Sometimes I get the feeling that, given a few more years, maybe not too many, the only difference between us and the fantasy future in this film is that the firemen of the future will loathe books, criminalize and burn them, while we just ignore them.
This bleak picture of the future is Ray Bradbury's, filmed by Francois Truffaut, scored by Bernard Hermann, and starring Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, and Cyril Cusack, with Anton Diffring in a supporting role.
The tract houses on wooded lots all look alike. Their inhabitants, including Werner's airhead wife, Christie, spend their time chatting cheerfully about how good things are, when not absorbed by Cousin Pollyanna on the telly. There are no books, of course. Books only make people think and thinking makes people sad. It might even prompt some to dissent. Dangerous things, books.
So it's illegal to own them. There is a kind of mailbox in front of the fire station where anyone can drop a note accusing his obnoxious neighbor of owning books. This activates the fire brigade, led by Cusack and crewed by the ambitious young Werner and the jealous Diffring. The firemen board their flamboyantly red engine and sip to the location of the accused, where they tear everything apart in their search for books. If the books are found, they are piled together and set alight with some kind of flame thrower.
Out of curiosity, Werner slips one of the contraband books into his tunic and takes it home. Late at night, when Christie is asleep and no one is around, he creeps into the kitchen, turns on the light, and begins reading Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield." He haltingly reads everything on the title page, including the name of the publishers in London and New York. Then he gets to the text. "Chapter One. I am born." Well, I'll tell you -- the guy is hooked. Before you know it he's got a secret library and he's reading everything he can secret away during his raids. His wife finds out, squeals on him, and leaves. Werner's last raid is on his own house but in addition to burning the pile of books on the floor he burns everything, including his boss.
On the advice of a criminal neighbor, also played by Julie Christie, he makes his escape to a group of "living books" who have carved a living out of the wilderness. They don't OWN books, so they can't be prosecuted. They ARE books. Their names correspond to the titles of the book that each has memorized. Werner is warmly accepted by the community. He would like to be "David Copperfield" but "we already have a David Copperfield," so he becomes the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The final scenes show us people wandering about through the snowy woods, ignoring each other, mumbling aloud the words of the texts they've memorized. Presumably they live happily ever after.
The picture rolls along effectively and spookily. The photography is fine and the acting is at a professional level, though I do wish Oskar Werner with his rosebud mouth didn't run as if he were dancing over red hot coals, gracelessly, his elbows raised like an ostrich's.
The main problem I had with the movie is that it might have made a good short story but it's a little thin for a feature-length movie.
What I mean is that we can already see that the popularity of books -- of carefully crafted reading material in general -- is in decline. Newspapers and weekly news magazines are in Cheyne-Stokes respiration. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both losing readers, while the picture newspapers still glare at us from the supermarket checkout counters. (Latest headline in The Globe, as I write this, "Obama IS a Mulsim.") Another generation and they'll be historical curiosities, although we may still be able to buy broadsheets full of photos of celebrities now grown old and fat.
Books are in just as bad a shape. I know this to be a fact because nobody bought my books! Hardly made a dime. And they were just full of penetrating insights, too! (Sob.) Okay. We can accept the decline of literacy as a fait accompli, although we also have to note that among the many books we see curling up in pain in the middle of the bonfires, we don't see any works on science, technology, or math. Everything burnt is a novel or a work of philosophy -- the humanities but not the sciences. Well, that's understandable. When was the last time a quadratic equation generated sad thoughts in anyone? But this problem is never brought up in the movie. As far as the story is concerned, books are books.
Another hole in the logic is this: Before books can be loathed, they must become important in social life. No one loathes the moon or a polymerized molecule of nitrogen dioxide because who the hell cares about them? Nobody. They're irrelevant. And that's where books seem to be headed today. Not towards criminalization but towards total irrelevance. U* cnt H8 something U dnt no abt bc Ur 2 dumb.
When I was in high school we read "The Great Gatsby" in English class. Out of the hundreds of college students I've taught, there were only two who'd read "Gatsby" -- one on her own and another in an ADVANCED PLACEMENT class. Bradbury and Truffaut are on the right track, I think. Books will disappear. But not because they're illegal, but just because nobody wants them anymore.
