Essay online on Brave New World novel and movie

Everyday people try to imagine their future in bright colors, but everything can have another even ”˜gray’ character. Thus, we are going to compare the movie “Brave New World” and the novel with the same title for the purpose to understand the author’s message in both works of art.

To begin we can mention that the movie “Brave New World” is a kind of television movie based on a famous novel written by Aldous Huxley. It is possible to say that the movie is a screen version of the book, but being honest, we can mention that the movie is loosely based on the novel.

“Brave New World” is a fantastic story full of interesting scenes and suggestions, because the action takes its place in a far future, where everything is different to our reality. Of course, filmmakers took the novel as the base for their project, but they also ”˜modernized’ everything, and showed the events in the frames of the own thoughts about life and future changes. The film is focused on the relationships of Bernard Marx, who is a high-level “Alpha” executive, and Lenina Crowne, who is a schoolteacher responsible for educating children. Marx is presented as a person who is interested in changes, and has a lot of wild theories on mind control and human psychology, while the implementation of these theories can destroy the created world. According to the film’s plot, the reality is presented in a very organized way, and everything in people’s life is subordinated to special law and rules.

In contrast to film, the main concepts are presented in more mild way in the book because the book was written much earlier than the film was created, and the book’s author was not even able to image all the changes of our reality. Comparing both the novel and the movie, we see that the world is divided in several castes, and everything could be forecasted. According to the film, society is ideal in its morality because there are no crimes, wars, age and sufferings in the ”˜new world’. Each member of the ”˜new world’ is genetically designed for the purpose to become an ideal component of the created world. Institution of marriage is condemned and rejected in principle. All people take a special drug to relieve tension. Citizens are divided into four classes: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, and everything is accounted by wise and enlightened government. Thus, all people being similar to each other have the same behavioral patterns, while two persons, Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne, decided to change everything because they cannot listen to the voice of mind and their strong feelings overwhelm all forbidden laws.

In Huxley’s novel the main moto is “commonality, stability and sameness”, and this motto is proclaimed, and not even disputed because people are presented as a kind of crowd, which despite of the caste system of division, still needs ”˜the almighty father’ to control them, to think about important things instead of them, to decide all the questions, and to act. Huxley shows a kind of paradise in the own book, and the same picture we can also see in the film, where people live like plants in pots. These people are torn off the own native natural environment, and are transplanted into an alien environment, where they are trained to percept the new medium as ”˜paradise’. The concept of ”˜plant’ has also a metaphorical meaning because people are not born in a traditional way, and are grown in special plants. At the stage of embryo development, they are divided into five castes of different mental and physical abilities beginning with the “Alpha” (the most intellectual persons) with maximum development and ending with the most primitive “epsilon”. In addition, in order to maintain the caste system of society, the government instills people a feeling of pride in belonging to their caste through hypnopedia for the purpose to provoke a respect to the own caste and a kind of contempt to the lowest caste. Thus, the book and the movie describe the life of different people who can not fit into this ”˜new world’, where everything seems to be logical and predicted.

It also becomes obvious that the main novel’s hero, Helmholtz Watson, is completely removed from the movie, and his place is occupied by Bernard Marx, whose image is presented in another way. For instance, Marx’s character is stronger and righteous in the movie than in the book, and his feelings for Lenina are more complicated and not one-sided as in Huxley’s novel. Thus, the movie’s conception receives additional deepness even from the structure of the main hero’s character.

To sum up, we have compared and contrasted both the novel and the movie in this paper, and have understood that really strange and dangerous world is presented in both of them. It seems that the author of the book and filmmakers are trying to show the audience that it is important to think about utopia in other vein because even utopia is feasible, and sometimes life is mowing toward utopia exactly through the creation and development of high technological devices, which could allow to control everything (even people). Thus, both the movie and the book “Brave New World” provide an idea that people should want to live in less ”˜perfect’, but more free society for the purpose to avoid utopias and to return to the above described example of the ”˜new world’.