Story remains rich as ever and performances can be great, but there are a few clunkers.
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A perfect time for Fahrenheit 451 remakes; HBO’s version falls short
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I would say they are both right. And a lot of other people are right. There are a lot of right answers when you talk about what a book is "about".
That's the first thing we need to do, is talk about what "about" means. Generally when you break down a book the first two questions you ask are about TOPIC and THEME
Topic is any and everything is book is discussing or presenting. A book about a farm hand and a baker falling in love in the 1800s is about farming, romance, baking, and the 1800s ... at the very least. In that way, government censorship is absolutely a topic of Fahrenheit 451 because it's a thing that happens in the book. The book talks about it. A lot.
What you're arguing about is theme; what is the book SAYING about it's topics. If the work is didactic, what's it trying to teach us about the topic, if it's not, what is trying to make us think or feel.
Here, you say that Mr. Bradbury doesn't think the book has anything to say about government censorship, it's intended to be a symbol to better illustrate the things it has to say about changing media landscape. I mean ... good for Ray! He's certainly entitled to his opinion, and I'm sure he could point out textual evidence and write one hell of a essay about it.
But ... here is the thing. I don't know that I agree with him, or that his argument is practically strong. And that's fine. The conversation is far from over in scholarly circles and this is in no way an absolute, but a majority ... I'm even going to go as far as to say a significant majority of people who talk about books for a living think authorial intent counts for exactly dick and shit. You don't own your work, and if someone reads it and thinks it's saying government censorship is bad and, this is the super duper important part, can provide TEXUAL EVIDENCE that holds up to peer review or other forms of scrutiny, then ... that's what your book is saying. No one gives a shit that you didn't WANT it to say that because it did. (well, again ... no. A lot of people do care. There are whole scholarly groups that argue authorial intent as gospel. But that paradigm is rapidly disappearing)
The arguments against authorial intent are pretty strong, with the two most powerful both having to do with relevance within shifting cultural norms. If someone writes a book where they want to talk about how baseball is better then soccer and I do that by making all the soccer players in my book stupid, mean, smelly and most important black because they know showing they are black people is the best way for the audience to understand they are stupid and the "bad guys", they don't get to say the book is not about systemic racism because it sure as shit is ... even if they didn't want it to be.
Another example is historical context. The historical context of Othello is pretty nuts. It was a time where a man sharing a bed with another man and jacking off to each others stories about their wife was a thing that happened. Frequently. And it was totally cool. So the scene where this basically happens likely didn't have anything at all to say about homosexuality, gender, or gender roles ... but it's IMPOSSIBLE for it not to speak to those things when reading it today. Shakespeare's intent in that scene is irrelevant to today's reading.
TL
L - Like your high school teacher said, no wrong answers. Books are about a lot of things, at once and the author isn't any better at knowing what his book is about then an informed reader.
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
That's a big oddity. A society that eliminates books, but everyone seems to be able to read? That suggests technical and engineering literature still exists, just not thought provoking 'stories'. A technical society must have written language. Commerce needs signs and prices. Shucks, they need street signs. You can't run any kind of business or government bureaucracy without lots of writing.
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I've always imagined the hound as kinda like Ravage from the old Transformers cartoon.
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A great movie for its time. I must wish that the fire visuals could have been given more budget. The woman burning in the house was great. The little grill they brought out to burn the small pile of books was a bit laughable. I had always imagined that as much bigger and intense.
Still, I own the DVD and love it.
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It goes back even further than that. Juvenal coined the term panem et circenses (bread and circuses) in ~100 AD to describe how Roman Emperors placated the masses by distracting them with food and entertainment.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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When pol pot came to power in Cambodia, anyone with an education was either executed, or sent to the countryside to work in the fields as manual labor. The goal was certainly to produce an reimagined agrarian society.
On the other hand, North Korea has a semi modern society for a very small percentage of elite, while the vast majority are brainwashed manual labourers.
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I get your criticism. It's hard to imagine a school without books but there are other ways of sharing information. There were TVs everywhere for example. Is it so hard to imagine a society, hellbent on eradicating ideas, to change their educational system accordingly?
Writing a book is still the easiest way to get your ideas out there. Probably the only exception being YouTube. There's a gangbang scene in a sewer involving children hidden away in a children's book that's even been adapted as a movie several times...
With all that in mind, is the premise really so unbelievable? Especially next to fantasy and superhero stories? It's still fiction in the end which always requires suspension of disbelief to a certain regard.
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I was just about to say this but you beat me to it. Equilibrium does a great job of modernizing and adapting F451. It’s also highly entertaining with some great action scenes.
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This book was only tangentially about surveillance, and it's message about censorship is only presciently modern if you live on the far-left or the far-right where people continue to be paranoid that Twitter is censoring them or that only the NYT should be allowed to editorialize the news.
