Fahrenheit 451

Library as cathedral, as all libraries should be – John Rylands Library, Manchester.

Read me, love me, touch me, treasure me

This is a book about the power of books that is itself steeped with references, both explicit and indirect, to the great works that permeate our culture so thoroughly that we do not always notice them – until they’re gone. Bradbury shows us the horror of a hedonistic but unhappy world where books and ideas are banned in the futile pursuit of the illusion of happiness. As with A Clockwork Orange (see my review

The intended message of this 62-year-old novel is different: a prescient warning about the addictive power of continuous, passive imbibing from the virtual worlds and interactive screens that are our constant companions. I guess Bradbury was so infused in bookish culture himself that he didn’t realise how loudly the literary message shouts from every page, almost drowning out everything else: read me, love me, touch me, treasure me. Reading is a physical, sensual, transformative relationship, not merely a mental process. See this excellent article (thanks, Apatt!) for Bradbury’s views on the persistent misinterpretation of his book:

Nevertheless, the balance of themes is shifting: smartphones and the Internet of Things mean we’re catching up with Bradbury’s vision. Certainly, I was more aware of his technological warning than on previous readings – but it’s still the insatiable thirst for what is in and from books (ideas, discussion, and knowledge) that stokes my passion for this novel:
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
As Henry Cowles are our lives.”

The weak characterisation, cruelly caricatured Mildred, and the rationale and details of the totalitarian state’s oppression, censorship (sadly apt after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January 2015), and warmongering are secondary – just the canvas on which Bradbury delicately paints his nightmare, by moonlight, to the pitter-patter of raindrops and the whisper of falling leaves.

tl;dnr – stick with the four paragraphs, above.

Plot and Narrative Structure

The plot is well-known: It is set in the near future, where all books are banned because they are elitist and hence cause unhappiness and division. Instead, the population is fed continuous inane soap operas to lull their minds into soporific approximation of non-unhappiness. TV really does rot their brains, or at least sap their ability to think for themselves. Firemen no longer put out fires, but instead burn houses where books are found.

Montag is a fireman, so part of the regime. But he is tempted by the unknown promise of what he destroys, takes greater and greater risks, and ends up a fugitive, living rough with other rebels, each of whom has memorised a book so that when things change, they can be rewritten. (Ironically, these people also destroy books – just the physical ones, after they have memorised them.)

There are three parts:

1. “It Was a Pleasure to Burn” shows the restrictions of Montag’s world, and his growing, but unfocused, dissatisfaction with it, contrasted with beautiful imagery of the natural world, especially moonlight and trees – and fire.
2. “The Sieve and the Sand” is about confrontation: with self and others – with truth.
3. Finally, in “Burning Bright”, revelation leads to liberation, danger, and the possibility of freedom. But at what cost?

QUOTES

I had forgotten (or maybe never noticed!) how wonderful the language is. This review is even more focused on quotes than usual, so I never forget.

Contradictions

• “The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.”
• “They walked in the warm-cool blowing night on the silvered pavement.”
• “He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other.”
• “He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.”
• “The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live.”

Mechanical Hound

This thing, this high-tech version of the most atavistic, omnipotent monsters that plague our dreams from infancy, is where Bradbury’s hybrid of beauty and horror reaches its peak:

• “The moonlight… touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.”
• “Out of the helicopter glided something that was not machine, not animal, not dead, not alive, glowing with a pale green luminosity.”
• “He could feel the Hound, like autumn, come cold and dry and swift, like a wind that didn’t stir grass… The Hound did not touch the world. It carried its silence with it.”

(Moon) Light, Rain, Nature

• “Laughter blew across the moon-colored lawn.”
• “The moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract.”
• “They read the long afternoon through while the cold November rain fell from the sky in the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so empty and gray-looking without its walls lite with orange and yellow confetti.”
• “You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds… and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire.”
• “The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapours for supper.”
• “The more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty.”

Burned Books as Once-Living Things

• “The flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch.”
• “They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.”
• “The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry.”
• “Their covers torn off and spilled out like swan-feathers.”
• “The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.”
• “Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly.”
• “The floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.”

