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1984 This piece started on March 27, 2009 with references to Mark Fuhrman and 1984 that had a familiar ring. I found out why two days later when I went to A Tale of Two Coins to add a link to something Fuhrman said in Murder in Spokane. It was about his role in the 1984 Las Angeles Olympics. Putting in the link was all I had to do apart from putting 1984 in bold type to show what that year meant to Fuhrman relative to the image of O.J. Simpson that put him on trial for murder. The Palace Station incident hadn’t happened yet and we didn’t know who Michael McClinton was. Therefore, McClinton's role in that incident could not be factored into his circumstantial links to the March 21, 1994 murder of Robert C. Hurd or the pull of 1984 on Mark Fuhrman’s “imagination.” The point here is that 1984 has intense personal meanings to Fuhrman. It is woven into the most widely accepted image of O.J. that Fuhrman helped to create and the 1994 murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman according him and the people who followed his lead. 1984 marks the first documented instance of a pattern of abuse on O.J.’s part against Nicole, created retroactively and symbolically in Fuhrman’s 1989 letter to the Los Angeles city attorney. The important thing about Fuhrman’s “indelible” memory of that incident is that he got the year wrong. You have to reverse the order of the year he said it happened with the year it did happen to get it right. Real time cannot be reversed. But numbers can be and they often are by dyslexics like O.J. who sometimes transpose them in writing because they see them in reverse order. When writing numbers, transposition errors are the most common mistakes made by nearly everyone. American civilians write dates in the order of month, day and year but Europeans and the American military put the day ahead of the year. Transposing the last two digits in a year lets you use one year as a code for another year. 1984 can in this way be used as a code for 1948; the year Rube Goldberg won the Pulitzer Prize for his “foolish machines” cartoons. A strong case can be made for Fuhrman using the transposition formula in his Murder in Spokane reference to 1948 and to Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe (PM) in the last two sentences of the same paragraph: "...Even with the advance in high-tech criminalistics, there’s a homicide textbook written in 1948 that I still find very useful. Given the tools available to him in the 1940s, a hardworking gumshoe like Philip Marlowe could have solved the case in a matter of weeks." With Marlowe you get Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum respectively as Philip Marlow in the 1944 and 1975 screen adaptations of Chandler’s novel, Farewell, My Lovely. You get Mitchum’s co-stars Charlotte Rampling and John Ireland. You get the 1944 screenplay version of Double Indemnity co-written by Chandler and Billy Wilder. If you ever wondered why the anklet scene with Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Charlotte Rampling in Farewell, My Lovely descending the staircase are so reminiscent of each other, now you know. Rampling’s February 5 birthday is the same as Fuhrman’s. Ireland’s March 21st death day is the same as Robert C. Hurd’s. Rampling’s last movie before the Hurd murder was Hammer Over the Anvil (’93). With all of that you still get George Orwell’s book 1984. Less than two minutes into the opening scene of the 1984 version of the book, you see a man in a propaganda film pounding a piece of glowing metal over an anvil with a hammer. The working title of Orwell’s book changed from year to year as it was being written. He set the publication title as the transposition of 48 when he completed the manuscript that October. It was published in 1949. Transposing 49 gives you 94, the year that Robert C. Hurd, Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed. Common to both crimes was the hammer that Mark Fuhrman said Hurd was beaten to death with and the weapon that was used like a hammer on Nicole before she and Ron Goldman were killed. The events in Orwell’s 1984 unfold between April and June. You wouldn’t know it at first from the 14 2 84 (14, February, 1984 – Valentine’s Day) date of a newspaper article Winston Smith is editing when you see him working at the INGSOC Ministry of Records. His job is to overwrite history that the Party wants to change. The real date is the one that you see him writing in his diary in a cramped corner of his tiny apartment room that the surveillance camera can’t reach. It’s April 4th in the '84 version of the movie (in the 1956 version it's April 18, Brad Roberts' birthday). Winston's reversal of the day and month that you see in his diary is an act of rebellion. He is a thought criminal. He knows that he will eventually be caught, tortured and killed for this greatest of all crimes in the totalitarian superstate of Oceania. INGSOC stands for English Socialism, the ruling totalitarian party of Oceania. “I” for “E” in English makes no sense because it isn’t supposed to. Neither is “English” since Oceana comprises nearly half of the inhabited globe and England appears to be a fading concept. Giving new meanings to the language is a big part of a process that the Party is using to erase all obsolete thoughts associated with Standard English (Oldspeak). The INGSOC designation could change overnight but the Party will live on. You see INGSOC at Party rallies when you see Big Brother, as Dorothy and company first saw the Wizard of Oz, but you don’t hear it spoken; you hear, “the Party”. When you hear that “Big Brother is watching you,” you know that the Party behind the mask is watching – and listening for any sign that you might be a thought criminal. Inner Party leader O’Brien, hinting that he is a secret rebel, gives Winston “the book” supposedly written by the founder of the resistance Emmanuel Goldstein disguised as the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. “The book” is stuck like Post-it paper to the pages of the dictionary. Only when Winston and his illicit lover Julia are captured, separated and tortured in cells outside of room 101 of the Ministry of Love, does O’Brien tell Winston that he wrote the book. Inside of room 101 is where all thought criminals are converted to true acolytes of Big Brother before they are executed. If Charlotte Rampling jumped into your head just then for some inscrutable reason it could be because you looked at her body of work at some time and saw that she played a character called Julia twice. Such is the influence of the subconscious mind. When you call up one idea from your memory you get everything associated with it and there is no way to filter out everything you don’t want all of the time.
