Feel Good, Inc.

Hm, first off: All my rec letters but Borkowski's have been completed. Hooray, I get to go to college! So that's cool. And, in an effort to bring home the fact that Oscar Wilde > James Joyce to Marky Mark, I brought in the action figure. He was mightily impressed and commending me on its awesome when Robby D came in and Marky Mark insisted I show it to him: Verily, I say they were both quite impressed. Robby D was cracking up.


Robby D: "That's so dorky, you're actually cool!"

Marky Mark: "In our eyes you're really cool--like up here. In your peers' eyes, however..."


Robby D was like, "Maybe I'll put it in your recommendation letter!" But fortunately, he didn't. Haha.


Well, then: otherwise my amusing x-block (Marky Mark's class was fairly hilarious too) I am finally getting off my butt (or actually, down on it) to write up a bit on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

It's the future--a future not nearly as oppressive as Anthem, but still fairly oppressive and behind. Society technology-wise is impressive (baby-incubating machines!) but people are very infantile. Everyone 'worships' (for it is claimed they are atheists, but--) Henry T Ford, the creator of mass production. Is creator right? Well, it's as close as you can get, I guess. LSD ('soma') and sex are the basic activities of everyone, whenever they want. Oh, and people are split into castes by intelligence and stature which is tweaked with while babies are still in their incubating machine things.

Ah, and people are controlled through classic conditioning and hypnopaedia. Hypnopaedia is learning through what you hear in your sleep*, kind of like that episode of Dexter's Lab where he tries to study during his sleep by playing the French record and ends up just learning 'omele du fromage' instead. Classic conditioning is... well, think of it as how you'd train a dog: when your dog goes outside, you praise him and maybe give him a treat. When he has an accident in the house, you'd yell at him. Eventually he learns to only go outside because he likes being praised and prefers it to being yelled at. I bring this up because we get an example of this early on with a set of Delta babies. They're shown flowers. Naturally, the babies are attracted to the beauty and begin crawling to the flowers. Babies get too close: Sirens ring, an electrical current threaded throughout the floor electrocutes them all. This is repeated until the Delta babies learn to hate and fear the beauty. Why? Because if they take vacations to enjoy the beauty, they aren't consuming. The whole society is based around production and consumption with hardly another point but that continual cycle, all in honor of Henry T. (I wonder if he was still alive when this book was first published? Wonder how he felt about it, if he was...)

Ah, yes, and Henry T has also been given the credit for everything. Well, kind of: He is accredited with first saying "History is bunk" (certainly not the case!) and with Freud's works. These are the only two cases I can spot, but I'm going to assume he basically receives credit for anything pre-Brave New World society. Jeez, Henry T!

Bernard is an annoying coward, for the record. He acts as though he hates society--but he doesn't fit in because although he is an Alpha Plus, his stature is too short and likes doing things alone, and has a million little things that make him difficult to fit in with everyone else. So he is upset and agitated, especially with the rumors flying about that the reasons why he has all these undesirable traits is that there was "alcohol in the blood-surrogate." But, as soon as he has John and everyone loves him, oh my gosh society is awesome I'll talk to you later I've become an overnight womanizer. And ergh... he just annoys me. Though Bernard is an awesome name, and I did name my Beanie Baby hedgehog that. But that is besides the point.

"'I'd rather be myself,' he said. 'Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.'" Good job being a hypocrite, Bernard! High five? Oh, and to be fair, Tyler's theory on this holds water as well. He felt left out in society and unaccepted so he was grumpy and upset. Thus, when John came and everyone loved him, he decided society wasn't all that bad--because he was happy. He was in a good mood. So everything was better. Which may be repeating what I typed above, but seeing as I actually argued with someone about it as a class assignment instead of pretending Dante can hold a conversation and has read the book made me feel the need to bring it up.

"'Do you see that damned spot?'" I love John for this. He's referring to blood, of course, but even more, he's referring to Shakespeare's play Macbeth, which happens to be my favorite play of Shakespeare's.

"'For instance,' she hoarsely whispered, 'take the way they have one another here. Mad, I tell you, absolutely mad. Everybody belongs to everyone else--don't they? Don't they?' she insisted, tugging at Lenina's sleeve." This is scarier. Like I may or may not have said earlier, there isn't really such a thing as marriage or a monogamous (is that the word?) relationship. Life after work is one continuous orgy. The lady saying this, Linda, is John's mother--forced to leave the 'civilized' society because she became pregnant. She was forced to move to an Indian reservation, and after all these years, upon Lenina and Bernard's arrival is ecstatic to see people from the old world. Of course, she feels the need to speak in length that she shares Lenina's disgust about the people, and how strange their customs are, and all that. But, she is so entrapped by the 'civilized' society's view the Indians' idea of marriage and monogamy scares her. She is scared to care for just one person, and to love. To love! To feel something more than lust for a person, beyond that. Good God. Can you imagine? I believe that's the most sinister part of Brave New World, over the soma and the discourage of knowledge and encouraging orgies and all that. To fear something like love and real, true affection.