Fire

If BuzzFeed is to believed (a medium-sized “if”, imo), its original title was not “Fahrenheit 451”, but “The Fireman”. He and his publishers thought it a boring title, so they called a local fire station and asked what temperature paper burned at. The firemen put Bradbury on hold while they burned a book, then reported back the temperature, and the rest is history.

• The opening sentence: “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. with this brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”
• “The books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
• “Those who do not build must burn.” (Do they ignite the fire, or are they consumed by it?)
• “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did.”
• “A bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange.”
• A bonfire, “was not burning; it was warming… He hadn’t known fire could look this way. He had never thought… it could give as well as take.”

The descriptions of fire are also the best feature of Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder which I reviewed

Dangers of Books

Many of the reasons given could just as easily apply to TV shows; Faber says as much to Montag, “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books” and that those same things could be in the TV shows, but aren’t. Instead, the TV shows are specially designed to numb minds to all except vague pleasure.

• “Books aren’t people… my family [soap stars] is people”.
• “None of these books agree with each other… The people in those books never lived.”
• “It didn’t come from the government down… Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick… Today… you can stay happy all the time” because only comics, confessions and trade journals are permitted.
• “The firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord.”
• “We must all be alike. Not everyone was born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal… Then all are happy”, protected from the “rightful dread of being inferior”.
• “Our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred”, so everything that might upset anyone is destroyed.
• Filled with facts, people “feel they’re thinking… they’ll be happy because facts of that sort don’t change.”
• “All the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, and all the second hand notions and time-worn philosophies.”

Dangers of VR

There is bitter irony in a “living room” where the only “living” is that of fictitious people, passively observed on the huge screens on the walls.

• Entering the bedroom “was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon had set.”
• “Her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound… coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty.”
• “People don’t talk about anything… They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools and say how swell.”
• Brainwashing: “It’s always someone else’s husband dies.” and “Nothing will ever happen to me.”

General Quotes

• Clarice’s face had “a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity”.
• “He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness.”
• A stomach pump: “looking for all the old water and old time gathered there… Did it drink of the darkness?… The impersonal operation… could gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out.”
• “The world had melted down and sprung up in a new and colorless formation.”
• “He slapped her face with amazing objectivity.” (It is not being condoned.)
• “She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked into their nostrils and they plunged about.” That’s why owners shouldn’t be present.
• “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” A line from a poem by Alexander Smith that Montag glimpses, “but it blazed in his mind for the next minutes as if stamped there with fiery steel.”
• “His hand had been infected [by picking up a book], and soon it would be his arms. He could feel the poison working up… His hands were ravenous. And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything.”
• “I don’t talk things… I talk the meanings of things.”
• “If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.”
• “The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
• “They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls.”
• “There was a crash like falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms.”
• “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” From Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.
• A buzzing helicopter “like butterflies puzzled by autumn”.
• A ten-lane highway: “A boatless river frozen there in the raw light of the high white arc-lamps; you could drown trying to cross it.”
• “His nose was suddenly good enough to sense the path he had made in the air of the room.”

Homework

I choose to inhale and absorb the atmosphere of the book, without stopping every few sentences to investigate each possible reference and quote, but those who enjoy literary detective work will find plenty of material here.

The other mystery is Captain Beatty: he is remarkably well-versed in the classics of literature, philosophy and history. “I was using the very books you clung to, to rebut you… What traitors books can be.” But is that explanation enough?

What Book Would You Be for Posterity?

The obvious question is, if you were going to become a book and memorise it for posterity, what would you choose? Would it be cheating to pick “Fahrenheit 451”? Should it be for personal comfort or something that will be useful in rebuilding society?

The hardest questions is, would you give up everything for literature?

“All we can do is keep the knowledge… We’re no more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise… You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone.” When people ask what we do, “We’re remembering”.

In Summary

I love the fact that this book is a paean to the power of the written word: that people will live and die for it, and will wither without the transformative power of fictional worlds and the insights of others. The lure and love of literature is irrepressible. Books “stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Postscript

Related to this – and to 1984 – Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote in a group discussion:
“There’s a distinct echo in both books of the Garden of Eden story, with Eve tempting Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And in each case, it’s a denial of the dogma that this is the original sin.”

