essay why fahrenheit 451 will always be terrifying

Why Fahrenheit 451 Will Always Be Terrifying

The scariest sentence ever written: "It Was a Pleasure to Burn"

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• B.A., English, Rutgers University

There’s a reason dystopian science fiction is evergreen—no matter how much time goes by, people will always regard the future with suspicion. The common wisdom is that the past was pretty good, the present is barely tolerable, but the future will be all Terminator -style robots and Idiocracy slides into chaos.

Every few years political cycles cause an uptick in attention being paid to classic dystopias ; the 2016 Presidential election pushed George Orwell’s classic 1984 back onto the bestseller lists, and made Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale a depressingly appropriate viewing event. The trend continues; HBO announced a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic 1953 science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 . If it seems surprising that a book published more than six decades ago might still be terrifying for modern audiences, you probably just haven’t read the novel recently. Fahrenheit 451 is one of those rare sci-fi novels that ages wonderfully—and remains just as terrifying today as it did in the middle of the 20 th century, for a variety of reasons.

More Than Books

If you’ve been alive for more than a few years, odds are you know the basic logline of Fahrenheit 451 : In the future, houses are largely fireproof and firemen have been re-purposed as enforcers of laws that prohibit the ownership and reading of books; they burn the homes and possessions (and books, natch) of anyone caught with contraband literature. The main character, Montag, is a fireman who begins to look at the illiterate, entertainment-obsessed, and shallow society he lives in with suspicion, and begins stealing books from the homes he burns.

This is often boiled down to a slim metaphor on book-burning—which is a thing that still happens—or a slightly more subtle hot-take on censorship, which by itself makes the book evergreen. After all, people are still fighting to have books banned from schools for a variety of reasons, and even Fahrenheit 451 was bowdlerized by its publisher for decades, with a “school version” in circulation that removed the profanity and changed several concepts to less alarming forms (Bradbury discovered this practice and made such a stink the publisher re-issued the original in the 1980s).

But the key to appreciating the terrifying nature of the book is that it isn’t just about books . Focusing on the books aspect allows people to dismiss the story as a book nerd’s nightmare, when the reality is that what Bradbury was really writing about is the effect he saw mass media like television, film, and other media (including some he couldn’t have predicted) would have on the populace: Shortening attention spans, training us to seek constant thrills and instant gratification —resulting in a populace that lost not just its interest in seeking the truth, but its ability to do so.

In this new age of “ fake news ” and Internet conspiracy, Fahrenheit 451 is more chilling than ever because what we’re seeing is possibly Bradbury’s terrifying vision of the future playing out—just more slowly than he imagined.

In the novel, Bradbury has the main antagonist, Captain Beatty, explain the sequence of events: Television and sports shortened attention spans , and books began to be abridged and truncated in order to accommodate those shorter attention spans. At the same time, small groups of people complained about language and concepts in books that were now offensive, and the firemen were assigned to destroy books in order to protect people from concepts they would be troubled by. Things are certainly nowhere near that bad right now—and yet, the seeds are clearly there. Attention spans are shorter . Abridged and bowdlerized versions of novels do exist. Film and television editing has become incredibly fast-paced, and video games have arguably had an effect on plot and pacing in stories in the sense that many of us need stories to be constantly exciting and thrilling in order to keep our attention, while slower, more thoughtful stories seem boring.

The Whole Point

And that’s the reason Fahrenheit 451 is terrifying, and will remain terrifying for the foreseeable future despite its age: Fundamentally, the story is about a society that voluntarily and even eagerly abets its own destruction. When Montag tries to confront his wife and friends with thoughtful discussion, when he tries to turn off the TV programs and make them think, they become angry and confused, and Montag realizes that they are beyond help—they don’t want to think and understand. They prefer to live in a bubble. Book-burning began when people chose not to be challenged by thoughts they didn’t find comforting, thoughts that challenged their preconceptions.

We can see those bubbles everywhere around us today, and we all know people who only get their information from limited sources that largely confirm what they already think. Attempts to ban or censor books still get robust challenges and resistance, but on social media you can witness people’s hostile reactions to stories they don’t like, you can see how people create narrow “silos” of information to protect themselves from anything scary or unsettling, how people are often even proud of how little they read and how little they know beyond their own experience.

