Great literature has uncanny ability of summoning the past and holding it up as a mirror to our current reality.
One night, I watched a fascinating movie. It was Fahrenheit 451, released by HBO on May 12, 2018. While the movie was released back then, the source material—a novel by American author Ray Bradbury—has been around since 1953.
It’s a dystopian tale, though perhaps not as bleak as Orwell’s 1984. Through this story, Bradbury critiqued the American politics of the 1940s while flashing a warning sign about where we might end up if we aren't careful. Since I haven't read the original book and can't vouch for how faithful the adaptation is, I’m basing this on the movie, sprinkled with some insights from reviews I’ve read.
The movie paints a future society that is aggressively anti-book. The Fire Department has undergone a terrifying rebrand: they don’t put out fires anymore; they start them. Their job is to sweep neighborhoods and incinerate books. If you’re caught owning one, your identity is wiped from all official databases, leaving you a ghost in a hyper-connected world.
The regime has scrubbed all public memory of the past. There are no physical or digital archives accessible to the masses. Firefighters don't even believe you if you tell them their job used to be saving lives, not burning pages. In this future, the only source of truth is an artificial intelligence called "The Nine."
Think of The Nine as Google, but with absolutely no competition. There are no other websites. All information flows through The Nine, except, of course, the forbidden content of books.
Information is curated by super-intelligent algorithms. There are no writers, no journalists, and no messy social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Public participation is reduced to tapping "smile" or "like" emojis on real-time news feeds served up by The Nine.
It’s a visual world. You don’t choose what news to consume; it’s force-fed to you in a one-way stream. The Nine absorbs data through surveillance in public and private spaces—even your bathroom has smart cameras that talk to you.
Here is the twist: In Fahrenheit 451, the dictatorship of The Nine and the brutality of the Firemen didn't come from a machine uprising or a power-hungry maniac like Hitler. The Nine exists because the public wanted it.
The backstory reveals that after a bitter Civil War sparked by endless debates and conflicting ideologies, the American people voluntarily surrendered their freedom. Knowledge became the scapegoat. The public decided that war was caused by people who "knew things." Knowledge gave people dreams and ideals, and when ideals clashed, conflict followed.
War made people unhappy. Therefore, knowledge became the enemy. Books, as vessels of knowledge, had to go. People who read, thought, or dreamed of a better future were branded as criminals.
For the sake of "happiness," people handed their liberty over to a technological dictatorship. They built their own cage.
According to TV critic Ben Travers, the movie updates the tech to feel more like 2018. They aren’t just burning paper; they are smashing hard drives. The concept of "The Nine"—a single, all-encompassing internet—is a modern addition.
Director Ramin Bahrani explained this shift perfectly: "Really what [we’re] getting into is consolidated internet... controlled not by a handful of companies but by one... Say if Google or Facebook joined forces... they could control and censor anything."
Another major change is the female lead, Clarisse. In the novel, she is a young girl, but in the movie, she is transformed into a young woman (played by the cool Algerian dancer Sofia Boutella) who becomes a love interest for the protagonist, Montag (Michael B. Jordan). The film even kills off the main character in the end, doubling down on the dystopian vibes.
In his review, Ben Travers didn’t mention the socio-political backdrop that birthed the original novel. However, I did some digging and found a 1956 radio interview with Ray Bradbury on oldradioprograms.us.
It turns out, Fahrenheit 451 was born as a direct critique of McCarthyism. For those unfamiliar, McCarthyism (named after its ringleader, Senator McCarthy) was an ideology and practice of domestic terror waged by the US government against its own citizens from 1947 to 1956.
This era (1947–1959) is known as the "Second Red Scare," a time when American socio-political life was gripped by fear due to government repression. It was marked by the massive silencing of civil liberties, all under the pretext of preventing Communist influence in the United States.
During the "Second Red Scare", civil liberties were crushed. Teachers, civil servants, and artists were investigated ("litsus," as we might say in Indonesia). If you were suspected of leftist ideology, you lost your job. Writers were blacklisted—like the "Hollywood Ten," famously depicted in the movie Trumbo.
Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 to critique a society that justified government oppression and sacrificed the freedom to think, all for an abstract idea of "safety" and "happiness."
This is where it gets uncomfortably familiar. Fahrenheit 451 feels incredibly contextual to Indonesia.
We were no strangers to banning books. It was a staple of the New Order regime, and frankly, it still happened, at least until five years ago. The difference? In the distant past, it was the Attorney General and the military doing the banning. But in the era of 5 to 10 years ago, it was civil militias and vigilante groups (like the Islamic Defenders Front, FPI) conducting the raids and burning books.
Here lay the danger. Terrified by these vigilante groups and the increasingly brutal acts of terrorism, people fought back. But this resistance risked swinging the pendulum too far to the other extreme: the resurrection of state-sponsored terror.
Driven by fear of fundamentalist groups, the public seemed ready to surrender its civil liberties. In online conversations, there was a growing, worrying support for repressing freedom of speech. We saw this years ago with the public support for the Anti-Terrorism Bill, which included 'Guantanamo-style' clauses allowing security forces to detain suspects for months without trial.
Those of us who lived through the New Order should know better. We know what it looks like when security forces are given blank checks to act arbitrarily. We just celebrated 20 years of freedom from that era, yet the ghosts of those practices still linger.
Fear of terrorism is making us react blindly. We are forgetting that giving excessive power to the state’s coercive apparatus can push us into a different, but equally deadly, form of terrorism: Official Terrorism.
We endured state terror for thirty-two years. Do we really want to go back?
