Revisiting Huxley’s Dystopic Vision of Future Cinema, The Feelies: Immersive Experiences through Contemporary Multisensory Media

Manfred Milz

doi:10.25038/am.v0i20.325

Abstract

Aldous Huxley’s concern with media, and in particular with cinema, is one of the most conspicuous components of his work as a social critic and as a novelist. Evaluating its potential societal functions, as an artistic genre, a didactic cultural tool for documentaries or as a mass entertainment venue, determined his critical relationship towards the medium. Due to his impaired eyesight, Huxley’s attention to perception, intertwined with advancing cinema-technologies, was not restricted to the visual, but extended to all of the human senses, as he demonstrated in the Feelies of his novel Brave New World (1932). Primarily with regard to mechanomorphic reflexes of human conditioning, this cinematic concept is interpreted by drawing from articles and essays of evolutionary, psychological, political, and aesthetic perspectives that Huxley developed on a parallel writing track in popular print media during the 1920s/30s. In confronting modes of multisensory immersion around 1900 with some of the 20th/21st centuries, this contribution reevaluates Huxley’s vision of future cinema. Article received: June 10, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

Highlights

Evaluating its potential societal functions, as an artistic genre, a didactic cultural tool for documentaries or as a mass entertainment venue, determined his critical relationship towards the medium. Due to his impaired eyesight, Huxley’s attention to perception, intertwined with advancing cinema-technologies, was not restricted to the visual, but extended to all of the human senses, as he demonstrated in the Feelies of his novel Brave New World (1932)
Throughout the 1920s, Aldous Huxley contributed with essays and articles in popular magazines, journals and newspapers essentially to the public discourse on mass leisure as “an asset and a problem”,1 in concurring with the competing findings of contemporary social theoreticians who categorized leisure not merely as a “problem” or “challenge”, but rather as a “threat” that triggered “fear”
Mass production and mass leisure were initially characterized by monotony and boredom

Summary

Mechanomorphism in work and leisure

Throughout the 1920s, Aldous Huxley contributed with essays and articles in popular magazines, journals and newspapers essentially to the public discourse on mass leisure as “an asset and a problem”,1 in concurring with the competing findings of contemporary social theoreticians who categorized leisure not merely as a “problem” or “challenge”, but rather as a “threat” that triggered “fear”.2 Some years prior to. In 1935, he predicted television-sets a common standard in hotel-rooms, a refinement in stereoscopy, color-applications, synthetic voices and synthetic sounds (implying the production of sound-track compositions).33 Following his previous findings regarding media technology, Huxley extends in his novel the recent introduction of synchronized sound in the movie industry to the other senses, a transformative innovation that he indicates – in reference to “the Wurlitzer”, a theatre organ used to create sound for silent movies – by a “Super-Vox Wurlitzeriana rendering of ‘Hug me, till you drug me, honey’.”34 The properties and effects of the elaborate cinema-technology are best summarized in the advertisement of the movie Three Weeks in a Helicopter, whose pornographic plot is subordinated to an engulfing sensation: “AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY, WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT.” The overture played by the scent-organ at the beginning of the film has been designed to put the audience, through a delicately balanced composition of sounds, smells, and flavors, into an entranced stage:. In Brave New World, the relationship between instinct and consciousness that conventionally marks the distinction between animal kingdom and urban culture, is reversed: John, labeled as “The Savage” from the reservation, continues to read and quote Shakespeare and tries to sustain his conscious self, while Lenina exclusively lives her physical-instinctive self – in direct response to their shared exposure to cinematic excesses. Lenina incorporates physiologically what Huxley defines as “Fordism” by translating it into “mechanomorphism” and what Seltzer characterizes as “the radical and intimate coupling of bodies and machines:” an act in which the cinema-screen functions as a prosthetic device, as indicated by Frost in her discussion of the Feelies, by referencing Buck-Morss.

Simulation rides in multisensory environments

Conclusion