In an era dominated by radio and cable, Neil Postman worrisomely argues in Amusement to Death that we are more likely to lead to a Brave New World than to a The world of 1984. Recently, the American drama "Brave New World" produced by Peacock, adapted from the novel of the same name by Aldous Huxley, showed such a world with great impact at the beginning.
Lenina's supervisor, Bernard, called her into the office and showed her a 3D image of her having sex with another man. Bernard magnified her expression, and the picture showed a trace of reassurance and infatuation on her face, hugging the man in her arms tightly.
"You can't be so selfish. You can't try to monopolize this man because he belongs to everyone. You're solipsistic," Bernard reprimanded.
What was Lenina's mood at this time? She may have some anger, shame and sadness. Then she took out a small pill and ate it. Her expression quickly returned to a calm state, and there was no sadness or joy in her eyes.
Pleasure: an emotion of nothingness
If you haven't read the original novel, the setting of "New London" may confuse the audience a bit.
"New London" is a world where there is truly a hierarchy for everyone. Starting from the embryo, people are divided into alpha (alpha), beta (beta), gamma (gamma), delta (delta) and epsilon (epsilon) in the order of the Greek alphabet, and each level is divided into plus And minus, like a high-tech version of caste society.
Alpha+ is the eternal leader, Beta can do advanced research work, Gamma belongs to ordinary citizens and is suitable for work in the service industry, Delta and Epsilon are people with low intelligence, responsible for repetitive and hard work , their language has only a few words, and they don't even have the ability to lie. But no one has ever questioned one's own class. From the beginning of the embryo, each individual has been divided into different classes in an orderly manner. As children, the hierarchy is clearly emphasized. Alpha children can build blocks on the table, while Gamma and other children stand on the side, and if the blocks collapse, they must quickly clean up on the ground. Occasionally, when a child "somehow" wants to touch Alpha's toy, he will be whipped by the manager on the side.
Negative emotions come up occasionally, but a pill can bring people back to happiness. This kind of pill is called "soma", which is translated as "soma" in Chinese. It has the same effect as morphine and marijuana. One pill will let you re-enter the empty happiness.
Coincidentally, Huxley himself seemed to agree with Neil Postman, when he wrote to George Orwell and asked him to send him a copy of 1984, he told Orwell that he The dystopian version I wrote may be more believable.
Huxley said he did not think torture was necessary to conquer a people, like Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth. "All you need is to teach people to love their bondage."
Bernard and Lenina were completely in love with such a "Brave New World" until a trip to "The Savage Land" met a "savage" named John.
Sex: A Permitted Freedom
On this planet, there is a group of people who retain the habits of the old world, so the native "New Londoners" come to visit here, and they watch with interest the dismemberment operation, the Black Friday fight, the unwed pregnancy At their wedding, someone grabbed the marriage and shot each other.
Until the "barbarians" could not bear to be observed and raised their guns to revolt, Bernard and Lenina, who were seriously wounded, were rescued by John, who also entered New London while being chased with them.
How terrifying would New London be to out-of-towners? Sex is respected here, there are always large sex parties open to people, the bodies of men and women are intertwined, but the scenes presented in the play are not full of interest. The kind of fascination under the illumination of colorful lights is like a chaotic world after drug addiction, and the artistry overshadows the scene itself.
John the "barbarian" who had never seen such a scene was naturally at a loss. He strayed into a group sex party, dodging the outstretched arms of naked men and women. When a woman wanted to hug him, he was frightened and fled to the middle of the dance floor in a panic. On the pillar, he kicked away someone's outstretched hand and screamed loudly, "Don't touch me!"
The inhabitants of New London, not knowing why, stopped and stood naked, looking up at the "barbarian" above the pillar, clothed and unable to read whether his rank was Alpha or Epsilon. The picture takes an ironic turn here: a "barbarian" who seems to have completed his transition to a god as he looks down upon the naked New London inhabitants.
"Barbarian" John, just as the leader predicted, became a "virus", he told the residents of New London about the cruelty and violence in the barbaric world, and gave Lenina, who yearned for a stable relationship, the experience of "monogamy". The perspective in the play shows that the clothes of the residents listening to the story around him gradually changed from pure white to black.
John seems to gradually sink into the party, sink into the sexual catharsis that does not need to be suppressed at all, however, is a world of sexual freedom the so-called "Brave New World"? Huxley wrote in his preface: "As political and economic liberty perishes, sexual liberty increases accordingly as compensation."
In fact, there have been attempts to create such utopias in human history.
In the United States, the most famous "free love" commune is the Oneida community, which was founded by a religious fanatic, John Noyce. From 1847 to 1881, the Oneida community had a maximum of more than 500 residents, who cultivated collective land and produced traps to sell to the outside world. Every adult had his own room, but everything else was shared, including children. and sexual partners.
Here, it is shameful to fall in love with only one person, and everyone is obliged to have sex with other people. But gradually, Noyce's dictatorship came into conflict with members of the community, as young men were asked to have sex with older women, while Noyce himself was able to exercise his "first night's right" to have sex with virgins. So people rose up, Noyce went into exile, and the community fell apart.
In contrast to this "experiment", people will find that despite the dictatorship of Noyce, it cannot prevent men and women from developing love and marrying in private. In fact, in the West, no experiment in group marriage can last more than a few years. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead put it: "No matter how many 'communes' are invented, the family will come back quietly."
Brave New World: A Place to Escape
As it opens, Bernard plays her full sex tape in front of Lenina. In New London, where privacy doesn't exist, Bernard himself even talks to his boss while squatting.
Everyone needs to wear a contact lens-like device that connects to the indra system and can tell if everyone's level is alpha or beta just by looking at it. People can also watch the images they see from the perspective of another person, just like a 24-hour online webcast.
The Indra system, like a large sky-eye system, or the "Red Queen" in Resident Evil, monitors everyone's life.
It seems to have a taste of "Black Mirror", and the director of this show is Owen Harris, who directed the "Black Mirror" series. Sadly, the show slips into the "defying artificial intelligence" cliché in the final episodes rather than the "dystopian" notion that Huxley wanted to convey.
There are many adaptations in the play, and the indra system is also an original plot. In addition, the adaptation of the soul character John is a bit regrettable. In the original work, although living in a barbaric land, John has read "The Complete Works of Shakespeare", and his ideas are black and white, unshakable. Therefore, after entering New London, his resistance is much more intense than in the play. What made him see the essence of New London in the original book was the tragedy of his mother's death from an overdose of soma, but this scene was omitted from the play.
The savage who "needed God, needed poetry, needed real danger, needed freedom, needed good, needed sin", in a heated debate with the chief, undercut one of Huxley's points.
Barbarian John said, "I demand the right to suffer right now."
The chief replied: "You haven't said the right to old age, ugliness, and impotence; the right to syphilis and cancer; the right to be annoying; the right to always be afraid of what will happen tomorrow; the right to typhoid fever ; the right to be subjected to all kinds of indescribable suffering."
After a moment of silence, the barbarian finally replied: "I demand all of this."
In the opening chapter of Brave New World, Huxley quotes the Russian thinker Berdyaev: life is running towards utopia. Perhaps a new era is beginning in which intellectuals and the cultural class find ways to escape utopia in the hope of returning to a less "perfect" but more "free" non-utopian society.
Even such a non-utopian society, as Huxley said: "The purpose of man's free will is to choose between madness and ignorance." But madness and ignorance, all of which I demand.
The original text was published in "VISTA Watching the World", WeChat public account "Watching the world every day"
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