Review: Orwell Rolls in His Grave

If Robert Kane Pappas’s aesthetic is rudimentary, it’s more than made up for by his sheer force of will.

Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Photo: Sag Harbor-Basement Pictures

An essential companion piece to Joel Bakan and Harold Crooks’s The Corporation and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, director Robert Kane Pappas’s Orwell Rolls in His Grave is an expert piece of investigative journalism that likens our media system to a subsidiary of our country’s corporate process. Polemically, Pappas’s incendiary film is closer in tone to Moore’s anti-Bush rant, but aesthetically it shares more in common with Bakan and Crooks’s PowerPoint-ish exposé of corporate greed and irresponsibility.

Throughout, Pappas repeatedly points to the conflict of interest that exists in this country between the media and the corporations to which they’re beholden. And he does so by tracing a line between everything from the October Surprise that alleged that the Reagan campaign promised arms and money to Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election to CBS’s failure to air BBC reporter Greg Palast’s expert account of how George W. Bush’s own campaign unmistakably stole the last Presidential election.

Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, though, Orwell Rolls in His Grave isn’t concerned with undermining Bush’s rationale for going to war against Iraq, instead choosing to focus on the current administration’s chokehold of the media and silencing of its adversaries. Throughout his sometimes exhausting documentary, Pappas reveals how veteran journalist Helen Thomas was silenced by the White House for being critical of the Bush administration, the media’s failure to report the links between the Carlyle Group and Lockheed Martin, and Clear Channel’s despotism toward musicians who exercise their First Amendment rights.

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The accusations detailed throughout may not come as a surprise to some, but in total the rollcall of insults frighteningly suggest that we’re indeed living beneath “the dark, ominous shadows of totalitarianism.” Pappas’s smorgasbord of expert interviews and archival footage is intelligently if somewhat haphazardly pieced together with references to Orwellian lexicon (if the media is our country’s Big Brother, we’re its sheep) and scored to ominous mood music, but if Pappas’s aesthetic is rudimentary, it’s more than made up for by his sheer force of will.

Score: 
 Director: Robert Kane Pappas  Screenwriter: Robert Kane Pappas  Distributor: Sag Harbor-Basement Pictures  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2003  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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