With the internet and the 1st amendment in peak condition we're further from Fahrenheit 451 than ever before. Censorship is non-existent as a political reality, and while we're perhaps more aware of cultural censoriousness (that is, the individual and corporate desire to censor with non-government means) I don't think we're a low point in human history for that. With social media we're just aware now that PragerU gets a bunch of content warnings from Youtube, but two decades ago PragerU would at best be mailing our a newsletter if they existed at all. Yeah, Youtube might withhold ad money from Dave Rubin, but we actually have Dave Rubin and fifty years ago you either were buddies with a major news organization or were nobody. It's peak marketplace of ideas currently.
That said, surveillance and authoritarianism are ever with us in a multitude of rationals, so make dystopian media about those and I'll call them apropros all day long. Don't pretty we're in a censorship crisis though right now, we actually have the DNC and the GOP concerned people too much free access to media, not too little.
With the internet and the 1st amendment in peak condition we're further from Fahrenheit 451 than ever before. Censorship is non-existent as a political reality, and while we're perhaps more aware of cultural censoriousness (that is, the individual and corporate desire to censor with non-government means) I don't think we're a low point in human history for that. With social media we're just aware now that PragerU gets a bunch of content warnings from Youtube, but two decades ago PragerU would at best be mailing our a newsletter if they existed at all. Yeah, Youtube might withhold ad money from Dave Rubin, but we actually have Dave Rubin and fifty years ago you either were buddies with a major news organization or were nobody. It's peak marketplace of ideas currently.
That said, surveillance and authoritarianism are ever with us in a multitude of rationals, so make dystopian media about those and I'll call them apropros all day long. Don't pretty we're in a censorship crisis though right now, we actually have the DNC and the GOP concerned people too much free access to media, not too little.
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They didnt burn technical documents and manuals. They even said so in the book. The gov was not truly against reading, that was just the means to the end. The gov was trying to stop people from thinking for themselves by bombarding them with distractions and entertainment so they could maintain control.
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This is just dumb. Especially when your next statement is that Moby Dick is a highly analyzed classic (implying the Bible isn’t). You don’t have to be religious to see why the Bible is in fact a highly analyzed classic that secular scholars study in-depth.
Besides, if you were really going to select a small handful of books for your citizens to have access to, would you really select The Bible and Moby Dick? Wouldn’t you choose books with absolutely nothing that would prompt them to question the nature of the world, of people (or, as the Bible says “the hearts of men”), of drama and ambition?
It’s a pretty silly choice for the modern movie to make. Ironically, this allowing of some books completely flies in the face of the Truffaut film. At the end of that one, the survivors gather at the end and piece together an oral Bible. They’ve each memorized certain passages, such as the Lord’s Prayer, and they recite it out loud in bits and pieces. It’s a moving moment showing how important the words and ideas are: the people who have escaped oppression will never surrender the ideas and words the books contain even if the books themselves are lost.
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To be honest, I think it's probably the best here to employ Occam's Razor and conclude that the simplest explantion for including Moby-Dick is as a little in-joke reference since Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of the book in the 1950s. I doubt there was any more thought to it than that.
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Interesting. It’s an odd choice for an inside joke since it causes a ton of unnecessary questions, I guess. I’d probably just go with having Moby Dick on a TV somewhere...but OK.
My point about having a Bible be available in that particular society still stands. But I’d be curious to see if there’s other books allowed in the film beyond those 2 cited.
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Just to add ... if you are trying to control you population though religion, something we have a lot of historical and modern examples of, the absolute first thing you do, every time (In this is historically true, not just theory) is take away ANY access they have to the religions holy book.
Say it's too sacred to be in the hands of most people, print a "revision" and don't translate it from some ancient language, say the old one was influenced by Satan, write it in fucking code ... whatever it takes to ensure NO ONE other then your most powerful priests and leaders have access to your holy book.
The bible was translated to English and mass produced NOT by Catholics, but by Lutheran's (before that was a thing) who were trying to show the general population that all that indulgence bullshit wasn't anywhere in there. I will repeat this, and it's important to understand this is just history ... the ONLY reason the Bible got into the hands of the common man was that a bunch of people who wanted the general population to REBEL AGAINST THE CHURCH felt that letting them see the bible was the best way to point out how fucked their organized religion was. And ... it mostly worked.
Think about it. When you pull a woman aside after mass and tell her that god wants her and her 13 year old daughter to be your sex slaves, the LAST thing you want is her to start quoiting the bible and saying "I'm pretty sure he doesn't, in point of fact". You want ABSOULTE and unquestioned authority to know, preach, and interpret the will of god with your clergy.
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Well, to be honest, I don't know if that's the reason or not, I was just pointing out that there exists a connection between Moby-Dick and Ray Bradbury, because otherwise, Moby-Dick seems like a bit of a random choice in this case, that's all.
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Nice!
My wife and I just gave our 8th edition to one of our GFs for her installment (she cherishes books she will not wreck it).
My wife and I just gave our 8th edition to one of our GFs for her installment (she cherishes books she will not wreck it).
