FAHRENHEIT 451 1966

Looking over my sizable collection of DVDs...amongst the dramas, comedies, musicals, thrillers, adventures, horror films, and even documentaries; I note there to be a conspicuous paucity of four distinct genres of film: war movies, sports films, westerns, and science fiction. I’ve really not a single war film (Doctor Zhivago coming closest); only one western - the original True Grit, unless you count Doris Day’s Calamity Jane; and sports weigh in exclusively with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. My sole concession to the field of science fiction is François Truffaut’s flawed, but nonetheless splendid adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. One of the very few science fiction films I really enjoy, perhaps due to the fact that it was made by a man who had gone on record as not being particularly fond of science fiction films himself.

Julie Christie as Linda Montag

Oskar Werner as Guy Montag

Julie Christie as Clarisse McClellan

Cyril Cusack as The Captain

Anton Diffring as Fabian

Ray Bradbury’s ingenious novel about a future society where reading is forbidden, books are banned, and marauding herds of fascist “firemen” canvas the countryside in search of books to burn, is sci-fi light. Its setting is futuristic but technology plays into it in the most mundane, everyday ways. What speaks to me most vividly is the story's overall concept and vision of a word distrustful of thought. There are just some ideas that, to me, are simply irresistible in their cleverness. Ira Levin achieved this twice: once with the idea of a thriving Satanic Coven in modern Manhattan overseen by a bunch of little old ladies and gentlemen (Rosemary’s Baby); a second time with a suburban community populated by ideal wives, all of whom, in actuality, are robots (The Stepford Wives). The concept of a world in which firemen are paid and trained to start fires strikes me as pure genius. It’s a sharp and concise idea that lends itself to all manner of dramatic possibilities and opportunities for social commentary.

The Fireman of Fahrenheit 451, on their way to a book burning

Fahrenheit 451 is a standout work of literature, but as much as I love the book and as fond as I am of the film, I find I enjoy both most when I leave off on trying to compare the two. It’s best not to look to Truffaut’s adaptation for faithfulness to the original text, nor is it worthwhile to ruminate on the possible improvements to Bradbury’s prose introduced by Truffaut’s articulate mastery of the language of cinema. Both are enormously entertaining and thoughtful works capable of being enjoyed as free-standing, independent narratives with slightly differing objectives.
Bradbury’s book is a political allegory, more sociological in bent, commenting on the dangers of censorship and threats to independent thought. Truffaut’s film is more personal in scope. Something akin to being the literary companion to both his 1973 valentine to the movies: Day for Night, and his 1980 paean to theater: The Last Metro; Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 speaks to the filmmaker’s love of books and reading. It's not so much a sci-fi film as a Grimm fairy tale about a nowhere man who finds himself by getting lost in the written word.

By the light of his big screen TV, Montag reads his first book - Dickens' David Copperfield.
An unexpected perk of seeing this film today is in noticing how many of Ray Bradbury's predictions for the future (Reality television, wall-sized TVs, earbuds, anti-intellectualism, a disdain for literature) have come to pass.

I derive a great deal of pleasure from both artists' approach to the material, and find that looking to the many ways in which the film deviates from Bradbury’s themes or corrupt the author’s intentions is a perfect way to both court frustration and blind oneself to the unique pleasures of Truffaut’s film.

The Book Lady
Montag finds his beliefs shattered and the course of his life altered when he encounters an old woman  (Bee Duffell), a lifetime book hoarder, who would rather die than have to live without books.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Perhaps my favorite thing about Fahrenheit 451 is Truffaut’s dogged resistance to meeting and satisfying the genre expectations of science fiction. In a 1970 interview with film critic Charles Thomas Samuels, Truffaut expressed his disinterest in science fiction and claimed to have felt no affinity for the novel’s political metaphor. Truffaut chose instead to construct an allegory about a closed-off, dissatisfied man who comes to fall in love with life, mankind, and himself, when he embarks on an epiphanic discovery of books and reading. For me, this is a brilliant tact on Truffaut's part, one which may have disappointed many fans of the novel, but saves Fahrenheit 451 from being just another sci-fi film with socio-political subtext. Truffaut's disinterest in politics increases the human interest levels in Bradbury's story in much the same way Roman Polanski's agnosticism helped bring a stronger emotional/psychological emphasis to Rosemary Baby.

In the visual, hyper-literal language of film, I think it would have been unwise to emphasize those political elements of Fahrenheit 451 which are so obviously stated, underlined, and emphasized in the plot itself. Truffaut avoids overstatement and didacticism by letting the film’s agenda regarding fascism, repression, and censorship play out in the background…reserving his foreground focus for the characters and the human drama.

Family

State

Self

PERFORMANCES

Fahrenheit 451 marks my 6^th post for a Julie Christie film, so by now, most visitors to this blog know the drill: a brief introduction to the character followed by a paragraph or two of gushing, fawning, thoroughly over-the-top (yet not-unwarranted) admiration for the iconic sixties actress. All unencumbered by neutral, objective appraisal. And as Christie assays a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (Time Magazine- “…it strongly supports the widely held suspicion that [Julie Christie] cannot actually act. Though she plays two women of diametrically divergent dispositions, they seem in her portrayal to differ only in their hairdos"), it affords twice the opportunity for unbridled fandom.

I'll make it brief. Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, working with Christie for the first time (they would collaborate several times more in the future) makes her look positively stunning no matter which character she plays. Lastly, she's a major asset to the film and its lifeblood despite never really getting as strong a grasp on the Clarisse role as that of Linda...a character who has more than a few things in common with Darling's Diana Scott. 

Cyril Cusack is charming, paternal, and ultimately
terrifying as the doctrine-spouting Chief of firemen.

