“Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia?”
“I have just been, for the first time, to see and hear a talking picture,” Aldous Huxley writes in a 1929 essay called “Silence Is Golden.” “A little late in the day,” he imagines his “up-to-date” readers remarking, “with a patronizing and contemptuous smile.”2 After all, the film that introduced Huxley to the world of sound cinema, The Jazz Singer, had been released two years earlier. The “gigantically enlarged” (21) images on the screen spouting noise send Huxley into paroxysms of scorn and fury. He is especially horrified by the scene in which Al Jolson sings “Mammy” in blackface: “My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out those sodden words, the greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed” (23). While only half feigning his reactionary pose, Huxley condemns the talkies as “the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement” (20), presenting one of the most popular vehicles of pleasure as a nightmare of emotional degradation and appalling physical effects.
Huxley’s cranky response to The Jazz Singer, a film that stood as both a technological landmark and a massive box-office success, is a window onto a key moment in the history of cinema when articles such as “Silence Is Golden,” “Why ‘Talkies’ Are Unsound,” “Ordeal by ‘Talkie,’” and “The Movies Commit Suicide” contended with equally impassioned defenses of sound film.3 The crisis occasioned by the coming of sound now appears as an overblown objection to a transition that in hindsight seems inevitable.4 But just as the cinema itself was often perceived as revolutionary—George Bernard Shaw remarked in 1914, “The cinema is going to form the mind of England…. The cinema is a much more momentous invention than the printing press”5—the coming of sound was greeted by many as a watershed moment. Beyond the changes in the industry (technological developments and the retirement of actors who had disagreeable voices, for example), the talkies raised more philosophical questions about the social, moral, and even physical implications of moving and talking images, and how those images were influencing the general public’s appetite and capacity for pleasure. In particular, Huxley was interested in the didactic potential of film. Always fascinated by educational systems, whether examining the training of infants, mass pedagogy, the Dalton Plan, or liberal education, Huxley extended this concern to cinema in his essays and fiction.
Cinema history would not be accurately represented by a chronicle of technological evolution from, say, Muybridge to the present. Such a history would miss a crucial component of the story: spectatorship. Accounts from the period such as Huxley’s and Iris Barry’s Let’s Go to the Pictures emphasize not just what happens on the screen but also how the audience responds.6 Those responses are strikingly different from how we now think of cinema spectatorship, and this is particularly true of the reception of the talkies. Contemporary critics such as Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Jonathan Crary, Ben Singer, Linda Williams, and Laura Marcus, following the early lead of Walter Benjamin7 and Siegfried Kracauer, have moved away from the psychoanalytic approach that dominated film criticism of the 1980s toward a more historical and sociological model that addresses how visual modernity in general and cinema spectatorship in particular are bodily, visceral experiences.8 Cinema is not merely a screen for psychic identifications but is experienced by an embodied, physically affected spectator. While the myth of Lumière’s train sending confused audiences screaming from the screen in 1895 has been debunked,9 writing from the time of “Silence Is Golden” illustrates Kracauer’s assertion that film was thought of as a particularly somatic medium, influencing “the spectator’s senses, engaging him physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually.”10 Gunning’s description of the earliest filmmaking as a “cinema of attractions” (121) and Singer’s examination of early “blood and thunder” melodrama, among other work, suggest that modern technologies of vision were experienced as mobilizing the body and actively produced new modes of spectatorship and perception. (Recent critics, such as Susan Buck-Morss, have extended this to propose that the cinema screen is a kind of prosthetic organ that “does not merely duplicate human cognitive perception, but changes its nature.”11) This was especially true of the transition to sound.
The cinema, particularly in its avant-garde forms, offered fresh approaches to representation; techniques such as montage and closeups inspired many modernist writers to find literary equivalents.12 At the same time, the reception of early film (the “youngest” art, as Virginia Woolf put it in her 1926 essay “The Cinema”13) is very much in keeping with that of mass culture in general: intoxication, addiction, deluded reverie, and gluttony. In a 1925 Vanity Fair essay called “Where Are the Movies Moving?” Huxley writes that “the darkness of the theater, the monotonous music—inducing, as they do, a kind of hypnotic state—enhance in the minds of the spectators the dream-like quality of what they see on the screen” (Essays 1:176).14 Kracauer’s section on “the spectator” in Theory of Film characterizes film spectatorship as “lowered consciousness” (189). In an article for Close Up, Bryher describes a stupefied film audience: “To watch hypnotically something which has become a habit and which is not recorded as it happens by the brain, differs little from the drug taker’s point of view.”15 Both hypnosis and intoxication influence mind and body, suggesting that the cinema spectator is vulnerable on two fronts, but Bryher’s metaphor points to the common feeling that moviegoing was a particularly embodied experience, bypassing the rational mind entirely.
The reception of film had its roots in responses to elements of mass culture such as amusement parks, radio, and other leisure technologies that appealed to the body in new ways. Film was already conceived of as a bodily experience when it was silent, but the addition of sound made the association more pronounced.16 In 1930 Charlie Chaplin maintained: “I shall never speak in a film. I hate the talkies and will not produce talking films. The American industry is transformed. So much the better or worse, it leaves me indifferent. I cannot conceive of my films as other than silent. My shadow appears on the screen as in a dream, and dreams do not speak.”17 For Chaplin, the cinematic experience of ephemeral, mute dreaming was shattered by the talkies, which forced a new kind of embodiment on the medium. Many remarked on the physical and cognitive difficulties that the sound film presented to the audience. Virginia Woolf wrote: “The eye licks it all up instantaneously and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without beseeching itself to think…. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples” (269). The image of the brain being roused without having to function analytically—a distinction between sensual stimulation and cerebral reasoning—is an apt figure for the modernist conception of the trouble with mass culture pleasure. This sense of dislocation between the brain and the body is supported by Barry’s contemporaneous observation that “Every habitual cinema-goer must have been struck at some time or another by the comparative slowness of perception and understanding of a person not accustomed to the pictures: the newcomer always misses half of what occurs” (13). The idea of a population divided between those who had been initiated into the new physical practice of cinema spectatorship and those who had not marked a unique and brief moment in film history: a narrow bridge of time between the wars in which audiences’ capacity for sensual pleasure seemed to be undergoing an expansion that was not, to many critics, for the better.18
Despite Huxley’s pose of being defiantly out of date in “Silence Is Golden,” he wrote a music and theater column in the Weekly Westminster Gazette that kept him current, and he published essays on a wide range of cultural topics for mass-market journals including Vanity Fair and Esquire. Even so, Huxley joined other interwar critics who conflated all forms of mass or popular culture. In a 1927 article for Harper’s, “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age,” he writes:
The rotary press, the process block, the cinema, the radio, the phonograph are used not, as they might so easily be used, to propagate culture, but its opposite. All the resources of science are applied in order that imbecility may flourish and vulgarity cover the whole earth.19
The cinema is one in a series of horrors here, but elsewhere, as in his 1923 essay, “Pleasures,” Huxley singles it out as an especially pernicious “ready made,” collective pleasure (Essays, 1:356). The scene of cinema audiences who “soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense,” challenged only to the extent that they must “sit and keep their eyes open” (356), recurs throughout Huxley’s writing, such as the people “sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood” in Eyeless in Gaza (1936). Even when traveling in Malaysia, Huxley manages to find a film audience to ridicule:
The violent imbecilities of the story flickered in silence against the background of the equatorial night. In silence the Javanese looked on. What were they thinking? What were their private comments on this exhibition of Western civilization? … The world into which the cinema introduces the subject peoples is a world of silliness and criminality.20
For Huxley, cinema is largely symptomatic of cultural degeneration that goes by the name of progress, and the introduction of sound was a particularly alarming development because of its implications for pleasure. In expanding its scope to include not just the eyes but also the ears, sound cinema exerted control over even more of the sensual body.
