Feelies In Brave New World

In the article, “Huxley’s Feelies: The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World”, Laura Frost compares Aldous Huxley’s experiences with “talkies” and his use of “feelies” in his novel, Brave New World. Huxley was first introduced to moving pictures, that included sound, with The Jazz Singer in 1927, and did not enjoy them (Frost 443). Frost looks at this and many experiences Huxley had with cinema. Frost analyzes Huxley’s complex relationship with cinema to show the multi-faceted effects of cinema on the real-world and Huxley’s literary works.

Huxley is known for deploring talking movies, known as “talkies,” and often condemns them as part of an increasingly industrialized society. But, Frost points out that Huxley recognized “cinema’s potential

to be either an instrument of social and political reform or a medium of cultural degeneracy” (445). Despite his rejection of popular culture, Frost notes the irony of Huxley’s place in twentieth-century pop culture (448). Frost also draws parallels between Huxley’s fate in pop culture and the fate of John the Savage, one of the characters in Huxley’s novel Brave New World. She shows that with John’s eventual death at the end of the novel “the last chance for culture perishes…John is a casualty of popular culture” (454). Frost addresses Huxley’s understanding of cinema and pop culture and how that connects to his use of cinema and pop culture in literature.
In Brave New World, there is a great cultural phenomenon called the “feelies”.

They are motion pictures, often erotic, that utilize all of an audience’s senses to provide them with pleasure (Frost 447). “Feelies” are the mass production of pleasure. Huxley felt that changes in the ways we achieve pleasure show the degeneration of our culture, “in place of old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions — distractions which demand from pleasure seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort” (qtd. in Frost 446). Industrialization and mass production, both of which are looked down upon by Huxley, are now applied to pleasure and leisure. Frost notes that Three Weeks in a Helicopter, the cookie-cutter “feelie” shown during Brave New World, involves many complex allusions and illustrates Huxley’s views (449). One of the allusions is the ironic setting. It is set in Alhambra, a location in Britain that evolved overtime to “accommodate the evolution of popular pleasure” (Frost 450) and embodies the cultural degeneration Huxley found in pop culture. Three Weeks in a Helicopter embodies the idiotic pop culture in a location where Huxley’s “real culture” would have once occurred (Frost 450). Despite Huxley’s disgust with cinema, Frost argues that Huxley’s use of cinema, in “feelies” and training films, “provide both a cautionary tale and a vision of cinema’s social

possibilities” (449). Frost points out the irony and complex usages of cinema found in Huxley’s literary works, to show his views on and understanding of cinema.
The addition of sound to moving pictures spurred a lot of debate. Frost illustrates this in her analysis of Huxley’s views on cinema and its connection to the mass production of pleasure. As Huxley states, “few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as ‘pleasure’” and now cinemagoers “need only sit and keep their eyes open” (qtd. in Frost 446-447). This transition in ways we achieve pleasure is hyper analyzed by Huxley in his literary works, as Frost points out through her exploration of the use of cinema in Huxley’s popular novel, Brave New World (449). Frost analyzes Huxley’s reactions to talking movies and draws comparisons between these experiences and the “feelies” found in Huxley’s literature.