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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2006 by Laura Frost

Huxley and Hollywood

In a development not anticipated by his early writings on film, in 1938 Huxley moved to Hollywood, the home of "standardized amusement" and "Elinor Glyn Ltd.," and spent the rest of his life there. His friendships with figures such as Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos allowed him access to the inner circles of Hollywood. Along with other expatriates including 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 combination 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), his participation in a developing industry that produced films such as Citizen Kane changed his perception of film's possibilities. (28)

Huxley made two attempts to adapt Brave New World to visual forms. In a 1945 letter to Loos, he proposes 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" (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 Lei of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). "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. "The project never got off the ground because RKO owned the dramatic rights to the novel and would not allow it to be produced (Clark 62).

More startling 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)

The exchange between film and literature became more fluid in the forties and fifties, the golden age of Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), Candide (1956), 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" (106). Huxley's musical adaptation of Brave New World came shortly after MGM's Singin' in the Rain (1952), with its comic treatment of the talkies. With the turn to the musical, shaped around song and dance numbers, film was, in some senses, turning back toward its roots in the music hall. This comes across strongly in Huxley's three-act musical version of Brave New World, which contains nine bizarre songs and several equally odd dances, including 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" (44). As theater becomes more like film, film becomes, 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.