All of Huxley’s writings on cinema from the period are arranged around the dichotomy presented in “Pleasures”: new and old, physical and mental, trite and meaningful.21 It is integral to his vision of futurity in Brave New World, a dystopia, or, as Huxley called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure.22 London in the Year A.F. (After Ford) 632 is a culture of genetic and psychological control; individuals are decanted into a state whose motto is “Community, Identity, Stability.”23 Huxley’s novel is famous for its bottled babies, color-coded classes, hypnopaedic conditioning, and the pharmacological marvel soma. A nightmare of a totalitarian, genetically engineered future, Brave New World is also a cautionary tale about a world where artifacts of high culture are held under lock and key while the populace is supplied with “imbecile” entertainment. Everyone is happy, but it is the happiness of a mechanical utilitarianism aimed to produce uniform and banal satisfaction. The denizens of Brave New World follow a prescribed routine of “standardized amusement” summarized by the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, Mustapha Mond, as “Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies” (224).
With the feelies, Huxley extends the innovation of synchronized sound to include all the senses. The feelies have a special status among other means of mass pleasure insofar as they are aesthetic creations: Mond describes them as “works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation” (221). In a central scene, John the Savage, newly exported from the Malpais Reservation (a parody of Lawrence’s representation of primitivism in texts such as The Plumed Serpent), attends a feely called Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Billed as “AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT” (167), a parody of the 1920s cinema slogan, “All-Talking, All-Singing, All-Dancing,”24 Three Weeks in a Helicopter is three-dimensional and scented, with tactile sensations produced by metal knobs embedded in the viewers’ chairs. The pleasure that the feely transmits provokes in the Savage a rage at its sensual indulgence that is similar to Huxley’s at the cheap emotion and audio excess of The Jazz Singer.
Mond explains to John that in the Brave New World there is “no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think” (55). Pleasure has become a full-time job. Here Huxley would seem to fit the old stereotype of the modernist elitist who shores up the “great divide.” Accordingly, Brave New World has typically been read as “the classic denunciation of mass culture in the interwar years.”25 Huxley’s novel belongs to what is traditionally a markedly didactic genre. Pleasure is not characteristically associated with dystopic texts, in which negation and repression are common notes. The generic ambitions of the dystopia, the attempt to depict a culture gone awry, mean that images of degradation and inequity are the norm. One of Huxley’s challenges, then, is to render dystopic pleasure unattractive. His own term “negative utopia” captures this contradiction.
In his essay “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” Adorno examines the status of pleasure in this imagined totalitarian state. He argues that Huxley is “inwardly an enemy of intoxication,” who is “less concerned with the dehumanization of the industrial age than the decline of its morals.”
The regularly occurring communal orgies of the novel and the prescribed short-term change of partners are logical consequences of the jaded official sexual routine that turns pleasure to fun and denies it by granting it. But precisely in the impossibility of looking pleasure in the eye, of making use of reflection in abandoning one’s whole self to pleasure, the ancient prohibition for which Huxley prematurely mourns continues in force. Were its power to be broken, were pleasure to be freed of the institutional reins which bind it even in the “orgy-porgy,” Brave New World and its fatal rigidity would dissolve.26
“Turning pleasure to fun” and denying it “by granting it” but exposing its follies is a canny description of modernism’s approach to pleasure. Reversing modernism’s demand that readers learn to appreciate difficult pleasures and reject easy ones, in Brave New World Huxley depicts a culture in which pleasure is compulsory and engineered to eliminate intellectual challenge and to produce docile citizens. However, the culture that is meant to be repulsive is secured by a wide variety of “fun” that is often, from a readerly perspective, pointedly engaging. That is, there are moments in the novel in which the reader is brought face to face with “fun” that escapes Huxley’s withering critique. This ambiguity in the representation of ostensibly debased pleasure is especially evident in the feelies. For all his griping about silent cinema’s transition to sound, in Brave New World Huxley provides unexpected insight into a time when cinema’s technological innovations were not just observed but also truly felt, producing one of the most far-ranging meditations on the uses of pleasure from the period.
“EVERY HAIR OF THE BEAR REPRODUCED”
Although the feelies are pap for the public, their institutional structure indicates their importance in Brave New World. (While the movies were increasingly thought of as an American product, Huxley portrays the feelies as a distinctly local industry.) The “Feeling Picture” headquarters comprise twenty-two floors of the Bureaux of Propaganda in London (66), the “buildings of the Hounslow Feely Studio” sprawl over “seven and a half hectares” (62), and at the College of Emotional Engineering “Professor of Feelies” is a title of considerable status (156). John is escorted to the feelies by Lenina Crowne, to whose attractive physique, good-natured promiscuity, and provocative clothes (hot pants, boots, and zippered lingerie) Huxley calls excited attention. Word has it that Three Weeks in a Helicopter is an especially good feely. In the opening pages of the novel, the Assistant Predestinator tells Henry Ford, “I hear the new [feely] at the Alhambra is first-rate. There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it’s marvellous. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects” (35).
Huxley’s choice of venue for Three Weeks in a Helicopter, the Alhambra, evokes a rich history of British popular entertainment. Built on Leicester Square in 1854 and known initially as The Royal Panopticon of Science and Art, the Alhambra’s first of many subsequent incarnations was as a Victorian shrine to scientific exhibitions, a combination of intellectual curiosity and industry that would fall into Huxley’s category of “real” pleasure. In 1858 it became The Alhambra Circus and then, in 1864, the Alhambra Music Hall.27 The building was demolished in 1936 to clear room for a cinema, the Odeon, as if fulfilling Eliot’s apocalyptic prophecy about the passing of music hall culture and the rise of “the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema.”28 The Alhambra, with its transformations that reflected the evolution of popular culture, is a fitting forum for the feelies.
