“Postmodern Documentary as Non-Linear Global History”
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (California State University, San Marcos)
George Orwell is having a moment. In an age where US government officials speak of “alternative facts,” and fascism around the world has cloaked itself in the language of freedom, Orwell’s 1949 anti-totalitarian novel 1984 has loomed larger than ever. In early 2026 in the US, as spokespeople for ICE ignored video evidence of their abuses, posts citing 1984 teemed on social media: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” And in February 2026, a judge ruling on whether the federal government could remove panels at Independence National Historic Park mentioning George Washington’s slaveholding began with a quote from Orwell: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.” In her decision, Judge Cynthia Rufe decreed that the federal government had no authority to “dissemble and disassemble historical truths,” and she ordered the panels restored. Yet, it is not certain that her ruling will stand.
Raoul Peck’s 2025 film Orwell: 2+2=5, a poetic look at the origins and evolution of Orwell’s thinking, seems perfectly timed for this era. However, Peck and his producer, the illustrious documentarian Alex Gibney, began making it long before the November 2024 election results. In fact, Peck told an interviewer in 2025 that “When I started working on Orwell, I thought Kamala Harris would be president, and the film was as important for me at that time as it is today because the problem didn’t start with the present administration.” The film thus looks not only at the fate of truth under the first and second Trump administrations, but also earlier in the twenty-first century. Peck highlights a 2002 Bush speech calling Iraq a “grave threat to peace”… before his administration began a war by invading it. Peck juxtaposes this speech against the motto of the authoritarian state Oceania in 1984: “War is Peace!”
Indeed, Orwell: 2+2=5 grows out of themes that have long concerned Peck. Born in Duvalier-era Haiti, Peck has often focused his films on rulers who abuse their power and terrorize adversaries. His dramas Haitian Corner (1988) and Man By the Shore (1993) centered on victims of the Duvalier dictatorship; Moloch Tropical (2009) was a lacerating parody of a fictional Haitian dictator, a “populist” whose greed and narcissism led him to violate the promises he’d made to supporters. Peck’s duet of Patrice Lumumba films (the 2000 biopic Lumumba and the 1991 documentary Lumumba: Death of a Prophet) examined how colonizers and their allies have distorted the past to better rule in the present. And in his masterwork, the 4-part HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), Peck considered the role of media stereotypes in distorting reality, a theme also present in his 2004 Rwandan-genocide epic Sometimes in April.
In some ways, the style of Orwell: 2+2=5 most resembles that of Peck’s best-known film, I Am Not Your Negro (2016; hereafter IANYN). As in IANYN, there is no dialogue per se; the film presents a collage of Orwell’s own words, narrated by the actor Damian Lewis. Peck marshals passages from Orwell’s publications and the Orwell Archive alongside a dizzying array of stock footage, to tie events from Orwell’s time to those in ours (from Myanmar to Viktor Orban’s Hungary).
Orwell makes a compelling truth-teller for Peck; he served in the Indian Imperial Police (in his own words, as “part of the actual machinery” of colonial despotism) before his “bad conscience” led him to name and oppose it. Interspersed with Orwell’s words about “the organized lying practiced by totalitarian states,” Peck includes clips of Vladimir Putin and other world leaders depicting war as spreading peace. As Orwell came to understand the injustices he’d participated in and watched fascism’s creep in the 1930s, he labelled the suppression of information a key harbinger of the coming of authoritarianism: “If the leader says of such-and-such an event, ‘it never happened’: well, it never happened. And if he says that two and two are five: well, two and two are five.” Peck intersperses these quotes with scenes of dictators around the globe pronouncing verifiable lies, against a backdrop of the bloodshed they have caused. Following footage of the January 6 riots, Peck includes outtakes from a January 7, 2021, videorecording of Donald Trump struggling to declare credibly, “My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote.”
Peck also uses data visualization techniques to illustrate the multiplication of book bans in the US after 2022 and their similarity to censorship regimes elsewhere. He employs such visualizations, interspersed with warnings from Orwell, to highlight the extreme concentration of wealth among a handful of billionaires who can then control information through ownership of media companies, social networks, or surveillance-technology companies.
Many critics have extolled Orwell: 2+2=5, including Rolling Stone’s David Fear who called it Peck’s “magnum opus” and the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis who termed it “a work of visceral urgency.” However, in discussing the film with students and others used to more conventional documentaries, I have found that its nonlinearity can be polarizing. And some critics have qualified their praise by describing the film as “overloaded” with connections or as being “provocative but sometimes convoluted.”
In my view, however, Orwell: 2+2=5’s nonlinear style epitomizes the potential of what Robert Rosenstone has called the postmodern history film, one which can “point to [the past] and play with it, raising questions about the very evidence on which our knowledge of the past depends.” Indeed, the very juxtapositions in Orwell: 2+2=5, dizzying as they may be, help us understand individual historical phenomena as part of much larger patterns, something recognized by Stephanie Zacarek in her Time review. Peck’s ability to link historical events from so many contexts shows his dexterity as a filmmaker who is also a veritable transnational historian. Whereas academic historians tend to specialize in nations and centuries, Peck’s unique lived experience (spanning Haiti, Congo, Germany, France, and the US) and command of multiple languages allow him to connect multiple national histories. With inspiration from Orwell, he thus weaves together totalitarian phenomena from many eras – government lie-purveying, history falsification and state-sponsored violence, from Stalinist Russia to Baghdad, Gaza, Hindu nationalist India, and the modern US – in a devastating way. His accumulation of reference points and images help underscore that Orwell’s words, which in a better world would remain dystopian science fiction, were prophetic in ways we have only begun to grasp.
