Unlike ‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’ seems practically impossible to adapt well for any size of screen. I don’t understand why this is. I’ve recently endured two and a half episodes of last year’s NBC version of it and whereas the first episode was okay, it rapidly slumped into sheer awfulness which was painful to watch even a minute of. It isn’t even the exception in that respect. There have been earlier TV and cinematic versions which were just as bad in their own way. The one with Leonard Nimoy in it for example was just dire. The only version which I can remember which was any good was the 1980 TV movie, and even that was plagued with low production values and was very stagey.
Just indulge me a moment while I slag off the latest version. This will obviously contain spoilers.
I can’t be comprehensive or incisive in my criticism of the series, but I can pick out a few things which form part of the calamity. One is the depiction of the Savage Reserves. My impression is that the makers of the series got antsy about racist and inaccurate depictions of the Southwestern Native Americans and decided instead to show them as “white trash”. The problem with this is that it isn’t actually any better to stereotype the White working class than any other group, and it seems to me that the motive there is simply to attack an easy target which is unlikely to be watching and therefore unlikely to complain. It also seemed that as soon as we’d got to the Savage Reservations and their very un-“Brave New World”-ly atmosphere, we got stuck there. I don’t think the quality of the writing could ever measure up to that of Huxley’s, and the effect is therefore of an ugly clash. Moreover, the majority of the world needs to be depicted as vapid and it seemed they were rather too keen on showing off the slickness and beauty of the sets and special effects. Also, guns‽ Are you kidding me‽
It isn’t even “so bad it’s good”. I was only driven to continue by disbelief at how awful it was, hoping there would turn out to be some kind of twist which justified what they’d done. But it’s just bad.
What puzzles me about this is that whereas this is often bracketed with ‘1984’ as great mid-twentieth century depictions of dystopia, Orwell’s work seems to lend itself quite well to such treatments. My personal favourite is the John Hurt version. This and Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ have an oddly similar appearance, although the tone is rather different. Pains were taken not to depict anything in the film which didn’t exist in 1948, when the novel was written. The acting is excellent, the sets are too. I find it coming to mind on a regular basis even now, getting on for forty years later. Maybe the difference is that romance in Orwell’s book is not dead, but is persecuted, whereas in Huxley’s work it died centuries before the start of the novel. One problem may be common to much science fiction: ‘Brave New World’ focusses more on ideas than plot or character and suffers if adaptation focusses on special effects because that reproduces the very superficiality it aims to criticise. Science fiction cinema and TV is generally worse for high budgets and good special effects because they distract from the core meaning of the text, and the kind of ideas Huxley’s novel addresses are hard to depict visually. There also isn’t that much action, and there are great slabs of exposition in it, including the climax. A somewhat worrying possibility concerning adaptation is that the world is probably now considerably closer to how it is in the story and therefore it’s harder to see what it’s criticising because we tend to take it for granted.
Huxley and Orwell knew each other and the former wrote to the latter about ‘1984’. One striking observation in his letter was that rather than the kind of brutal physical violence committed to keep the Airstrip One populace down, something more akin to brainwashing would be more likely to be deployed because it would lead the citizenry to “love their servitude”. There’s certainly a lot of overt psychological manipulation in the post-war work, but it’s accompanied by torture and execution and the standard of living for most is very low. One thing the two do share is the colour-coding of the castes, and they also share the feature of being set at specific dates, at least insofar as we know Big Brother isn’t lying about that, but since Winston can remember the immediate post-war period as a child he probably is, for once, being honest. Huxley also said:
I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.
I want to move on now to something which may or may not constitute a dystopia: the Eloi/Morlock section of H G Wells’s ‘The Time Machine’. The Time Traveller moves downward in time to the year 802 701 CE, where he finds a society where the effete Eloi live above ground in a kind of bucolic setting but are predated upon by the more malevolent and violent subterranean Morlocks. There’s clear satire here, but Wells also attempts to portray human evolution in this respect. The Morlocks are descended from the lower orders and the Eloi are what remains of the middle and upper class, and the two have become different species.
There are other dystopias and depictions of the future from this era, insofar as the fifty-three years separating Wells’s and Orwell’s works can be seen as an era. They include Zamjatkin’s ‘We’ published in 1924 in English translation, which since it preceded the invention of the video camera envisaged an urban environment where all the buildings were made of glass. Olaf Stapledon’s World State is another, which is an Americanised world founded in the twenty-third century and lasts for five thousand years, was devised in 1930 and isn’t exactly a dystopia but reflects a serious lack of fulfilment of the human spirit combined with fairly advanced but stunted technological development. Huxley’s World State is technologically stunted by design, to prevent progress causing instability. Looking closer to the present day, ‘Blake’s 7”s Terran Federation is plainly modelled on a mixture of Huxley’s and Orwell’s worlds, with thought control by the use of drugs, the use of soma, the existence of castes referred to by Greek letters and also a corrupt military dictatorship with torture and summary execution. It’s as if someone who had never read either book but was aware of their influence had tried to imagine what it was like. Another example of a dystopian novel near that time is Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’, where books have been outlawed. This may be unfair, but although I think Bradbury’s book is excellent, I also get the impression that Bradbury is praising quality literature without really knowing much about it. H G Wells also wrote the genuinely dystopic ‘The Sleeper Wakes’ and ‘A Story Of The Days To Come’, which I haven’t read but I think cover his vision of what would happen if socialism wasn’t adopted, so presumably we’re living in that future. Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’, written in 1937, does the opposite, imagining a world where even the first person singular pronoun has been abolished. Incidentally, it’s interesting that Olaf Stapledon was imagining something somewhat similar in the form of a cosmic hive mind in his ‘Star Maker’ of the same year.
