Big Brother Poster

The Big Brother Poster is the most inescapable object in the visual world of Nineteen Eighty-Four: a coloured poster, "too large for indoor display," tacked to the wall of the Victory Mansions hallway, depicting an enormous face more than a metre wide — a man of about forty-five with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features — beneath the caption "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." It is repeated on every landing, opposite the lift shaft, and it is contrived so that the eyes follow the passer-by; and what the opening chapter fixes on the walls of Winston Smith's apartment building, the closing chapter fixes on the wall of the Chestnut Tree Café, where the same vast face eyes him from across the room and is finally loved. The poster is the Party's most durable icon: the printed body of a god whose gaze is surveillance and whose worship is obedience.

Appearance and Ubiquity

Winston first meets the poster on a bright cold April day, when the stiff breeze and grit follow him through the glass doors. The lift is unusable — "even at the best of times it was seldom working," and during daylight the current is cut off as part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week — so he climbs the seven flights slowly, resting several times: he is thirty-nine and carries a varicose ulcer above his right ankle. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster gazes from the wall, "one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move." From the window the same black-moustachio'd face gazes down from "every commanding corner" of the street, the dark eyes looking deep into Winston's own, while at street level a torn poster flaps fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. The image is carried everywhere — on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet — "always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you," with no escape except "the few cubic centimetres inside your skull." It reaches into private flats: the Parsons' sitting-room walls carry a full-sized poster of Big Brother among the scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and the frontispiece of a children's history textbook turns "the hypnotic eyes" on Winston as he reads.

Icon of the Adored, Icon of the Hated

The object of worship defines itself against the object of hatred. At the Two Minutes Hate, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, flashes onto the screen — a lean Jewish face with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard, a face that resembles a sheep's — a renegade who, long ago, had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, before he engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, was condemned to death and mysteriously escaped and disappeared. Around Goldstein gather the whispered rumours that form the demonology of the poster's rule: the Brotherhood, a "vast shadowy army" of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State, and "the book," the compendium of all heresies, which no ordinary Party member would mention if he could avoid it. At the climax of the Hate the screen image melts from the monstrous Eurasian soldier into the face of Big Brother, "black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm," and it persists for several seconds after the picture fades; the little sandy-haired woman flings herself forward over the back of her chair and, murmuring what sounds like "My Saviour!," stretches her arms towards the screen in what is plainly a prayer. The poster is the permanent, printed version of that adored face — the icon that remains when the screen goes dark.

The Face of Official Happiness

The poster's fixed benevolence presides over a regime that manufactures its own good news. From the telescreen an eager youthful voice announces "glorious news": the battle for production has been won, the standard of living has risen "by no less than 20 per cent over the past year," and all over Oceania there have been "irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations" as workers paraded with banners "voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us." That same propaganda machine reports demonstrations thanking Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week — a ration already scheduled to fall from thirty grammes to twenty, and which, only the day before, had been announced as reduced to twenty grammes a week. Parsons swallows it "with the stupidity of an animal"; the eyeless creature at the other canteen table swallows it with a furious desire to track down and denounce anyone who remembers that the ration was thirty grammes last week; Syme swallows it "in some more complex way, involving doublethink." Winston is left to wonder whether he is alone "in the possession of a memory." The face on the poster smiles over the contradiction; it is the visual form of a lie that must be believed twice over.

The Theology of the Poster

The deepest account of what the poster means comes from O'Brien in the Ministry of Love. "We are the priests of power," he tells the broken Winston: "God is power." Power, in this theology, is collective — the individual only has power "in so far as he ceases to be an individual," so that by merging himself into the Party he becomes all-powerful and immortal — and it is exercised over the mind before anything else: "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull... We make the laws of Nature." Goldstein's forbidden book states the doctrinal basis of the image: Big Brother is not a man but "the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world," his function to act as "a focusing point for love, fear and reverence" — emotions more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organisation. Every copy of the poster is that guise made material, a small altar on which the Party exhibits itself.

The Final Gaze

In the last chapter the poster completes its arc. At the Chestnut Tree Café, in the lonely hour of fifteen, Winston sits in his usual corner gazing into an empty glass, watched by "a vast face" on the opposite wall — "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said." The waiters know his habits: the chessboard is always waiting, his corner table is always reserved, and nobody cares to sit too close to him; he never counts his drinks, the bills are undercharged, and he now holds a sinecure more highly paid than his old job at the Ministry of Truth. When a trumpet-call announces a great victory in Africa, he is swept into a blissful dream of running with the cheering crowds and of walking down the white-tiled corridor with the long-hoped-for bullet entering his brain. He gazes up at the enormous face, reflecting that forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache; two gin-scented tears trickle down the sides of his nose. The book ends with the poster's demand finally met: "He loved Big Brother." The eyes that followed Winston through the hallways of Victory Mansions follow him to the last page.