We demanded a world like this.”ĭid we? Are we? Look how eerily relevant this premise is, Fahrenheit 451 blares, with its Alexa-like homebot (named Yuxie in the film), who doles out compliments and orders personalized-drugged-eyedrops for Jordan’s increasingly dissatisfied Montag, and appears to be listening even when she’s not supposed to be. Jordan), a firefighter in Beatty’s command. “They sold us what we wanted, self and happiness,” Clarisse (Sofia Boutella) tells Guy Montag (Michael B. Tech companies, it’s revealed, have become a kind of de facto government, phasing out language to better ping the dopamine receptors of The Nine’s twitchy users.
Any literature or art uploaded to The Nine is dubbed “graffiti,” and strictly outlawed. In Bahrani’s world, all Americans are permanently plugged into a kind of rolling online network called The Nine, broadcast on screens in every home, and projected onto the city’s buildings.
The great difference from the novel is a practical one, given the contemporary ubiquity of cellphones and the ability to download any book in existence at the tap of a thumbprint. The Logic of the Filing Cabinet Is Everywhere An Xiao Mina Everything else is systematically torched by firefighters, whose hoses spout kerosene instead of water. Knowledge, Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) tells a classroom of schoolkids, “will make you sick and crazy.” The great classics ( Moby-Dick, the Bible) have been abridged into a handful of emojis. The story is set in a kind of alternate-reality Cleveland by way of Black Mirror, where (as in the source material) books have been outlawed. Ramin Bahrani’s Fahrenheit 451, which airs on HBO Saturday night, updates Bradbury’s dystopia for the social-media age, meaning that television is no longer bringing about the downfall of civilization: the internet is. The 1953 book features a woman whose entire life revolves around her “interactions” with actors whose shows take up three full walls of her living room-an immersive kind of entertainment unheard of in Bradbury’s time, but commonplace now.
How do you make a television movie out of a book whose premise is that televised entertainment is destroying humanity? Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury told LA Weekly in 2007, is a warning against an age of factoids, of rolling cable-news chyrons, of attention spans so fried that what he once called our “hopscotching existence” makes it impossible to sit still with a novel.
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