Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

FAHRENHEIT 451 1966lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2013/04/fahrenheit-451-1966.html

Looking over my sizable collection of DVDs...amongst the dramas, comedies, musicals, thrillers, adventures, horrorfilms, 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 onewestern - the original True Grit, unless you count Doris Day’s Calamity Jane; and sports weigh in exclusively withMartin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. My sole concession to the field of science fiction is François Truffaut’s flawed, butnonetheless splendid adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. One of the very few science fiction films I reallyenjoy, perhaps due to the fact that it was made by a man who had gone on record as not being particularly fond ofscience fiction films himself.

Julie Christie as Linda Montag

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Oskar Werner as Guy Montag

Julie Christie as Clarisse McClellan

Cyril Cusack as The Captain

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Anton Diffring as Fabian

Ray Bradbury’s ingenious novel about a future society where reading is forbidden, books are banned, andmarauding herds of fascist “firemen” canvas the countryside in search of books to burn, is sci-fi light. It setting isfuturistic but technology plays into it in most mundane, everyday ways. What speaks to me most vividly is the story'soverall concept and vision of a word distrustful of thought. There are just some ideas that, to me, are simplyirresistible in their cleverness. Ira Levin achieved this twice: once with the idea of a thriving Satanic Coven inmodern Manhattan overseen by a bunch of little old ladies and gentlemen (Rosemary’s Baby); a second time with asuburban community populated by ideal wives, all of whom, in actuality, are robots (The Stepford Wives). Theconcept of a world in which firemen are paid and trained to start fires strikes me as pure genius. It’s a sharp andconcise idea which 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 Ienjoy both most when I leave off on trying to compare the two. It’s best not to look to Truffaut’s adaptation forfaithfulness to the original text, nor is it worthwhile to ruminate on the possible improvements to Bradbury’s proseintroduced by Truffaut’s articulate mastery of the language of cinema. Both are enormously entertaining andthoughtful 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 andthreats to independent thought. Truffaut’s film is more personal in scope. Something akin to being the literarycompanion to both his 1973 valentine to the movies: Day for Night, and his 1980 paean to theater: The LastMetro; Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 speaks to the filmmaker’s love of books and reading. It's not so much a sci-fi film asa Grimm fairy tale about a nowhere man who finds himself by getting lost in the written word.

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By the light of his big screen TV, Montag reads his first book - Dickens' DavidCopperfield.

An unexpected perk of seeing this film today is in noticing how many of RayBradbury's predictions for the future (Reality television, wall sized TVs, ear buds,

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 inwhich the film deviates from Bradbury’s themes or corrupt the author’s intentions is a perfect way to both courtfrustration and blind oneself to the unique pleasures of Truffaut’s film.

The Book LadyMontag finds his beliefs shattered and the course of his life altered when heencounters an old woman (Bee Duffell), a lifetime book hoarder, who would

rather die than have to live without books.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMPerhaps my favorite thing about Fahrenheit 451 is Truffaut’s dogged resistance to meeting and satisfying the genreexpectations of science fiction. In a 1970 interview with film critic Charles Thomas Samuels, Truffaut expressed hisdisinterest in science fiction and claimed to have felt no affinity for the novel’s political metaphor. Truffaut choseinstead to construct an allegory about a closed-off, dissatisfied man who comes to fall in love with life, mankind, andhimself, when he embarks on an epiphanic discovery of books and reading. For me, this is a a brilliant tact onTruffaut's part, one which may have disappointed many fans of the novel, but saves Fahrenheit 451 from beingjust anther sci-fi film with socio-political subtext. Truffaut's disinterest in the political increases the human-interestlevels in Bradbury's story in much the same way Roman Polanski's agnosticism helped bring a strongeremotional/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

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of Fahrenheit 451 which are so obviously stated, underlined, and emphasized in the plot itself. Truffaut avoidsoverstatement and didacticism by letting the film’s agenda regarding fascism, repression, and censorship play out inthe background…reserving his foreground focus for the characters and the human drama.

