Fahrenheit 451

By: Ray Bradbury / Narrated by: Tim Robbins

Length: 5 hrs and 1 min

Oh, if he could see us now… stuck in one of those cycles… HOPING to get to a new and better one

Fahrenheit 451 was one of those books, where when all was said and done, ain’t over but for the crying, I dashed over and Googled and Wikipedia-ed m’self silly. CERtainly the venerable Bradbury, having written this in a post-WWII world, was speaking of the vileness, the evil authoritarianism of book burnings.

Turns out? He wasn’t. In many interviews (As cited in Wikipedia), he often tried to set the story straight: It was about how television and mass media lowered an interest in reading. To add to this: He called himself “a preventor [sic] of futures, not a predictor of them” in an article cited.

JAYSUS, sooo right on the first count, and jeez-louise sooo innocently prescient on that big ol’ second count.

Guy Montag is a Fireman, and he’s just come off a job where a house harboring books in it has been torched and burnt to the ground. He’s feeling mighty fine, is whistling and jauntily sauntering his way back to his own home when a chance encounter with a teenaged girl named Clarisse knocks him for a loop. She is clear-eyed and honest, engages him in conversation, and shows him the world around them the way she experiences it. She is NOT tuned out, indeed, her honesty and observations have sent her into therapy and put her on a watchlist. When she wonders why Montag isn’t happy, he scoffs and bids her an adieu.

Upon arriving home, he finds his wife tuned out, with her little mass media “seashells” (Think: Earbuds) crammed in her ears, as always. Unlike always, however, he finds that she’s taken at least an entire bottle of sleeping pills. In come a team to clear her stomach and transfuse her tainted blood with fresh blood; they’re matter-of-fact and somewhat crude about the whole thing, and then they’re off to treat an incoming call about their next OD’d person.

Montag realizes he is not happy; no, he’s quite unhappy. Drat that Clarisse.

Over the course of the rest of the novel, we see Montag’s dawning horror over just what his job has meant, the destruction he’s caused, the murder at times. He starts questioning: Why? -and- What’s in the books? So important that some people will go up in flames with them rather than surrender them?

He’s a mess. And it turns out that he’s actually tucked several books he’s saved into a hiding place.

There are misgivings, questions, a fire-boss who suspects and needles Montag. There’s a not-living-not-dead detection Hound, a monster who can track a book from vast distances, can sniff out a harborer of the illegal things that torments Montag as his fears mount, as he begins to do the unthinkable: Read rather than sit in a room where the parlor walls are massive screens where televised material provides stimulation and a life-lived which is kinda sorta, he sees now, NOT-a-life.

This ain’t m’ first outing with Mr. Bradbury, and The Illustrated Man had me full-well aware that the man could take the ominous and ratchet up the tension, notch by painful notch, until one is in a state of agonized: What’s Next?! Sure, Bradbury has written of innocent and nostalgic times, but Fahrenheit 451 makes us wish for them because they soooo are NOT here, there’s the complete lack of them, there’s the wholesale surrender to stupidity and mindlessness, the embracing of a life lived in sleepy indifference.

-And- there are the reasons stories and books have gone away, as told by Beatty, Montag’s fire-boss: A larger society, greater population means maaaany more minorities, all who would see themselves represented in offensive manners. -THEY- would have us censor and destroy these depictions rather than have them read and discussed openly (Familiar?). -Or- The Powers That Be might see books that make people Think, make them Question power, make them Seek change; so burn those books rather than have them read and discussed openly (Familiar?).

All this is performed, how to say this, but: Tim Robbins deserves more than the single Oscar, he needs Best Leading Man, all that stuff cuz good cow! is he amazing. Every now and again he got a tad shrill, but I think that’s because, say, Mildred—Montag’s wife—WAS shrill when she wasn’t tuned out and tuned in to the parlor walls. It was hard on the ears for her nagging and histrionics (What? she screeches: You can’t quit being a Fireman; we need that fourth parlor wall!!!). But Robbins does every single other character impeccably. Then too, this is by far the most INTENSE Bradbury I’ve experienced, fraught with pacing that ebbs and flows (Actually, more like: ebbs and rushes in like a tsunami!), where emotions are heightened by deepest desires, by sheer terror. Montag lives in a world where teenagers will follow a person and mow them down like dogs in the street, killing just because they’re bored. Robbins captures every bit of danger Montag is in; he conveys his evolution from Numb to So Very Awake.

And the ending? A Canticle for Leibowitz, anyone? Is there Hope?

Or is there Just Another Cycle.

Dunno, see for yourself. What a ride, what a commentary. Jeez, what a world this is, huh?