What follows is a slightly tidied-up version of my remarks to introduce Fahrenheit 451 at the Worcester Public Library last Saturday, March 28th.

Welcome.

The film we are about to watch is a 1966 Francois Truffaut adaptation of a 1953 Ray Bradbury novel about book burning, censorship, state capture of media, propaganda, the proliferation of parasocial relationships replacing real ones, forced conformity, and fake news.

If that seems relevant to our world today, I have to admit, I agree.

Bradbury was influenced in his writing by his experiences with McCarthyism, Naziism, and the changing media landscape of his lifetime, which spanned the golden age of radio and the height of broadcast television. Broadcast media concerned him greatly: he thought that it would inevitably lead to a dumbing down of the populace and was an ideal vector for propaganda and social control. He warned of a flourishing of censorship and authoritarianism as a result.

Truffaut brought that thematic charge into the 1960s and the modernist era, using the visual language of futurism to create a sense of everyday claustrophobia, conformity, and peril, and to symbolize the death of the life of the mind.

For me, some of the most prophetic elements in this film are the visuals of giant flatscreen televisions (Bradbury called them “parlor walls”) that allow people to interact parasocially with actors and hosts who they consider to be their family. I don’t think those kind of online connections are necessarily bad in reality—some of my best friends are Twitch streamers!—and certainly the proliferation of creator content allows for the spread of education as easily as of disinformation and radicalization.

The problem is, of course, that media literacy becomes ever more difficult as our information spaces become less curated, and it’s far easier to indulge one’s cognitive biases and soothe any misgivings than it is to integrate all sorts of information that it turns out might be awkward or uncomfortable or make us re-examine our preconceptions. People like easy answers; even more so, we like easy answers that cast us as the protagonist or make us feel like we’re safe. We dislike things that make us feel uncomfortable of challenged.

Truffaut and Bradbury seem more interested in “vibes” than in documenting the actual progress and functioning of fascism—for that, we have the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin and George Orwell. And unlike the world of Fahrenheit 451, real authoritarianism has never been concerned with keeping people happy and comfortable.

However, one psychological truth that manifests through that metaphor is among the ways in which authoritarianism gets a roothold to begin with: with that intolerance for uncomfortable ideas. When people are not willing to have their preconceptions challenged, they try to create an environment where they will never be pushed back against. Nobody really wants to deal with moral complexities and nuance: we want a world where we can be right. And that’s the world that Truffaut’s authoritarians provide for their populace. One where the answers are simple and the good guys always win and you never have to feel that faint unease that maybe there are a lot of ethical compromises in every action and throughout history.

This is something America has historically been bad at--accepting that there are historical faults that require acknowledgement and reparations. We as a culture too often exist in a state of denial.

Should you accidentally feel lonely or unsatisfied or conflicted or upset, take a pill, and in a moment it’ll pass.

The path to authoritarianism in this film provides a sort of opposite to the moral argument of “The Good Place,” I suppose. And I name that work in particular because I find myself morally obligated to pushes back against the idea that non-book entertainment is essentially simplistic and sedating.

But that little quibble aside: in this film, the books serve as a metaphor. They serve as a metaphor for both individualism and true social connections, for complex and nuanced thought, for critical perfection. Fahrenheit 451 is not just a polemic against censorship. It is an argument for the usefulness of sitting with the discomfort that comes from realizing that we are not the center of the universe and that other people also have subject positions.

And that we might not be right about everything. Even if the parlor wall tells us we must be.  

A good practice, I think. One that makes us worse consumers, perhaps, but better people and better citizens.