In spite of my appreciation of the three works I’ve mentioned, and against the grain of the usual attitude towards respecting literature of this calibre, it has occurred to me that ‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’ and ‘The Time Machine’ could all be placed on the same timeline. This isn’t an entirely idle exercise.
First, dates. ‘1984’ is set in 1984, although it isn’t entirely clear because of the lies and propaganda woven by Ingsoc. ‘Brave New World’ is set 632 years after the first Model T Ford rolled off the production line in 1908, so that’s 2540 CE, and it also makes 1984 retroactively 76 AF (After Ford). The Time Traveller arrives in 802 701 CE, which is so far in the future that it hardly makes any difference when Huxley’s dating system is used, but it’s 800 793 AF. The chronologically earliest novel is in the most distant future and the latest is in the least distant, which might be significant. It could be linked to an increasing realisation of how social and technological change appear to accelerate, although there are arguments that it doesn’t, which I’ve been into somewhere (can’t remember exactly where). ‘Brave New World’ has a backstory which is again somewhat reminiscent of ‘Blake’s 7’, probably because that’s where the TV series got it from. However, because “history is bunk” according to Ford, the details are a little hazy and Ford and Freud are actually confused for each other, so the question of whether it’s accurate history arises. The same is true in ‘1984’ because of the distortion introduced by Ingsoc, which always reminds me of North Korea. For instance, Big Brother is said to have invented the steam engine. This provides the first link between the two. 1984 represents an early stage where people can still remember a time before Ingsoc and therefore can’t be lied to quite as effectively. Once living memory is gone and Newspeak has succeeded in remoulding thought, a new version of history can be created, and this is of course already underway with the editing of the ‘Times’ and other historical records which is Winston’s job. And as I’ve said, colour-coded uniforms already exist and the Inner Party, Party and proles have become classes with no possibility of social movement between them. Sexual activity is frowned upon and only accepted as a necessary evil, to be eliminated as soon as practicable. But as Huxley pointed out in his letter to Orwell, the ultimate revolution goes beyond politics and amounts to mind control, which he felt reflected the thought of the Marquis de Sade. He saw Orwell’s idea of the “boot on the face forever” as quite labour-intensive and wasteful. As Asimov pointed out, a society operating at Airstrip One’s level of distrust would require the watchers to be watched, and those watchers and so forth ad infinitum, which is of course impossible. However, it’s more efficient to get the populace to oppress itself, and this can be seen in the character of Parsons, who purports to be proud of his daughter for calling the Thought Police on him for allegèdly saying “death to Big Brother” in his sleep. He’s doing Big Brother’s job for him. Huxley’s view is that this is logistically a much better way of oppressing people, and this is why conditioning and soma occupy such a prominent position in his new world. There seems to be a fair bit of sadism in ‘1984’: they don’t like the fact that they have no control over sexual pleasure, so they’re trying to get rid of it.
These can be linked together as follows:
- Shortly after 1948, coups of some kind took place throughout the world leading to the formation of three power blocks plus a disputed area in Afrika and the southern part of Asia. These are Oceania, consisting of the Americas, Australasia, southern Afrika and the British Isles; Eurasia, comprising continental Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Eastasia, which is mainly China. These are at constant war and their régimes are practically identical, consisting of an inner party which oppresses an outer party and doesn’t bother much with a third prole group because they oppress themselves due to their lack of education. They wear colour-coded uniforms. This is the situation as of 1984 CE.
- Newspeak becomes all-pervading. The gradual unification of the world which began with the formation of the three power blocks continues until the whole world is part of one state, and history is re-written completely. The disputed areas change location and become savage reserves. The Inner Party decides that sex for reproduction gives the population too much opportunity to subvert the next generation and replaces it with artificial wombs growing fetuses outside the body. This gives it the opportunity to condition babies from before birth. A new drug is developed which causes the people to become placid and coöperative, which renders the constant state of shifting war unnecessary. The three classes, now mass-produced, become completely fixed and are conditioned differently.
- By 2540 CE, the world is unified and divided into five castes. Reproduction is a function of the state and the people are controlled by drugs and conditioning. The colour-coded uniforms are now applied to each caste and therefore somewhat diversified. Alphas are the old inner party, Betas and Gammas the outer party and Deltas and Epsilons the proles. There is no possibility of rebellion and technological change is deliberately prevented as it leads to instability. There’s a lot of sex.
- At this point I want to borrow from Stapledon’s First World State, which is contemporaneous with Huxley’s. The ultimate reason for its decline was that fossil fuel reserves became exhausted after five thousand years and there was insufficient flexibility in human behaviour to adapt, so a new dark age began. Similarly, a calamity befalling Huxley’s world state might not be amended due to the rigidity of conditioning and social roles, meaning that the loss of resources (“ending is better than mending”) would mean the end of civilisation as they knew it. Reproduction by means of intercourse could begin again, much to the distaste of the people involved, but the savage reservation people would have been doing it all along anyway, so they would have the upper hand. They would not, however, interact.
- Finally, the situation H G Wells describes has developed. Humans are now two separate species, the Morlocks and the Eloi, living in a primitive state and in denial about their death, which is a remnant of the conditioning to accept death instilled in the days of the World State. Some evolution has occurred since it’s now getting on for a million years since the events of Brave New World.
In closing, it feels to me that Huxley failed to appreciate that the inner party of ‘1984’ was not merely motivated by efficiency but also by sadism and the need to know that others are worse off in order for them to assert their psychological superiority. This is, sadly, not even slightly fictional in my view. It is not enough to celebrate one’s own success. One must also be conscious of others’ failure. This is one reason the government of today’s Airstrip One needs an underclass.
A Box Of Chocolates 