Christie plays both Linda Montag, the superficial, self-absorbed wife of fireman Guy Montag, and Clarisse, the inquisitive, rebellious schoolteacher who inspires Guy to examine his life. Of course, I think Christie is fabulous in both roles chiefly because she doesn't engage in over-broad, showy acting devices delineating the two characters - something audiences at the time faulted her for, but which seems to me to be an authentic realizing of Truffaut's overall concept. I saw Fahrenheit 451 many years before reading the book, and I must say that the impression I got from Julie Christie appearing in dual roles was one of Truffaut offering to audiences the visual similarity between Clarisse/Linda as an external manifestation of Montag’s inner perspective.

Linda and her mirror double (Clarisse?) confront  Montag about reading books when it is forbidden. Tellingly, the challenging Linda remains physically estranged from her husband, while her double seems to stand in solidarity with Montag in his defense of thinking and feeling. The very things Clarisse believes in and fights for.

By this, I mean that I've never taken it to be a literal fact that two complete strangers in Montag's life are perfectly identical women. Rather, I've always held the belief that it is only Montag who sees them as identical. Montag responds to the similarities between Clarisse and Linda (“She’s rather like you, except her hair is long”) and sees them as twin halves of the same person. The intellectual and spiritual/the unimpassioned and superficial. This is not, however, consistent with Bradbury’s vision. In the book, Clarisse is a teenager and different from Linda in every way...but the duality fits Truffaut's more personality-based interpretation of Fahrenheit 451. I like to think that the Clarisse and Montag we see at the end of the film are a vision of what Linda and Guy were before their senses and passions were dulled by suppression and conformity.

Fueling my theory that much of Fahrenheit 451 deals in intentional ambiguity  and concepts of duality is the brief scene where a spying schoolmistress looks like (is?) Montag's nemesis, Fabian (Anton Diffring). 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Fahrenheit 451 is marvelously devoid of the usual futuristic hardware fetish I find so stultifying in most science fiction movies. The film presents futuristic progress as boring, workaday and banal; which is somehow always what seems to happen with technology. The fact that the internet—the most revolutionary invention for the gathering of sharing of information—is chiefly used as a tool for bullying, bickering, and pornography, is proof enough that technology always surrenders to the inalienable fact that people obstinately remain no more than human in the face of the most incredible technological advances.

The Narcissists 
I don't recall if it was in the book, but Truffaut suggests sensual narcissism as a kind of side-effect of a technological society wherein people are discouraged from interacting and thinking. Throughout the film, people are glimpsed absent-mindedly stroking, kissing, or caressing themselves. Certainly, the current mania for self-involved social media, selfies, and online over-sharing can be seen as the ultimate real-life actualization of Truffaut's hinted-at phenomenon of self-absorption.

This is Truffaut's first color film, and he makes great use of the gloomy countryside locations and contrasts them strikingly with eye-popping, Kubrick-red interiors and crimson fire imagery. On a side note, what would this film be without the music of Bernard Herrmann? Beautiful, sweeping themes that remind me very much of Vertigo.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

At the start of this essay, I stated that I think Fahrenheit 451 is a splendid but flawed Truffaut effort. Its chief flaw, as I see it, being that a film about people benumbed and rendered passionless due to the oppressiveness of a totalitarian society, risks being the very thing it hopes to dramatize. In reference to the 1996 film Fargo, a critic (Pauline Kael, perhaps) made the very good point that even an excellent movie about moronic people is still ultimately a film about moronic people, and therefore one not easily endured, no matter its proficiency.

Francois Truffaut envisions a future in which hyper-technology lives quaintly aside the old-fashioned (antique telephones, oil lamps). Here, Montag is gifted with a straight razor by his wife ("It's the very latest thing!") and encouraged to ditch his old-fashioned cordless electric.

François Truffaut (who didn't speak English and whose first and only English language film this is) does a great job of finding photogenically bland, cold landscapes in which to play out his drama, and he takes some real chances in intentionally asking for stilted, sometimes robotic performances from his actors. While all of this is consistent with the theme of the story, it is deadly to entertainment. If Fahrenheit 451 suffers at all, it is from a lack of blood coursing through its veins. In focusing so effectively on the aspects of the plot demonstrating the spiritually deadening effects of an oppressive society, Truffaut fails to arrive at a satisfactory way of conveying what is at stake and what stands to be lost when people are deprived of the freedom to think. Without some sense of life's vitality expressed somewhere on the screen, there just seems to be something elemental lacking in the depiction of the life-changing effect books and reading can have on the human spirit.

But I’m a sucker for movies about emotional and spiritual transformations (virtually ANY version A Christmas Carol can easily reduce me to tears by the end), so I find myself moved—perhaps unaccountably so, given the film’s cool presentation—by the awakening of Guy Montag to the miracle of books. Oskar Werner's scenes discovering the written word, specifically the sequence in which he tries to make sense of a woman who'd rather die than be separated from her books, are sensitively rendered and unexpectedly moving. 

Montag finds his bliss

As a teen, I retreated into books as a means of coping with my crippling shyness. As an adult, I'm happy that my onetime escapist immersion into the written word has blossomed into an appreciation of the way books actually serve to expand one’s world. I love libraries, old bookstores, and the heft, weight, and texture of books. So much so, in fact, that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able surrender to the practicality of e-books and electronic readers. While on that topic: there is something very Ray Bradbury-ish in naming an electronic device (one poised to replace books and paper-printed literature), a Kindle and Kindle Fire. I understand the name is intentional, but, boy!...in these anti-intellectual times, talk about Bradbury’s book-burning future coming to pass!

 Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013