Which means that the seeds of Fahrenheit 451 are already here. That doesn’t mean it will come to pass, of course—but that’s why it’s a frightening book. It goes far beyond the gonzo concept of firemen burning books to destroy knowledge—it’s a succinct and frighteningly accurate analysis of precisely how our society could collapse without a single shot being fired, and a dark mirror of our modern age where unchallenging entertainment is available to us at all times, on devices we carry with us at all times, ready and waiting to drown out any input we don’t want to hear.

HBO’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t have an air date yet, but it’s still the perfect time to re-introduce yourself to the novel—or to read it for the first time. Because it’s always a perfect time to read this book, which is one of the most frightening things you could possibly say.

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Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age

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By Ramin Bahrani

• May 10, 2018

No books were harmed in the making of this motion picture . There will be no such disclaimer at the end of my new film, because we burned a lot of books. We designed powerful, kerosene-spitting flamethrowers and torched books — en masse. This was not easy for me to do. I was taught at a very young age to read and respect books. Even setting a teacup on a book was considered a sin. In my parents’ household, Hafez’s book of Persian poetry, “The Divan,” was revered like a religious text.

But now I was making a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s seminal novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which presents a future America where books are outlawed and firemen burn them. The protagonist, a fireman named Guy Montag, begins to doubt his actions and turns against his mentor, Captain Beatty. When I set out to adapt the novel early in 2016, I was faced with a big question: Do people still care about physical books?

I asked an 82-year-old friend for advice. “Go ahead and burn books,” he said. “They mean nothing to me. I can read anything on my tablet, from the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ to Jo Nesbo, and I can read them in bed, on a plane or next to the ocean, because it’s all in the cloud, safe from your firemen’s torches.”

If he felt this way, what would teenagers think? Bradbury’s novel is a classic taught in high schools across America. But the more I thought about it, the more relevant the novel seemed. For Bradbury, books were repositories of knowledge and ideas. He feared a future in which those things would be endangered, and now that future was here: The internet and new social-media platforms — and their potential threat to serious thought — would be at the heart of my adaptation.

I had never adapted a book, let alone one so important. Altering a work so brilliant and beloved always upsets some fans. I knew Bradbury had supported François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation. More important, Bradbury himself had reimagined “Fahrenheit 451,” first as a stage play and then as a musical, changing many elements, including letting Montag’s neighbor Clarisse McClellan live. (In the novel, she dies early on.) With Bradbury as my guide, and a vow to stay true to his ideas, I began working on the script.

“Fahrenheit 451” was written in the early 1950s, not long after Nazis burned books and, eventually, human beings. America was living under a cloud of fear created by the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism, which brought political repression, blacklists and censorship of literature and art. These anxieties permeate the novel.

But Bradbury’s key inspiration was the invasion of seven-inch black-and-white televisions into people’s homes. Bradbury was no Luddite. He wrote screenplays, including one for an adaptation of “Moby-Dick.” He also wrote 65 episodes of a television series, “The Ray Bradbury Theater.” But in “Fahrenheit 451” Bradbury was warning us about the threat of mass media to reading, about the bombardment of digital sensations that could substitute for critical thinking.

In the novel, he imagined a world where people are entertained day and night by staring at giant wall screens in their homes. They interact with their “friends” through these screens, listening to them via “Seashells” — Bradbury’s version of Apple’s wireless AirPods — inserted in their ears. In this world, people would be crammed “full of noncombustible data” — words to popular songs, the names of state capitals, the amount of “corn Iowa grew last year.” They will “feel they’re thinking,” Bradbury wrote, “and they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.”

Bradbury was worried about the advent of Reader’s Digest. Today we have Wikipedia and tweets. He worried that people would read only headlines. Today it seems that half the words online have been replaced with emojis. The more we erode language, the more we erode complex thought and the easier we are to control.

