From the very start of the film I was given the feeling of a communist type of society/ environment. The first colors visible are black, white, grey and red, and the opening captions are in bold red letters. This is a major significance between the film’s opening scenes and the books opening scene. It’s like hearing a name a bunch of times, and finally being able to put a face to the name. Right off the bat I was able to grasp an idea of what the society was like and its strict ruling. From the very start of the film a crowd is seen watching a propaganda video that started out fairly calm but quickly transformed into scenes of violence. The film mentions the people of the crowd as “the builders” of the society. At 2:35 the film shows fires, bombings, death and shootings, the narrator soon appears on screen commanding the people to scream the leaders name in guessing causing an uproar.
The sight of war caused to crowd to become roweled up. This imagery helped give me a clear understanding of how the poorer people lived. In the novel, I understood that they were forced and brainwashed by propaganda to love the party and follow its every command, but seeing the crowds attitude switch at the drop of a dime made it crystal clear how wrapped around the parties fingers they actually were. Consumed by propaganda and false teaching to the point of extreme mood swings, they went from relaxed to infuriated in a matter of seconds. They are taught to hate certain thinghs and adorn others, this becomes apparent when the film changes for the last time. Showing “INGSOC” on the screen with a flag waving behind it causes everyone to praise this imagery, some even begin to cry.
One similarity between the novel and film would be their way of living. The streets are littered with trash, houses lay demolished while many have clear signs of impact, assumingly due to war, and the elevator in the building doesn’t work. Everyone is living in ruins and technology that should be used to their benefit doesn’t work, yet all rooms are wired with monitors.  The scene where the elevator isn’t working is a very important one, it shows what the party really cares about and what they priorities. They have enough technology to watch the proles and monitor their every move, yet could care less to provide them with working elevators to ease the struggles of everyday life they encounter living in such a dilapidated neighborhood. The elevator can serve as a symbolism of normal life, and that being gone shows how far gone society is. Nothing is normalized anymore and the party has absolutely no intention of bringing “normality” back.
