Ninety Minutes of Hate

Paper Summary:

This paper compares the heroes, heroines, and villains of "1984" and "Equilibrium". It explains that "Equilibrium" is a modern action movie with strong allusions to George Orwell?s "1984". Both the movie and the book have similar main characters, ranging from the hero and his girl to the villain.

From the Paper:

"Equilibrium features a futuristic society in which emotion is suppressed by the regular taking of drugs by the citizenry. The main character is a Tetragrammaton cleric named John Preston who enforces the elimination of emotion. He is trained to eliminate anything that can cause extreme emotion and to do it so thoroughly that one would never know it existed. This is commonly artwork and literature of great significance. At one point Preston realizes what exactly he is doing and how it will affect the future. He then tries to secretly conceal these emotions while still continuing to work. As this fails to work, he seeks out a secret brotherhood of resistance fighters to challenge the government. 1984's Winston Smith is remarkably similar in many respects. He also lives in a world where emotion is suppressed. "To the degree that the totalitarian state approaches its "ideal" condition, it destroys the margin for unforeseen behavior" (Howe 197). The government bottles up the people's unpredictable instincts and emotions to fuel other emotions such as fear, hatred, and lunatic credulity (Orwell 111). Winston is a member of the Party and thus works for the government. Just like Preston, he eliminates remnants of the past. ?The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted of persons whose duty it [is] to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction (37)."

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