Chaplin, Orwell, and the Birth of Big Brother

The Premise

When Raoul Peck's documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 premiered at Cannes in May 2025, it was billed primarily as a political essay film — an argument that George Orwell's warnings about totalitarianism, propaganda, and the corruption of language remain urgently relevant in 2026. It earned 83 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes from 66 critics, with a Metacritic score of 74 out of 100, according to Wikipedia's tracking of critic aggregators.

But the documentary, which received its UK theatrical release on March 27, 2026, makes a second argument that has drawn sharper critical attention: that Orwell's relationship to cinema — long dismissed by biographers as a minor sideline — was in fact central to how he constructed the machinery of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Specifically, the film contends that Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film The Great Dictator planted the seed of Big Brother.

What Orwell Actually Said About Chaplin

The key piece of evidence is not invented: it is Orwell's own 1940 review of The Great Dictator, published in the periodical Time and Tide, one of 45 film reviews Orwell wrote for the publication between 1940 and 1941, according to The Telegraph's theatre critic Dominic Cavendish, writing about the documentary on March 27, 2026.

In that review, Orwell described the film's climactic speech — in which Chaplin, playing a Hitler lookalike accidentally elevated to a podium, delivers an improvised democratic rallying cry — as, in Orwell's words, "one of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time." He wrote that its force came from having "no connection with the rest of the film whatever, except the sort of connection that exists in a dream — the kind of dream in which you are Emperor of China at one moment and a dormouse the next." (Source: The Telegraph, March 27, 2026, quoting Orwell's 1940 review in Time and Tide.)

Cavendish argues in The Telegraph that Orwell was not merely reviewing the film; he was "anatomising the mechanism by which an image can bypass rational resistance." That analysis would surface again, almost verbatim in its logic, in the opening chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, where protagonist Winston Smith describes watching a cinema newsreel depicting the massacre of refugees — and finds himself simultaneously repelled and aesthetically compelled by the spectacle.

The Biographers Got It Wrong

Orwell's connection to film has historically been minimized. Biographer Bernard Crick, according to Cavendish writing in The Telegraph, characterized Orwell's film reviews as "with few exceptions, hasty, heavy-handed and banal." The conventional reading was that Orwell wrote about films only because he needed the money.

The documentary challenges this. Peck highlights a circa-1940 unpublished essay by Orwell titled New Words, in which Orwell wrote that cinema was "the one possible medium for conveying mental processes," and specifically praised the medium's ability to represent dreams and unconscious states. Orwell also wrote, in a 1936 letter praising Elmer Rice's satirical novel A Voyage to Purilia, that the book contained "a most interesting analysis of certain conventions — taken for granted and never even mentioned — existing in ordinary film." (Source: The Telegraph, March 27, 2026.)

These are not the observations of someone indifferent to cinema's grammar.

The Ministry of Truth as Film Studio

The documentary's most striking argument concerns Winston Smith's job. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth — Orwell's fictional state department responsible for the Soviet-style rewriting of news and the photographic erasure of political inconvenients. Cavendish points out, citing the novel directly, that Smith is an expert in image manipulation: he understands that the helicopter camera and the helicopter weapon are the same instrument, that reality and spectacle fuse in the service of power.

The opening cinema sequence in Nineteen Eighty-Four — in which Smith watches footage of the slaughter of refugees and cannot help but admire its composition — explicitly treats the film screen as a weapon of mass psychological conditioning. Later, the "Two Minutes Hate" is also a screening. Big Brother is, at its core, a cinematic phenomenon: a projected face, carefully edited, designed to produce a specific emotional response on command.

Peck's argument, as presented in the documentary and elaborated in a Big Issue interview published March 27, 2026, is that Orwell understood this mechanism more deeply than any other novelist of his era — and that he learned it, in significant part, by watching Chaplin, then the most powerful mass-media communicator alive, demonstrate exactly how it worked.

The Documentary Itself: What Critics Said

The film narrates Orwell's biography through archive material and Damian Lewis reading from Orwell's letters, essays, and novels. It premiered at Cannes on May 17, 2025, was released in the United States by distributor Neon on October 3, 2025, and opened in France via Le Pacte on February 25, 2026, according to Wikipedia's production record.

The Hollywood Reporter's Sheri Linden wrote that the film "delves into the ways Orwell's arguments illuminate a century's worth of geopolitics" with a "dynamic mix of biography and intellectual essence." (Source: Wikipedia's compilation of critical reception.)

The Irish Times, in a March 27, 2026 review, called it "ambitious in scope" but argued the film "often feels cluttered and overlong, shifting clumsily between biography, analysis and polemic." The Irish Times also raised a substantive historical objection: Peck largely sidesteps the 2003 declassification of British Foreign Office file FO 111/189, which documented that Orwell provided the Foreign Office's covert propaganda unit with a list of suspected communists — including Charlie Chaplin — in 1949. The Irish Times reviewer argued that "no intolerant informer should be as unambiguously lionised as Orwell is here."

That irony — that Orwell named Chaplin to British intelligence the very year he was writing a novel about state surveillance and informers — is not directly addressed in Peck's film, according to the Irish Times review.

Peck on Why Orwell Still Matters

In his Big Issue interview, Peck — whose 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro on James Baldwin was nominated for an Academy Award — described the film's intention as mapping "the whole thing again in a way that is clear and understandable, confront people with their own reality and connect the dots with what happened before."

Peck said he deliberately avoided making Donald Trump the film's center: "There will be another world after Trump. But he is the craziest example. Nobody thought it would happen in America. But the rise of fascism has been everywhere in the last 40 years, and nobody seems to know the right way to fight it." He described Orwell's value as providing a "toolbox" — the renunciation of reality, the invention of alternative facts, the attack on universities and the justice system, the cult of personality — that applies to authoritarian movements across eras and geographies. (Source: Big Issue, March 27, 2026.)

The Bigger Picture

The documentary arrives at a moment when Nineteen Eighty-Four is enjoying renewed commercial and critical attention. The novel's warnings about doublespeak, surveillance, and the manipulation of collective memory have been cited in academic, journalistic, and political contexts across the 2020s in connection with events ranging from the January 6 Capitol attack — which Peck includes in the film — to AI-generated disinformation campaigns and state censorship of the internet.

The specific argument about cinema's influence on Orwell is a narrower scholarly claim, but it reframes a creative genealogy that has been taken for granted. If Chaplin showed Orwell how a projected image could hijack rational thought — could make a crowd love a man they had just been taught to fear, or fear a man they had just been taught to love — then The Great Dictator is not merely a work Orwell reviewed. It is one of the primary source documents of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The fact that Orwell later fingered Chaplin to British intelligence, while simultaneously completing his novel about state informers and surveillance, is the kind of complexity that Peck's documentary, by most critical accounts, leaves mostly unexplored.