Like Brave New World itself—and like most dystopias, which simultaneously reference the past, present, and future, Huxley’s feelies reach both back to cinema’s music hall origins and forward to the imagination of technologies such as virtual reality. Three Weeks in a Helicopter is preceded by a performance inspired by music hall “turns” that were a feature of early cinema presentations and had more in common with vaudeville than with today’s “coming attractions.” The performances preceding films in the twenties were a varied roster of short acts that included humorous skits, newsreels, cartoons, travel and nature films, and musical performances. Three Weeks in a Helicopter begins with an overture by the Huysmans-inspired scent organ that plays a symphony of synaesthetic effects. Max Nordau’s notorious critique of Huysmans’s decadent hero—“a parasite of the lowest grade of atavism”—is specifically connected to the synaesthesic effect of symbolist art, which Nordau calls
a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.29
Nordau’s contention that such aesthetic developments are harbingers of cultural degeneration (following Plato in asserting that the lowest form of mindless, pleasure-driven life is that of an oyster) sounds very much like Huxley, whose most “civilized” character in Brave New World is “the Savage.” The “confusion” of sound and sight that characterized the talkies was a sign of cultural regression for many critics. “The soul of the film—its eloquence and vital silence—is destroyed,” Ernest Betts opined. “The film now returns to the circus from whence it came, among the freaks and the fat ladies.”30
Beyond the complaints about poorly executed sound films, there was a more far-reaching philosophical and aesthetic argument against the talkies: the contention that each art should stay within and develop according to its own limits, and that images rather than sound “must be/are the primary carriers of the film’s meaning and structure.”31 Rudolf Arnheim’s 1938 essay “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film” is a classic statement of this point, opening with the premise that there is an “uneasiness” in film audiences due to “the spectator’s attention being torn in two directions,” between vision and hearing.32 Chaplin and many others reiterated the point:
people blather of “talking films” and coloured films and stereoscopic films. I can’t abide coloured etchings, and on the stage we already have a perfect three dimensions. Why, we lose half our quality if we lose our limitations! Motion, two planes, and a suggestion of depth: that is our chaos from which we will fashion our universe.33
Huxley makes a similar argument for retaining the limitations of each artistic medium in “Where Are the Movies Moving?” He delightedly describes a silent sequence in which his “favorite dramatic hero, Felix the Cat,” is shown singing, as indicated by “little black notes” issuing from his mouth. The cartoon cat “reaches up, catches a few handfuls” of notes and makes a scooter out of them on which he rides away. “Seen on the screen,” Huxley marvels, “this conversion of song into scooters seems the most natural, simple, and logical thing in the world.” This example
indicates very clearly what are the most pregnant potentialities of the cinema; it shows how cinematography differs from literature and the spoken drama and how it may be developed into something entirely new. What the cinema can do better than literature is to be fantastic.34
Here Huxley credits cinema with a serious advantage over literature and supports a modernist aesthetic (the abstraction and surrealism of music concretized into notes and then transformed into scooters). However, he also conservatively insists that each art should stay within its own boundaries.
By contrast, the avant-garde cinema was pushing for more porous boundaries between the arts, and exploring how cinema could be developed into something more sensually and formally innovative. Sergei Eisenstein, W. I. Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov’s 1928 “Statement on Sound” advocates montage and “the creation of a new orchestral counterpoint of sight-images and sound-images.”35 Eisenstein goes further in “Synchronization of Senses,” which describes how a “single, unifying sound-picture image” might be developed as a “polyphonic structure” that “achieves its total effect through the composite sensation of all the pieces as a whole.”36 Pointing to examples of synaesthesic art including Rimbaud’s “famous ‘color’ sonnet” (90) and Whistler’s “color symphonies” (108), Eisenstein proposes that such effects could be achieved in cinema. “To remove the barriers between sight and sound, between the seen world and the heard world,” he rhapsodizes, “To bring about a unity and a harmonious relationship between these two opposite spheres. What an absorbing task! The Greeks and Diderot, Wagner and Scriabin—who has not dreamt of this ideal?” (87). It is the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” that synthesizes multiple media: the reverse of the Laocoön argument, which Huxley advocates. Huxley believed in a certain degree of playful surrealism, but not a free fall into promiscuous sensual hyperreality, which he saw as aesthetic and generic monstrosity. The feelies are a parody of Gesamtkunstwerk inspired by the talkies’ addition of sound to image. Kracauer made a similar connection, describing Berlin’s “picture palaces” as “A glittering, revue-like creature” that “has crawled out of the movies—the total art work [Gesamtkunstwerk] of effects” that “assaults all the senses using every possible means.”37 For Huxley, film alone among other forms of mass culture has the fearsome potential to expand so promiscuously, both formally and socially. (In 1936 Huxley reported on his recent visit to “a gigantic new movie palace” in Margate: “Its name implied a whole social program, a complete theory of art; it was called ‘Dreamland.’”38 The cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk strives to bring about the “lowered consciousness” that Huxley saw early cinema inducing: people are not just hypnotized but put to sleep by the fantasies on the screen.)
Huxley’s feelies link cultural degeneration and aesthetic decadence. The posture of the audience, “sunk in their pneumatic stalls” (evocative of both the music hall and the barnyard, as well as Eliot’s Grishkin, whose “friendly bust / Gives promises of pneumatic bliss”39) suggests a submissive absorption of stimuli. However, the audience at the feelies is anything but drowsy. The scent organ transports its audience through a gamut of sensations that are but an amuse-bouche to the main attraction, Three Weeks in a Helicopter:
suddenly, dazzling and incomparably more solid-looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality, there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in one another’s arms, of a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female…. Expiringly, a sound-track superdove cooed “Oo-ooh”; and vibrating only thirty-two times a second, a deeper than African bass made answer: “Aa-aah.” “Ooh-ah! Ooh-ah!” the stereoscopic lips came together again, and once more the facial erogenous zones of the six thousand spectators in the Alhambra tingled with almost intolerable galvanic pleasure. (168)
The goal of the feelies is not mere mimesis, but rather a straining at the boundaries of artificiality to create an enveloping and lurid experience of pleasurable hyperreality. The sensation produced by the feely is created by a “galvanic” or electric current, like a low-level shock treatment. It takes the audience to the edge of unpleasure: it is “almost intolerable.” Notably, the one sense that is not stimulated by the feelies is taste; indeed, taste, in the sense of aesthetic judgment, is exactly what is lacking here.
Huxley’s representation of mass culture in Brave New World explains the seeming contradiction between the two dominant accounts of early cinema—as a Benjaminian shock, on the one hand, and as a narcotic, on the other—which Buck-Morss characterizes as producing “the simultaneously hypersensitized and anaesthetized mass body that is the subject of the cinematic experience” (55). Huxley’s feelies both shock and arouse but ultimately contain and subdue their audience by directing their responses in a way that renders them socially, if not sensually, passive.
The plot of Three Weeks in a Helicopter is “extremely simple” (168). In this respect, the feelies resemble the early “cinema of attractions,” which, Gunning argues, appealed to an audience more interested in the display of spectacle and the “act of looking” than the development of a particular narrative (121). The characters sing a duet and make “a little love … on that famous bearskin, every hair of which … could be separately and distinctly felt.” The “negro” develops “an exclusive and maniacal passion” for “the Beta blonde” and she is “ravished away into the sky and kept there, hovering, for three weeks in a wildly anti-social tête-à-tête with the black madman” (168–169). She is rescued by
three handsome young Alphas … and the film ended happily and decorously, with the Beta blonde becoming the mistress of all her three rescuers…. Then the bearskin made a final appearance and, amid a blare of sexophones, the last stereoscopic kiss faded into darkness, the last electric titillation died on the lips like a dying moth that quivers, quivers, ever more feebly, ever more faintly, and at last is quiet, quite still. (169)
Representing the feelies is a challenge of ekphrasis that Huxley meets through language that strives for tactility as well as visuality. The moth fluttering on the lips in stuttering words reflecting the weakened beating of its wings, along with the hairs on the rug, produce sensations equal to visual spectacle. Huxley uses language that asks the reader not just to visualize the images but also to imagine their “tactual effects.”
