From HBO comes a teaser trailer for an upcoming adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a film that went into production a year before the 2016 election–that is, before things in America took a turn for the worse and the weird. That life has started to imitate Bradbury’s art hasn’t been lost on the film’s director, Ramin Bahrani, who told critics at the Television Critics Association:
Politically things are going in a very strange direction in terms of what is real and what is not real… I think we’ve been going in that direction for a long time, it’s just now kind of being revealed to us more clearly. So I think from a high level, that’s a problem….
I don’t want to focus so much on [Trump] because I don’t want to excuse the 30, 40 years prior to that. He’s just an exaggeration of it now…
I don’t want us to forget what Bradbury said, that we asked for this… We are [also] electing again this thing [a smartphone] in my pocket . We are electing to give it all away to this.
Between the technological advancements in last 20 years and politics, I think Bradbury’s biggest concern about the erosion of culture is now… and the speed at which this is advancing is exponential.
Will we actually get ahead of the dam, or will it just be a flood and up to some other generation to bring back all of Bradbury’s heroes?
The new film starring Michael B. Jordan, and Michael Shannon will come out this spring. Stay tuned.
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It would seem that Ray Bradberry had a prophetic vision of a future society. I spoke with him on a few occasions, he mentioned Fahrenheit 451 was essentially and an impossible story to become true. I guess he had more Hope in society and maybe our ability to think for ourselves . The novel should be read by anyone who values free thinking .