Hacker Cinema
Fahrenheit 451
1966 · Film · 113 min
Directed by François Truffaut
In the future, the government maintains control of public opinion by outlawing literature and maintaining a group of enforcers, known as “firemen,” to perform the necessary book burnings. Fireman Montag begins to question the morality of his vocation…
4 positive1 mixed21 neutralfrom 26 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
28 comments on Hacker News
FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
> Conservatives Take Aim at ‘One Battle After Another’: “Year’s Most Irresponsible Movie”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/one-battle-after-another-conservative-reactions-1236394128/
> Netflix's 93% RT Hit Show That Has the U.S. Government Furious Is a Streaming Sensation
https://collider.com/netflix-boots-streaming-success-after-government-backlash-october-2025/
And that’s before we’ve even touched HBO. John Oliver is probably the most obvious example. But I’d say shows like Watchmen count too. Fahrenheit 451. Succession was pretty clearly mocking FOX News and its media ecosystem.
Art that’s critical of the government doesn’t literally have to be shouting “Trump bad”, it can be done through critique or mocking of the values it holds.
Funny you should say hiding in the woods. The closing scene in the film of Fahrenheit 451 is a group of people preserving books by memorising them and hiding in the woods.
Reminds me of the 'interactive' video from the 1960s Fahrenheit 451 movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs8U50T3l0
For the 'you're right!' bit see: https://youtu.be/ZOs8U50T3l0?t=71
Even if this were a serious bill rather than ostensible fodder, the possibility of Fahrenheit 451 turning from an indexed satire into a documentary as it was ground into swarf and burned is doing anything but decreasing.
That sounds just like the "TV show" from Fahrenheit 451, just endless conversations about nothing where you are the star.
> it's not Fahrenheit 451 anymore.
What it is, is your relationship to the story and that's really what an adaption is about. A good adaption I think always shows you what someone feels in regards to the original work, it's a response to or a dialog with the original and that can include any emotion you have towards it. Artistically you don't really owe Fahrenheit anything, that's the sort of "fandom" mentality that I think is pretty misplaced and immature in art, but popular now because everything has fans and followers.
I agree with your observation about Dune but I think it's quite smart. Villeneuve has basically rewritten Chani entirely and shows us the story from her point of view, starting and ending the two movies with her deliberately. It's a critical outside view on Paul unlike the book in many ways, and I think that just reflects Villeneuve's perspective. (and also coincidentally Herbert's actual intent for Paul, it will hopefully spare people the awkward monologues from the second book)
Deep Space 9 is another example of this right, there's the die-hard fan mentality of "It goes against everything ST is about!", but ultimately it makes the universe much more interesting and compelling because it gives you another perspective from another point in time from someone who didn't quite buy into the utopianism and just expressed that.
But if you wan to have your own vision, why don't you just create your own world to do that in?
If I took Fahrenheit 451 and adapt the story so that the state executes Guy Montag because my vision is that hate speech is dangerous, it's not Fahrenheit 451 anymore.
Take the most recent Dune movies as an example; In the books, Paul spends so much time becoming Fremen and trying to resist the prophecy as well as endlessly worrying about a space jihad, only taking the water of life when he was not able to predict that Gurney would try and kill his mother.
In the new vision "Let the Jihad begin!"
The first is the story of a reluctant hero who is trying to keep his family alive and cherish the love of the desert people who adopted him.
The second portrays a mother and son who scheme to use those around them to further their end goal of power and revenge.
If I enjoy eating Oreo cookies and I buy an ice cream that is labeled "Oreo Ice Cream" but when I taste it, it is Strawberry Jam flavor, I am not going to be writing a review that praises the product designer for their bold vision. I will be taking the product back for a refund.
This looks like something out of the Fahrenheit 451 movie.
yeah mine is 95% paperbacks. Most in somewhat-poor condition. They were printed cheap 70 years ago, and the fact they are still viable is an achievement in itself. They are getting hard to find now, partly because 2nd hand bookshops don't stock them because the condition is too bad.
