NEO-1984



NEO-1984

"It was a bright cold day
in April, and the clocks
were striking thirteen."
—George Orwell, 1884

Actually, my dears—
I prefer the 1956 version of 1984
With Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith
And slutty sultry Jan Sterling as Julia his lover—
Imbuing the film with her “Fallen Angel” hauntiness
And “Ace in the Hole” ennui & sullen beauty…

Michael Redford sulks as General O’Conner—
Donald Pleasance adding the usual gay angle as Parsons,
While In the newer version directed by Michael Anderson…

Burnt-out Miss Richard Burton—
Making her appearance fresh from her gay
Staircase to Heaven drag act—still giddy & flamboyant
After her breathtakingly campy tango with Sexy Rexy,
Full of her usual deep Welch depressingly rich sonorities,
Droning away, as usual, her crummy cold war camp…

Playing it up as she always does—
With her sophisticated sardonic ironic candor
Doing her “The Spy Who Swished in From the Cold” skit,
Little plot twists with dumpy Miss Orwell’s snarky Theme,
Giving the Nightmarish Storyline a tinsey-wensey tiny-bit
More modern campy Melodrama to keep the dreary
Dystopian Drag routine going for awhile longer…

Actually tho, my dears, am I too gauche saying—
Isn’t Orwell’s premise a retro sci-fi flight of fantasy—
His world of 1948 looking into a neo Fifties Future?
Isn’t that how Film & Fiction work? Gazing back then
Thru a kind of fuzzy film noir Bijou ‘50s glass darkly?

A kind of medieval morality play—
For our hip slick so-so 21st century postmodern age?
Garishly displaying like a tacky paperback novel's cover—
The same old musty, well-worn & endlessly-thumbed thru
Dog-eared comic book spiel?

Cheer up tho, my fellow astute cineastes—
There’s plenty of time, my dears & at least a 5-minute
Intermission, giving us couch-potatoes some wiggle-room
For one more Hollywood version to spawn—all the way from
Netflix to John Hurt’s Alien & Lynch’s Mulholland Drive…

The same old picked-over polemical push—
Toward you know what? One last new Oscar-winning
Version of adolescent America’s Gone Baby Boomer
“Vision Thing”? One last hangover ersatz future?
One last neocon version of Orwell’s 1984 & lovely
Arthur C. Clark’s ho-hum Childhood’s End?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Arthur C. Clarke, actually.

Good enough to be worth being pedantic about.