Linda's death is also frightful. The people in Brave New World's society have been desensitized against death. They are taken to see the dead and dying hospitals and then given chocolate cream or eclairs, so eventually they'll just associate the death with the treats... I think they were given soma too. Basically government-issued LSD. So when John discovers Linda dead and makes a fuss, the nurses all become quite irritated: "As though death were something terrible, as though anyone mattered as much as all that!" Basically saying corpses aren't worth mourning for.

Ooh, my favorite chapter is chapter sixteen. Following Linda's death, there's a whole scuffle, involving Bernard and Helmholtz. John, Helmholtz and Bernard are dragged off to the Controller. This man is an Alpha Plus of extreme intelligence--in fact, he is on the same level as John. He understands where John is coming from. He understands what John wants. So why doesn't he agree and reform society? As uncomfortable as his truths are--"'Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.'" Stability and progress and so on... beauty clouds the views. Truth makes it difficult for people to focus on and stick to a certain goal. Sure, you may not have Shakespeare or God (though this argument confused me, Henry T Ford's presence made it feel very much like they were worshiping him) but you no longer have social instability. No one is never in danger. "Everybody's happy nowadays", so says the hypnopaedic slogan. This may sound sick, but, it doesn't sound too bad. Who doesn't want safety? Even the Controller, although he is saddened and lonely because no one else can share his knowledge and whatnot, is smart enough to know that these means really are necessary. And why someone who was such an obvious dissenter in his early years would be chosen for such a position of power... I'm thinking it's like how men in the IRS are ex-tax cheaters themselves. Fraud...ers. I... I'm trying! Anyway, I was basically the only person in the class who rather pitied the Controller. I felt bad for him, being all alone at the top like that.

A quick note on Helmholtz: He's one of my favorite characters in any book. He has the feeling society isn't quite right, but he isn't suddenly throwing away all his old values and norms from that society. He doesn't suddenly understand and accept new beliefs like something so simple as drinking water. John reads Shakespeare to him and says something about mothers--and Helmholtz cracks up. Regardless of his feelings of discontent, he still can't suddenly reject everything he was raised upon, like every character in everything else seems to quite easily. High five, HH.

"'Christianity without tears--that's what soma is.' 'But the tears are necessary.'" I'm quite fond of chapter seventeen, too. Both of them are tied for number one.

"'Isn't there something in living dangerously?'" My personal belief is if you haven't come close to dying, done something stupid while knowing you could easily be dragged to the bottom of the sea or hitting a tree (I decided to see if it really was impossible to fall down a mountain today. I was doing great till I landed on a patch of wet leaves.) or what not you haven't really gotten the full palate because you haven't had that exhilaration. Not only the fear, but the ecstasy afterwards when you realize you're not dead after all. Too make up for the lack of this in the lives of the people in Ford's State (So much less obnoxious to type than Brave New World every time! Do they actually ever refer to it as Ford's State in the book?) people are injected with VPS, which basically floods the system with adrenaline. It makes the body react the way it would react to fear or rage, but without actually feeling it and letting it hold you. "'...Without any of the inconveniences,'" as the Controller. John, fed up, retorts: "'But I like the inconveniences.' 'We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.' 'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'"

Unfortunately, being the idiot I am, I seem to have left my Contemporary Lit folder in my locker, so you'll have to wait until probably Wednesday to get the hypnopaedic list. Normally I wouldn't care so much, but I do want to include them. I'd wait, but you guys have been waiting for, on average, a thousand years.


Oh, and I watched Eyes Wide Shut last Friday. It is, I believe, Kubrick's final film. Uh. You know how I often talk about how much I like Kubrick? Well. And as for Kidman... oh, I was so excited after seeing The Others. She was so terrible in this movie. The movie was terrible. But she was worse! This movie... Kubrick had to have been high as a kite. A Clockwork Orange (also Kubrick) was a freaky movie; it's supposed to be. This weirded me out more. No lie. There's a scene where Tom Cruise goes into a weird orgy underground cult thing. What? Then they're like, "You're an outsider, Tom Cruise..." Then a girl dies, Cruise thinks it was murder on the cult's part, it was just an OD, then he reconciles with his wife. No, I didn't get it either. The only things I have been able to come it with were: The sex cult was like fight club, only with sex instead of fighting. The second is my theory of what the movie was supposed to be about. Which would be: always in movies, an event isn't just an event. It always leads to some vendetta or scheme or what have you. What I think Kubrick was trying to do, or what I'm pretending he was trying to do was say, what if it was just an isolated event. Oh. Cool idea in theory, but there's a reason why no one else has touched it.

Aside from that, it was kind of really shoddy. I guess Kubrick was probably pushing 70 or so, so we should cut him some slack... but grr. It was so--compared to his other works--KUBRICK! Man. It was a bad movie from start to finish. Its saving grace was the fact that Tom Cruise looked gorgeous in it. And even then, I was paying a lot more attention to the puzzle I had on the ground in front of me. With a cat on it. Maybe that was foreshadowing to the fact that I'm going to end up as a crazy cat lady. Aw...


The reason why this took so long to post is I've been incredibly busy. Two essays and a project, and I was in Virginia for the long weekend. How long did it take? Well, today's the opening day of Where the Wild Things Are.

EDIT: Normally I would make you connect the title with the post if there's a connection worth having, but I think the Feel Good, Inc music video lends itself well to Brave New World. It's by the Gorillaz.