Family

State

Self

PERFORMANCESFahrenheit 451 marks my 6th post for a Julie Christie film, so by now, most visitors to this blog know the drill: a briefintroduction 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

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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 seemin 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 collaborateseveral 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 asthat 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, theinquisitive, rebellious schoolteacher who inspires Guy to examine his life. Of course, I think Christie is fabulous inboth 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'soverall concept. I saw Fahrenheit 451 many years before reading the book, and I must say that the impression I gotfrom Julie Christie appearing in dual roles was one of Truffaut offering to audiences the visual similarity betweenClarisse/Linda as an external manifestation of Montag’s inner perspective.

Linda and her mirror double (Clarisse?) confront Montag about reading bookswhen it is forbidden. Tellingly, the challenging Linda remains physically

estranged from her husband, while her double seems to stand in solidarity withMontag 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 literal fact that two complete strangers in Montag's life are perfectlyidentical women. Rather, I've always held the belief that it is only Montag who sees them as identical. Montag

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responds to the similarities between Clarisse and Linda (“She’s rather like you, except her hair is long”) and seesthem 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 everyway...but the duality fits Truffaut's more personality-based interpretation of Fahrenheit 451. I like to think that theClarisse and Montag we see at the end of the film are a vision of what Linda and Guy were before their senses andpassions 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 FANTASYFahrenheit 451 is marvelously devoid of the usual futuristic hardware fetish I find so stultifying in most science fictionmovies. The film presents futuristic progress as boring, workaday and banal; which is somehow always what seemsto happen with technology. The fact that the internet—the most revolutionary invention for the gathering of sharing ofinformation—is chiefly used as a tool for bullying, bickering, and pornography, is proof enough that technologyalways surrenders to the inalienable fact that people obstinately remain no more than human in the face of the mostincredible technological advances.

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This is Truffaut's first color film, and he makes greatuse of the gloomy countryside locations andcontrasts them strikingly with eye-popping, Kubrick-red interiors and crimson fire imagery. On a sidenote, what would this film be without the music ofBernard Herrmann? Beautiful, sweeping themesthat remind me very much of Vertigo.

THE STUFF OF DREAMSAt the start of this essay I stated that I think Fahrenheit 451 is a splendid but flawed Truffaut effort. Its chief flaw, as Isee it, being that a film about people benumbed and rendered passionless due to the oppressiveness of atotalitarian 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 stillultimately a film about moronic people, and therefore one not easily endured, no matter its proficiency.

François Truffaut (who didn't speak English and whose first and only English language film this is) does a great jobof finding photogenically bland, cold landscapes in which to play out his drama, and he takes some real chances inintentionally asking for stilted, sometimes robotic performances from his actors. While all of this is consistent withthe theme of the story, it is deadly to entertainment. If Fahrenheit 451 suffers at all, it is from a lack of blood coursingthrough its veins. In focusing so effectively on the aspects of the plot demonstrating the spiritually deadening effectsof an oppressive society, Truffaut fails to arrive at a satisfactory way of conveying what is at stake and what standsto be lost when people are deprived of the freedom to think. Without some sense of life's vitality expressedsomewhere on the screen, there just seems to be something elemental lacking in the depiction of the life-changingeffect 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 Carolcan easily reduce me to tears by the end), so I find myself moved—perhaps unaccountably so, given the film’s coolpresentation—by the awakening of Guy Montag to the miracle of books. Oskar Werner's scenes discovering thewritten word, specifically the sequence in which he tries to make sense of a woman who'd rather die than beseparated from her books, are sensitively rendered and unexpectedly moving.

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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 whereinpeople are discouraged from interacting and thinking. Throughout the

film, people are glimpsed absent-mindedly stroking, kissing, or caressingthemselves. Certainly the current mania for self-involved social media,

selfies, and online over-sharing can be seen as the ultimate real-lifeactualization of Truffaut's hinted-at phenomenon of self-absorption.

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

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 myonetime escapist immersion into the written word has blossomed into an appreciation of the way books actuallyserve 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 onthat topic: there is something very Ray Bradbury-ish in naming an electronic device (one poised to replace booksand 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!

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Copyright © Ken Anderson

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