<i>Fahrenheit 451</i> Tackles the Evils of Social Media
How do you make a television movie out of a book whose premise is that televised entertainment is destroying humanity? Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote in 1951, is a warning against an age of factoids, of rolling cable-news chyrons, of attention spans so fried that our “hopscotching existence” makes it impossible to sit still with a novel. The 1953 book features a woman whose entire life revolves around her “interactions” with actors whose shows take up three full walls of her living room—an immersive kind of entertainment unheard of in Bradbury’s time, but commonplace now.
Ramin Bahrani’s , which airs on HBO Saturday night, updates Bradbury’s dystopia for the social-media age, meaning, where (as in the source material) books have been outlawed. Knowledge, Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) tells a classroom of schoolkids, “will make you sick and crazy.” The great classics (, the Bible) have been abridged into a handful of emojis.Everything else is systematically torched by firefighters, whose hoses spout kerosene instead of water.
