Fahrenheit 451: Did the adaptation work with book changes?

Building on Clarisse’s character

One of the good points of the movie was the change with Clarisse. In the book, she doesn’t last long. In the books, she’s initially only there as a way to give Montag someone to talk to; someone to help him feel connected to a person. That’s the role she initially plays in the movie but then goes further. Rather than just suddenly disappearing, she becomes Montag’s love interest–because, what’s a movie without a love interest, right?

During the movie, Clarisse is also there to expose Montag to the world of books. It turns out in the novel that he already has a stash of books, but for the movie seeing Montag from the start is important. We need to see him as the man his commander, Beatty, wants him to be; the man he’s supposed to be in the system. It’s important to see the development of who he becomes play out on screen from start to finish and that’s Clarisse’s part.

This part is something that works better. It felt odd that we were meeting Montag in the middle of his journey of discovering books and the information they held. This did, admittedly, make it harder to connect with him at first. A movie can’t get away with doing that.

Complete change to characters

Clarisse wasn’t the only character to change. Really, the only character that felt like he stayed the same was Beatty. Because of so many other changes, Clarisse worked well.

Montag in the book is an unhappily married man to a woman who has tried to kill herself in the opening of the book. We later learn that she is the one responsible for turning Montag into the authorities when she finds out he has stashed books away. It’s hard to find a good quality to this woman. While you hope in the book that she’s going to change and show her support for her husband, it’s clear that isn’t possible; it’s just not who she is.

Meanwhile, Montag is alienated from friends. He just doesn’t have any at all, even though there are some within the books. The only people we see him closely interacting with are Beatty and Clarisse. It’s hard to see any good qualities in him until he picks up that first book, which isn’t the first book in the novel. While he had other material in his air conditioning unit, there weren’t any books. By his world being opened up, we lose that secrecy from him that you get a sense of in the start of the novel.

And then we can’t ignore the way the world is explained to us. For the most part, this is managed well. It’s through the social media postings, a trip to a school, and the capture of Eels early on. What is annoying is the explanation in the library. This is something from the books and it works when reading. However, in the movie, it was more of a tell rather than a show.

However, there was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in the explanation in the woman’s home–the woman who ends up burning herself. While talking about “The Tales of Huckleberry Finn,” Beatty says “nigger” in passing. Many of us flinched when watching the movie, but not Montag. The word means nothing to Montag, which is something that Beatty explains why. The focus is on Montag and the way he doesn’t even show a twitch in the eye that the word means anything.