My latest is up at the Everyman, discussing Animal Farm and the lie of equality:

It is said that you should never judge a book by its cover or a film by its trailer. This is fair, except that covers and trailers both exist to be judged; to give the potential audience some idea what to expect of the story.

In the case of Andy Serkis’s adaptation of Animal Farm, what we can expect seems to be a goofy, stupid, paint-by-numbers animated comedy. The villain is a generic evil businesswoman, Napoleon appears to be a clueless Homer Simpson type, and Animal Farm itself is a bright, happy place of filled [sic] with cute animals doing fun things and making corny jokes.

Which is to say, it is the opposite of what the story is supposed to be.

Now, a cheap, braindead adaptation of a classic story that inverts the intention of the original work is nothing new, but when the original is an allegory for some of the darkest days of the last century, it does feel as though we’ve crossed a bit of a line.

To be fair, there is a chance that the trailer is misleading and that Animal Farm: Gollum Edition will be a good and faithful adaptation of the book, just as there is a chance that Boxer actually was being taken to the vet. But I would lay very long odds against it. The fact that Seth Rogan is voicing Stalin says quite a lot about what to expect.

The only positive thing about this whole debacle is that it provides an opportunity to discuss the original novel

I will presume that, unlike the filmmakers, most you have read the book: a grim allegory of the Russian Revolution in which the idealistic utopia of animals running their own farm for their own benefit in perfect equality becomes, in practice, a brutal dictatorship in which Napoleon and his fellow pigs treat their fellow animals worse than the farmer ever did, just as Stalin and the Bolsheviks ‘subverted’ the revolution and imposed a far more brutal and inhumane dictatorship than the Tsar had ever imagined.

The book’s most famous line (which appears in the trailer more or less as a joke) is the final commandment, which runs: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This line and the book in general are often interpreted as a warning against allowing one group or another to claim an unequal place in society.

But I would argue that the events of the book reveal (intentionally or not) a much harder truth; that the real problem with the final commandment is not the nonsensical second clause, but the idealistic first. All animals are not, in fact, equal. Equality is a lie, and always will be.

Read the rest here