fool's circle

I first watched Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaut) on TV in my teens; I was dumbfounded by such a boring scifi movie without cool special effects. But the premise was great: what if we lived in a society that banned and shunned writing and literacy?

I rewatched the movie on dvd yesterday, after 20-odd years, and finally got it. Although the cover blurb had to point out to me that Julie Christie played the roles of the heroine & anti-heroine (methadon-ette?); just as I had to be told that one woman was played by 2 actors in The Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel).

Reader's Digested Version:
Setting: An edition of our own society where all books are banned.
Story: A fireman, who burns books and arrests readers, is enticed into literature by non-com educator. The fireman becomes estranged from his numb, conformist wife who is repelled by his book-loving ways. She reports him to the authorities. He escapes to live with the book people, who memorize books, "become books", to evade Big Brother.

Luscious to watch - smooth, elegant Hitchcockian cinematography by Nicholas Roeg - long seductive sequences of books burning - cool colours interrupted by the lipstick red firetrucks - the whole thing lusciously un-sexy. And Bernard Herrmann's music has the same dusky, romantic, semi-sweet quality I loved so much in Psycho. Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch's fave scorer, owes Herrmann a drink (hopefully Heaven is not a nation of teatotallers).

Many people find the ending hopeful 'cause the book people preserve literature by memorizing it. But it's tragic; the authorities succeeded in annihilating the written word. This society has come full circle, and listen to stories as we once did, rather than read them.

TV is the medium for keeping everyone docile. Not much has changed since the '60s. Fahrenheit 451's society is paranoid; they believe that people who think differently will make everyone unhappy. In our society, people who have different beliefs are potential terrorists. All books are obscene in Fahrenheit 451's society; in our society people don't understand that any book and no book is pornography.

Now for my anti-climax:
Any real society, utopia or distopia begs the same question: At which point are we in the cycle of propaganda to reality back to propaganda? We can't tell and we're fools.