The Invention of Brave New World

The other day I was watching the movie, The Invention of Lying, and it was about some make-believe, utopian society that was exactly like ours, only everyone told the truth. Everyone was blunt about absolutely everything and no one lied, with the exception of one man by the name of Mark. He found a way to bend the truth, so he became the only person in the world who could tell lies, and everyone believed him. This movie was very similar to Brave New World, I thought, not just because Mark is practically the same name as Marx, but because everyone in the movie was just so naive of what was actually going on, just like the characters in the novel.

In the film, women only chose to mate with a man if his physical features and his economical status were worthy enough to mate with. They were more concerned with what their lifestyles would be and what their children would turn out to look like, as opposed to just being happy with the one you love, cliche sort of thing. This is just the case in Brave New World. In the beginning of the novel, Lenina was reluctant to go out with Marx because of how he looked, the way he acted, and his poor reputation. In both scenarios, the women acted this way because they were nurtured to have that shallow train-of-thought. Even nowadays, people are attracted to someone based on their looks and status, which is another fact that proves Huxley's future is not at all far from our present.

The more I watched the movie, the more I noticed how very similar it was to the book; and the more I read the book, the more I realized how very similar it was to our lives.