But-something I never could have imagined at seventeen-even a 4K screenful of amorous naked bodies in their prime can become fatiguing. Luckily for the series writers, just enough explicit sex weaves throughout the storyline to keep viewers from thinking too deeply about anything. But as Mustapha Mond, one of the state’s World Controllers, says in the novel, they’re nonetheless “nice, tame, animals.” They’re managed by shrewd and vigilant therapists, not Morlocks. In effect, the people of Huxley’s World State are Eloi. Resentments and discomfort are abolished through genetic manipulation, social conditioning, drugs, free sex, erasure of the past, and an ecstasy of consumer appetites teased and fulfilled. Huxley envisioned a World State made permanent by compulsory happiness. A very un-Huxleyan feminist-led revolt in the primitive Savage Lands is cheesy and implausible. And the story goes off the rails in the first episodes. But in the Peacock version, the role is weak and confused. John the Savage, played by Alden Ehrenreich, is a naïve but compelling character in the Huxley novel. It also has a fine cast: Harry Lloyd (as Bernard Marx), Jessica Brown Findlay (Lenina Crowne), Demi Moore (Linda), and Nina Sosanya (a female version of the novel’s Mustapha Mond). The good news is that the latest attempt, by NBCUniversal’s new Peacock channel, has a vastly better production quality. Previous TV productions, in 19, have been laughably bad. Its appeal is mainly cerebral: the despair of a human being who suddenly finds himself in a society of immense comfort but without sin, freedom, real danger, poetry, love, or God. Brave New World lends itself poorly to the screen. I thought of the Eloi recently as I watched Brave New World, the latest effort to bring the 1932 Aldous Huxley novel to television. As the time traveler discovers, the Morlocks raise and tend the infantilized Eloi as cattle. At night, the Morlocks, the formerly human monsters who run the machines that run the paradise, emerge from their tunnels underground. He finds a beautiful world filled with beautiful young people, the Eloi, whose main tasks seem to be eating, playing, and having lots of carefree sex.
A man in Victorian London invents a vehicle that carries him into the distant future. One of the best books I read in my teen years was his novel The Time Machine. Wells was a tiresome socialist, but an interesting futurist.
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