MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the dystopian future of HBO’s Fahrenheit 451, a society-wide book-burning campaign has reduced literature to ruin. An internet platform, “the 9,” provides three books to citizens; but The Bible, To the Lighthouse, and Moby Dick have been so radically republished by the government that their adaptations now exist in emoji form. Tellingly, each of the canonical texts is predicated on violence. The Bible, with its Old Testament grounding in mass murder; To the Lighthouse, with its floridly Oedipal hostility between James and Mr. Ramsay; and Moby Dick, with its concentrated aggression against sailors and whales all foreground violence. For its part, Fahrenheit 451 dramatizes violence spectacularly, enacting book burning in a ritual orgy that leaves readers breathless. What is arguably more affecting in the latest version of Bradbury’s cautionary tale is less the ritual form that such destruction takes than the requirement that firemen join obedience and pleasure. Indeed, those who seek out and destroy the few remaining “libraries” of banned materials are called upon by Captain Beatty to revel in the experience. Viewers see that fascist regimes rely on more than obedient foot soldiers and complacent, if also ill read, citizens. That “more”—a sense that fulfilling a regime’s strictures is a celebratory pleasure—affords a view of mass obedience that recalls Freud’s great insight, in Civilization and Its Discontents, that safety has burdensome costs. We achieve social stability by renouncing the power of brute individuals, replacing their authority with rules, norms, and prohibitions that serve the interests of groups. Civilization is thus a larger “us” that requires the reality principle to trump the pleasure principle. Fahrenheit 451 merges these foundational principles, in the process offering a pleasure-reality mode of obedience that, like the repression undergirding citizenship, must ultimately and tragically fail.