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It has become popular to call dystopian novels “prophetic.” Slippery slopes abound: Our corseting of women’s reproductive rights begets The Handmaid’s Tale, technology dependence begets Black Mirror; the list goes on. For HBO’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, airing Saturday, May 19, the slippery slope into mass-scale book-burning looks different in 2018 than it did in 1953, when Ray Bradbury published the novel and later serialized it in the pages of Playboy.
For Bradbury, the tipping point was television, then only in its infancy. For the menu of dystopian weak spots available in our current cultural moment, it’s difficult to pick just one target. How do you reconcile an oversaturated information marketplace with the well-documented decline in reading books? Director Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes) culls plenty of righteous fury in this updated version, but its preoccupation with futuristic aesthetics makes for a cool techno-husk without a meaningful core.
Some of Bahrani’s 21st-century upgrades are inspired, particularly casting Michael B. Jordan as Guy Montag, the troubled fireman whose growing curiosity about books threatens his career and conscience. His casting is additionally meaningful as it is the latest in a string of recent films featuring performers of color in roles not originally written for them, including A Wrinkle in Time‘s Meg Murry (played by Storm Reid) and Deadpool 2‘s Domino (portrayed by Zazie Beetz). Montag is one of the Salamanders, a group of “firemen” who burn books and bully the rebellious “Eels,” who read them into submission.
Led by Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon), the firemen in this adaptation are half-police, half-reality stars. There is a kind of rote machismo in the Salamanders’ bonding, which largely consists of drinking beer and singing songs about how brave and awesome they are. Their exploits are broadcast to the masses on the Nine, a state-operated social network airing on mirrors, walls and even skyscrapers.
The female characters also get major makeovers. Montag’s TV-zealot wife, Mildred, is gone from this adaptation entirely—and she is not missed. Clarisse (Sofia Boutella) is updated from a schoolgirl neighbor to a grungy twentysomething who acts as a Salamander informant. Eels who are caught hiding books get their identities removed via fingerprint, rendering them un-American—a heavy-handed nod to the novel’s origins in the era of McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Clarisse and Montag encounter each other at a pseudo-“club,” where zombified patrons congregate not to speak to each other, but to play with VR. She gives Beatty a tip that leads them to an old woman’s massive and illegal library, a regular “Tower of Babel,” in Beatty’s words.
It is the social media element that is the urgent jolt of modernity in the film, particularly with problematic news algorithms and the promulgation of false information.
This is the site of Montag’s transformation: Haunted by those mountains of books, and the lengths the woman will go to to protect them, Montag’s worldview collapses. He steals one of her books—Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground—and brings it to Clarisse, who lives in the city’s seedy underbelly with the other Eels and revolutionaries. Before burning the Tower of Babel, Beatty goads Montag to read a line from one of the books. Montag doesn’t understand it, which is precisely what Beatty intends. This, says Beatty, is why we burn. Books are confusing, and they offer too many conflicting views. It is better to be spoon-fed one view, or none at all; anything more creates chaos and depression. Ignorance is bliss, as the old dictum goes.
Also included in Beatty’s lecture—much of which is taken directly from the book—is a taste of Bradbury’s views on minority censorship. Black people don’t like Huck Finn, white people don’t like Native Son, feminists don’t like Henry Miller—so, into the fire they go. At best, it’s a curmudgeonly jab at political correctness; at worst, it democratizes grievances of wildly varying harm as equal wrongs. Why do they burn books? The film offers a dozen explanations, but gives only reductive headlines—the very social ill it wants to correct.
Clumsy and largely unnecessary exposition is the film’s biggest hindrance. In one early scene, Beatty and Montag barge in on a rebellious broadcaster in the middle of delivering a mournful monologue about the replacement of long-form journalism with “just the headlines.” Even a talented actor like Shannon can’t elevate the dialogue above ham-fisted footnotes—for example, claiming that it was the “millions of opinions” which caused the Second Civil War, resulting in 8 million deaths, including his own father. Just one of those facts warrants a scene’s worth of investigation. Instead, these details are sloughed off like dead skin, revealing only a skeleton of an idea underneath.
Besides the handling of Beatty, much of the film’s character transformations from the novel actually work to good effect. In the novel, the characters are entirely without personal histories; at one point, Montag must ask his wife how they met. But in the film, Montag is given a father, whose muddied memory haunts him as he begins to doubt his Salamander programming. Jordan’s Montag makes for a strong audience surrogate: We see flashes of the fieriness seen in the actor’s more recent work as Killmonger and Adonis Creed (there is even some superfluous boxing), as well as the pain that comes from discovering that he’s a victim, too. The film is best when we get glimpses of the characters’ private lives: Beatty writing scraps of quotes he remembers on rolling paper, or Montag alone on his couch, lost in the digitized ocean waves that crash, photo-real, from his walls.
The film bursts with tech, creating an overcrowded aesthetic perhaps meant to resemble the ad and autoplay-riddled webpages we’re inured to now. Its Luddite politics don’t distinguish which technologies are torporific and which are illuminating, instead simplifying all tech to a simple algorithm: To be on the grid is to be a zombie, and to be off is to be enlightened. Much of the digital interface resembles a hollow version of something you’d find on Black Mirror, such as the “Fifteen Million Merits”-esque wall-to-wall video screens and digitalization. Some of this comes from Bradbury’s paranoia about television; in the novel, Montag’s wife is obsessed with the soap opera characters whose lives play out on her parlor walls. Bahrani’s adaptation also injects some of our current anxieties around surveillance into an Alexa-like robot called Yuxie, whose cool robotic voice encourages Montag to sedate himself with memory-suppressing eye drops when his vitals are “low.”
But it is the social media element that is the urgent jolt of modernity in the film, particularly with problematic news algorithms and the promulgation of false information. However, its effectiveness is marred by the exaggerated futurism of the aesthetic; considering that fake news is a real-time threat in 2018, the message would be better to be delivered on a regular iPhone.
With a surfeit of good dystopian work released in the past year—Blade Runner 2049, plus the aforementioned Black Mirror and Handmaid’s Tale, to name just a few—Fahrenheit 451 might lack the elegance to linger in our memory. This is unfortunate, considering the infiltration of anti-intellectualism in our highest office. While only some of Bradbury’s novel has come to pass, Donald Trump is a creature straight from his bleakest nightmare: He can’t name the last book he’s read, and he won’t read intelligence reports if they’re longer than a page. Bradbury’s dystopia is Trump’s utopia. Either way, let’s avoid that slippery slope altogether.