While Lenina emerges from the feely “flushed” and aroused, John is “pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire.” He tells Lenina, “I don’t think you ought to see things like that. … It was base … ignoble” (169–170). Although Huxley asks his reader to sympathize with John’s high-minded rejection of the feelies after the fact, the language he uses to describe Three Weeks in a Helicopter is titillating: everyone in the audience, even John, experiences the galvanic erogenous effects. At climactic moments—specifically, when John rejects pleasure—the reader is more aligned with Lenina than with the sensitive but repressed Savage. His overreaction to the shallow and silly, but also sleazily engaging culture the feelies represent necessarily calls into question his capacity to cope with very human kinds of somatic experience. John is so appalled by it all that he retreats to the countryside, where he mortifies his body, flagellating himself. Darwin Bonaparte, “the Feely Corporation’s most expert big game photographer” (252), stalks and films John’s acts:
He kept his telescopic cameras carefully aimed—glued to their moving objective; clapped on a higher power to get a close-up of the frantic and distorted face (admirable!); switched over, for half a minute, to slow motion (an exquisitely comical effect, he promised himself); listened in, meanwhile, to the blows, the groans, the wild and raving words that were being recorded on the soundtrack at the edge of his film, tried the effect of a little amplification (yes, that was decidedly better)…. When they had put in the feely effects at the studio, it would be a wonderful film. (253)
Bonaparte’s efforts culminate in a hit feely feature called The Savage of Surrey that “could be seen, heard and felt in every first-class feely-palace in Western Europe” (254). With its alliterative play on Robert Flaherty’s popular 1922 film Nanook of the North, The Savage of Surrey assimilates John to the form of mass culture most foul to him. His flight from hedonism will be absorbed into the economy of mandatory pleasure. The feely’s ensuing publicity contributes to John’s suicide, and the novel’s concluding scene presents his dangling feet as if shot cinematically in close-up:
Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east. (259)
With John’s death, civilization’s last chance for culture perishes. Horrified by the hedonism of the Brave New World and hunted and framed as an animal himself in The Savage of Surrey, John is a casualty of popular culture: death by pleasure.
GOATS AND MONKEYS
The particular feely Huxley describes in Brave New World is a composite of parody and allusion that draws together specific debates about the implications of sound cinema and its potential to become something more culturally significant than mere “fun.” Three Weeks in a Helicopter seems to be an assemblage of random stupidity subordinated to its more spectacular effects, but is in fact a strategic amalgamation of the two kinds of pleasure Huxley delineates in his essay “Pleasures” as “old” and “modern.” The feely’s title and its memorable “tactual effects” allude to a 1907 best-selling romance novel, Three Weeks, by one of the most prolific genre writers of the era, Elinor Glyn. Glyn is best known now for her novel It and the silent film adaptation that launched Clara Bow’s career as the “It Girl.” After Glyn’s debut as an extra in a Cecil B. de Mille film, she wrote over a dozen screenplays for major studios. Glyn was a vigorous proselytizer of high-handed ideas about romance in her numerous novels as well as her articles and her treatise The Philosophy of Love (1923), and a tireless promoter of her own writing, as exemplified by her four-volume series The Elinor Glyn System of Writing (1922), the third of which is devoted to writing “photoplays.”40 Glyn also worked extensively with Rudolph Valentino after he appeared in The Sheik, helping transform his screen persona from a dominating and seemingly racially exotic lover to a more aristocratic leading man.41 To skeptics such as Huxley, Glyn represented the nadir of both contemporary fiction and popular cinema. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge observe that in the teens and twenties, “Glyn was the reigning queen of popular love literature and considered ‘very hot stuff’ among the ‘low-brow public.’”42 Graves and Hodge assert that she was “not read by the more discriminating,” yet many modernists reference her work, including Rebecca West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.43 Woolf wrote about Glyn in a 1917 diary entry: “Expecting life & smartness at least I spent 8d upon a Magazine with Mrs Asquith’s love letters, & they’re as flat & feeble & vulgar & illiterate as a provincial Mrs Glyn might be.”44 In Fiction and the Reading Public, Q. D. Leavis caustically remarks that “famous authors of bestsellers are run as limited companies with a factory called ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.’ or ‘Elinor Glyn Ltd.’” (50). Indeed, Glyn’s industriousness was remarkable, because she saw her writing as a commercial enterprise—Anne Morey dubs her “the sexual Martha Stewart of the 1920s, with all the power and vulnerability that that strategy confers upon a woman who operates as a brand”—as well as a means of promoting herself and her conceptions about men, women, sex, and love.45 Just as Lawrence saw Hull as symptomatic of lamentable tendencies in popular writing and cinema, Huxley chose Glyn, Hollywood doyenne, to exemplify debased modern amusement. Glyn was also, even more self-consciously than Hull, an educator of mass audiences in the ways of pleasure.
Three Weeks is in many respects an inversion of The Sheik. It tells the story of an affair between Paul Verdayne, a listless upper-class British man, and the queen of an unnamed Eastern European nation who seems modeled on the dominant women of Sacher-Masoch. Just as Hull’s Diana “learns” to be a woman through conforming to gender stereotypes, Glyn’s Tiger Queen takes Paul in hand and teaches him to be a man through a combination of erotic edification and lectures. She tells him, “You must not just drift, my Paul, like so many of your countrymen do. You must help to stem the tide of your nation’s decadence, and be a strong man.”46 But decadence of an order that would have enraged Max Nordau is exactly what follows. In the climactic scene of the novel, Paul finds the queen reclining on a magnificent tiger-skin rug, gripping a fleur du mal between her teeth. She writhes around (“like a snake,” Glyn writes, no fewer than four times [86, 87, 88, 134]), and the tactile stimuli—slithery snakeskin and soft fur—are as confused as Glyn’s mixed metaphors: “She purred as a tiger might have done while she undulated like a snake” (134). Paul impregnates her, becoming the pillar of strength she meant for him to be. Three Weeks has a strongly racialized discourse running through it (the queen’s behavior is attributed to her “Slav” blood) charged with orientalist themes. Its emphasis on improving a nation’s or race’s “stock” through reproduction reflects the contemporary discourse of eugenics, a theme that overlapped with Huxley’s interests in Brave New World.47 Three Weeks’ moral and sexual lessons are staged through, as Laura Horak puts it, Paul’s “sensual education,” which was extended into Glyn’s cinematic contributions that “modeled and invited spectators to participate in a form of erotic, embodied spectatorship.”48 Glyn’s novel was an instant success in Britain and was filmed several times. In particular, the scene with the tiger-skin rug in the 1924 version, Horak demonstrates, simulates Paul’s point of view and his thralldom to the dominant Tiger Queen, thus putting the spectator in the position of experiencing the “visual arousal and physical restraint” that are at the center of Glyn’s erotics in her novel (94).
Glyn played up the centrality of this scene, with its pedagogical and erotic content, by posing with such rugs in publicity photographs. This prop is rendered absurd in Huxley’s novel, with the characters exclaiming about the feely’s simulation of the bearskin rug. Rebecca West commented that Glyn represented an “appalling … school of fiction … that imagines that by cataloging stimuli one can produce a feeling of stimulation.”49 Indeed, like The Sheik, this is exactly what Three Weeks does, and very effectively too, judging by its popularity. In a 1915 letter in which Huxley discusses Lawrence’s censorship problems with The Rainbow, he writes, “It is always the serious books that get sat on—how much better to suppress Mrs. Glyn,” suggesting that there was something about Glyn’s romances that needed to be contained.50 However, as in Lawrence’s reading of Hull, this feature of romance fiction—its arousal of the reader through sensual description and its deliberate shaping of the reader’s response—could be appropriated at the same time that it was criticized, and Huxley does just this in his adaptation of Three Weeks in Brave New World.
