Fahrenheit 451 was a Ray Bradbury science fiction classic novel that was turned into a futuristic (well, futuristic in those days) movie in 1966 by the great French New Wave director Francois Truffaut.
I remember it well. I must have been about 14 years old, too young to be taken to such films. But heck, we were living in the Third World, and the ticket punchers at the doors of the Twentieth Century cinema in downtown Lusaka, looking like bored, dreary flies in their red waistcoats and threadbare township trousers, hardly ever bothered to check your ID.
So we watched breathless as Truffaut’s vivid colours and bold interpretation of what the 21st century would look like unfolded before our eyes.
The film starred Oskar Werner and Julie Christie. I was too young to work out why Christie had to play both the fireman’s wife and his troublemaking mistress. But then this was Truffaut and the sophistication of French cinema translated into English — which is probably why it was never a gigantic box-office hit.
The premise, though, was astounding, whatever age you were, and whether you had read the Bradbury original or not. It went like this:
In the future (that is, where we are today) books had become bad news. Anyone caught owning, reading or borrowing one of the things was immediately criminalised, more or less tarred and feathered in the streets as an example to others. Hundreds of thousands of people fled into the forests to avoid this fate, and to hold on to their love for the written word.
In this brave new world, firemen were no longer tough guys who risked their lives to put out fires, but pansified Darth Vader lookalikes who went around in funky red flying fire engines, bent on setting books on fire. They were licensed pyromaniacs, working for the government, who in turn were working for what they considered to be the good of society. Ignorance had officially been declared bliss.
I suppose this is the rather vague and roundabout connection being made by the heroically more-than-lifelike Michael Moore with his Fahrenheit 9/11 — that we live in a world of obligatory ignorance, supervised by a bunch of dangerous fools. And, moreover, that these dangerous fools license latter-day firemen to take to the skies and unleash waves of fire on unbelievers.
Not bad. Only I would venture that the comparison is generally lost on most moviegoers (which I suppose underlines the fact that we live in an age where the literature of the past is all but dead).
Nevertheless, by his choice of title for the movie, Moore inevitably invites comparison with Fahrenheit 451. (Bradbury himself apparently has taken great issue with Moore for what he considers plagiarism.)
The problem is that, for all the hype around it, and the long wait for the movie to hit our own screens (a jury prize at Cannes, threats of cancelling distribution by the major American studios) Fahrenheit 9/11 is not nearly as much of a movie, nor as provocative a stream of ideas, as Farenheit 451. Its success lies mainly in unearthing and stringing together a series of clips from television news that cleverly combine to show us what a reckless and heartless crowd the current American leadership is. And television news, painfully blown up on to the big screen, has limited appeal, I would have thought, for a cinema audience.
As far as I can remember, the vulgarity of the ruling classes (‘You are the ‘haves’ and the ‘have mores’ — my constituency,” quips a smug George W Bush at a lavish dinner) is never shown in Truffaut’s film. It is rather felt by their very absence — the cowed, cautious posture of the ordinary citizens going about their business, the cold power of the ubiquitous firemen constantly hovering over them.
Of course comparisons, as the lady said, are odious. Comparing a 1960s feature film with a documentary film of 2004 doesn’t quite hang. And yet, as I have said, Moore himself invites this comparison by using the legendary status of the Truffaut film to subliminally sell his own.
Fahrenheit 451 pulled off the trick of inventing a future that was really a way of looking at the present. For all the hovering fire engines and slick, driverless monorail trains (just like we have at Sun City, that other failed vision of what the future would look like) the aesthetics were very much of their times — the minimalist furnishings in the uniform apartment blocks, the women’s bobbed hairstyles, the language were all of the 1960s. And the message was: don’t look for Big Brother round the corner. Big Brother is sitting in your living room right now, watching you through what you thought was a one-way television screen.
Fahrenheit 9/11 shows us the present unadorned, in all its boorish, ghastly glory. It has none of the stylised imagery of, for example, Waheed Andrew Dosunwu’s Hot Irons, which managed to make inner-city black Detroit look like the past, the present, the future and a world beyond the imagination all at the same time. But then, as I’ve said, comparisons are odious.
But then again, genres demand comparisons. If you go out on a limb (and it would take a very large limb to support Moore) don’t expect not to be noticed, studied and criticised.
For all the hullabaloo and brouhaha, Fahrenheit 9/11, in my opinion, fails to come up to scratch.