FANTASIA OBSCURA: An American Dystopia Through the Eyes of a French Auteur
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you just can’t do things by the book anymore…
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Directed by: François Truffaut
Please note that there will be spoilers here for both the film and the source material.
Ray Bradbury’s account of a dystopia where the state asserts control over the populace through convincing them that books need to be burned for their own good is probably one of the most influential American novel ever written. Readers for decades after its initial publication were terrified of a society that would abandon collected knowledge and instead immerse themselves in wall-to-wall reality television.
Must. Resist. Obvious. Comment!
As terrifying as Bradbury’s vision was for his characters to live it, it was certainly no fun for French New Wave pioneer Truffaut to film…
The film opens with a credit sequence that reinforces its anti-reading values: All we see are close-ups on and tracking shots of television antennas, while the credits are read by a voice off-screen (Alex Scott). By doing this, Truffaut establishes early on how much reading is discouraged in this society, and draws you in instantly to his bizarre environment.
Much like the book, the film focuses on Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), a fireman in a society where the profession has a whole new set of tasks: to hunt out and burn books. He’s very good at his work, as we see when the film opens after the credits with a call to an apartment where he hunts for and gathers up every book hidden there and then sets them ablaze like a funerary pyre on the sidewalk outside, while his boss Captain Beatty (Cyril Cusack) looks on approvingly:
On his way back from his job, he encounters on the monorail ride to the suburbs Clarisse (Julie Christie), a young woman who strikes up a conversation with him and starts to plant seeds of doubt in him:
Montag is slightly shaken by the encounter, but descends into his usual annoyance with his wife Linda (also played by Christie) who is so into her reality programming and free pills the government encourages folks to take that she way as well just be a figure being broadcast into the house, like the ubiquitous announcer Cousin Midge (Noel Davis).
The more his dissatisfaction rises with Linda, the more time he spends with Clarisse, getting involved with her habits, including her book smuggling operation. This sets up Montag to question his role in life, and when he decides to not be part of the system, he ultimately has to take drastic action, including setting fire to Captain Beatty and going on the run from the cops, which gets on air coverage that will seem way to familiar to anyone who ever watched a police chase shot by a news helicopter.
Ultimately, Montag finds his way out of the city, where he encounters the “book people”, who feel it is their mission to memorize a complete book in order to insure that, as explained by their leader (Scott playing an onscreen character now) as he introduces Montag to the rest of the “library”:
Speaking of books, Truffaut was still enthralled by his conversations with Alfred Hitchcock, which were compiled in 1966 into the book Hitchcock/Truffaut. In many ways, the adaptation he lenses is based more on Hitchcock’s than Bradbury’s work. This becomes evident as one listens to the score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Hermann and notices some of the homages Truffaut weaves into the film, such as the dream sequence Montag has that suggests the similar sequence in Vertigo. (It would have been even more noticeable had one of Truffaut’s earlier choices for Clarisse or Linda, Tippi Hedren, actually gotten at least one of the parts.)
And that may have been one of the few parts of the shoot Truffaut was looking forward to. He committed to the film, his first (and last) film in English, before he had mastered the language; he could barely speak to his producers at Universal and most of the crew in England where this was shot without the help of a translator.
His lead, Werner, could speak in French (having done Jules et Jim with Truffaut four years earlier), but neither man wanted to speak to each other. Many observers on set noted that Werner’s having “gone Hollywood” since the last the two worked together made him an “insufferable f’n’ bastard”, and Truffaut, who was not in his element in terms of country, language, or genre, could barely get him to do the film as he envisaged.
In terms of Truffaut’s vision, his general disdain/lack of appreciation for genre made him take liberties with the source material that gives the film at best a tangential connection to the original story. In his hands, the story becomes a personal, intimate tale of an individual who has to go through a hellish process of questioning everything around him. Doing it through the love of books, a personal subject for the director, imbibes the story with a sense of gravitas, the joy of acquiring learning through reading being an act of personal growth that we experience up close.
Which is fine in and of itself, but ends up losing some of the heft and chill that Bradbury’s book contained. By making Clarisse in the film an active participant, as opposed to being as in the book a brief encounter before becoming an unfortunate victim of a hit-and-run, some of the shock at how callous people had become is lost. The removal of the nuclear attack on Montag’s city, the ultimate burning ordered by the authorities, removes not only a major irony that buttresses the themes of the book but a sense of scale as to how bad problems had gotten in society that they needed “book people” to help out.
In many ways, the film itself is much like the society it portrayed: it’s a continual battle of words versus pictures. Where the script falls flat, between Truffaut’s handle on the language and Werner’s refusal to work with what he had as requested, Truffaut’s camera work (aided by Nicholas Roeg’s cinematography) is fascinating to observe. He uses an extensive tool kit of shots and set-ups to add more to the scene than a straightforward shot would have gotten, and makes us wonder what we might have gotten had this been an entirely original Truffaut genre piece in his native French.
We would never get that film; the only other genre work he would take up after this film was as an actor, playing Claude Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Which was one more effort than he made to make a film in English, never trying that again.
As for the original property, the book would continue to go on as a work of important literature, and as of this writing HBO will soon air a new adaptation of the work. And while the book is being so celebrated, it has a number of times been banned by different communities, with threats to burn the book on occasion because of how it makes the reader feel.
Must. Resist. Obvious. Comment!
NEXT TIME: When it comes to film production, you can’t get by with a little help from your friends if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing yourself…