In Huxley’s oppositional equation, Glyn and the feelies represent collective, accessible, somatic pleasures that “mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience”; “the serious books” are represented by modernism (Lawrence) and, in Brave New World, by Shakespeare. Throughout Brave New World, beginning with its title, Huxley juxtaposes the feelies with Shakespeare. After a confused John returns from his trip to the Alhambra, he opens The Complete Works of Shakespeare, which he has smuggled in from the Reservation. He “turned with religious care its stained and crumbled pages, and began to read Othello. Othello, he remembered, was like the hero of Three Weeks in a Helicopter—a black man” (171).51 Visiting Eton, John asks, “Do they read Shakespeare?” He is told that the library “contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements” (163). In Brave New World, Shakespeare’s work has been seemingly severed from its theatricality--Huxley figures it not in its enacted form, which might resemble the collective amusement he critiques, but in the more private experience of reading—and yet it is surreptitiously cited through the feelies.52
Most obviously, Shakespeare represents the lost values of refined and literary culture. When Mond and John discuss Shakespeare, John laments the passing of “old things” such as books because
the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Those plays, where there’s nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing.” He made a grimace. “Goats and monkeys!” Only in Othello’s words could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred. (219)
The words refer to Iago’s speech about trying to get visual proof of Desdemona’s infidelity: “It is impossible you should see this, / Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys” (3.3.402–403). For John, the feelies promote voyeurism, showing publicly and en masse what should be intimate, individual experience. He insists to Mond that
“Othello’s good.… Othello’s better than those feelies.”
“Of course it is,” the Controller agreed. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”
“But they don’t mean anything.”
“They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.”
“But they’re … they’re told by an idiot.” (220–221)
This discussion reiterates Huxley’s formulations in “Pleasures” and goes even further in articulating the cultural divide between new, popular amusements and those of past eras. When John mistakenly calls the feelies “plays,” expecting them to have meaning, and Mond corrects him that their importance is their “agreeable sensations,” Huxley opposes significance to sensation. Culture can have meaning or it can deliver “agreeable sensations to the audience,” but not both. Hence Mond describes the pleasure of the feelies as an empty tautology: “they mean themselves.” Again, Gunning’s concept of the “cinema of attractions” is apt here as Huxley suggests that the tawdry desire for stimulation remains cinema’s (and the popular novel’s) main appeal, while Shakespearean drama offers the dignified and valuable rewards of narrative significance and complexity. But of course, John’s sense that Shakespeare solicits only noble emotions is wrong; as his own quotations show, Shakespeare was not above lust and sensationalism.53
Neither Huxley’s nor John’s use of Shakespeare is as high-minded as they might want. Shakespeare’s story of a jealous “Moor” and a white woman provides the taboo pretext of Three Weeks in a Helicopter. The feely focuses on free love, against which the maniacal monogamy of the “blackamoor” is cast, and miscegenation. Although there is disagreement about whether Shakespeare’s Moor is black or sub-Saharan, Huxley definitely casts a black man to couple with the Beta blonde. The “blackamoor” in the feely and Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer both link the talkies with racial exoticism, physicality, and simultaneous modernity and primitivism. While some writers, such as Una Marson, lamented the overwhelming whiteness of the cinema (“Cinema Eyes,” 1937), Huxley was not alone in associating cinema with racial otherness. (The Sheik too, in both the novel and the film version, plays on the sexualization of racial difference that turns out to be a masquerade.) In 1929, the British film journal Close Up devoted a special issue to “The Negro in Film” from which, Jane Gaines observes, “One receives the impression from the special issue that the Negro was in vogue in London as never before.”54 The editor of Close Up, Kenneth Macpherson, “lament[ed] the passing of the silent film: he concurred with others that the only consolation was that the talkies now made it possible to hear the Negro for the first time” (Gaines, 1). On one level, blackness functions fetishistically for Huxley; on another level, it is a way for him to emphasize further the bodily aspects of cinematic effects. “Again and again,” Miriam Hansen observes, “writings on the American cinema of the interwar period stress the new physicality, the exterior surface or ‘outer skin’ of things.”55 This is certainly true of Three Weeks in a Helicopter, with its attention to the skin color of its actors and the texture their bodies feel on the bearskin rug.
There is a curious congruence of racial mixing and the talkies throughout Huxley’s work. Both “Silence Is Golden” and Three Weeks in a Helicopter showcase racial masquerade and miscegenation. Al Jolson’s famous “Mammy” scene, to which Huxley calls such attention, has another “racial” layer beyond the image of the white man in blackface. Jolson’s character is from an orthodox Jewish family; as he puts on his makeup and prepares for an opening-night performance on Broadway that will keep him from honoring his father’s dying wish that he sing Kol Nidre in the synagogue, he describes his hesitations to his love interest, Mary (a “shiksa” who troubles Jolson’s character’s mother): “There’s something, after all, in my heart—maybe it is the call of the ages—the cry of my race.” “Race,” or ethnicity, is both an essential trait and a “special effect” in The Jazz Singer, an identity that can be painted on.56 The black-and-white film stock of the early teens and twenties was animated by contrast: the less subtle the better. Huxley does not comment overtly on the racial dimensions of The Jazz Singer in “Silence Is Golden,” but his concentration on Al Jolson’s blackface performance suggests that it drew his attention, and the film’s preoccupation with racial and ethnic contrast does appear in Huxley’s description of how the members of the band in The Jazz Singer “belong to two contrasted races. There were the dark and polished young Hebrews…. And there were the chubby young Nordics, with faces transformed by the strange plastic powers of the American environment into the likeness of very large uncooked muffins, or the unveiled posteriors of babes” (21). “Race” is read precisely as the “outer skin of things,” as color and the consistency of flesh on the screen. But race and ethnicity went deeper for Huxley. Throughout his writings on cinema, he expresses anti-Semitic paranoia about Hollywood, which he feared was run by “Jews with money.”57 His association of cinema both with blackness and with Jewishness, and more generally with racial promiscuity, resembles nothing so much as the rhetoric of “degeneration,” with its anxiety about unrestrained pleasure.
At the same time, as with the synthetic but seductive Lenina, Huxley plays on the excitement of taboo representation in the feelies. On this count, Three Weeks in a Helicopter has another intertext: white slavery films. This genre of “vice films,” especially popular in the teens, told melodramatic stories of young girls being kidnapped and forced into “slavery,” a code name for prostitution. Shelley Stamp argues that films such as White Slave Traffic and Traffic in Souls responded to anxiety about young women’s new urban recreation culture, and particularly cinema. “Cinemas were described by many observers as arenas of particular carnal license, where women were alternately preyed upon by salacious men who gathered around entranceways, and themselves tempted to engage in untoward conduct.”58 The Beta blonde’s sexualized “enslavement” to the blackamoor plays on the sensationalism underpinning the white slavery scare at the turn of the century as well as the fantasy of miscegenation. Huxley reaffirms racial stereotypes even as he mocks contemporary films that exploited these stereotypes.
The representation of black sexuality in films of the twenties was vexed, whether in Birth of a Nation (a film Huxley knew and wrote about), with its scene of a black man chasing a white woman, or “race films” like those of Oscar Micheaux. In Three Weeks in a Helicopter Huxley makes use of the fantasy of black male sexuality threatening white womanhood in a scene that would have been banned under the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, better known as the Hays Code: “Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.”59 Indeed, everything about the feely, from the kisses to the interracial romp on the bearskin, would have been unrepresentable in mainstream cinema in 1932. Huxley uses the cover of dystopia—and the overt condemnation of the fictional culture—to depict what would otherwise have been deemed obscene or even pornographic.
