George Orwell's Pop Culture Hot Takes
Dissecting The Traitors, Caberet and Cancel Culture
Was George Orwell a time traveller or are we woefully predictable? This question kept running through my mind as I read his novel 1984, which holds such cultural significance today despite being published over 70 years ago.
A brief synopsis for those unfamiliar, 1984 follows Winston Smith as he navigates his dystopian existence in an oppressive totalitarian regime, in which he works for the Ministry of Truth, a government department charged with falsifying and altering all media past and present to align with the propaganda of the party.
All party members are subjected to 24/7 surveillance through the use of telescreens in which they are monitored under the watchful eye of the party leader ‘Big Brother.’ The telescreens also serve as a broadcast in which party messaging is spouted at all hours of the day. Beyond the physical surveillance, citizens live in a constant state of paranoia and mistrust in which people are encouraged to report one another for any indiscretion or suspicion no matter how slight—any mannerism outside of complete uniformity could be deemed as a sign of guilt and be reported.
This novel has had a tremendous impact on pop culture, especially in the realm of reality television. There is an obvious connection with Big Brother which was mimicked on the reality show, bringing Orwell’s depiction of extreme surveillance to life in a fascinating and highly entertaining reality TV experiment.
However, in more recent times, The Traitors has emerged as a new show that centres on Orwell’s musings on groupthink and fearful paranoia. The game show involves a bunch of pseudo-celebrities living in a medieval castle, in which ‘traitors’ are selected and the rest of the contestants become ‘faithfuls’. There is a murder a night and a banishment ceremony in which theories and accusations are flung across a roundtable until one person is voted out and reveals if they are a faithful or a traitor.
The first day in the castle is always extremely pleasant as friendships are formed and everyone parrots that they have no idea who a traitor could be. However, this quickly devolves into a mist of suspicion and paranoia reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Friends accuse friends, minute facial expressions are determined as surefire signs of guilt and often ‘faithfuls’ are banished. The show presents a fascinating study on how quickly a group of people can succumb to a hive-mind mentality, as we watch on each episode as a fresh smear campaign is concocted against a contestant—often unfounded and woefully incorrect, yet voted out with such conviction of guilt by their fellow ‘faithfuls’—sub ‘faithful’ for comrade and you’ve got an Orwellian dystopia.
Coincidentally, Alan Cumming who is the host of The Traitors US is having a bit of a moment online right now as his rendition of ‘Money’ from the 1993 revival of Cabaret is a trending sound on TikTok. Caberet is a musical depicting the consequences of inaction, using a glitzy nightclub as the setting in which the characters and audience live in blissful ignorance of the atrocities being committed outside its walls. The warning of wilful ignorance and blatant escapism prevalent in both Cabaret and 1984 can easily be applied to our collective use of social media and doom-scrolling, keeping our minds lulled for fear of catching a peak of what’s happening outside.
Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. - 1984, George Orwell
With our phones permanently glued to our hands, we are primed to receive messaging that infiltrates and sways our worldview, with the internet employing the same techniques of the authoritarian regime in 1984—fear-mongering, rage bait and frenzied hatred to drive the hive mind to a collective opinion. Cancel culture is a prime example of this as we see creators have their careers decimated by the public, where suddenly hate comments become justifiable and any previous niceties or parasocial relationships formed with said creator must be extinguished, promptly replaced with disdain.
To end on a truly terrifying note, I highly recommend watching this video by Blonde Politics which discusses Techno-Feudalism. A frightening insight into the Tech billionaire’s intimate ties to the current administration in the US, and how these select few collectively own almost all social media platforms and methods of communication—quite dystopian indeed.
Till next time xx