's performance spans the broadest range of emotions, from loving father and husband to an Everyman caught in a Kafkaesque political nightmare. Writer-director Filho has also received his share of awards beginning at Cannes, not just for the detail of this period piece, but for viscerally sharing the pit-of-the-stomach terror of living under an authoritarian dictatorship.
Audiences elsewhere in the world, like those in his native Brazil, are familiar with the feeling.
In the U.S., it's still a new sensation.
Authoritarian rule also lurks in the shadows cast by Raould Peck's impressionistic documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5.”
Assembled from diaries and letters of the English author known as George Orwell, filmmaker Peck mixes in passages from the author's short but world-changing collection of writings, primarily “Animal House” and “1984,” in written passages and film adaptations.
Far more startling are the news clips shot more than a half-century after the author's death in 1950, proving how accurate – and terrifying – his vision would become.
Arthur Blair, the man who would assume the pen name George Orwell, was born in 1903 and died of tuberculosis 46 years later. Son of a civil servant, he developed an envious contempt for Britain's upper class, and later fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco.
Although he did a stint writing propaganda for the BBC during World War II, he felt that creating literature was his higher calling … and his curse.
The portrait that emerges from Peck's artsy, dreamy, almost stream-of-consciousness script isn't of a happy man. But biographical details hardly matter to Orwell's impact, recognized by the fact that the word Orwellian has existed in the dictionary since the 1950s, and gains new meaning with each passing day.
People of a certain age first encountered Orwell in high school where his novels were frequently part of the curriculum. Their theme was the perils of authoritarianism, whether looked at satirically in “Animal Farm” or as a chilling warning in “1984.”
Our adolescent minds could grasp the dangers in the slogan, “Big Brother is Watching.” We assumed Big Brother was a creation of force and power. What we couldn't grasp was that he might possess a psyche, as twisted as a pretzel. We weren't ready yet for Orwell's insights into the workings of the mind, and how minds can be manipulated.
It happens through crimes against language.
There's no such thing as absolute truth, but language has to pretend there is … and that it's the path to get us there.
Words are the way we make sense of what we see. And what we think.
But when words are not used to pursue the truth, they can be as lethal as any weapon.
George Orwell revealed the mechanics of doublespeak, the way phrases can belie the words they're made of: “War is Peace” “Freedom is Slavery.” “Ignorance is Strength.” 2+2=5.
History isn't something to be learned, but rather something to be created anew, to justify whatever Big Brother is doing at the moment.
When Big Brother has no belief or use for “the truth” beyond fulfilling his infantile desires, a big lie is no different from a small one.
It's all lies.
As newsreel footage in “Orwell” illustrates, dictators around the world have embraced these methods for decades. America's leader is the latecomer to the party, frantically making up for lost time.
CNN's Erin Burnett reported Friday that the administration didn't want weather forecasters to use the word “ice” in connection with the winter storm blanketing the country.
Many of us assumed that authoritarianism is just unbridled power, forced upon its victims. George Orwell knew that it was more insidious, coming from within.
Crimes against language replace knowledge – knowing what we know – with lies and doubt.
It's the doubt in our minds that opens the door wide for Big Brother to walk in and take over, telling us 2+2=5 because he says so.
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