This story echoes Mildred’s “Seashell ear-thimbles” (i.e., a brand of in-ear headphones) that act as an emotional barrier between her and Montag. In a 2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that people misinterpret his book and that Fahrenheit 451 is really a statement on how mass media like television marginalizes the reading of literature. Regarding minorities, he wrote in his 1979 Coda
‘There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. […] Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever. […] Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
Book-burning censorship, Bradbury would argue, was a side-effect of these two primary factors; this is consistent with Captain Beatty’s speech to Montag about the history of the firemen. According to Bradbury, it is the people, not the state, who are the culprit in Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit’s censorship is not the result of an authoritarian program to retain power, but the result of a fragmented society seeking to accommodate its challenges by deploying the power of entertainment and technology. As Captain Beatty explains (p. 55)
…The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean.”[…] “It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
A variety of other themes in the novel besides censorship have been suggested. Two major themes are resistance to conformity and control of individuals via technology and mass media. Bradbury explores how the government is able to use mass media to influence society and suppress individualism through book burning.
The characters Beatty and Faber point out that the American population is to blame. Due to their constant desire for a simplistic, positive image, books must be suppressed.
Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light. Faber went further to state that, rather than the government banning books, the American population simply stopped reading on their own. He notes that the book burnings themselves became a form of entertainment for the general public.
In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, “it works even better because we have political correctness now.
Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.”
Predictions for the future
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unspecified city and time, though it is written as if set in a distant future. The earliest editions make clear that it takes place no earlier than the year 2022 due to a reference to an atomic war taking place during that year.
Bradbury described himself as “a preventer of futures, not a predictor of them.” He did not believe that book burning was an inevitable part of the future; he wanted to warn against its development.
In a later interview, when asked if he believes that teaching Fahrenheit 451 in schools will prevent his totalitarian vision of the future, Bradbury replied in the negative. Rather, he states that education must be at the kindergarten and first-grade level. If students are unable to read then, they will be unable to read Fahrenheit 451.
As to technology, Sam Weller notes that Bradbury “predicted everything from flat-panel televisions to earbud headphones and twenty-four-hour banking machines.”
Adaptations
Television
Playhouse 90 broadcast “A Sound of Different Drummers” on CBS in 1957, written by Robert Alan Aurthur. The play combined plot ideas from Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bradbury sued and eventually won on appeal.
Film
Main articles: Fahrenheit 451 (1966 film) and Fahrenheit 451 (2018 film)
A film adaptation written and directed by François Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie was released in 1966.
A film adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani and starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, and Lilly Singh was released in 2018 for HBO.
Theater
In the late 1970s Bradbury adapted his book into a play. At least part of it was performed at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles in 1979, but it was not in print until 1986 and the official world premiere was only in November 1988 by the Fort Wayne, Indiana Civic Theatre.
The stage adaptation diverges considerably from the book and seems influenced by Truffaut’s movie. For example, fire chief Beatty’s character is fleshed out and is the wordiest role in the play. As in the movie, Clarisse does not simply disappear but in the finale meets up with Montag as a book character (she as Robert Louis Stevenson, he as Edgar Allan Poe).
The UK premiere of Bradbury’s stage adaptation was not until 2003 in Nottingham, while it took until 2006 before the Godlight Theatre Company produced and performed its New York City premiere at 59E59 Theaters. After the completion of the New York run, the production then transferred to the Edinburgh Festival where it was a 2006 Edinburgh Festival Pick of the Fringe.
The Off-Broadway theatre The American Place Theatre presented a one man show adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 as a part of their 2008–2009 Literature to Life season.
Fahrenheit 451 inspired the Birmingham Repertory Theatre production Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine, which was performed at the Birmingham Central Library in April 2012.
Radio
In 1982, Gregory Evans’ radio dramatization of the novel was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 starring Michael Pennington as Montag. It was broadcast eight more times on BBC Radio 4 Extra, twice each in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015.
BBC Radio’s second dramatization, by David Calcutt, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2003, starring Stephen Tomlin in the same role.
Music
In 1984 the new wave band Scortilla released the song Fahrenheit 451 inspired by the book by R. Bradbury and the film by F. Truffaut.
Computer games
In 1984, the novel was adapted into a computer text adventure game of the same name by the software company Trillium, serving as a sequel to the events of the novel, and co-written by Len Neufeld and Bradbury himself.
Comics
In June 2009, a graphic novel edition of the book was published. Entitled Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation, the paperback graphic adaptation was illustrated by Tim Hamilton. The introduction in the novel is written by Bradbury himself.
Cultural references
Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 refers to Bradbury’s novel and the September 11 attacks, emphasized by the film’s tagline “The temperature where freedom burns”. The film takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and its coverage in the news media, and became the highest grossing documentary of all time. Bradbury was upset by what he considered the appropriation of his title, and wanted the film renamed. Moore filmed a subsequent documentary about the election of Donald Trump called Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018.
In 2015, the Internet Engineering Steering Group approved the publication of An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles, now RFC 7725, which specifies that websites forced to block resources for legal reasons should return a status code of 451 when users request those resources.
Guy Montag (as Gui Montag) is used in the 1998 real-time strategy game StarCraft as a terran firebat hero.
