As a result, the included commercials are as much a part of the cultural commentary as the film itself, and that is highly illustrative.Īccordingly, with this film, we are left with a clear indication of the bankrupt direction of our globalized Western culture. When I realized that what I was seeing was not the film, but a commercial advertisement break, I also realized that the director, no matter how lacking the overall organization of the film may be, had actually succeeded very well in relating Huxley's 1931 vision to the current culture at that time. In fact, when I saw the first two or three commercials in the first break, I actually mistook that they were part of the film.
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When the first commercial break occurred, as NBC provided no initial flash-screen announcing a commercial break (something that was a convention for network TV for many decades), the commercials seemed to flow seamlessly with the film footage. (And I recommend this to all as a way of life.)Īs a result, seeing the commercials which are included as a part of this recorded film was a revelation to me. And am committed to continuing to do so, for as long as I live. In short, as much as is possible in our overwhelmingly materialist and advertisement dominated American society, I avoid all forms of advertising. From that time on, I have relied on sources via non-mobile internet, where I can still, thankfully, control almost all intrusion of advertising. In 2006 that morphed into an abandonment of all TV entirely, including public broadcast networks, and all news programming. Personally, I abandoned all network broadcast, in fact any TV broadcast that included commercials, in the early to mid 1990's. There's something important to be learned from this. As a result, we are treated to some of the most common evening broadcast commercials at that time, which, at the time of this writing, was 23 years ago. However, what is very interesting about this recording is that it is taken straight off NBC network prime-time broadcast, including the commercial breaks. Overall, this film is a rather poorly directed, somewhat botched version of Huxley's cautionary tale. From the Reagan era on, materialism has been our raison d'etre in the West, and we are living the dubious and highly destructive results today. Huxley's vision was prescient in this respect, in that we experienced a temporary wholesale return to the empty promises of materialism post WW2 in the 1950's, and then re-committed to it entirely in 1980.
Although Huxley was definitely concerned with the dangers and seductions of authoritarianism, eugenics (which was gaining in popularity at that time), and the imposition of social controls, he was also concerned with the loss of the indefinable something we call "the human soul" through the wholesale adoption of a materialist philosophy and an approach to life which embraced the pursuit of self-centeredness at the expense of anything and everything else. In 1931, the extremes of the so-called "Red Scare" of the Truman administration, administered predominantly by Roy Cohn and Senator McCarthy, had not yet occurred in the United States, and people generally weren't experiencing a propaganda-generated overwhelming fear of the idea of sharing wealth as the basis of an economy (socialism). That the novel spoke to the dangers of authoritarian collectivism (Communism) was predominantly a projection of the times in the 60's. By the 1960's, the book was considered a classic - a cautionary tale of the consequences of a society based on the pursuit of materialism.
His prescient vision of a future society was extrapolated at the time from the excesses of the 1920's ("Roaring Twenties), at the dawning of the Great Depression. Aldous Huxley wrote his socially dystopian novel "Brave New World," in 1931.