Vonnegut on Film: Naomi

This semester, I assigned my students a Kurt Vonnegut short story.  Harrison Bergeron has always seemed prescient to me, especially as our society becomes more and more prejudiced against the intelligent, the complicated, the extraordinary.  We seem happier to stare at the latest reality show than create for ourselves or challenge the norms.  Ours is the era of acquiescence, of apathy.  ...Or so I feel when I read Vonnegut.

If you have not read Harrison Bergeron, here is a full text.  It should only take you about five minutes to read.  The style is typical Vonnegut, where you're not sure if the characters are likeable, but boy O boy are they interesting.

There have been many attempts to make Vonnegut cinematic, and most of them fall painfully short.  There is a wry quaility to Vonnegut's prose that makes it difficult to film.  One of my students, however, found a decent short film version on YouTube.  It's about twenty minutes long, largely wordless, and pretty good.  If you've got twenty minutes to kill, and want your brainstem tickled a bit, try this: