Quiz 1: Grey. Lots of Grey.

 

I bet you've never seen faces this happy, before. Ever.

World of Glory. Wow.

I don’t know how many of us were ready for it, but I sure wasn’t; at least for the very first scene. I guess that was the point of the scene, of course; to shock us and to open our eyes to a legacy we’d chosen to shove under the rug and forget about. Outside of Schindler’s List, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more depraved and horrifying act carried out on screen. Some horror films may try to be more horrifying with their explicit gore and visceral depictions of death, but they don’t carry the weight that the memories of Hitler’s policies do, nor the true horror that those policies brought upon millions of innocent victims.

But as I watched the rest of the film, I still felt gripped by the director’s disturbing picture of what could be considered everyday life. I felt the way I felt when I read George Orwell’s 1984 for the first time. There was a sense of foreboding throughout the whole movie as I associated the cold, grey world that the film’s protagonist lived in with that of the world Winston Smith lived. At every scene change my mind whispered “Thought Police” and I would panic at the sight of a man in a black suit standing anywhere on the frame. At any moment I expected the mustached man to be nabbed and dragged away for Thoughtcrime to be thrown into the gas van himself like the people in the first scene.

I knew that there was something different about the scene in the church, though I had to watch the entire film to understand the significance of our hero’s conversion. And still I expected the Thought Police to arrive at any moment, right till the very end of the film, to take our hero away. I was more focused on the parallels between Orwell’s Oceania and the setting of the film than I was on the true message being conveyed by the director.

But maybe that was what the director was getting at; that our world has become Oceania and Orwell's nightmare. Where 1984 warns us of the dangers of losing one’s political freedom through communism, World of Glory warns us about losing our personalities through the ignorance of our past and the lack of concern for our present and future. If we just let things happen without caring or acting, then we doom ourselves to these grey, half-dead lives.

Seriously, read 1984 if you haven’t already; the first couple of chapters alone will be all you need to draw major comparisons between it and World of Glory.