‘Fahrenheit 451’ at 60

At first glance, François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 might be considered, for its maker, the ultimate departure.

To start with, the film evokes a future world—a world in which firemen confiscate and then incinerate printed material, especially books. For Truffaut, this sort of setting contrasted sharply with the milieus he had favored since the start of his career. His films, through the mid-1960s, were either urgently contemporary—such as his 1959 debut about a Parisian adolescent, The 400 Blows, or his 1960 Frenchification of a crime novel by the American writer David Goodis, Shoot the Piano Player—or aglow with the fading light of days gone by, such as his 1962 dream of bohemia at the time of the Great War, Jules and Jim. 

That Fahrenheit 451 was also the first film Truffaut elected to make in color was a significant but ultimately superficial feature; so is the fact that it was his lone film in English. Its conjuring of the future was the real divergence. Until his death in 1984 at age 52, Truffaut would again burrow into the past (1975’s The Story of Adele H.; 1978’s The Green Room) and toil in the present (1968’s The Bride Wore Black; 1981’s The Woman Next Door), but the closest he ever came to resuming his involvement with science fiction was his appearance as the kindly scientist Lacombe in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—a genuine sci-fi epic, albeit one set in relatively more contemporary times than Truffaut’s fable.

As it happens, in a 1966 interview collected in the book Truffaut on Cinema (2017), he described Fahrenheit 451 as just that—“a fable, a moral tale.” This raises the question as to whether the film—despite its jetpack-wearing firemen and monorails—should be characterized as science fiction at all. As Truffaut told it, his attraction to the film was not a matter of speculating about times to come—the impetus for so many great science fiction films, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968) to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—but attending to present concerns in a novel context. “Censorship of books, in fact, is a current issue, and not simply a theme in science fiction,” Truffaut said in that same interview. “Books are being burned every day across the world, and Fahrenheit interested me because it pushed this book-burning tragedy to an extreme degree.” 

In other words, Fahrenheit 451 was fantastical only in imagining the widespread formalization of book-burning rather than the act itself, which, as Bradbury himself explained in a 2002 interview on the film’s DVD release, was common throughout history. “Over the years, I’ve read about the various libraries of Alexandria burning three or four thousand years ago, I think twice by accident, once on purpose,” Bradbury said. “And then in China, I heard rumors of burnings of libraries and books, and Hitler, of course, in Germany in the early ’30s.”

The film stars Oskar Werner as Montag, among the firemen who ransack residences rumored to contain books before his curiosity about, and eventual devotion to, literature leads him to renounce his vocation. As the film opens, Montag is presented as a slick figure—Werner’s dour, unsentimental countenance peaks through his dark helmet—who executes his task not with the urgency of the firemen of old (the men who, some speculate, once put out blazes) so much as the dutifulness of a garbage man. In the opening scene, as the firemen plunder an apartment in which books have been secreted away inside a light fixture and behind a TV screen, Montag comes across as neither enthusiastic nor dubious. “Books are just too much rubbish,” he says half-heartedly but unquestioningly. And the burning of them has become as routine as pest exterminations, although those who have books, unlike those who are beset by roaches, are in violation of the law and flee to avoid arrest.

Yet Truffaut chose to film this future world in a recognizably old world. The movie was photographed (by Nicolas Roeg, later the director of Walkabout and Don’t Look Now) in England, and its few dystopian flourishes—the monorail, the strangely designed fire engine, the basic concept of a book-burning squad—stand out amid the countryside, the suburbs, the Tudor houses that look of their own time, not the future. 

“There is practically only one science fiction scene, that of the flying men who are searching for Montag as he is trying to escape,” Truffaut said in the interview in Truffaut on Cinema. “Science fiction effects are very difficult to create, and often risk appearing ridiculous.” Yes, logistics may have dictated some of Truffaut’s choices, but the effect is to evoke a society in transition: The future is trying to crowd out the past, but the past—recognizable to us as a normative present—is hanging on in the form of England around the time of Churchill’s death: the coziness of an old house, the comfort of a rocking chair on a porch, the pleasure of picking up a pocket-sized paperback and flipping through its pages. 

“The book becomes an object that one cherishes increasingly over time—even the binding, the cover, the smell of the pages acquire great sentimental value,” Truffaut said.

Of course, these things have no pull on Montag, who is awakened only by his friendship with Clarisse (Julie Christie), a bright, pixieish, covertly book-hoarding young woman who is a kind of variation on a theme of Montag’s proudly unthinking wife Linda (underscored by the fact that she, too, is played by Julie Christie). When told that Clarisse’s house is not fireproof, Montag says that it is a prime candidate to be torn down. This is modern society’s answer for what it deems outmoded or dangerous, whether books that stir the mind or domiciles that lack indoor sprinkler systems. 

It is a measure of Montag’s growth that, his interest piqued by Clarisse, he starts inhaling great books like fresh air amid the flames—and that we wince for him when, his accumulation of contraband reading materials having come to the knowledge of his superiors, his books shrivel and darken in the fire: There goes Tolstoy, there goes Nabokov. The score by Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann gives the book burning scenes an operatic dimension; certainly, the tracking POV shots and striking use of jump cuts, high angle shots, and even a Vertigo dream sequence connote the Master of Suspense’s influence on his protégé. 

Although Fahrenheit 451, book and film alike, is widely considered to inveigh against censorship, what we can perceive about the authorities’ justification for book burning seems to stem less from a wish to suppress ideas per se as much as to dull potentially excitable inner lives—to guard against people becoming whipped up by too much Dickens. “Just keep ’em busy and you keep ’em happy,” says Captain Beatty (Cyril Cusack), referring to the mindless diversions that people consume instead of books, including insufferable “interactive” TV programs. In a few quick scenes, Truffaut shows that when people are denied the chance to inhabit other worlds, they will get lost in themselves: In one scene, a young woman embraces her own reflection in a monorail window; in another, a lady of means pats her own fur coat. These people could desperately use some Austen or Dostoevsky.

So could we. If anything, seen 60 years after its release, the “futuristic” aspects of Fahrenheit 451 call to mind our ghastly present, where we outsource our sources of satisfaction to selfies, screens, and AI while we tolerate the populace’s blooming illiteracy. The book scenes that were normative for Truffaut—the things that anchored his movie of the future to reality—now seem so very distant. In 1966, one could likely still fathom the commitment and sacrifice of the Book People, seen at the end of the movie, whose charge is to retain the contents of whole books in their minds—the place no fireman’s blaze can touch. Today, their dedication is the most literally fantastic thing about the movie, and the final words spoken, by a boy supposedly reciting a text by Robert Louis Stevenson, have the quality of a dirge: “And he died as he thought he would, as the first snows of winter fell.” 

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