Notably, at the same time that Huxley plays Othello for its erotic implications in the feely, John uses Shakespeare as a defense against sensual pleasure throughout Brave New World. When Lenina tries to seduce him, for example, “inevitably he found himself thinking of the embraces in Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde and ahh! the more than real blackamoor” (192), and he spits Shakespearean insults to keep her at bay (“Down from the waist they are Centaurs, though women all above. … Impudent strumpet!” [195–196]). John’s quotations reflect his intelligence, but they are also a stilted means of critique. Their anachronistic and artificial quality, part of an attempt to stifle somatic pleasure through authority, are no competition for the overwhelming immediacy of the pleasure vehicles in Brave New World. Huxley’s manner of describing dystopic pleasure necessarily produces its giddy attractions.
Despite the broad satire of the feelies’ idiocy, Huxley does not choose to portray them as lacking in magnetism—like the mechanistic Tiller Girls, for example, whom Kracauer oddly characterizes as “sexless bodies in bathing suits” (Mass, 76)—and his opposition to intoxication, as Adorno describes it, is not uniform. The effects of soma, for example, are presented as a comalike daze into which characters fall, so readers do not generally experience its compelling properties as they do the feelies. Soma is, therefore, easier to dismiss. But Huxley dwells on the feelies’ allure and efficient mobilization of the body. He does the same with the “uncommonly pretty” and “wonderfully pneumatic” Lenina Crowne, who is closely related to the feelies. Her characteristics—sensual, female, modern, available to everyone—code her as an embodiment of mass culture. She is discussed by the men who have “had” her, just as they discuss the sensual merits of Three Weeks in a Helicopter. The novel includes several scenes of Lenina taking off and putting on her outfits, which Huxley details as carefully as the feely scenes (e.g., “the softer rolling of those well-fitted corduroy shorts” [60]). The scene in the “GIRLS’ DRESSING-ROOM,” in which “eighty vibro-vacuum massage machines were simultaneously kneading and sucking the firm and sunburnt flesh of eighty superb female specimens” (36) and Lenina emerges from her bath like some futurist Aphrodite, straddles the line between critique (of conveyorbelt hygiene) and soft-core fantasy. Even more charged is the scene in which John steals into Lenina’s hotel room and rapturously fondles her clothes, which unfolds in strikingly parallel terms to the feely Three Weeks in a Helicopter:
He opened the green suit-case; and all at once he was breathing Lenina’s perfume, filling his lungs with her essential being. His heart beat wildly; for a moment he was almost faint. Then, bending over the precious box, he touched, he lifted into the light, he examined. The zippers on Lenina’s spare pair of viscose velveteen shorts were at first a puzzle, then solved, a delight. Zip, and then zip; zip, and then zip; he was enchanted. Her green slippers were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He unfolded a pair of zippicamiknicks, blushed, put them hastily away again; but kissed a perfumed acetate handkerchief and wound a scarf round his neck. Opening a box, he spilt a cloud of scented powder. His hands were floury with the stuff. He wiped them on his chest, on his shoulders, on his bare arms. Delicious perfume! He shut his eyes; he rubbed his cheek against his own powdered arm. Touch of smooth skin against his face, scent in his nostrils of musky dust—her real presence. “Lenina,” he whispered. “Lenina!” (142–143)
Like the feelies, this scene commences with the stimulation of smell (of Lenina’s perfume), moves on to touch and sight and sound (“Zip, and then zip”) and has a vicarious quality, as Lenina’s “real presence” is withheld. The sense of taste is, as in Three Weeks in a Helicopter, missing from John’s experience. As with the feely, this is a scene of guilty pleasure that Huxley invites the reader to feel with his character. John’s handling of Lenina’s garments echoes Huxley’s linguistic descriptions of her. Even as the author emphasizes Lenina’s artificiality, he effectively simulates John’s arousal through funny but also charged scenes of fetishistic desire. When John discovers Lenina sleeping in bed, “dressed in a pair of pink one-piece zippyjamas” (143), his romantic Romeo and Juliet sentiment quickly gives way to the desire to “take hold of the zipper at her neck and give one long, strong pull …” (144). Huxley’s ellipsis tempts the reader to conjure the body beneath those zippyjamas.
After such erotic scenes of longing, John’s rejection of Lenina, the feelies, and other sensual pleasures is represented as a puritanical hysteria, which Huxley criticizes as much as thoughtless consumption of the feelies, soma, and orgy porgy. When they are finally together, Lenina does a zippered striptease for John: her “white sailor’s blouse” comes off with the “long vertical pull” that is denied earlier. She drops her “pale shell pink” zippicamiknicks with a “Zip, zip!” and approaches John in a kinky ensemble of shoes, kneesocks, and a “rakishly tilted round white cap” (193). John attacks her while quoting Othello: “O thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet that the sense aches at thee” (195). Huxley depicts John’s response as absurdly repressed. His hypervigilant rage against mutual attraction is excessive and goes against his own—and perhaps the reader’s—desires. “Lenina’s artificial charm and cellophane shamelessness,” Adorno observes, “produce by no means the unerotic effect Huxley intended, but rather a highly seductive one, to which even the infuriated cultural savage succumbs at the end of the novel” (105).
The tiger skin and bearskin, the goats and monkeys, the odor of pig’s dung, and the way the “big game photographer” Darwin Bonaparte tracks John all contribute to a strong sense of bestiality and mindlessness surrounding the feelies, of physical transgression and cultural regression—but also excitement and sensation—that Huxley associates with film. He presents cinematic progress as at a crossroads between new and old pleasures, between the serious, thoughtful world of Othello and the decadent, sybaritic, but nevertheless seductive world of Glyn. In keeping with his characteristic interest in cultural conditioning, Huxley adds a further cinematic allusion to Three Weeks in a Helicopter that indicates how the dangerous pleasures evoked in his “negative utopia” might be managed.
THE SAVAGE OF SURREY
The idea that people’s pleasures can be upgraded through aesthetic training is a major modernist gamble. Huxley “reverse engineers” this premise in one of the founding principles of Brave New World: that people can be influenced, through techniques such as hypnosis and sleep conditioning to reject “old” pleasures (e.g., Shakespeare) and instead embrace more straightforward, sensational amusements. Just as Huxley was interested in how the conception of the family or individuality, for example, could be influenced by education, he was intrigued by how cinema could shape people’s minds. He positions the management of pleasure in Brave New World as a means of bolstering the other techniques of social conditioning, such as eugenics.
John’s feely epitaph, The Savage of Surrey, along with the other feelies mentioned in Brave New World—“the famous all-howling stereoscopic feely of the gorillas’ wedding” (253) and The Sperm Whale’s Love-Life, which Darwin Bonaparte considers the gold standard in feelatography—indicate that Huxley had a particular kind of film in mind when he invented this form of amusement. Although the coyly titled feelies seem ludicrously farfetched, they are not far off from real ethnographic and nature documentaries that were hugely popular in Britain in the twenties. The foremost among these was a series called Secrets of Nature, sponsored by British Instructional from 1922 to 1933. In her history of British cinema, Rachel Low notes that “The excellence and popular success of the Secrets of Nature films was one of the few bright features of the British film industry during the twenties…. They were liked by both ordinary audiences and highbrows.”60 Screened before feature-length films, the Secrets of Nature shorts focused on topics such as the habits of the cuckoo or plant growth. Their titles were often coyly suggestive: Romance in a Pond, for example, investigates the life cycle of newts. According to David King Dunaway, these documentaries were Huxley’s favorite kind of film, and “in particular his favorite [was] The Sex Life of Lobsters.”61 Huxley’s brother Julian, who was active in the popularization of biology, narrated and directed an Oscar-winning film called The Private Life of the Gannets (1935). Although both titles sound like feelies, appealing to audience prurience, Huxley often praised documentary film. In “Silence Is Golden,” he lauds the “fascinating Events of The Week” newsreels. In Heaven and Hell, he applauds colored documentaries as “a notable new form of popular visionary art” and singles out Disney’s The Living Desert, with “the immensely magnified cactus blossoms, into which … the spectator finds himself sinking.”62 In 1929 he wrote that he was “personally … very fond” of “the documentary film which shows me places I have never visited, strange animals, odd people, queer trades…. Nanook and Chang and Moana are delightful, imaginative liberations for those who have undergone long slavery in the world of adult interests” (“The Critic in the Crib,” Essays 3:13–14).
