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I—Film
and Violence, a
Classic Case History
“The
problem with
candy...”
On a foggy night less
than a week into the new
year of 1974, film director Stanley Kubrick and his entire family,
using assumed names, boarded a ferry at Dun Laoghaire. They were making
the trip from Ireland back to England days ahead of the planned return.
This sudden cloak and dagger exit occurred shortly after resumption of
shooting on the film Barry Lyndon (1975) following
a Christmas break. Coming as a complete surprise to his production
crew, Kubrick's departure brought an abrupt end to the work that had
been scheduled. Within twenty-four hours, the entire crew, which had
been active for several weeks near Dublin, closed operations and headed
back to England to find a new location for the completion of filming.
Shortly after his return, Kubrick consulted with executives of Warner
Brothers, his studio partner and film distributor, and made the
decision to withdraw his previous film, A Clockwork Orange
(1971), from further distribution and viewing in the United Kingdom.
The
extraordinary change in plans for the production work on Barry
Lyndon and the subsequent withdrawal of A Clockwork
Orange from its theatrical run were apparently triggered
by a
single incident. Although officially denied by Kubrick, on the morning
prior to his departure from Ireland a member of his staff had received
a call from an officer of the Special Branch from Dublin Castle stating
he had learned from a reliable source that Kubrick had been
placed on the IRA's hit list (Baxter, 289).
Though
no one seemed to know the specific details regarding the reasons for
the IRA's death threat, speculation centered on two sources of
aggravation—the staging of British
“redcoats” in a field in Kilkenny for scenes in Barry
Lyndon and the accumulated outrage over scenes of sex and
violence depicted in A
Clockwork Orange. These
scenes had allegedly spawned an outbreak of copycat crimes in many
urban areas where the film had been showing. The most recent of such
crimes had occurred just across the Irish Sea only a little more than a
month prior in November of 1973 in Lancashire. A gang of teenagers was
reported to have been crowing “Singing in the
Rain”—a favorite song of the film's anti-hero
Alex—as they raped a seventeen-year-old girl (Parsons, 5).
According
to Ken Adam, the interior set designer for Barry Lyndon,
Kubrick dismissed the Kilkenny staging as the source of the IRA's ire
and insisted that A
Clockwork Orange was primarily
to blame for the death threat. Apparently, similar though less credible
threats—not from the IRA— had been received by
Kubrick over the course of the last two years (Baxter, 290).
Kubrick's
retreat from Ireland, however, was probably an action taken more with
an eye for the well being of his family than for his personal safety.
Nevertheless, the withdrawal of the film was, for a man of his
confidence and pride, an extraordinary about-face. But the film
contained such wanton violence, presented from the cavalier point of
view of the perpetrators, that it gave many consumers reason for pause
and many others reason for outrage. Newspaper ads at the time of the
film's release promoted it with a portrait of a slyly smirking Alex
along with the caption: “Being the adventures of a young man
whose principal interests are rape, ultraviolence and
Beethoven”—to which could have been added
“molestation, mugging, and murder.”
Following
the book of the same name by Anthony Burgess, the film tells the story
of a teenage hoodlum of the future, Alex, whose gratuitous criminal
exploits, portrayed in graphic detail, are finally brought to a halt
when government authorities arrest him and submit him to the
“Ludovico treatment.” A form of classical
conditioning, this treatment reprograms Alex to become violently ill
when he contemplates violent actions. Alex’s attempt to
commit suicide as an escape from his fate makes him the center of a
public debate over the morality of the Ludovico treatment and launches
a popular backlash that ultimately leads the State to reverse his
programming and set him free to roam the streets at liberty to commit
crimes once again.
While
Alex's unique “reform” by the authorities becomes a
point of central focus in the story, his eventual release back into
society at the end—free to return to his ultraviolent
ways—brought to contentious conclusion a film that on the
whole accomplished both less and more with audiences of the time than
was intended by Kubrick.
Following
its opening in December of 1971, the film was constantly surrounded by
controversy, criticism, and copycat crime. The British Board of Film
Censors initially approved it for audiences over the age of eighteen,
but several local authorities, incensed by its content, fought this
rating and tried unsuccessfully to have it completely banned from
public viewing. The Motion Picture Association of America initially
gave the film an X rating for its sexual content and several newspapers
from various major cities in the United States refused to run
advertisements for it.
The
reception among critics was remarkably divided. Vincent Canby of The New
York Times enthusiastically proclaimed, “A
Clockwork Orange is so beautiful to look at and to hear
that
it dazzles the senses and the mind even as it turns the old real red
vino to ice.” Rex Reed of ,u>The New York Daily News
called Kubrick a “genius” claiming that the film
was “a mind-blowing work of dazzling originality and
brilliance... one of the few perfect movies I have seen in my
lifetime.”
