The new adaptation of Brave New World opens with white text on a black background:
Welcome to New London, we have three rules:
No privacy
No family
No monogamy
Everyone is very happy.
Or are they? 80 years on, few viewers will be unaware that, for the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s New London, true happiness is far from assured. In this totalitarian society, babies are all born outside of the human body in a state-controlled ‘hatchery’, and a biological caste system determines the social role individuals are permitted to play: Alphas are leaders; Betas are elite workers; Gammas and Deltas are servants; and Epsilons form a drone-like underclass. All are kept docile through the ready availability of pleasure: endless parties, casual sex, an immersive form of cinema called the ‘feelies’, and the regular administration of the drug soma, available in pill or liquid form.
In this version, the protagonist Bernard Marx doesn’t work at the Central London Hatchery, but is instead employed as a soma peddler for the Bureau of Stability. His job is to keep everyone in a consistent state of contentment, topping up their soma dose as necessary with pretty multicoloured pills (“how about a yellow?”). Citizens carry with them a clicking soma dispenser, the same shape and size as a fountain pen.
The prop allows the filmmakers to signal characters’ emotional distress with canny simplicity. Social anxiety? Click. Interpersonal conflict? Click. When the restless Bernard gets into an argument on a bus with a young Alpha, the other passengers are left disconcerted, unsure how to respond to an unusual display of social tension. Bernard the candy man dutifully proceeds around the bus, dropping pills into their trembling hands: click, click, click.
The true drama begins when Bernard and his sexpot Beta companion Lenina take a rocket across the Atlantic and return with John the Savage, a man born to New London parents, but raised in the ‘Savage Lands’. More like an Indian reservation in the novel, the Savage Lands are here cleverly reimagined as a theme park devoted to 21st Century American decline. New London visitors load onto a tour bus and gawp at the ‘house of correction’ (a prison), the ‘house of monogamy’ (a church), and witness a reenactment of what is presented as the most important event in the savages’ calendar, ‘the annual day of black’ (Black Friday), in which shoppers tear each other to pieces in their lust for bargains.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a barbed attack on late capitalism on primetime TV. A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of savage culture included “jealousy, competition, greed, and strife.” She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life, while its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting the 26th century could seem when set beside the 21st.
Unlike the other properly “conditioned” characters, John the Savage is burdened by unrestrained and unmedicated human emotion. He gets jealous, he hits people, he smashes things, and he feels grief and sorrow. His entry into New London proves destabilising because, for all of its emotional sterility, the restrictions placed on this society do work, in that they have managed to successfully rid themselves of conflict.
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SubscribeInteresting article and thanks for the quote from Neil Postman, worth a read. Like many societies in the past decadence will be our downfall not politics.
Interesting. I think people are more likely to succumb to easy pleasures if the rest of their life isn’t functioning (drug addiction in deprived areas). This is why people need good and meaningful work, but many people don’t have this, and our society doesn’t seem to put much emphasis on this (as in bs jobs, Graeber).
“the key elements of savage culture included “jealousy, competition, greed, and strife.” She’s not wrong, of course. “
Do you assert that we savages here in the U.S. (the referenced land) have no culture? No sense of legality and morality?
I would offer that you are wrong about the “key” elements; the culture is the part that keeps those self-destructive tendencies in check, and allows for growth rather than decay. But we are speaking fictionally, of course.
Good Postman quote with comparison between Orwell and Huxley. Which one is closer to realization today? Dopes, or prisoners? (Can we consider MSM censorship as “burning books”, which is a fair comparison?)