Feelies In Brave New World

In the article, “Huxley’s Feelies: The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World”, Laura Frost compares Aldous Huxley’s experiences with “talkies” and his use of “feelies” in his novel, Brave New World. Huxley was first introduced to moving pictures, that included sound, with The Jazz Singer in 1927, and did not enjoy them (Frost 443). Frost looks at this and many experiences Huxley had with cinema. Frost analyzes Huxley’s complex relationship with cinema to show the multi-faceted effects of cinema on the real-world and Huxley’s literary works. Huxley is known for deploring talking movies, known as “talkies,” and often condemns them as part of an increasingly industrialized society. But, Frost points out that Huxley recognized “cinema’s potential

They are motion pictures, often erotic, that utilize all of an audience’s senses to provide them with pleasure (Frost 447). “Feelies” are the mass production of pleasure. Huxley felt that changes in the ways we achieve pleasure show the degeneration of our culture, “in place of old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions — distractions which demand from pleasure seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort” (qtd. in Frost 446). Industrialization and mass production, both of which are looked down upon by Huxley, are now applied to pleasure and leisure. Frost notes that Three Weeks in a Helicopter, the cookie-cutter “feelie” shown during Brave New World, involves many complex allusions and illustrates Huxley’s views (449). One of the allusions is the ironic setting. It is set in Alhambra, a location in Britain that evolved overtime to “accommodate the evolution of popular pleasure” (Frost 450) and embodies the cultural degeneration Huxley found in pop culture. Three Weeks in a Helicopter embodies the idiotic pop culture in a location where Huxley’s “real culture” would have once occurred (Frost 450). Despite Huxley’s disgust with cinema, Frost argues that Huxley’s use of cinema, in “feelies” and training films, “provide both a cautionary tale and a vision of cinema’s social