I suppose that I should be used to Hollywood fundamentally misunderstanding literary dystopias. They’re not always making bad movies, but they so rarely understand what the author was trying to say. BRAVE NEW WORLD seems destined to do the same:
The fundamental point of BRAVE NEW WORLD is that Huxley believed that it was the ultimate end result of our own society, and – this is very important – that the new society would work. Which it does! If you don’t care about culture, the arts, the humanities, or indeed anything above bodily pleasures, you can spend your life in easy pleasure. If you do care about those things, you eventually get sent to an island – where you can have all of those things, surrounded by people who feel the same way. And if you’re a Savage from the reservations, you can go to the Devil in whatever way you like.
It looks like this show is setting up John Savage to be a (presumably successful) rebel against the system. Which means that they picked precisely the wrong IP; in the book, the system not only wins, it wins so thoroughly that it doesn’t even really noticed how it squashed the hero in the process. Personally, I’d have gone with Ira Levin’s THIS PERFECT DAY instead. It’s not as good a book, but it does have the virtue of having a message that aligns with the creative intent of this show, as opposed to being utterly contrary to it.
Moe Lane
PS: I understand that actors typically don’t major in English literature. That’s fine, for a given value of ‘fine.’ But surely screenwriters must read the occasional book?
Not the first time. Remember Starship Troopers? Paul Verhoeven went out of his way to completely subvert and invert the point of Robert Heinlein’s novel and portrait Federation as a Nazi utopia. It’s absolutely nothing of sort, but hey, that’s what Hollywood was going for. Hell, they even race change Juan Rico from a rich aimless Filipino teenager in Buenos Aires to a blonde European.
Verhoeven reportedly wasn’t even aware of the existence of Starship Troopers when he wrote the script. After he finished it, people who read the script noted that it had some similarities to Heinlein’s novel, and he bought the rights to provide some name recognition.
This isn’t the first time that Hollywood has done Brave New World. There was a mini-series back in the ’90s that featured Leonard Nimoy. I didn’t see it myself (the ads clued me in that I’d want to avoid it), but I’ve heard that it was pretty bad.
The best mainstream movie to actually address the ideas in Brave New World? Demolition Man, and I am being perfectly serious about this. That and The Last Action Hero annoy me, because they demonstrate that Hollywood CAN make smart, subtle action flicks: it just doesn’t WANT to.
If it were played straight, you’d effectively have Hollywood indicting itself.
.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
The personal destruction in the book was impersonal and lacking overt malice.
Setting that fictional dystopia against the contrasting known reality of the casting couch and ruined lives implicitly makes Hollywood a hellscape.
.
(Granted, you could make one hell of a powerful movie out of that. I’d love to see it.)