At the time I was reimagining this scene, I spent much of my day on Twitter. It was early 2021, and everyone there was chronically angry. People communicated by jeering, trading insults, hectoring, flinging accusations… It was like being in an abusive relationship with everyone in the world.
A few years ago, I got what, for a writer of political fiction, is a dream job. I was invited by the estate of George Orwell to write a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point of view of Julia, the lover of the protagonist, Winston Smith. The concept had been in the air for years, until its writing seemed inevitable; by asking a trusted person to do it, they hoped to nudge it in a direction that did justice to the original. They wouldn’t pay me, but after I’d finished and published the novel, they would give it their support and help it find its way in the world.
It was a huge compliment but also a daunting responsibility, and I was immediately engrossed in work: rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, sketching plans and ideas, researching the political history that drove Orwell to write his book, drafting my first pages. My opening chapter – like Orwell’s – was the well-known scene of the Two Minutes Hate.
The Two Minutes Hate is a ritual in which Party members gather to watch a film of the rebel leader Emmanuel Goldstein and express compulsory rage. Regardless of their beliefs, the audience finds this an easy task. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate,” Orwell writes, “was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”….
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George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984
For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life
The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Circa 1921)
George Orwell and Douglas Adams Explain How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea
George Orwell’s Five Greatest Essays (Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Hiltzik)
After the truth-shower 