Film Adaptations

1966 Film – Watch

Truffaut’s 1966 version is visually stunning and broadly faithful to the book. See details on imdb

Riffing on This and Truffaut
See Megan Dunn’s brilliant first book, Tinderbox, which I reviewed

2018 Film – Avoid

Adapting a book for screen can excuse or require changes. But the 2018 one was a travesty that exacerbates the common misunderstanding of Bradbury’s intended message AND adds a ludicrous new plot in its place. There is nothing at all about the addictive and mind-numbing allure of superficial soap operas (Montag doesn’t even have a wife), but there is a weird sciency thing about books being encoded in the DNA of a bird, so they’ll live for ever! It wasn’t even well acted or written (I presume it didn’t improve in the second half). See details on imdb Library as cathedral, as all libraries should be – John Rylands Library, Manchester. Image source This is a reserve about the ability of books that is itself steeped with references, both explicit and indirect, to the big works that permeate our culture so thoroughly that we do not always notice them – until they ’ re gone. bradbury shows us the repugnance of a hedonic but infelicitous world where books and ideas are banned in the futile pursuit of the magic trick of happiness. As with ( see my recapitulation HERE ), there is a constant tension between the lusciously poetic linguistic process and the horrors of the setting.The intended message of this 62-year-old novel is different : a prescient warning about the addictive power of continuous, passive absorb from the virtual worlds and interactional screens that are our constant companions. I guess Bradbury was so steep in bookish polish himself that he didn ’ t realise how forte the literary message shouts from every page, about drowning out everything else : read me, love me, touch me, prize me.See this excellent article ( thanks, Apatt ! ) for Bradbury ‘s views on the haunting misinterpretation of his book : LA Weekly article Nevertheless, the counterweight of themes is shifting : smartphones and the Internet of Things base we ’ re catching up with Bradbury ’ randomness vision. surely, I was more mindful of his technical warning than on former readings – but it ’ sulfur however the insatiate crave for what isand from books ( ideas, discussion, and cognition ) that stokes my mania for this novel : As Henry Cowles wrote in Aeon recently, “ Screens are not just a partially of life today : theyour lives. ” The weak characterization, cruelly caricatured Mildred, and the rationale and details of the totalitarian department of state ’ sulfur oppression, censoring ( sadly apt after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January 2015 ), and warmongering are secondary – just the sail on which Bradbury finely paints his nightmare, by moonlight, to the pit-a-pat of raindrops and the whisper of falling leaves.The plot is long-familiar : It is set in the about future, where all books are banned because they are elitist and hence cause unhappiness and division. rather, the population is fed continuous asinine soap operas to lull their minds into soporific approximation of non-unhappiness. television actually does rot their brains, or at least sap their ability to think for themselves. Firemen nobelium long put out fires, but rather burn houses where books are found.Montag is a stoker, so separate of the government. But he is tempted by the stranger promise of what he destroys, takes greater and greater risks, and ends up a fugitive, living rough with other rebels, each of whom has memorised a script so that when things change, they can be rewritten. ( ironically, these people besides destroy books – fair the physical ones, after they have memorised them. ) There are three parts:1. “ It Was a joy to Burn ” shows the restrictions of Montag ’ randomness world, and his grow, but unfocused, dissatisfaction with it, contrasted with beautiful imagination of the natural populace, specially moonlight and trees – and fire.2. “ The Sieve and the Sand ” is about confrontation : with self and others – with truth.3. finally, in “ Burning Bright ”, revelation leads to liberation, danger, and the hypothesis of freedom. But at what monetary value ? I had forgotten ( or possibly never noticed ! ) how fantastic the language is. This review is even more focused on quotes than usual, so I never forget.• “ The trees overhead made a bang-up sound of letting down their. ” • “ They walked in theblowing night on the silver pavement. ” • “ He felt his torso divide itself into a, a indistinctness and a hardness, a shaky and a not tremble, the two halves grinding one upon the other. ” • “ He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into abecause it was new. ” • “ The Mechanical Hound, lived but did not live. ” This thing, this high-tech version of the most atavistic, almighty monsters that plague our dreams from infancy, is where Bradbury ’ s hybrid of beauty and horror reaches its bill : • “ The moonlight… touched hera and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling animal. