We watched a excerpt from the film version of Fahrenheit 451 in class today and I felt like it directly related to Michel Foucault's Panopticism theory. In the film the government has outlawed reading and the possession of books. The main character Guy Montag, a new member of the firefighters or bookburners as they are, has trouble accepting this malicious attempt to control society through cutting off their supply to knowledge and learning all together. There is one scene in which the firemen come upon an old house filled with books. The woman resident refuses leave as they start the fire to set the novels ablaze. It seems that she would rather perish than live in a panoptic world full of control and ignorance. She burns with the books and Montag is heavily burdened with the vision of her body disappearing into the flames. I found out an interesting fact as to why the film is entitled Fahrenheit 451; apparently this is the temperature upon which book pages will combust into flame. The film deals heavily with the idea of governmental control and how much we are brainwashed in everyday society. Another scene shows Montag's wife Mildred watching television and an empty bottle of sleeping pills. Although her life is boring and unchanging, she seems to find comfort in an interactive program which vacantly asks her opinion on unimportant matters. We can relate this to modern day society through the programs we watch. How much does media influence us? Fox News? On what is fashionable? What we should wear? What car we should drive? etc... here is the Fahrenheit 451 trailer & an old interview with Michel Foucault...
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