I‘m currently working on writing, animating, and composing the script, visuals, and music (respectively) for a film adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Once the first episode is finished, it will be posted on YouTube and shared with my 12th grade English Teachers; the rest of the series will follow (that’s very easy to say but— [uncomfortable laughing] yeah it’s gonna take awhile)
I don’t want to keep bothering the people following my whump blog with this, so I will be posting everything about it here.
I will also post literary analyses, memes, and terrible puns; I may occasionally express my desire to beat O’Brien into a pulp, but that’s beside the point. Mainly, this blog will serve as a brainstorming tool, and as a means to track my personal progress in the project.
Currently listening to my Eurythmics’ For the Love of Big Brother cassette on my RCA portable bass boosted player.
EDIT: Woah I got this for $4.50… it goes for way more than that amount online. I don’t think they knew what they had. It works beautifully too. The actual tape is pink as well which is pretty cool.
Who would win in a fight, Winston “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats” Smith or R.M. “rats rats rats thousands millions of them all red blood” Renfield
does that suck, mark? is it not fun to have your privacy violated? do you feel uncomfortable with people knowing things about you that you'd rather they not know? tell me more about how much you value your security and privacy, mark.
So I’ve finally been making my way through Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy, which is a really fascinating and long book that is all about how international human rights monitoring has shaped and changed the way countries, especially democracies, use and hide their use of torture. And the book is mostly a thorough description of the history and development of modern torture methods, really very detailed and well researched. Very much recommend to anyone writing about torture in fiction.
But I think the parts I find most compelling are the ones where Rejali talks about the philosophy and psychology of pain and torture, and whether it could ever be effective or justified (which, spoiler alert: no not really). And I found a really interesting article by him of using Orwell’s 1984 as a segue into analysing accounts by torture survivors to group their modes of resistance (and sometimes betrayal): ‘Whom Do You Trust? What Do You Count On?’ https://www.reed.edu/poli_sci/faculty/rejali/articles/What00.html
I have always been troubled by the narrative of torture in 1984, so I’m glad that Rejali deconstructs it somewhat. He challenges the notion that torture could so routinely and predictably force people to betray their ideals and selves, or that the creation of a perfectly scientific torture machine is a realistic future prospect.
To summarise (and forgive me if I am not as eloquent as Rejali here, the piece is really not that long and a worthwhile read), resistance can come in various forms: alertness (awareness of what is to come and discipline in one’s adherence to the idea), governance (of self and community, the connection to the wider struggle), compassion (the ability to acknowledge the humanity of not just oneself and one’s allies but also one’s captors and torturers), forgetfulness (a sort of intentional dissociation and passivity in the face of fear and horror) and laughter (the ability to find dark humour and make light of one’s situation).
I particularly find the quotes from Milovan Djilas (a Yugoslav communist who was tortured by the royalists in the 1930s and later imprisoned by Tito’s regime for his rejection of government policies) interesting:
‘If one lives in the service of an idea, says Djilas, then one "need not fear, and has no reason to fear, prison, torture, or even death. He will survive. He will live on in the lives of his comrades, in the life of the idea. Nevertheless, he will also be more confident and able to bear torture all the more easily if he is familiar with certain "weak points" innate to the act itself and those who practice it."’
‘Almost always, one does not become a traitor under torture but before torture...most people prepare themselves to give in under torture before arrest, while they are still free.’
For Djilas, it is the ultimate acceptance of death for the idea that allows him to not betray his cause or his comrades. He has already accepted the final outcome, and he has resigned himself to what may happen through awareness of the act of torture itself.
Jacobo Timerman (Argentinian journalist and author who was tortured by the military junta in the 1970s), similarly takes an approach of resignation to his ordeal, but he does so through dissociation and acceptance, allowing himself to be ‘led into and through the pain’ with deliberately little thought:
‘In the year and a half I spent under house arrest, I devoted much thought to my attitude during torture sessions and during the period of solitary confinement. I realized that, instinctively, I developed an attitude of absolute passivity. Some fought against being carried to the torture tables; others begged not to be tortured; others insulted their torturers. I represented sheer passivity. Because my eyes were blindfolded, I was led by the hand. And I went. The silence was part of the terror. Yet I did not utter a word. I was told to undress. And I did so, passively. I was told when I sat on a bed, to lie down. And, passively, I did so. This passivity, I believe, preserve a great deal of energy and left me with all my strength to withstand the torture. I felt I was becoming a vegetable, casting aside all logical emotions and sensations--fear, hatred, vengeance -- for any emotion or sensation meant wasting useless energy.’
There’s something very interesting to me in Timerman’s description of the various forms of resistance of others around him and his own acceptance of what was to happen. We tend to imagine a prisoners being dragged and manhandled into torture chambers, so there is something especially striking about the image of a captive being led blindfolded by the hand.
I would really urge people to read the article and share your own thoughts on it because I think it’s genuinely such an interesting exploration of the human experience of adversity and a little window into how people cope with and survive the most awful circumstances.
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who's my best friend in the world and recently he was like "you're too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!" and I was like "a niece might be more up my alley" and he just got more excited and said "ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful"