In their 1934 book Secrets of Nature, the collaborators Mary Field (“the only Englishwoman at present directing talking pictures”63) and Percy Smith (“an expert on micro-cinematography”) remark that when the Secrets of Nature series “went talky,” it faced the same obstacles that other kinds of films did: “Experiments have shown that the majority of cinema-goers cannot both look and listen. When they go to the pictures they have the tendency to look, for had they wished to listen, they would have stayed at home and turned on the wireless” (214). An illustration in the book titled “Synchronizing a ‘Secret of Nature’” shows a group of musicians recording a film sound track. The image indicates the seriousness with which the Secrets of Nature films were produced and also hints at the surrealism of the venture, as a full orchestra accompanies an arachnid rendered twice as large as a grand piano. (The Matrimony of Mites, one imagines the title of the finished product might go.)
From cinema’s early days, there was interest in its didactic potential. In 1914, Shaw wrote,
“Synchronizing a Secrets of Nature Film” Courtesy of Studiocanal Films Limited
The cinematograph begins educating people when the projection lantern begins clicking, and does not stop until it leaves off. Whether it is shewing you what the South Polar ice barrier is like through the films of Mr Ponting [90 Degrees South (1911–1912)], or making you silly and sentimental by pictorial novelets, it is educating you all the time. (7)
Shaw adds that the cinema “is educating you far more effectively when you think it is only amusing you than when it is avowedly instructing you in the habits of lobsters.”64 This idea of education sneaking in under the cover of pleasure is a significant twist on statements such as Eliot’s “alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement,’ or ‘purely for pleasure’ that may have the greatest, and least suspected influence upon us.” Shaw had an optimistic vision of cinema as an edifying pleasure. In “The Critic in the Crib,” Huxley cites a Columbia Teachers College study that found that “class-room films can raise pupils’ marks by an average of twenty-four per cent,” and that most teachers thought such films were useful “in arousing and sustaining the children’s interest, in improving the quantity and quality of their reading, and in aiding them to correlate features of their lessons with personal experiences and community conditions” (Essays, 3:13). Huxley notes, however, the findings of another team of researchers that “at no age did students like such semi-educational productions as Nanook, Grass, Moana, and Chang” (13). These seemingly contradictory conclusions are played out in Brave New World when John visits the Eton “Beta-Minus geography room.” The students are watching an ethnographic film about the Penitentes of the Savage Reservation beating themselves. The students roar with laughter while Bernard takes advantage of “the cinematographical twilight” to make a pass at the Head Mistress. John, meanwhile, is “pained” and bewildered at the spectacle (162). The students are hardly interested in the film, but it is nevertheless working its subliminal power to imprint the cultural values of the Brave New World upon them. Huxley’s vision of how educational cinema might develop is much more cynical than Shaw’s; it functions, like the other forms of mass pleasure, to shore up the citizens’ social conditioning. As a mass medium that appealed to people because it seemed so accessible, cinema could “form the mind of England,” as Shaw predicted, but it could also deform the mind, as in Brave New World, and produce docile rather than alert citizens.
Throughout his representations of cinema, Huxley draws attention to films’ sociopolitical potential, and the ways they can be used to manipulate audiences. In one of his earliest comments on film, Huxley wrote in 1916 that Birth of a Nation
is said to mark quite a new epoch in cinematographic art. In time, no doubt, we shall have cinemas being bought up by the political parties for propagandist work, in which they will soon excel even the newspapers. The effect of them in China is said to be prodigious, while Rumania is described as a Cinematocracy. (Letters, 94–95)
Huxley only briefly remarks upon the art of De Mille’s racially inflammatory epic; he is more interested in the propagandistic implications of cinema than its aesthetic possibilities. Similarly, shortly after the publication of Brave New World, in a 1935 Daily Express article, Huxley imagines “the retrospective gaze” of a future journalist to make a series of predictions about how life would look in 1960. He devotes considerable space to prophecies about the cinema. “As for the talkies … they took to color in the early forties and became stereoscopic about nine years later” (Essays, 3:423). He recalls that actors began “having themselves fitted with synthetic voices” and that politicians followed suit:
Ministries of Propaganda found that it was possible to supply dictators, monarchs, and even democratic Prime Ministers with a brand of synthetic eloquence incomparably more moving than that of the greatest orators of previous epochs. (3:424)
Huxley was not far off with his aesthetic predictions, but his political predictions are fanciful. As in Brave New World, there is a gap between his sense of what is pleasurable—and his own ability to simulate that sensation, textually—and his understanding of the extent to which such entertainment could be harnessed for a political or pedagogical purpose. The way Huxley depicts pleasure and the way he wants the reader to judge it are not exactly congruent in Brave New World, suggesting that it is not as easy to program as Huxley imagined. This is underscored by the irony that despite Huxley’s critique of the repressive, censorious, and totalitarian culture of Brave New World, schools still regularly ban the novel, in part because of its salacious content.65 As with Lawrence’s work, the pleasure of the text takes on a life of its own once real readers step into the picture. No matter how directly an author attempts to steer them, readers will always have the freedom to react however they want—within the limits of their social conditioning, Huxley might add. The fact that there is room for characters in Brave New World to reject compulsory amusement indicates that pleasure, like the cinema, can be repressive or potentially revolutionary.
Here the distinction between a dystopia and a negative utopia is significant. George Orwell’s 1984, for example, imagines a culture in which pleasure is withheld; in Brave New World, pleasure is imposed. Since Orwell writes about mass culture from an external perspective, the reader views it as invasive, exploitative, and dispiriting. Orwell does not generally show the reader pleasurable effects of the mass culture he denounces. Huxley’s “negative utopia” takes more representational risks by beckoning its reader to imagine the allure of what is also ultimately a repressive mechanism of social control.
Huxley himself characterized John’s assimilation into the Brave New World as an “insane life in a Utopia” (viii), indicating its inherent contradictions. Jameson’s suggestion that dystopic literature necessarily anticipates utopianism (“the post-catastrophe situation in reality constitutes the preparation for the emergence of Utopia itself”66) is one way of understanding the tensions in Huxley’s representation of mass pleasures. They must be appealing enough to register with the reader as such, but they must also justify John’s despair and suicide. Embedded in Huxley’s simultaneously attractive and repellent stimulants like the feelies, soma, and free and easy sex is the hope for a more perfect pleasure.