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws. ” • “ Out of the helicopter glided something that was not machine, not animal, not dead, not active, glowing with a pale green luminosity. ” • “ He could feel the Hound, like fall, come cold and dry and swift, like a scent that did n’t stir grass… The Hound did not touch the global. It carried its secrecy with it. ” • “ Laughter blew across the moon-colored lawn. ” • “ The moonlight distilled in each eye to form a eloquent cataract. ” • “ They read the retentive good afternoon through while the cold November rain fell from the sky in the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlor was so empty and gray-looking without its walls lite with orange and jaundiced confetti. ” • “ You could feel the war getting ready in the flip that night. The means the cloud moved aside and came second, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds… and the spirit that the flip might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire. ” • “ The river was balmy and easy, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and blues for supper. ” • “ The more he breathed the nation in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. ” • “ The flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch. ” • “ They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small female child, among the bodies. ” • “ The books lay like big mounds of fishes left to dry. ” • “ Their covers torn off and spilled out like swan-feathers. ” • “ The books jump and danced like roast birds, their wings ablaze with crimson and jaundiced feathers. ” • “ Light the first base page, light the second foliate. Each becomes a black butterfly. ” • “ The floor littered with swarms of total darkness moths that had died in a individual storm. ” If BuzzFeed is to believed ( a medium-sized “ if ”, international maritime organization ), its original title was not “ Fahrenheit 451 ”, but “ The Fireman ”. He and his publishers thought it a bore title, so they called a local anesthetic ardor place and asked what temperature paper burned at. The firemen put Bradbury on delay while they burned a book, then reported back the temperature, and the pillow is history.• The open sentence : “ It was a especial pleasure to see things eat, to see things blackened and. with this brass beak in his fists, with this great python spitting its poisonous kerosene upon the earth, the rake pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blaze away and burn to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. ” • “ The books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned night with burning. ” • “ Those who do not build must burn. ” ( Do they ignite the fire, or are they consumed by it ? ) • “ It ’ randomness ceaseless motion ; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. ” • “ A bloom of displace, a one wonderfully flower that curled in petals of yellow and aristocratic and orange. ” • A bonfire, “ was not burning ; it was … He hadn ’ triiodothyronine known fire could look this way. He had never thought… it could give american samoa well as take. ” The descriptions of ardor are besides the best feature of Bradbury ‘s short-circuit storywhich I reviewed HERE Many of the reasons given could merely as easily apply to television shows ; Faber says a much to Montag, “ It ’ s not books you need, it ’ south some of the things that once were in books ” and that those same things could be in the television receiver shows, but aren ’ triiodothyronine. rather, the television receiver shows are specially designed to numb minds to all except undefined pleasure.• “ Books aren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate people… my syndicate [ soap stars ] is people ” .• “ none of these books agree with each other… The people in those books never lived. ” • “ It didn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate come from the government down… Technology, mass exploitation, and minority imperativeness carried the trick… Today… you can stay felicitous all the time ” because only comics, confessions and trade journals are permitted.• “ The firemen are rarely necessary. The populace stopped read of its own accord. ” • “ We must all be alike. not everyone was born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyoneequal… then all are felicitous ”, protected from the “ true awful of being inferior ” .• “ Our refinement is so huge that we can ’ t have our minorities upset and stirred ”, thus everything that might upset anyone is destroyed.• Filled with facts, people “ feel they ’ re thinking… they ’ ll be glad because facts of that sort don ’ thyroxine change. ” • “ All the airheaded things the words mean, all the fake promises, and all the second hand notions and time-worn philosophies. ” There is biting irony in a “ support room ” where the entirely “ populate ” is that of fabricated people, passively observed on the huge screens on the walls.• Entering the bedroom “ was like coming into the cold marble room of a mausoleum after the moon had set. ” • “ Her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound… coming in on the prop up of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. ” • “ People don ’ thyroxine talk about anything… They name a fortune of cars or clothes or swimming-pools and say how swell. ” • Brainwashing : “ It ’ south always person else ’ south husband dies. ” and “ Nothing will ever happen to me. ” • Clarice ’ s font had “ a kind of gentle crave that touched over everything with indefatigable curio ” .