The visionary British writer Aldous Huxley was erudite, expressive and prophetic. His best-read novel, Brave New World, warned of the dehumanization that could be triggered by technology. As a social forecast, it proved more accurate in some aspects than George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley predicted a tyranny of hedonism with the pleasure principle as the substitute for oppression. Sometimes in recent years it seemed as if his Brave New World verged on becoming our world.
The endearing documentary Huxley on Huxley (out on DVD) explores the author’s creative years, largely through a series of interviews with his wife, Laura. Twenty years his junior when they married in the 1950s, Laura continued to live in the Mediterranean villa under the Hollywood hills where Aldous died in 1963 on the day of JFK’s assassination. She was, by the accounts of others who knew the couple, a great inspiration to the author, and would follow a vein of his thought by penning several popular self-help books. Laura died in 2007 at age 96.
The film’s final scene shows the empty Huxley house, devoid now of all color and life. Through her interviews, director Mary Ann Braubach explores the influence of Huxley on the more thoughtful wing of the ‘60s counterculture through his journey into Tibetan Buddhism and psychedelia. For him, LSD was never recreational but a key to “the doors of perception.” Laura’s nephew, who knew Aldous in childhood, recalls a kindly man and others who knew him remember him striving for the best of what it means to be human. Like many great teachers of the past, the law for Huxley was love.