Great literature has uncanny ability of summoning the past and holding it up as a mirror to our current reality.
One night, I watched a fascinating movie. It was Fahrenheit 451, released by HBO on May 12, 2018. While the movie was released back then, the source material—a novel by American author Ray Bradbury—has been around since 1953.
It’s a dystopian tale, though perhaps not as bleak as Orwell’s 1984. Through this story, Bradbury critiqued the American politics of the 1940s while flashing a warning sign about where we might end up if we aren't careful. Since I haven't read the original book and can't vouch for how faithful the adaptation is, I’m basing this on the movie, sprinkled with some insights from reviews I’ve read.
The movie paints a future society that is aggressively anti-book. The Fire Department has undergone a terrifying rebrand: they don’t put out fires anymore; they start them. Their job is to sweep neighborhoods and incinerate books. If you’re caught owning one, your identity is wiped from all official databases, leaving you a ghost in a hyper-connected world.
The regime has scrubbed all public memory of the past. There are no physical or digital archives accessible to the masses. Firefighters don't even believe you if you tell them their job used to be saving lives, not burning pages. In this future, the only source of truth is an artificial intelligence called "The Nine."
Think of The Nine as Google, but with absolutely no competition. There are no other websites. All information flows through The Nine, except, of course, the forbidden content of books.
Information is curated by super-intelligent algorithms. There are no writers, no journalists, and no messy social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Public participation is reduced to tapping "smile" or "like" emojis on real-time news feeds served up by The Nine.
It’s a visual world. You don’t choose what news to consume; it’s force-fed to you in a one-way stream. The Nine absorbs data through surveillance in public and private spaces—even your bathroom has smart cameras that talk to you.
Here is the twist: In Fahrenheit 451, the dictatorship of The Nine and the brutality of the Firemen didn't come from a machine uprising or a power-hungry maniac like Hitler. The Nine exists because the public wanted it.
The backstory reveals that after a bitter Civil War sparked by endless debates and conflicting ideologies, the American people voluntarily surrendered their freedom. Knowledge became the scapegoat. The public decided that war was caused by people who "knew things." Knowledge gave people dreams and ideals, and when ideals clashed, conflict followed.
War made people unhappy. Therefore, knowledge became the enemy. Books, as vessels of knowledge, had to go. People who read, thought, or dreamed of a better future were branded as criminals.
For the sake of "happiness," people handed their liberty over to a technological dictatorship. They built their own cage.
According to TV critic Ben Travers, the movie updates the tech to feel more like 2018. They aren’t just burning paper; they are smashing hard drives. The concept of "The Nine"—a single, all-encompassing internet—is a modern addition.
Director Ramin Bahrani explained this shift perfectly: "Really what [we’re] getting into is consolidated internet... controlled not by a handful of companies but by one... Say if Google or Facebook joined forces... they could control and censor anything."
Another major change is the female lead, Clarisse. In the novel, she is a young girl, but in the movie, she is transformed into a young woman (played by the cool Algerian dancer Sofia Boutella) who becomes a love interest for the protagonist, Montag (Michael B. Jordan). The film even kills off the main character in the end, doubling down on the dystopian vibes.
In his review, Ben Travers didn’t mention the socio-political backdrop that birthed the original novel. However, I did some digging and found a 1956 radio interview with Ray Bradbury on oldradioprograms.us.
It turns out, Fahrenheit 451 was born as a direct critique of McCarthyism. For those unfamiliar, McCarthyism (named after its ringleader, Senator McCarthy) was an ideology and practice of domestic terror waged by the US government against its own citizens from 1947 to 1956.
This era (1947–1959) is known as the "Second Red Scare," a time when American socio-political life was gripped by fear due to government repression. It was marked by the massive silencing of civil liberties, all under the pretext of preventing Communist influence in the United States.
During the "Second Red Scare", civil liberties were crushed. Teachers, civil servants, and artists were investigated ("litsus," as we might say in Indonesia). If you were suspected of leftist ideology, you lost your job. Writers were blacklisted—like the "Hollywood Ten," famously depicted in the movie Trumbo.
Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 to critique a society that justified government oppression and sacrificed the freedom to think, all for an abstract idea of "safety" and "happiness."
This is where it gets uncomfortably familiar. Fahrenheit 451 feels incredibly contextual to Indonesia.
We were no strangers to banning books. It was a staple of the New Order regime, and frankly, it still happened, at least until five years ago. The difference? In the distant past, it was the Attorney General and the military doing the banning. But in the era of 5 to 10 years ago, it was civil militias and vigilante groups (like the Islamic Defenders Front, FPI) conducting the raids and burning books.
Here lay the danger. Terrified by these vigilante groups and the increasingly brutal acts of terrorism, people fought back. But this resistance risked swinging the pendulum too far to the other extreme: the resurrection of state-sponsored terror.
Driven by fear of fundamentalist groups, the public seemed ready to surrender its civil liberties. In online conversations, there was a growing, worrying support for repressing freedom of speech. We saw this years ago with the public support for the Anti-Terrorism Bill, which included 'Guantanamo-style' clauses allowing security forces to detain suspects for months without trial.
Those of us who lived through the New Order should know better. We know what it looks like when security forces are given blank checks to act arbitrarily. We just celebrated 20 years of freedom from that era, yet the ghosts of those practices still linger.
Fear of terrorism is making us react blindly. We are forgetting that giving excessive power to the state’s coercive apparatus can push us into a different, but equally deadly, form of terrorism: Official Terrorism.
We endured state terror for thirty-two years. Do we really want to go back?
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