“When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships,” wrote George Orwell about totalitarianism in the 1940s; a statement that has regained relevance in our current moment, as righteously highlighted by filmmaker Raoul Peck in his latest documentary essay Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025), opening this month in select theaters—particularly art-house cinemas and larger metropolitan areas. Orwell: 2+2=5 opened last week in the Bay Area at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco (with Peck in attendance conversing with Jon Else), is now playing at the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Berkeley, and will roll out to the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael on Monday, October 13, and the Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol on October 17. Meanwhile, here in Boise, our “arthouse” theater The Flicks is chirping crickets on the matter, electing instead to fill their Fall calendar with films to drink wine to or films readily available at the Edwards multiplex. So disappointing.
I complain because Orwell: 2+2=5 is one of the most important films of the season, essential for its instructional perspective on the autocratic shift towards a totalitarian government being engineered by Trump and his syncophantic administration. Peck, no stranger to totalitarian regimes, fled Duvalier’s Haitiaan dictatorship with his family as a child and—much like Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell)—crafts films that expose lies and draw attention to facts that deserve a hearing. “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship; a sense of injustice,” wrote Orwell and I can easily imagine Peck saying the same.
Peck utilizes Orwell’s biography as a means to explore authoritarian power both in the past and in the present by densely assembling diverse footage with what Manohla Dargis terms “a visceral urgency.” And what could be more urgent than to learn about and determine the forces that make dictatorships rise and fall? Peck succeeds at this by aligning events of the past with contemporary events so that their similarities are evident, and alarming.
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell observed, “that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Peck then shows that—to be corrupted by totalitarianism—one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. One needs only to follow the playbook. He parades General Min Aung Hlaing, Prime Minister of Myanmar and Acting President (2021-present); General Augusto Pinochet, “Supreme Head of the Nation” (1974-1990); Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines (1965-1986); General Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda (1986-present); Vladimir Putin, President of Russia (2000-2008; 2012-present); Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary (1998-2002, 2010-present), and then-President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s determined vilification of Iraq; comparable to Big Brother’s vilification of Eurasia in 1984. A more recent analogy? Putin’s justification to invade Ukraine as the propagandistic practice of “War Is Peace”. As for Trump? He’s targeting the American people as “the enemy within”!! He is labeling any criticism of his policies as terrorist activity!!
Orwell understood: “This kind of thing happens everywhere, but it is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not—as is sometimes claimed—a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”
Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists on his first day of his second term of office presaged an alteration of the past, much as he is now conducting a campaign of retribution against anyone who does not agree with his election denial. He is reaching into our cultural institutions to recontextualize history to suit his racist agenda.
“From the totalitarian point of view,” Orwell continues, “history is something to be created rather than learned.” Further: “A totalitarian state is, in fact, a theocracy and its ruling class in order to keep its position has to be thought of as infallible. Since in practice no one is infallible it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text book but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact.” Ignorance Is Strength, after all. “The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that—since absolute truth is not obtainable—a big lie is no worse than a little lie.”
Orwell died from tuberculosis four months after he completed 1984 and so never got to see the tremendous influence he has had on future generations and the important cautions he has gifted us. Peck’s documentary pays tribute to that gift and applies it thoughtfully and forcefully as a lesson we need to get through these unprecedented times.