Bradbury feared memory loss. Today we have designated Google and our social-media accounts as the guardians of our memories, emotions, dreams and facts. As tech companies consolidate power, imagine how easy it could be to rewrite Benjamin Franklin’s Wiki entry to match what the firemen in Bradbury’s novel learn about the history of the fire department: “Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin.” In his way, Bradbury predicted the rise of “alternative facts” and an era of “post-truth.”

As the virtual world becomes more dominant, owning books becomes an act of rebellion. When a printed book is in your possession, no one can track, alter or hack it. The characters in my film have never seen a book. When they first encounter a library, the books are like water in a vast digital desert. Seeing, touching and smelling a book is as alien to the firemen as milking a cow by hand would be for most of us. The firemen are transfixed by the books — but they still have to burn them.

Burning books in the film posed a legal challenge. The cover art of most books is protected by copyright, and in most cases we were unable to obtain permission to display it — let alone burn it on camera. So the art directors for my film designed countless original book covers that we could burn.

The question was: Which books? There were always more I wanted to burn than we had time to film. I knew I wanted to include some of my favorites, like “Crime and Punishment,” “Song of Solomon” and the works of Franz Kafka. But we had to burn more than just fiction. Herodotus’ “Histories” — history itself — was incinerated. Pages of Emily Dickinson, Tagore and Ferdowsi’s poetry crumbled into black ash. Hegel, Plato and Grace Lee Boggs’s philosophy were set on fire. The firemen discriminate against no one: Texts in Chinese, Hindi, Persian and Spanish all burned. A Mozart score, an Edvard Munch painting, magazines, newspapers, photographs of Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass and the 1969 moon landing went up in smoke.

Even the most fanatic firemen would have a hard time burning all the copies of a best seller like “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” After J. K. Rowling spoke out against Donald Trump on Twitter, people tweeted that they were planning to burn their Harry Potter books. So we followed suit. Famously banned books had to go: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Lolita,” “Leaves of Grass” and “The Communist Manifesto.” While we were shooting the film, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a frequent target of censorship, was once again banned in some schools, so into the flames it went. For some authors, having a book burned in the film was a badge of honor. Werner Herzog and Hamid Dabashi generously donated their work to be burned alongside the best and the worst of literature. If we save “Wise Blood” then we must preserve “Mein Kampf” as well.

Watching the books burn was an otherworldly experience. The hiss of incinerating pages sounded like the final gasps of hundreds of dying souls. The more we burned, the more hypnotic it became — a mesmerizing spectacle of pages curling and embers dancing into the void.

Bradbury believed that we wanted the world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books. That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How could they stop one person, hiding in his parents’ basement with a laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity’s collective history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it … or just hitting delete?

And who would notice?

Ramin Bahrani is a writer, director and Guggenheim fellowship recipient whose films include “Chop Shop” and “99 Homes.” His adaptation of “Fahrenheit 451” will air on HBO on May 19.

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Essay: Why " Fahrenheit 451 " will always be terrifying By Jeffrey Somers, ThoughtCo.com, adapted by Newsela staff on 11.15.17 Word Count 847 Level 1020L

"Fahrenheit 451" is about a future in which books , and their ideas, are not allowed. Photo from RA.AZ/Flickr

Dystopian science fiction is all about creating nightmarish visions of future societies. There is a reason the genre is so popular: many people look at the future with suspicion and fear. They feel that while the past was pretty good, things are getting worse and the future will be hellish.

Every few years, political events lead to a burst of new interest in certain older dystopian novels. For example, the 2016 U.S. presidential elections pushed George Orwell's book "1984" back onto the bestseller lists. The book was originally published in 1949.

Now, HBO has announced a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury 's great 1953 science fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451." The book is one of those rare sci-fi novels that has aged wonderfully. While it was published more than 60 years ago, it remains just as terrifying today as it was when it was written.

More Than Books

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. The basic premise of "Fahrenheit 451" is as follows: In the future, houses are largely fireproof and firefighters have been re-purposed as enforcers of laws that prohibit the ownership and reading of books. They burn the possessions and books of anyone caught with books. The main character, Montag, is a fireman who begins to question the society in which he lives, and who begins stealing books from those homes.

