My daughter recently read Animal Farm for her middle school class. Or maybe I should say she tried to just read Animal Farm. Because the second I got a whiff of George Orwell’s fertile satirical fields, I had to get in on that little assignment too. So she read it and we all listened to it, via CD, on a weekend trip we took together.
It had been years, decades really, since I’d last laid eyes on that book, and I am pleased to say that it far exceeded my fading memory of it. As a family, we ended up stopping the CD and talking so much it probably took twice as long to get through it as it could have. We first talked about satire. Then we talked about gullibility. Then we talked about archetypes. Politics. History. Fear. Courage. Domination. Submission. Anarchy. Totalitarianism. Lying. Manipulation. Parable.
The text is rich and the subtext is even richer as the book—which doesn’t seem to have aged a day in the past 60-plus years—systematically breaks apart what makes societies tick. How leaders rise and fall. How they establish systems of government, some of them valuable, beneficial and compassionate, some of them heinously hurtful and disrespectful to the very people they are set up over.
Which brings me to the word regime. It’s a funny word, hard to pronounce if you aren’t primed for it. And it has a lot to say when it comes to trying to define the world around us. Its obvious meaning lies in politics, governments and the like. But we can also point it at worldviews. And that’s when it gets really interesting.
“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy,” we read in Colossians 2:8, “which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” Now substitute philosophy with regimes. See what happens when you think of philosophies as controlling entities, directing your mind and heart, pushing you into line with the cold tip of machine gun?
And speaking of machine gun-toting regimes, Mick LaSalle, movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, has this to say:
The central confusion [concerning violent entertainment] that embarrasses critics, and progressives in general, is the notion that this is a free-speech issue. Yes, it’s absolutely true that strong images are needed to tell strong truths. You can’t attack the regime and talk about the violence of government, of sexism, and of racism without depicting that violence. Some of the best filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s, coming off of decades of suffocating censorship, knew this. But let’s not fail to recognize that today, violent media is the new regime. The industry, in cinema and gaming, which is monstrously profitable, is a mechanical, repetitive neural training ground for action. And like the Taliban, it targets disenfranchised young men and boys who are unformed and weak in personality.
LaSalle then calls on other film reviewers to discuss not just a movie’s artistic quality, but also what it’s conveying morally. “It’s time to stop behaving as if we were paralyzed,” he writes. “It’s time to lose our squeamishness about confronting screen violence—and the monolith of profit behind it—and to start acting like a community.”
To start acting like the entertainment we fill ourselves with is a regime.
So here’s to a new year dedicated to installing a benevolent dictatorship in your home’s family room—or should I say on your animal farm?
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