Theme Of Fahrenheit 451

The movie Fahrenheit 451 is set in a futuristic society that is a completely oral society. In this fictitious society the reading and owning of books has actually been made illegal and anyone accused of owning a book will be arrested before their house is searched, and any books found will be burned by firefighters for all their neighbors to see. In this film, there are several recurring themes that can be related to past philosophical teachings, as well as today’s increasingly self-centered society. These main themes to explore are; the censorship of society, perceived happiness versus true happiness, the value of life. Each of these themes are very similar to themes found in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and can also be found prevalent in

today’s society.
One of the very first things one may notice when watching the film Fahrenheit 451 is that there are no opening credits. Most movies have some form of opening credits, but instead, the first scene of this film is a narrator voicing the credits while showing shots of antennas on top of houses and buildings. This emphasizes the fact that those in charge can tell people whatever and there is nothing to prove that what they are being told is true or even truly best.

The government controls everything that the people see, hear and do. This may sound familiar to anyone who has read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. An allegory is a story that is told using symbolism that has a deeper meaning. In the Allegory of the Cave, several poisoners are kept chained in a cave with their heads held still while being forced to watch shadows of puppets that are cast from a fire behind a screen. These prisoners grow up thinking that these things are reality and it is the only reality they ever know, until one prisoner escapes and discovers the truth. The citizens in Fahrenheit 451 live in a figurative cave of censorship much like the actual cave that the prisoners lived in. They are prisoners to society’s ignorance and only see shadows of the truth through the media broadcasts and the so-called “interactive” television that everyone seems compelled to watch, this is their reality. A prime example of censorship is the schools in the film. Students do not work out of text books and there is no form of critical thinking, everything is simply rote memorization. The teachers of the school can be compared to the fire in the Allegory of the Cave that casts the shadow of the puppets, they are a tool of the

government to condition the generations to see the reality that they want everyone to see. When a teacher who sees through the illusion and deviates from the preferred method they are fired and everyone, even the students, refuse to have anything to do with that teacher. Censorship is very prevalent in today’s society. People today watch the news almost in the same way Montag’s wife Linda and everyone else in that society watch the “cousins”, they take everything at face value and believe every word, never questioning if what they are being told is truth, a version of the truth or some far stretched story told simply to engage the audience and get people’s attention and a lot of times the news does not report stories that make people unhappy, uneasy or afraid.
When it is questioned why reading is illegal and why books are burned, the main character Montag is told by the fire captain that is because books make people unhappy. The theme of happiness is very dominant in the film. It seems like the goal of the government is to make people happy, however, it is not necessarily true happiness that everyone is experiencing. Montag truly believes that he loves his job and that he is happy until the girl he meets on the train asks him “are you happy?” When he begins to truly look at and question his life he realizes how mundane and unfulfilling it is. The people of this society are overwhelmed with entertainment; they have constant stimulation and are left thinking they need more and more in order to be happy. This can be seen in society today with the increasing popularity of social media. Every time you turn around there is some other form of social media being created, all able to be accessed from ones small hand held portable device no matter where they are or what time of day it is. Entertainment is always available, but most things people consider entertainment today are mind numbing games or mindlessly scrolling through some sort of news feed on one of the various social media site. When the fire students begin being rambunctious, the captains solution for keeping them out of trouble is to “keep them happy” by increasing their dose of sports, but in reality it is just keeping them distracted. However, it is proven that these distractions do not really provide happiness when in the film Montag’s wife Linda’s ends up overdosing on pills and passes out. It is so common for people to take these drugs and overdose that no one deems it an emergency and they have a seemingly routine procedure in place for overdoses. Montag only begins finding true happiness when he starts defying the distractions of society and reading books, he shows that true happiness is not found in blindly conforming and living comfortably and he bears truth to Socrates statement, “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Like the prisoner who escaped and discovered reality, Montag was persecuted by those to whom he tried to reveal the truth. They chose to stay comfortably in their false happiness rather than work for true happiness.
Finally, tying in with happiness, in the film it is clear that life is not truly valued.

One may even go as far to say that the people in the film are not living, they are simply moving through each day from one day to the next. The people shown in the film, such as the firemen and Linda and her friends, who are completely conformed to the censored society are very shallow and do not care about anything except being popular and what the rest of society says about what is right or wrong. Montag is horrified that the old woman was allowed to be burned along with her books while the other firemen did not have any feelings about it whatsoever. Linda’s friends do not believe him that something like that would be “allowed” but showed no emotion about it. They nonchalantly talk about soldiers dying and feel no sorrow for the woman whose husband died. When talking about having babies one of Linda’s friends calls having babies reproducing and says that the only good thing about it is that the baby would look like you and that would be neat. In our society today people have become so desensitized to life and death that many people are in a way, just like Linda and her friends, only caring about their own lives and their own popularity. People are becoming increasingly self-centered in a society that encourages focus on the self, rarely reacting about sad or happy news except to pass it along as something to talk about. Most social media such as Facebook and Instagram are purposed for

people to post things and try to get “likes”. They are conditioned to think that if they have a lot of likes then they are popular and in turn their life is worth something. On Facebook people tend to have hundreds, if not thousands of “friends” most of whom they do not even know. Yet, having a large number of friends on social media gives people a sense of worth, much like the interactive cousins TV program in the film.
In many ways I believe that Fahrenheit 451 could and maybe should be, taken as a warning to our society to examine the direction we seem to be moving. The similarities between the film and our society today are haunting. The themes of censorship of society, perceived happiness versus true happiness, the value of life itself that can be found in the film seem to become more and more a reality of society with each generation. The common problem: books. In Fahrenheit 451 books are made completely illegal and their society became censored, unhappy and numb because of that, while books are perfectly legal right now in our society, each generation seems to become increasingly bored with reading, moving toward a more technological, distracted and self-centered society. The more we move towards that, the more it seems our society begins to have in common with the film Fahrenheit 451.