I imagine younger readers would struggle to get into the genre, although I think a lot of the big classics are still accessible. Seeing Dune as a big recent movie shows, I think, that a lot of the themes were tireless and haven't changed. I'm often amazed at how some things could have been written today, with the same social angst, but were written in the 40's or 50's. Poul's insight into advertising (The Space Merchants), Bradbury's commentary on censorship and offence (Fahrenheit 451) are both ones that spring to mind. But these are not isolated examples - there are lots of others. (Erik Frank Russell's Wasp is a perennial favourite and works as well today as ever.)
People often say they will keep old TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother or The Office on in the background. I think it simulates the feeling of having familiar social connections in ones life.
In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist's wife Mildred "finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls" [1]. She frequently calls the entertainers that appear on the screen her family. So this satirical observation is at least as old as that fiction.
I frequently wonder how AR/VR will play in this particular space. Cynically, I believe there is a killer app to be had there.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
> Never heard of this writer [...] before.
Oh my. Wow. That's... huge for you. How exciting!
He's famous enough that IIRC The Simpsons once made a joke about "The ABCs of Science Fiction" where the gag was that the really nerdy kid (I'm forgetting his name—not Millhouse, the other one who wasn't as prominent a character) subverted it by swapping the usual "Bradbury" for "Bester"—as in Alfred Bester, another very-well-regarded author who's not nearly as well-known outside of sci-fi as Bradbury is. Bradbury's one of those rare crossover authors who also gets claimed by the "literary" side of things. (the A is Asimov, and the C is Clarke, of course)
His most-referred-to work is the novel Fahrenheit 451, which has had a couple film versions made, and inspired a ton of other works—see, for a very direct example, the Christian Bale film Equilibrium. The contraband-burning "firemen" and full-wall TVs from F451 are often referenced, but it's got a lot going on. It's also one of those books with a very famous opening sentence.
[edit: a couple examples of references include the first in-game numeric code in some games—I think several that Looking Glass worked on, but also sequels to some of them by other studios—being "451". The Deus Ex series likes to do this, for instance. Then there's the unofficial but somewhat widely-implemented HTTP status code "451", which denotes unavailability for political—i.e. censorship—reasons]
Other major novels include Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine.
He wrote a fairly famous short story collection that functions something like a concept album—it's sometimes classed as a kind of structurally-unconventional novel, in fact—in that all stories are related by a setting (Mars), usually have a similar mood, and exist in some kind of rough shared universe, you might say, though they don't exactly form a single, solid narrative. It's titled The Martian Chronicles. Which stories it includes vary slightly with different editions, but any of them would be fine for a first read. It had a point-n-click adventure video game made, based on it (the game's not exactly an excellent example of the genre, and is probably not worth tracking down—and yes, I played it a lot back when it came out).
He wrote tons of other short stories, largely, but not exclusively, sci-fi. I've elsewhere on this page linked to a pair of anthology volumes which, between them, contain 200 distinct short stories, and those are not all the ones he wrote.
He's unusually literary for a sci-fi author, which you may or may not consider to be a good thing. There's not much action in The Martian Chronicles, for instance, and the emotional climax of one story comes when a character recites a Byron poem (text reproduced fully in the story). Much of what's so great about his work is what an outstanding crafter-of-sentences he was, and how well he communicated sensation through language. The mood-pallete he works with features emotions mostly in the longing and melancholy spectrum, which he uses with such facility that the sly bastard can make you feel homesickness for a future—that will never exist! His prose is, to say the least, uncommonly good for genre fiction, and especially for sci-fi from the time period his most well-known works come from.
> > Published in Playboy.
> Is this correct?
It's not unusual for well-regarded sci-fi stories—among other kinds of literature—from a certain time span to have been first published in Playboy. The "I read it for the articles!" joke had some truth to it because, for a long while, that could semi-plausibly be true. A quick check finds that, for example, the title story of the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House was first published in Playboy. A little surprising that that was the case, for those who weren't aware of Playboy's role in fiction publishing, but actually not uncommon.