Shelley Winters as Willa Harper readies herself for a gruesome death at the cutting edge of her husband's Stiletto in The Night of the Hunter . Just when you think that this line of inquiry is going increasingly away from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Orwell’s 1984 you get Shelley Winters as a linchpin between Robert Mitchum and Edmond O'Brien. Mitchum as the murderous false preacher in The Night of the Hunter slits her character's throat from ear to ear. O’Brien as the object of an actor's insanely jealous obsession with his ex-wife's love life reveals her murdered character's duel-personality killer to the sane half of himself in A Double Life. Edmond O’Brien is the protagonist Winston Smith in the 1956 movie version of 1984. He is the insurance investigator in the 1946 movie version of Earnest Hemmingway’s The Killers with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner – which begins with a murder in Brentwood, N.J. In the 1957 movie Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Burt Lancaster is Wyatt Earp. In Tombstone ('93) Robert Mitchum is the narrator.
Edmond O’Brien’s role in the first movie version of The Killers is not the only place that 1956 movie comes together with 1984. Remember the 84-48 transposition in the title of Orwell’s book and the year he finished writing it? Another screenplay version of The Killers was released in 1965. There is also a transposition of roles in the name O’Brien, the actor who plays the torture victim in Orwell’s novel and the character who tortures him. The producers of that move could not change the name of their A-list star to avoid audience conflicts on how to feel about the good guy actor and the bad guy character. Changing the name of Orwell’s A-list villain to O’Conner aborts that potential problem. This is where things get really interesting with Mark Fuhrman, the 1949 publication of 1984 and Robert C. Hurd who was beaten to death with a hammer on March 21, 1994. See how and how often names, dates, the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, the weapon used to kill Hurd and the actions of Michael McClinton that were used to imprison O.J. Simpson and Clarence Stewart are represented in Orwell’s 1984 novel. You need to go no farther than the book’s four cinematic incarnations, their five main characters (counting two that were fabricated to sell a lie) and a few noteworthy items in the biographies of the actors who portrayed them in 1953, 1954, 1956 and 1984. The O'Brien character in 1984 is particularly relevant to Michael McClinton and the regular cast of characters in Star Trek:DS9. Winston Smith – ’53 Eddie Albert / ’54 Peter Cushing / ’56 Edmond O'Brien /’84 John Hurt Julia – ’53 Norma Crane ’54 Yvonne Mitchell ’56 Jan Sterling ’84 Suzanna Hamilton O'Brien – ’53 Lorne Greene ’54 André Morell ’56 Michael Redgrave ’84 Richard Burton Big Brother See 1984 (television commercial) link Emmanuel Goldstein See the Emma Goldman link. If the Zuckerman and Goldie links to Norma Crain, the Police Squad! link to Lorne Greene and the hammer links to Peter Cushing, Suzanna Hamilton and Andre Morell aren’t enough for you, you get more with other actors who played main 1984 characters. Consider Yvonne Mitchell’s March 24 death day (Robert C. Hurd’s birthday was March 25) and Michael Redgrave’s death day on March 21. Consider how close Hurt is to Hurd and the Scrabble game name that comes out of RICHARD BURTON as O’BRIEN... ROBERT C HURD
He dials in the date and gets the old newspaper with the article he was told to change.
Martin Luther King was shot on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Mark Fuhrman said he clashed with Margaret York on the last day of '86 over a Martin Luther King "birthday" poster.
--Jasper |
Don’t forget
that the way you get to George Orwell’s 1984 is the way Mark Fuhrman did it in Murder in Spokane, chapter 23: The Simple Art of Murder Investigation with his
reference to a 1948 homicide “textbook” and the fictional private investigator Philip Marlowe. Good luck on finding that unnamed 1948 textbook. What you will
find with little difficulty is a an essay on pulp fiction and a collection of short stories written by Philip Marlowe’s creator Raymond Chandler in 1944 and republished in
1950. Chandler called it The Simple Art of Murder. Murder in Spokane was Fuhrman’s third book. Death and Justice was his fourth.
A Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963 was his fifth. 
The