• “ He felt his smile slide away, thaw, pen up over, and down on itself like a tallow bark, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning excessively long and immediately collapsing and immediately blown out. Darkness. ” • A stomach pump : “ looking for all the old water and old time gathered there… Did it drink of the dark ? … The impersonal operation… could gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out. ” • “ The universe had melted devour and sprung up in a fresh and colorless formation. ” • “ He slapped her face with amazing objectivity. ” ( It is not being condoned. ) • “ She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a very well dust of guilt that was sucked into their nostrils and they plunged about. ” That ’ south why owners shouldn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate be present.• “ Time has fallen asleep in the good afternoon sunshine. ” A agate line from a poem by Alexander Smith that Montag glimpses, “ but it blazed in his thinker for the future minutes as if stamped there with ardent steel. ” • “ His hand had been infected [ by picking up a book ], and soon it would be his arms. He could feel the poison working up… His hands were edacious. And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything. ” • “ I don ’ thymine talk… I talk theof things. ” • “ If you read fast and read all, possibly some of the sand will stay in the sieve. ” • “ The effective writers touch life often. The average ones run a agile pass over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. ” • “ They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls. ” • “ There was a crash like falling parts of a dream fashioned out of heave glass, mirrors, and crystal prism. “ • “ We can not tell the accurate moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a shed which makes it run over ; therefore in a series of kindnesses there is at death one which makes the center run over. ” From Boswell ’ s The Life of Samuel Johnson.• A hum helicopter “ like butterflies puzzled by fall ” .• A ten-lane highway : “ A boatless river frozen there in the raw light of the eminent white arc-lamps ; you could drown trying to cross it. ” • “ His nose was suddenly beneficial enough to sense the path he had made in the publicize of the room. ” I choose to inhale and absorb the atmosphere of the book, without stopping every few sentences to investigate each possible reference book and quote, but those who enjoy literary detective work will find batch of material here.The other mystery is Captain Beatty : he is signally well-versed in the classics of literature, philosophy and history. “ I was using the identical books you clung to, to rebut you… What traitors books can be. ” But is that explanation adequate ? The obvious question is, if you were going to become a book and memorise it for posterity, what would you choose ? Would it be cheating to pick “ Fahrenheit 451 ” ? Should it be for personal comfort or something that will be utilitarian in rebuilding society ? The hardest questions is, would you give up everything for literature ? “ All we can do is keep the knowledge… We ’ rhenium no more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise… You ’ re not authoritative. You ’ ra not anything. Some sidereal day the load we ’ ra carrying with us may help someone. ” When people ask what we do, “ We ’ ra remembering ” .I love the fact that this book is a paean to the might of the written password : that people will live and die for it, and will wither without the transformative world power of fabricated worlds and the insights of others. The bait and love of literature is irrepressible.. ” Related to this – and to 1984 – Derek ( Guilty of thoughtcrime ) wrote in a group discussion : ” There ‘s a clear-cut echo in both books of the Garden of Eden floor, with Eve tempting Adam to eat of the yield of the tree of cognition of effective and malefic. And in each case, it ‘s a denial of the dogma that this is the original sin. “ Truffaut ‘s 1966 translation is visually stunning and broadly close to the book. See details on imdb here See Megan Dunn ’ randomness bright first record, , which I reviewed HERE. She intended to rewrite 451 from the charge of opinion of the female characters, but ended up evenly fascinated by Truffaut ‘s adaptation – the identical process of adapting the book. The consequence is a fascinate, personal, and funny exploration of her attempts to adapt person else ’ south exploit. It besides includes many bewitching and sometimes surprise details about the film, such as Truffaut hand-picking the books that were burned in the opening scene.Adapting a script for screen can excuse or require changes. But the 2018 one was a travesty that exacerbates the common misconstrue of Bradbury ‘s mean message AND adds a farcical new plot in its seat. There is nothing at all about the addictive and mind-numbing tempt of superficial soap operas ( Montag does n’t even have a wife ), but there is a weird sciency thing about books being encoded in the deoxyribonucleic acid of a boo, so they ‘ll live for ever ! It was n’t tied well acted or written ( I presume it did n’t improve in the second base half ). See details on imdb hera