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There are contemporary variations on this idea, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses with their "governing body" consisting of "faithful and discrete slaves" who continually process the relevant literature and scriptures. By such means they attempt to control the faithful as times require by casting out the "old light" and introducing "new light". Members are strongly encouraged to dispose of materials considered "old light", sometimes to the point of treating such things as if they never existed. I find it all rather creepy and disturbing, but fascinating.
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"But, we have always been at war with Eastasia!"
Winston Smith would feel right at home.
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They were not the actual books, but more or less some words and emojis the length of a twitter post. This is in one of the first scenes of the film.
Still suboptimal but I thought maybe fitting considering some peoples use of emojis instead of words today.
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First of all, the book was based in America, it had closed its borders to the rest of the world, so probably book burning was confined to that country alone, plus it was about urban pacification, harder to pacify when the proles are running around with possibly dangerous ideas in their head, better to control what information they receive (much like the NewSpeak of 1984 - control the language; control the thought), thru controlled media.
Secondly, you can believe the elite of that society would have all the books, no matter what the book memorisers believed.
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When I read it in school I always pictured the hound from Red Planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcOOzD-JQs
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Yep, and the comparison is missing from the article,... odd.
Plus, Sean Bean doing what Sean Bean does best : -)
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I get the same thing from people who I pester to read Heinlein's Starship Troopers. They say: "...it wasn't only about spaceships and shooting stuff!"
^^ good analysis, BTW. Quite true.
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In Bradbury's time, the people wanting to silence free speech and ban books were mostly a relatively small minority of hyper-religious conservative types and fascists. Today, calls for censorship seem to be coming from ALL sides. It used to be the little old church lady holding up the sign that said "Free speech doesn't give you the right to publish smut." Today the more common sight is the college student holding up the sign that says "Free speech doesn't include hate speech."
Now almost everyone wants to censor. The only disagreement between the right and left is exactly what should be censored and how. The question of *if* we should have censorship doesn't even seem to be on the table anymore. Free speech could become a meaningless constitutional relic in an era where you can say whatever you want, but aren't allowed to say it anywhere.
Now almost everyone wants to censor. The only disagreement between the right and left is exactly what should be censored and how. The question of *if* we should have censorship doesn't even seem to be on the table anymore. Free speech could become a meaningless constitutional relic in an era where you can say whatever you want, but aren't allowed to say it anywhere.
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Never said it wasn't. But it's also a religious text.
It's easy to see a purpose for the Bible in a totalitarian society: because religion is an excellent tool for political manipulation.
Moby-Dick is not.
That's pretty much exactly what I said about Moby-Dick, in the very next two sentences, right after the section of my post you just quoted. Look, right here:
That sounds an awful lot like "books with absolutely nothing that would prompt them to question the nature of the world, of people [...], of drama and ambition" to me. (I'll double back on the ellipsis'd-out part in a second.) So you just called my post dumb, quoted it selectively, and then said basically the same thing I was saying as if it was your own idea. Cool.
It seems like the only part where we disagree is on the question of why a totalitarian state would allow the Bible, despite its provocative and potentially dangerous ideas, and not Moby-Dick. And again, I think the answer is simple: one's a religious text, the other is not.
(And I think ivantod has the right of it: Moby-Dick was probably just chosen as a reference to Bradbury writing the screenplay for a movie adaptation.)
Head Pirate made a good counterpoint to that, in saying that removing access to a holy book is a better way to use religion as a mechanism of control. I think that's a fair argument, though I'd also argue that there are plenty of people right now who have free access to religious texts and are nonetheless conditioned to believe what they're told to.
He also, you know, had a point to make, rather than just selectively quoting my post and calling it dumb.
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Woah, Bradbury himself has openly stated the book wasn't about censorship. The book was written in 1953 during the rise of TV, hell at this point in time the radio already had massive influence on society through for instance FDR and his "fireside chats".
Now you can argue that once the work is in the open the meaning of the book is up to the public perception of said book, much like how the meaning of a word is changed by being used differently or incorrectly.
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Fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship according to a source close to the author: http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray- ... t-451.html
I spent a lot of my life reading dystopian novels and learning about some of these authors in the hope that I'd one day write one, and one anecdote I remember about Bradbury is that he furiously walked out of a talk at UCLA when one of the audience members fought him on this point. As I understand it, as a lover of books he was appalled at was mass pop culture was doing to people's attention spans and interest in actually developing their own opinions on things and in factual knowledge. I get that that's not as cool as being explicitly about censorship, and it sounds more like your grandpa complaining about "kids these days," but this isn't exactly wrong and is definitely part of our post-truth world today. But as the postmodernists say, the author is dead (in this case literally) so it doesn't matter what he meant, it matters what people think he meant. In my mind, while it was obvious that this book wasn't explicitly about censorship I think the novel involves a synthesis of both points of view. But it's censorship in so far as a it's a self-imposed censorship, the firemen of 451 are just enacting the will of the people. There is likely a minority of book lovers being persecuted in this world, but it's not coming from top down, it's coming from the very aspects of the society that people in that world love. Censorship in that context takes on a somewhat different meaning, but yes, it is a form of censorship.
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