Fahrenheit 451 IS NOT a book about censorship(!)

[Darren Dirt]

Fahrenheit author corrects a misunderstanding of one of his most famous books...

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature. "Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen. His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day's L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point. "Useless," Bradbury says. "They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full." He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He's now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled "Bradbury on censorship/television."

He says the culpritin Fahrenheit 451 is not the state - it is the people. Unlike Orwell's 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as "walls" and its actors as "family," a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.

Interestingly, his book imagined a future of giant color sets - flat panels that hung on walls like moving paintings. And television was used to broadcast meaningless drivel to divert attention, and thought, away from an impending war.

His book still stands as a classic. But one of L.A.'s best-known residents wants it understood that when he wrote it he was far more concerned with the dulling effects of TV on people than he was on the silencing effect of a heavy-handed government.

http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/2

[Mr. Analog]

Well the trouble with being an artist is that you can only give people impressions on how to interpret your work.

I mean, I doubt very highly that Farenheit 451 will be remembered for vilifying people and not mindless authority.

But hey, he had to make a press release saying so that people would remember that it was he who wrote the book in the first place and not that crazy documentary-making guy from Michigan who really likes the Canadian health care system...