I did finish 1984 on 31-Dec-83. Maybe I need to read it again, don't remember too many details...
For Fahrenheit 451 I have seen the movie twice and I remember it quite well. No idea how much it is different from the book, have not read it.
Of course not all aspects of those fiction works apply, especially outside of China, Russia and the like. But Orwell would be not have foreseen how Google/Apple/Facebook can use positioning info or face detection of their users or how Russian internet trolls can influence US presidential elections or German vaccination opponents.
What would Ray Bradbury think of the 1966 movie version of "Fahrenheit 451"?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060390/
It is a reference to the book/movie Fahrenheit 451 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451_(disambiguation)
Fahrenheit 451 "wall" family and the movie Her are futures I see from this. The paper also lists stuff like better auto complete.
This is kind of like the classic book "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. There is a scene where a character is running down the street, and a ubiquitous tv show is on that tells everyone to look out their window for the dangerous person "Right now!" (with their photo shown) so that you can find and capture anyone running away through the city, with everyone coordinated.
No, those are present - part of the commentary of the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls.
Beatty recounts the history of how books lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over the course of several decades, people began to embrace new media (in this case, film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life.
Fahrenheit 451, good movie about that. I just found out Amazon owns Goodreads. They also own IMDB.
I agree it's more about the harmful influence of certain types of media than about censorship. An article posted on HN a while back quotes Bradbury saying this very thing (http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html). Maybe most people focus on the censorship angle since it was played up so much in the Truffaut film adaptation? Pretty sure I saw the film first, then read the book, and it certainly influenced my interpretation.
What exactly do you mean by "decentralized information"? Like too many niches, social fragmentation, etc?
I read Fahrenheit 451 in high school and then watched the movie. For a junior in high school thinking my whole life was ahead of me, thinking of a future like the one described in the book was kind of unsettling.
The fact the book got so many things right in 1953 is pretty eye opening:
Predicted regular use of earbud headphones,[2] interactive television, video wall screens, robotic bank tellers,[36] the demise of newspapers and the prevalent use of factoids.[37] Also had the Mechanical Hound[38] and technology for complete blood transfusions.
"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." (If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.) [1] Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu though authenticity is disputed.
Anyway, dystopian films containing mass surveillance (such as Fahrenheit 451) also cover the very same practice.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu
Isn't there a new Fahrenheit 451 movie coming out soon?
I gotta agree with you on that. All concept, no character. Which really makes ideal as a kicking-off point for a tv series.
(ditto for Fahrenheit 451)
librarians sure have read Fahrenheit 451
Luckily the movie is easily availabe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0bVqgBSZHk
Logan’s Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451
Lovely films. Something about the pacing or the cinematography of the films from that era appeals to me.
Ah… Zardoz… Nothing beats Sean Connery running around in weird sci-fi shorts. Also, Beethoven.
That's an opinion(so of course it can't be wrong) that I have heard, it is being debated fairly intelligently downthread along with a debate about the fantastic King of the Hill and Office Space.
Here is a list of movies that critics and non-critics consider to be much better post WWII satires than Idiocracy, according to internet ratings of these movies. Note: many of these are more humorous and brutal while being less crude and light-hearted than Idiocracy. Also many have plot, emotion, and deep characterization.
Films: American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dr. Strangelove, Office Space(also Mike Judge)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
My main problem with Idiocracy as a satire is that the message it sends is flatly incorrect, because the rules of their world are not the same as ours. It is a satire of some alternate universe in which we are not living, it has no applicability for the world we live in.
Film's message: "If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, time travel will be necessary to correct society's decline."
The truth:"If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, natural selection will take care of it, since intelligence seems to be a competitive advantage for apes."
I think the true message is also a better call to arms for both intelligent people and unintelligent people. The movie Idiocracy seemed like it was made to be consumed by the citizens of the low-IQ world, in both plot and acting. I do enjoy its light-heartedness.
Much more realistic are the famous dystopian texts, especially Harrison Bergeron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack