Huxley's feelies: the cinema of sensation in Brave New World

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2006 by Laura Frost

While Huxley briefly remarks on the art of De Mille's racially inflammatory epic, he is far more interested in the propagandistic implications of cinema than its aesthetic possibilities.

One way Huxley's concern about the possible sociopolitical function of the talkies emerges in Brave New World is as a sly joke. The sleep-teaching that impresses the values of Our Ford is said to have been discovered by Reuben Rabinovitch, "the child of Polish-speaking parents" (23), who was put to bed while the radio was left on and awoke "repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious old writer ... George Bernard Shaw, who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own genius" (24). Shaw's reputation as a social reformer and didact made him a natural target for Huxley, and the details of the scene are drawn from a web of associations linking Shaw to cinema history. After the coming of sound, Shaw stood by his earlier statement about the importance of film; he was garrulous on the subject of the talkies, as for instance in his 1930 article "GBS--'Talkie Prophet'" (70-71). In 1936 he wrote, "The silent film was no use to me.... When movies became talkies my turn came" (qtd. in Dukore xviii). Huxley seems to have perceived Shaw, the most famous living British playwright, taking up the mantle of "Talkie Prophet" as an alarming sign, and Reuben Rabinovitch's subliminal Shavian lesson is connected to the talkies through The Jazz Singer, whose hero is called Jakie Rabinowitz. Arguably the most famous mouthpiece of the talkies, he delivers the first recorded, nonsung words of the film: "Wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" Huxley uses this Rabinowitz/Rabinovitch character to draw the familiar analogy between the talkies and hypnosis. Casting Shaw in the role of droning hypnotist, Huxley knocks GBS from what Huxley perceived as a smug pedestal of self-regard and also insinuates that talkies' effects could be as insidious as radio, which, with print media, was the main vehicle of propaganda at this time. The talkies could surpass both newspapers and radio by mobilizing words and images, and the feelies portend an even more intrusive, manipulative future for film.

Shortly after the publication of Brave New World, in a 1935 Daily Express article, Huxley made 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 become stereoscopic about nine years later" (Essays 3: 424). He forecasts 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)

Here, as with the feelies, Huxley builds on the commonplace association of the talkies with sensual experience to imagine cinema as a bodily apparatus that is also inevitably a political instrument. While many of his contemporaries found the talkies excessive or confusing, Huxley expands on those reactions to explore the social and political implications of sound film. If the feelies suggest that Huxley was one of the great naysayers about cinematic development, they also suggest that few took the talkies more seriously.