It is a scene so highly charged and sympathetically played that you only wish the rest of the show had lived up to it. “We’re savages,” gasps Lenina, as it dawns on the two what they actually want. “In Huxley’s book, characters were given a hard choice between freedom and happiness”
It is while they settle into their hotel room at the park that Lenina and Bernard suddenly realise they want to be alone together – a shockingly dirty idea in a world that has outlawed monogamy and marriage – and that “it could be our wedding night”. Labelled a “savage” for living outside the walls of the World State, he encounters the Alpha Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd) and Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), his Beta pal.īernard and Lenina are vacationing in Savage Lands, a theme park modelled a little too closely on Westworld in which people act out the supposedly sinful values of the old order for the entertainment of tourists. In the series, Alden Ehrenreich – best known for taking up the mantle of Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars story – plays John. Huxley’s dystopia has now made it to the small screen. In creating a society without want, the Alphas have made a world without hope. Yearn to be more than you already are, and you won’t get very far. The cracks only show if you aspire to better things. There is no jealousy here, no rage, no sadness. In fact, no distinct human emotion has escaped this world’s smiley-faced onslaught of “soma” (a recreational drug), consumerism and pornography. The family – that eternal thorn in the side of totalitarian states – has been discarded, and with it all intimacy and affection. Want is a thing of the past and abstinence isn’t an option.
Consumption is pleasurable, addictive and a duty. In 1984, everyone is expected to obey the system in Brave New World, everyone has too much at stake in the system to want to break it.
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