I’ve written about the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s novel of the same name at A Year In The Country before, including some of the controversy that surrounded it relating to the imposition/use of non-director approved music by the production company… which brings me to some other Orwellian 1984 related controversy which involved Apple Computers.
In 1983 and 1984 Apple created and had broadcast a television advert that depicted a dystopic society that appears to be inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 and which was directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed another iconic vision of the future in Bladerunner. The advert features monitoring telescreens and a meeting where subservient and uniformly drably dressed workers are shown in a meeting listening to a Big Brother like figure who is orating along lines not dissimilar to those shown in similar scenes in 1984:
“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”
A nameless runner in athletic wear is shown outrunning visored police officers, carrying a large brass-headed hammer. She races towards the screen and hurls the hammer towards it just as the Big Brother-esque figure announces “We shall prevail!”. The screen is destroyed and the advert continues with a text and voice over saying:
“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”
There have been different interpretations of the advert by both observers and those who created it; these have variously posited Apple as the plucky underdog that brings down the conformity and leading market success of computer manufacturer IBM (which coincidentally had been nicknamed Big Blue) and also that it was not such a specific reference to IBM but rather showed the fight for the control of computer technology as a struggle of the few against the many, with the Macintosh symbolizing the idea of empowerment and originality.
Previous to the advert being broadcast attorney and film producer Marvin Rosenblum had bought the television and film rights to 1984 from George Orwell’s widow Sonia Orwell and considered the advert to be a copyright infringement and sent cease and desist letters to those involved. He did not file a lawsuit in regards to this matter but also the advert had a very limited broadcast that included its transmsission via 10 local US television stations on 31st December 1984 and it then had a second, and only national, transmission on 22nd January 1984 during a broadcast of the National Football League’s prestitigious annual championshop the Superbowl.
Apple did not further televise the advert, which has gone on to gain iconic status, although they did post a new version on their website in 2004 as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the Macintosh computer, digitally adding their then popular iPod digital music player and headphone earbuds to the heroine.
Viewed today there is a certain irony to the advert; in part because of Apple’s popularisation of mobile digital technology many of the world’s citizens carrying around their own two-way “telescreens” in the form of touchscreen mobile phones, while the empowered struggle of the “few” against the many in the case of Apple is dependent in terms of access to Apple’s “empowering” equipment on the financial ability to purchase digital products which often cost several hundred percent more than other similar products, albeit sometimes with less advanced specifications, equipment… technology giveth and technology take away etc etc…
Above and below are some of the advert’s storyboards drawn by Hank Hinton that were created while it was being developed and pitched and in which “Big Brother” has more friendly cartoonish face than in the finished advert and curiously I keep thinking that in one of the drawings he has a Ziggy Stardust-esque lightning bolt across his forhead, although actually it’s the runners hammer.
