“I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths,” an old man says in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. “No one wanted them back. No one missed them.”
The scariest thing about Bradbury’s science-fiction nightmare—published in 1953, and bearing stunning similarities to 2018—isn’t that books are outlawed and burned; or that the country wages vague, never-ending war; or that communication has garbled into white noise. The scariest thing about Bradbury’s anodyne dystopia is that its people want it. Sure, the government of Fahrenheit 451 oppresses, but it can’t do so without the cooperation of what one character calls “the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.” In this futuristic dark age, ignorance really is bliss.
Fahrenheit 451, HBO’s TV movie adaptation of Bradbury’s book (airing Sat May 19), handles some elements of the story really, really well and other elements not so really, really well.