Ultimately, the filmmaker concludes, as officials in the US and elsewhere try to convince us that what we see is not happening, that “You have to keep…your common sense: two plus two is always four.” And as images of contemporary protests around the world fill the film’s final minutes, Peck invokes another line from 1984, suggesting that average people can still resist together if they can become conscious of their circumstances: “If there was hope, it must lie with the proles.”
“Orwell and His Limits”
A.J. Bauer (University of Alabama)
I was born in 1984. That put me graduating high school one month after George W. Bush prematurely declared “Mission Accomplished” in his war against Iraq. Raised in a conservative household in Denton County, Texas, just about all I knew about politics growing up came from Rush Limbaugh or the Dallas Morning News. It was a difficult place and time to chart a path leftward.
George Orwell was my first bridge. I devoured Animal Farm and then 1984 in middle school. I read them both again in high school as part of the curriculum. 1984 gave me the critical lens to react to the post-9/11 patriotic fervor with horror. It helped me see through the Bush administration’s lies about its “War on Terror,” about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam Hussein’s fictional alliance with al-Qaeda.
But there is a reason Orwell was required reading in Texas public high schools. It is no doubt the same reason that Animal Farm and 1984 are featured on several ”best of” book lists for conservatives. Like many democratic socialists of his time, burned by his interactions with international communism under Stalin, Orwell committed his literary efforts to opposing totalitarianism—less so to promoting socialism.
Orwell can be a bridge out of conservatism, but he only gets you so far. One must keep reading or risk getting stranded in an anti-statism that can lead back to the right. It’s a short and unencumbered walk from 1984 to Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, for instance, or to the U.S. nationalist adage of infamous right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones: “the answer to 1984 is 1776.”
Knowing Raoul Peck’s impressive and radical oeuvre as a filmmaker, I was hopeful that Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025) would either reclaim Orwell for the left or at least reveal his troubling openness to right-wing readings. Peck’s recent works, I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) were tours de force that playfully yet critically laid bare the white supremacist foundations upon which modern Europe and the United States still sit.
In I Am Not Your Negro, Peck builds on an unfinished manuscript by James Baldwin, whose deeply poetic writings and provocative television appearances complemented Peck’s eye for rich juxtapositions and non-linear storytelling. In Exterminate All the Brutes, which focused on histories of colonialism and genocide, Peck drew upon the superlative historical works of Sven Lindqvist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In that series, Peck deftly incorporated autobiographical elements—anecdotes, family photos and home movies—that helped the viewer draw connections between the personal, the political, and the meta-historical.
Though it is stylistically consistent with these earlier works, Orwell: 2+2=5 suffers from the political ambivalence of its source material. This film is, after all, first and foremost a biography of Orwell. Tuberculosis, an ailment that long plagued Orwell and ultimately took his life, is a central motif—from artistic renderings of bacteria to a recurring sound of labored breathing. We learn of Orwell’s upper middle-class aversion to working class culture, of his five years serving as a British colonial police officer in Burma, of his brief sojourn fighting with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista against fascism in Spain. These are treated as informing the anti-authoritarian politics of Animal Farm and 1984. Yet, while Peck accurately conveys Orwell’s theory of global politics—that authoritarianism mixed with surveillance technologies result in extreme dehumanization—the film falls short of a coherent explanation for the ongoing global rise of right-authoritarian movements.
Peck seems to acknowledge that Orwell is perhaps a less-than-reliable theorist of such matters. The film is bookended by a photograph of Orwell as a baby, held by a white-clad Indian woman identified only as his “nursemaid.” At the start and end of Orwell’s life, Peck’s still-image panning lingers on her intense stare in a way that begs the question that goes frustratingly unanswered in this film: How did Orwell’s upbringing and social milieu, his class positioning and Eurocentrism, limit his radical vision?
That Orwell’s vision was limited is reflected in the film’s uncharacteristically muddled ideology. Its pairings of archival and contemporary news footage documenting the violence and atrocities of various authoritarian regimes are less coherent, less revealing than we might expect of Peck. For example, early in the film, Peck juxtaposes images of war-torn Berlin in 1945 under the title “Strategic Bombing,” before turning to images of war-torn Mariupol, Ukraine in 2022 under the title “Peacekeeping Operations.” Peck is clearly riffing on Orwell’s critique of newspeak in 1984.
But is the viewer supposed to equally sympathize with the citizens of Nazi Germany and the current citizens of Ukraine? The first population participated in a totalitarian project that cost millions of innocent lives. The latter population is being falsely accused of Nazism by a contemporary Russian state with totalitarian ambitions. Is Peck suggesting a moral equivalence between the bombing of actual Nazi civilians and the bombing of civilians who are being accused of Nazism under false pretenses? Presumably not, since Putin is later depicted as a quintessential totalitarian. Nevertheless, Peck’s choice is indicative of the jumbled analysis that emerges from Orwell’s knee-jerk aversion to state power qua state power.
In drawing contemporary parallels to Orwell’s caricatured depictions of life under totalitarianism, Peck draws on well-trod critiques of media commercialization and surveillance capitalism. The film features clips of Edward Snowden discussing the U.S. government’s efforts to spy on its own citizens. The film does not deal, however, with the fact that Snowden defected to Putin’s Russia, where he now lives under the same surveillance he once heroically criticized. Ironies and contradictory juxtapositions abound here, but they remain largely uninterrogated.
Orwell’s foundational experiences of totalitarianism were as an agent (of British empire) and frustrated ally (fighting alongside Stalinists in Spain). His personal aversion, while morally valid, left him unattuned to the perverse appeals of authoritarianism, which makes him an odd pick for explaining our current geopolitical conjuncture. Peck developed a more useful explanatory framework in Exterminate All the Brutes. Would that he had applied it to Orwell’s life and thinking.
DOCALOGUE 