Review of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) by Aro V — 25 Jun 2004

It's rather interesting how of all futuristic visions ever put to screen, the bad ones (or perhaps simply the more human ones) are always the ones that seem to come true. Arthur C. Clarke predicted that by the year 2001 we'd be taking holiday trips to the moon, and discovering mysterious black monoliths from the Tycho Crater. Yet we're fast nearing 2005, with no moon flights in over 30 years. Heck, the space program can be considered a slowly dying senile fetus right about now.

However, Fahrenheit 451 predicts a world, in which people spend their times watching silly interactive TV-shows, discussing the narrator's hair, while an organization of firemen go about town and burn books. At night, the exhausted firemen return to their fireproof, personalityless suburbian homes to read comic-book newspapers, and have hot sex with their wives. Truffaut pictures a world, in which reading is banned on the basis that it makes people unequal, and thus to make people equal, all books must be burned. A picture frighteningly similar to todays world, in which a great deal of people consider reading anything older than 5 years a waste of time and effort, in which the ex-mayor of Tallinn can openly state in a magazine, that he considers literature a dead genre, in which reality shows get the highest ratings in TV, and good drama programs must fight to stay on the air.

While Fahrenheit 451 may first seem to be an anti-fascist film (the chief character is named Montag, and speaks with a thick german accent, most characters seem to be pure arian, plus burning books was a 'popular activity' in the Third Reich), now 40 years later it has several disturbing parallels with present day.