This plot is often seen as an attack on censorship . After all, people are still fighting to have books banned from schools, and even "Fahrenheit 451" itself was partially censored by its publisher for decades: An edited "school version" of the book removed the bad language and changed some particularly disturbing ideas. When Bradbury discovered what had happened, he made such a fuss that the publisher re- issued the original, unedited version.

However, the key to understanding what makes the novel so terrifying is that it is not just about books. What Bradbury was really writing about was the effect he thought mass media would have on us over time. In his day, mass media meant television and film. Today, it also includes the Internet.

Bradbury feared mass media would train us to seek constant thrills and make us unable to pay close attention to anything for more than a few minutes. The result would be a population with no interest in finding out how society really works. Indeed, they would not even know what to look for. Society's rulers would be able to operate in secret and our freedoms would be lost.

In this new age of "fake news," Fahrenheit 451 is more chilling than ever. We are seeing Bradbury's terrifying vision of the future slowly coming true.

In the novel, the path to book burning is explained this way: First, television and sports shortened attention spans. Then, books began to be shortened to please readers with shorter attention spans. At the same time, small groups of people began to complain about certain ideas in books. Soon, the firefighters were assigned to destroy books to protect people from ideas they would be troubled by.

Things are certainly nowhere near that bad right now — and yet, the seeds are there. Attention spans are shorter, and shortened versions of novels do exist. Films and television have become incredibly fast-paced. Many of us now need stories to be constantly exciting. Slower, more thoughtful stories seem boring.

The Whole Point

That's the reason "Fahrenheit 451" is as terrifying as it ever was. It describes a society that voluntarily and even eagerly brings about its own destruction. When Montag tries to confront his

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. wife and friends with thoughtful discussion, when he tries to turn off the TV programs and make them think, they become angry and confused. Montag soon realizes that they are beyond help. They do not want to think and understand.

Instead, they prefer to live in a bubble. Book burning began when people chose not to be challenged by thoughts they did not find comforting, thoughts that challenged their preconceptions.

We can see those bubbles everywhere around us today. We all know people who only get their information from limited sources that mostly confirm what they already think. On social media like Facebook or Twitter, you can witness people's hostile reactions to stories they don't like. You can see how people narrow their sources of information to protect themselves from anything scary or challenging.

This means that the seeds of "Fahrenheit 451" are already here. That does not mean it will come to pass, of course — but that is why it's a frightening book. Bradbury's novel is a dark mirror of our modern age, in which unchallenging entertainment is available to us at all times, on devices we carry with us at all times, ready and waiting to drown out any input we do not want to hear.

HBO's adaptation of "Fahrenheit 451" is expected to air in 2018, so it is the perfect time to read or reread the novel. In fact, it is always a perfect time to read this book, which is itself a frightening idea.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. Quiz

1 Which statement would be MOST important to include in an objective summary of the article?

(A) Dystopian science fiction is great because it creates nightmarish visions of the future.

(B) HBO is about to make a movie version of Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451."

(C) "Fahrenheit 451" was once partially censored by its publisher for many years.

(D) Many people fear that Bradbury's vision of the future is slowly coming true.

2 Read the paragraph below from the section "The Whole Point."

How does the paragraph help develop the CENTRAL idea of the article?

(A) It illustrates how users of social media prefer to only read stories that they like.

(B) It shows that people who get information from limited sources tend to be hostile.

(C) It conveys the idea that many people today are uncomfortable thinking for themselves.

(D) It explains why many people are interested in various sources of information.

3 What is the MAIN reason the author included the section "Fake News?"

(A) to explain the problem of "fake news" in our society today and how it is being solved

(B) to compare Bradbury's vision of the future with what is happening today

(C) to explain how different types of media cause shortened attention spans

(D) to compare the plot of Bradbury's novel "Farenheit 451" with the plots of other novels

4 Read the section "The Whole Point."

What is the MAIN reason the author includes information about Montag trying to have a thoughtful discussion with his wife and friends?

(A) to show what happens when people stop thinking

(B) to contrast discussions today with discussions in the novel

(C) to establish the intelligence of the main character of the novel

(D) to explain a solution to the problem of watching too much TV

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.

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