Change Your Image
mickeyone
[white]....../white]The role of advertising, the Situationists say, is to create a world of mirrors in which people can obtain new images of themselves that fit the purposes of the overal system. Through this mirror function and by its expropriation of inner experience, advertising makes the human into a spectator of his or her own life. It is alienation to the tenth power. Life itself becomes a spectacle.
[white]....../white]By entering the human being's inner sanctum, our inner wilderness, advertising effectively pulls our feelings up out of ourselves, displays them and sells them back to us like iron from the ground. Our inner feelings are transmogrified into a new form��commodities. We desperately seek to get them back, and pay high prices for the privilege.
[white]....../white]The Situationists are correct. Whenever we buy a product we are paying for the recovery of our own feelings. We have thereby turned into creatures who are the commodities we buy. We are the product we pay for and all life is reduced to serving this cycle. Life and commodity achieve absolute merger; the ultimate stage in the inexorable drive of the system to convert all raw material into "valuable" commercial form. Advertising is the internal delivery system for this bizarre process."
�� Jerry Mander in "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" (pages 130,131)
Reviews
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Welcome to the future
(SPOILER ALERT for movie and book)
I have read a bunch of negative comments on this movie and so I just wanted to add my own comments. I haven't seen it lately but I have fond memories of this movie. Montag's cool accent, the lovely Julie Christie, the great Bernard Herrmann score. The opening is very unusual with no written credits, as so many others have stated. I remember the old woman who decides she will die with her books rather than lose them (really spooky idea to this impressionable person), the time when Montag faints, the monorail, the book people at the end which was SO just SO unbelievable -- touching, sad. I mean just imagine memorizing an entire book and that is your purpose in life, to retain that book. And the way they just lived totally without technology is also something that really got to me, since I have lived engulfed in technology/artifice my whole life, it is like seeing people who are totally alien to my way of life, I can't imagine living that way and yet there is something deep inside me that knows that all this technology we wrap ourselves in is ultimately meaningless.
During the O.J.Simpson chase being watched on TV someone mentioned how it reminded them of Fahrenheit 451 and this got me to read the book for the first time and in it I was amazed at how accurately Ray Bradbury had predicted the future, our future. From the seashell that people would listen to constantly (walkman) to automatic bankers to kids murdering other kids (HOW did he know that would happen, other than he realized the world was going to hell). Now we have these new kids who are totally and completely absorbed into the TV/movie/internet techno-medium and they can't understand how anyone can like a movie as boring as Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, which seems to me to again show how prescient Bradbury really was. Society has become faster, flashier, and more meaningless that ever before. Its all just a big show now.
But I am looking forward to the remake. Or maybe I'm not. What I would really like to see would be a movie that doesn't so much show how government tries to ban certain literature. See that's really such a crude way of doing things, it doesn't work that way at all here. Our present system is so much more subtle. I would like to see a movie that deals with how this population is kept brainwashed (which it most assuredly is) so that the elites can carry out their agendas without them having to worry about the general population catching on. A movie that would really lay bare what is going on behind the scenes, the manipulation of the masses. A movie sort of like The Matrix but whereas that was obviously fiction in this movie the viewer would toally identify with hapless consumer of infotainment and then get his socks knocked off by seeing how he is being targeted. Now that would be something!
So, if you haven't seen it I highly recommend this movie. And if you have and you found it boring, well, welcome to the future :)