That future is almost bleaker because it leaves us without any enemy except ourselves.
This bleak picture of the future is Ray Bradbury's, filmed by Francois Truffaut, scored by Bernard Hermann, and starring Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, and Cyril Cusack, with Anton Diffring in a supporting role.
The tract houses on wooded lots all look alike. Their inhabitants, including Werner's airhead wife, Christie, spend their time chatting cheerfully about how good things are, when not absorbed by Cousin Pollyanna on the telly. There are no books, of course. Books only make people think and thinking makes people sad. It might even prompt some to dissent. Dangerous things, books.
So it's illegal to own them. There is a kind of mailbox in front of the fire station where anyone can drop a note accusing his obnoxious neighbor of owning books. This activates the fire brigade, led by Cusack and crewed by the ambitious young Werner and the jealous Diffring. The firemen board their flamboyantly red engine and sip to the location of the accused, where they tear everything apart in their search for books. If the books are found, they are piled together and set alight with some kind of flame thrower.
Out of curiosity, Werner slips one of the contraband books into his tunic and takes it home. Late at night, when Christie is asleep and no one is around, he creeps into the kitchen, turns on the light, and begins reading Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield." He haltingly reads everything on the title page, including the name of the publishers in London and New York. Then he gets to the text. "Chapter One. I am born." Well, I'll tell you -- the guy is hooked. Before you know it he's got a secret library and he's reading everything he can secret away during his raids. His wife finds out, squeals on him, and leaves. Werner's last raid is on his own house but in addition to burning the pile of books on the floor he burns everything, including his boss.
On the advice of a criminal neighbor, also played by Julie Christie, he makes his escape to a group of "living books" who have carved a living out of the wilderness. They don't OWN books, so they can't be prosecuted. They ARE books. Their names correspond to the titles of the book that each has memorized. Werner is warmly accepted by the community. He would like to be "David Copperfield" but "we already have a David Copperfield," so he becomes the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The final scenes show us people wandering about through the snowy woods, ignoring each other, mumbling aloud the words of the texts they've memorized. Presumably they live happily ever after.
The picture rolls along effectively and spookily. The photography is fine and the acting is at a professional level, though I do wish Oskar Werner with his rosebud mouth didn't run as if he were dancing over red hot coals, gracelessly, his elbows raised like an ostrich's.
The main problem I had with the movie is that it might have made a good short story but it's a little thin for a feature-length movie.
What I mean is that we can already see that the popularity of books -- of carefully crafted reading material in general -- is in decline. Newspapers and weekly news magazines are in Cheyne-Stokes respiration. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both losing readers, while the picture newspapers still glare at us from the supermarket checkout counters. (Latest headline in The Globe, as I write this, "Obama IS a Mulsim.") Another generation and they'll be historical curiosities, although we may still be able to buy broadsheets full of photos of celebrities now grown old and fat.
Books are in just as bad a shape. I know this to be a fact because nobody bought my books! Hardly made a dime. And they were just full of penetrating insights, too! (Sob.) Okay. We can accept the decline of literacy as a fait accompli, although we also have to note that among the many books we see curling up in pain in the middle of the bonfires, we don't see any works on science, technology, or math. Everything burnt is a novel or a work of philosophy -- the humanities but not the sciences. Well, that's understandable. When was the last time a quadratic equation generated sad thoughts in anyone? But this problem is never brought up in the movie. As far as the story is concerned, books are books.
Another hole in the logic is this: Before books can be loathed, they must become important in social life. No one loathes the moon or a polymerized molecule of nitrogen dioxide because who the hell cares about them? Nobody. They're irrelevant. And that's where books seem to be headed today. Not towards criminalization but towards total irrelevance. U* cnt H8 something U dnt no abt bc Ur 2 dumb.
When I was in high school we read "The Great Gatsby" in English class. Out of the hundreds of college students I've taught, there were only two who'd read "Gatsby" -- one on her own and another in an ADVANCED PLACEMENT class. Bradbury and Truffaut are on the right track, I think. Books will disappear. But not because they're illegal, but just because nobody wants them anymore.
That future is almost bleaker because it leaves us without any enemy except ourselves.