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We meet Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), a pleasant looking, soft spoken member of the Firemen. Just like in our world, Firemen slide down a pole when there’s an alarm and jump on a big red truck. It has a siren, flashing lights, and as they tear across the countryside, children point and gawk in wonder. You don’t notice until the fire truck pulls up to a residence that there are no water tanks on board. Nope. These Firemen do not put out fires. They’re looking for books, which are contraband. When they find books, they burn them.

See? Firemen!

The Firemen have a network of Fire Boxes all around town. If you know someone who has books, you can drop the dime on them using a Fire Box. A bright red truck will pull up to this person’s house, where Montag and his friends will ransack the place and burn all the books they find right on their front lawn. And if the occupants of the house weren’t smart enough to be a hundred miles away, the police arrive to carry them away, never to be seen again.

I’ve never had to live under a totalitarian regime, so I’ve only ever seen this kind of thing in documentaries. But Truffaut goes to great lengths to burn actual copies of actual books, the majority of them classics. The camera lingers on them as they crackle and pop, the words readable and in some cases recognizable. At first it seems gratuitous, like Fascist porn or something. But the imagery is stark – the written word means something, and when you stop and consider the pre-internet world these people live in, you realize that you are watching a genocide of knowledge.

Stuff like this is why Truffaut is kind of a big deal.

You know what else is a big deal? Flame throwers! Montag is pretty good with one, and he goes about his job, burning the sum of all human knowledge, wearing the placid expression of an obedient drone. The man loves his work, and doesn’t even seem to mind when his micromanaging Captain (Cyril Cusack) speaks to him in the third person and constantly poses petty sociological conundrums designed to keep him on his toes. Montag is a good apple, next in line for a promotion at the Firehouse.

Sounds great, right? Just imagine if all you had to do was get up in the morning, put a blank, dopey expression on your face, spend all day burning books with a flame thrower, and then go home? What could be better or more fulfilling? Well, Montag is not a happy man, as it turns out. He’s a thoughtful type – a deep thinker. And this attracts the attention of a fellow traveler one day, as he heads home on the train. Her name is Clarisse (Julie Christie), and she’s just the perkiest goddamn person who has ever walked the face of the earth.

She explains that she’s a schoolteacher and is having trouble at work. She’s too much of a free thinker, which has attracted the wrong kind of attention. She asks Montag about his job, and whether he ever reads any of the books he burns. Montag views this as unthinkable, oblivious to the seed that’s been planted in his head. This is important, because waiting for him at home is his lazy, vapid wife (also played by Julie Christie) Linda. She cooks, and cleans, and never argues. The rest of the time she sits in front of the television, drinking State distilled liquor, taking State rationed tranquilizers, and watching what passes for entertainment in a society where you’re not allowed to write anything down.

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