HUXLEY AND HOLLYWOOD
The problem of representing negated pleasure is one that Huxley did not completely solve, and as time went by, he moved in a new direction. In a development not anticipated by his early writings on film, in 1938—less than ten years after his screed about The Jazz Singer—Huxley moved to Hollywood, the home of “standardized amusement” and “Elinor Glyn Ltd.,” and spent the rest of his life there. Perhaps this was no more ironic than the fact that Huxley, who was nearly blind, had such strong opinions about films he could hardly see. His friendships with figures such as Chaplin and Anita Loos allowed him access to the inner circles of Hollywood. Along with other expatriates such as Evelyn Waugh, Huxley worked as a scriptwriter for the major studios. Most of the projects with which he was involved were adaptations of literary classics—Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Jane Eyre (1944)—or similarly “highbrow” projects such as Madame Curie (1943). These were commercially successful examples of entertainment combining “old and “new” pleasures, a mode that had seemed elusive to Huxley in the twenties. While he continued to write about cinema satirically in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) and Ape and Essence (1948; it is presented in the form of a failed film script and includes a scene of baboons watching the cinema, bringing back the feelies’ themes of cultural regression and bestiality),67 Huxley’s participation in a developing industry that produced films such as Citizen Kane may have changed his perception of film’s possibilities.68
Huxley made two attempts to adapt Brave New World to visual forms. In a 1945 letter to Loos, he proposed a film that would “revolve around the person of a very clever but physically unattractive scientist, desperately trying to make a gorgeous blonde, who is repelled by his pimples but fascinated by the intelligence of his conversation” (Letters, 535). This figure, who seems to be a stand-in for Lenina (or perhaps the Beta blonde of Three Weeks in a Helicopter), sounds suspiciously like Loos’s most famous heroine, Lorelei Lee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “In the end,” Huxley continues, the scientist “makes violent passes at the blonde, gets his face slapped and is left disconsolate among the white mice and the rabbit ova—an emblem of personal frustration who is yet the most revolutionary and subversive force in the modern world” (Letters, 535). The drama no longer centers on one noble man’s resistance to pleasure but rather his inability to attain it.69
More surprising is Huxley’s subsequent attempt, in 1956, to adapt Brave New World to perhaps the least likely genre. He writes in several letters that he is at work on
a musical comedy version of Brave New World—for everyone tells me that science fiction can never succeed on the stage as a straight play, but that it will be accepted when the medium ceases to be realistic and makes use of music and lyrics. (Letters, 808)
As in his comment that “what the cinema can do better than literature is to be fantastic,” here Huxley suggests that science fiction has to be less realistic—and more fantastic, as well as more genre-crossing—in order to be commercially viable. The idea of Brave New World as a musical is a comedic prospect, which was surely part of the point. The exchange between film and literature had become more fluid in the forties and fifties, and the same period was the golden age of Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), West Side Story (1957), and Loos’s own Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949). Jerome Meckier speculates that “Perhaps Huxley conceived of musical comedy—the musical comedy of ideas—as the ideal form for bridging the ever-widening gap between high seriousness and popular entertainment.”70 The gap, in fact, was diminishing. Postwar culture did not insist on the schism between “fun” and pleasure in the way that the modernist period had, as I will show in chapter 6.
Huxley’s proposed musical adaptation of Brave New World came shortly after MGM’s musical comedy Singin’ in the Rain (1952), with its humorous treatment of the talkies revolution. Cinematic musical productions, shaped around song and dance numbers, turned back, in some senses, toward the music hall, with its combination of different kinds of entertainment. This comes across strongly in Huxley’s three-act musical of Brave New World, which includes nine whimsical songs and several equally odd dances, which include a kinetic “Death Conditioning” ballet and a soft-shoe shuffle involving workers in the hatchery singing “Everybody’s Happy Now.” At another point, Huxley revisits precisely the scene that so horrified him in The Jazz Singer—a scene straight from the music hall—and replays it as pure absurdity. A character “falls on one knee, in the attitude of Al Jolson,” and sings, not “Mammy” but “Bottle of Mine,” an ode to the bottle from which he was “decanted.”71 The sequence is designed to elicit laughs, in contrast to the disgust and shame that Huxley claimed to have felt watching Al Jolson sing “Mammy” in The Jazz Singer. The scene recasts melodrama as satire, aiming to elicit a knowing chuckle from the audience rather than cloying sentiment.
As theater became more like film, film became, once again, more like the stage, suggesting that the strict boundaries for artistic forms that Huxley advocated earlier as a means of keeping the talkies at bay had crumbled by the mid-fifties. Huxley gave his script to several readers, including Chaplin and Leonard Bernstein, but he never managed to find someone to write the score, and the musical was never produced. While it is a weak derivative of the original, the musical Brave New World does show Huxley reconfiguring some of the problems that preoccupied him in the novel. Throughout, pleasure is played as comic “fun” and, at points, Huxley seems to be parodying his own work. In act 1, Joe, a Beta minus, steals and gobbles up some of Lenina’s soma and makes a pass at her: “Listen, Baby. Let’s you and I go to the feelies tonight. I hear there’s a wonderful show at the Piccadilly Palace.” She turns him down “with dignity”: “Nothing doing. I think your behaviour is lousy and unethical.” Joe persists: “Boy meets pneumatic girl on a foam rubber mattress with a chinchilla slip cover. You can feel that fur all over you—every single hair of it. They say it’s terrific” (41). Riffing again on Glyn’s tiger skin, Huxley makes the feelies tawdrier, but they remain more of a dirty joke than the sign of cultural decline that they are in the novel. Significantly, Huxley chose not to stage the feelies, but he does represent the newer visual technology, television, and it plays a role similar to that in Orwell’s 1984, as mass media have encroached even further into the lives of citizens, out of the feely palace and into the private home.
Another striking change is the character of Lenina, who is less sexually aggressive and more thoughtful than in the novel: she joins John in reading The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and she is not the free lover she was in 1932. In the conclusion of the musical, Huxley takes a “third alternative” (ix) that he mentions in his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, as Lenina and John depart to join a community of like-minded exiles in Tahiti. In Lenina’s transformation, Huxley has traded in Othello for The Tempest and My Fair Lady. The conflict of sympathy with the puritanical “Savage” is resolved in the musical; John does not martyr himself but rather wins the girl. At the end of the musical, as the couple embraces, a huge television screen is superimposed on the stage and the audience watches two rival factions in Tahiti attack each other. This news broadcast is then interrupted by a commercial selling “Voluptua Hand Cream” (“Laboratory tests by famous scientists have proved that the effect of ethyl acetic aldehyde on anthropoid apes is little short of miraculous” ([103]). The final image in the musical is a Jumbo Economy Jar of synthetic pleasure (“Voluptua”) poised to distract citizens from political strife. Despite abandoning the nihilistic ending of the novel (John’s suicidal rage against hedonism) and despite Huxley’s attempt to sell or “sell out” his novel as a musical, this conclusion reiterates the warning of Huxley’s other work about the dangers of pleasure, but in a decidedly less alarming tone.
Huxley conceptualizes pleasure as a function of manipulation, whether by the state, by Hollywood studios, or by an author’s machinations. In doing so, he offers a reflection on the modernist proposition that people’s pleasures could be upgraded through hard work. Alongside his strong statements against contemporary, accessible, and somatic pleasure—which takes people away from political awareness—Huxley’s fictions also demonstrate that the choice between “old” or “new” pleasure, between the false consciousness of the feelies or the noble struggle of Shakespeare, is itself false. Brave New World proves that the alert and politically aware reader can appreciate—even have fun with—prurient pursuits such as the feelies at the same time that she appreciates a satiric attack on them. Our capacity for pleasure can and does sustain these contradictions, suggesting that even in the completely engineered state of Brave New World, pleasure may elude the system. This hope would become the basis of many utopian dreams later in the century, when Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and others would look to pleasure to break the grip of capitalism.
