Persistence of Vision

When Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his dystopian novel about the consequences of excessive state-run social engineering, his purpose was to satirize--and terrorize--the utopian faith of socialists who believed in the oxymoronic prospect of a benevolent totalitarianism. Huxley was seeking to provide an alternative, and an antidote, to the dangerous utopian fantasies of writers such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw--and what he got instead was almost universal disapproval. The critics panned the book--and the censors banned it. Today, Brave New World is an acknowledged classic, a vital and historic statement about the damage collectivism does to human individuality--but it's still on the censors' most wanted list: The American Library Association ranks it #52 on its list the 100 Most Challenged Books from 1990-2000.

And small wonder--this novel is no longer futuristic. Its insights into how readily humans sacrifice themselves to trivial amusements and easy distractions have become the stuff of contemporary psychology. As Christopher Hitchens put it in a 1999 article, "the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus."

So it's timely indeed that the moment has finally come for the first major motion picture adaptation of Huxley's novel. Huxley's estate was in dispute for a number of years--but now that the issues have been resolved, the way forward to this necessary and overdue film is open. Ridley Scott will direct and Leonardo Di Caprio will star.