A Chilling Look at Where We're Headed

Last week I watched Farenheit 451 for the first time on TV, and the film seemed remarkably prophetic. It's hard to believe this movie about a society that forbids all reading and burns all books was made 40 years ago.

We live in a frightening time, and although our firefighters don't set fire to books, we're already beginning to lose our sense of freedom and rationality. A few weeks ago, millions of Muslims took to the streets, burning books and everything in sight to protest against freedom of speech. And here in the U.S., the magazines that reproduced the cartoons have been removed from the shelves of many bookstores.

Visually, the film's modern living room with its huge flat-screen TV seems right on target. The mindless audience participation show that Linda watches each night could easily be a current reality program. And the picture-filled but wordless newspaper Montag "reads" looks like a new product for our post-literate age. Just last night, I heard the 911 Commission Report will soon be released in comic book format "for people who don't read books." Of course, chills went down my spine.

Flame Wars

This film first appeared in theaters in 1966. The Vietnam War was just getting under way, and the Pentagon was beefing up its disinformation campaign that was later documented in David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest. The film was based on a novel by Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953, when the hysterical Red Scares of McCarthyism were near their peak.

Bradbury's writing was originally published in the second issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. In an interview on the DVD, Bradbury claims that Fahrenheit 451 was his only work of science fiction.

That the "New Wave" director, Francois Truffaut agreed to direct the film was unusual. Bradbury was already an established writer, who probably wanted some artistic control and Truffaut was promoting the auteur theory of film in which the director has absolute artistic control.

The friction had a couple of effects on the film. Truffaut, eager to begin filming wrote the screenplay before fully mastering English. Even Truffaut was disappointed in the end with the stiff, flat dialog. For Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451 was his first, and last, English-language film. This may have contributed to the flatness of the characters. Some reviewers made an asset out of the stiffness by saying that the characters, deprived of serious thinking, and of books, and addled by drugs, were themselves, in fact, flat, soulless creatures. Bradbury had little say on the final screenplay.

The central character, Guy Montag, (Oskar Werner) is a "fireman." In this disturbing vision of the future, firemen burn books. Books are all but banned by the government because they have "conflicting ideas" in them. Those ideas can make people feel bad. It is the government's job to keep people happy, with drugs, large-screen television, and other entertainment. Does anyone still remember the term "Happy Talk News? Let's keep it positive.

The novel played on the concerns of the time when it was written. Censorship and suppression of thought, mainly through intimidation, was being exercised in the United States. The intimidation was being done by radio and newspaper columnists, who supported McCarthy. The book burnings by Nazis, which started in Germany in 1933 and continued until the end of World War II, were still in living memory. And the world was still reeling from the horrible pictures of the explosions of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as implications of the mass production of nuclear weapons.

By the time the film appeared, America was more concerned with race riots. So, burning was a viscerally powerful theme. Lost on most viewers in 1966 was the detail that among the burned books was the film journal Cahiers du Cinema for which Truffaut wrote, and that on the magazine's cover was a picture from the film Breathless, written by Truffaut. Also among the burned books: The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, both written by Bradbury.

Truffaut, however, contributed much to the uniqueness of the film as a work of art separate from the book. From the opening credits, which were spoken and not displayed on the screen, to the ending, in which the exiles who have devoted their lives to memorizing books recite their books while walking blissfully in the snow, Truffaut's genius is there. Also a stroke of genius was the casting of Julie Christie as Monag's drug-addled wife, and as the more compassionate and interested Clarisse, who seduces him into reading and thinking.

Like Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, describes a hedonist world, where the people need not think. I'll have my Valium now. And I have cable, so there must be something to watch. Maybe a rerun of Jerry Springer.

Flowers of Fire

It's curious that a director who spent so much of his early career railing against the tyranny of the literary tradition in French cinema should spend so much of his career either adapting novels or filling his films with techniques from and references to literature at every turn, so his attraction to Ray Bradbury's fable isn't that surprising. What is surprising is that in many ways it's his most purely cinematic film, discarding his usual over-reliance on voice-over to carry underwritten scenes for more purely cinematic forms of interpretation. Even the readings from the forbidden books are kept to a minimum: the obsession is in Montag's behavior, not the words he speaks.

Truffaut's playfulness is all over the material, from casting an actor who forbade his children to watch TV or go to the cinema as the fire chief (Cyril Cusack in the film's standout performance) to dramatically masking off half the screen and heightening the dramatic music for what turns out to be a less than dramatic moment in a search - and that's without the inclusion of Cahiers du Cinema among the burning books or mentioning Anton Diffring's brief moment in drag. But then this is an absurdist world, where firemen slide up poles and start fires and where fascism is accepted in that way it always is when gradually introduced because of people's innate ability to adapt to their circumstances, no matter how absurd or restricting.

It improves on Bradbury's novel by losing some of the more distancing sci-fi devices such as the fortune telling dog, and setting it's future in a soulless post-war New Town environment that is close enough to the real look of the time to add to the credibility. Much of what there is in the film isn't that far from reality, with plasma wall screens offering inept interactive' TV (even down to pressing the red button) becoming status symbols, and betrayal increasingly encouraged as an everyday, socially acceptable act. Indeed, the world it presents, where people touch themselves, not each other, and where conflicting ideas are discouraged because they just make people unhappy, seems all too contemporary. Only what is possibly the single worst special effect in film history (those laughable flying policeman on all-too visible wires), the film's one ill-judged excursion into optical effects, sticks out like a sore thumb.

Despite the huge problems between Oskar Werner (who wanted to play Montag with a wink and a smile) and Truffaut (who ended the shoot directing through an intermediary, using body doubles and having to cut Werner's takes short before he smiled!), Montag seems a credible protagonist, an empty vessel who suddenly has his horizons violently opened. Even the accent seems strangely right: not so much the idea of a German playing a fascist book burner (indeed, Diffring's German accent is dubbed here), but the way it seems to compliment the formal language of the piece. Even Julie Christie's blandness and sporadic awkward enthusiasm work well enough in this environment for her almost to seem to give a perform for once.

Throw in Bernard Herrmann's remarkably beautiful, sparingly used score, never more effective than in the final sequences that are almost magically complimented by the happy accident of a totally unexpected snowfall, and the result is a surprisingly moving piece about fundamentally shallow people. And it is a very comforting thought that, if behind every book is a man (or woman), then somewhere there is a man or woman who will keep every book alive despite all efforts to destroy it.

Universal's DVD is one of the very best on the market: the audio commentary is occassionally unsatisfying, but any gaps are more than filled in by the excellent 45-minute documentary, interview with Ray Bradbury, featurette on Herrmann's score, alternate title sequence, stills and poster gallery and trailer. Highly recommended.