Fahrenheit 451 film/reading discussion

Fahrenheit 451 as a film was a painfully bad attempt to recreate Bay Bradbury's famous dystopian novel; a very corny 1960s-style take that does no justice to the book itself. The stiffness of the shots themselves often appear to be trying too hard to seem flashy or adept, e.g. as the firemen toss the bag of books from the balcony and it falls in slow motion as if to suggest “Oh no, they’ve thrown them from the balcony, how ruthless!”. Then the bag explodes when it hits the ground and they have to re-collect all the books again to put onto the firepit, which doesn’t make sense at all and adds to the unintentional comical aspect of the film. The comedic interpretations of the firemen's costumes, and the very flat, robot-like acting, made the film almost not worth watching, along the lines of worst kinds of cheapo sci-fi.

Maybe the film has just not aged well, being made in 1966, but THX-1138 was made only 5 years later, and still texturally, visually, and sonically held up very well for over more than 40 years. So as an adaptation of a very famous dystopian novel, however contestable the novel’s premises about the importance of books being the basis for a dystopian world are, the film does not do justice at all to Bradbury’s vision and ideas. The film betrays a total lack of authentic imagination that a film like THX-1138 has, and only has very cartoonish, caricatured ideas about what the future will look like, which makes the film almost depressing, but also making it clear why there was so much to rebel against in the 60's, too. The film doesn't transcend the conformity of the 60's, which is what the book is almost ultimately supposed to be about: what it means to be an individual. 

In the essay ‘Compare/Contrast: Media Culture, Conformism, and Commodification in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and M.T. Anderson’s Feed’, a very interesting point is made in relation to “the power of the culture industry to mold the tastes of it’s audiences”, so it creates almost a world complete unto itself, like a closed circuit, but is taken for granted as Reality. But if television could provide “the same infinite detail” and aesthetic depth as literature, maybe the majority of people could experience directly what was only previously written about. Bradbury suggests the great majority of people never experience what is contained in literature because they never read or are able to read the great works, and because of their lack of mental development, they are easily controlled, molded only into “ideal consumers” that are conditioned to respond any kind of corporate prompts through technological media.