Other
critics were very much of the opposite opinion. Andrew Sarris of the Village
Voice, for example, warned that those who saw the film
would
“suffer the damnation of boredom” and that the
film's soulless presentation of violence “manifests itself on
the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless
futuristic fantasy.” Alluding to connections between social
and cinematic violence, Sarris went on to add, “I am tired of
the cult of violence. I am tired of people smashing other people and
things in the name of freedom and self-expression.”
However,
as the controversy over the film raged in the newspapers, critics
unanimously defended it against censorship. Even Sarris argued against
censorship complaining, “movies have always made a splendidly
superficial target for our lazier moralists.” After the Detroit
News made a public statement that it would not run
advertisements for X-rated films (which then included A
Clockwork Orange), even the media-shunning Kubrick
submitted
a letter to the editor in which he equated the paper's strident
moralism and censorial stance to the attitude evident in the following
rhetoric: “Works of art which ... need a set of instructions
to justify their existence, and which find their way to neurotics
receptive to such harmful rubbish, will no longer reach the public. Let
us have no illusions: we have set out to rid the nation and our people
of all those influences threatening its existence and
character” (cited in LoBrutto, 362).
Kubrick
then revealed these to be the words of Adolf Hitler in explanation of
his censorship of a Munich art exhibition in 1937. At the close of his
letter Kubrick cautioned, “High standards of moral behavior
can only be achieved by the example of right-thinking people and
society as a whole, and cannot be maintained by the coercive effect of
the law. Or that of certain newspapers.”
As
public outcry over the film mounted, Anthony Burgess—the
author of the novel from which the film was adapted—found
himself increasingly pressed into the role of defending the film as the
reclusive Kubrick withdrew from the public debate. Assaults of women
attributed to the influence of the film generated even greater
consternation and outrage in light of the irony emerging from Burgess's
revelation that the book had grown out of his attempts to cope with the
brutal assault on his wife by four American GI deserters near the end
of World War II. Although robbery rather than rape appeared to be the
motive, the severe beating his wife received for her resistance to the
attack caused a miscarriage and health problems from which she never
fully recovered.
Initially
Burgess's reaction to the film was positive and he went on a publicity
tour with Malcolm McDowell—the actor who played the starring
role of Alex. Over time, however, and adding to the irony stemming from
the book's unusual inspiration and the film's unanticipated effects,
Burgess's estimate of the merits of the film—as well as his
own book—changed. Speaking about the writing of the book,
Burgess remarked to Sheila Weller of the Village Voice,
“I was very drunk when I wrote it. It was the only way I
could cope with the violence [referring to the attack on his wife]. I
can't stand violence.... I loathe it! And one feels so responsible
putting an act of violence down on paper. If one can put an act of
violence down on paper, you've created the act! You might as well have
done it! I detest that damn book now” (57).
In
his autobiography, published in 1990, Burgess affirmed that his
intentions in writing the book were consistent with the general message
“that moral choice
cannot exist without a
moral polarity.” But he acknowledged the book's
effects—both on readers as well as himself: “I saw
that the book might be dangerous because it presented good, or at least
harmlessness, as remote and abstract, something for the adult future of
my hero, while depicting violence in joyful dithyrambs.... I was
sickened by my own excitement at setting it down, and I saw that Auden
was right in saying that the novelist must be filthy with the
filthy” (61). Regarding the film, Burgess had, at least by
the time of the publication of his autobiography, come to the
conclusion that Kubrick had dangerously altered the message of his book
into what he believed to be a “terrible
theme”—namely that “the violence of the
individual [is] preferable to the violence of the state”
(245).
So,
as it turned out, Kubrick and Burgess shared the experience of having
second thoughts. The aptness of the law of unintended consequences was
doubtless not lost on a man of Burgess's literary acumen. His
“text,” inspired by violence and intended to be
read as a statement against violence, is eclipsed by his obsessive
detailing of the violent actions of the featured
“hero” to the point where he must eventually recoil
from what, to his horror, emerges as the dominant
“subtext”—an unauthorized celebration of
violence. This recoil is then mirrored and compounded by Kubrick's
reversal of similar proportions in response to his adaptation of the
book.
Kubrick's
withdrawal of A
Clockwork Orange from further
viewing in the United Kingdom went largely unnoticed because it
coincided with the waning stages of the film's theatrical run. Only
several years after the fact, when the British National Film Theater
sought to arrange a retrospective of Kubrick's work in 1979, did it
become widely known, to the amazement of all, that Kubrick had banned
the film.
Although
he had never aggressively defended A
Clockwork Orange
from censorship in public appearances, Kubrick had published, as
already mentioned, written defenses in the Detroit News
and several other newspapers in the early part of 1972. In light of his
written vehement condemnations of censorship, Kubrick's self-censorship
of the film was astonishing and inexplicable. Despite the retrospective
by the British National Film Theater in honor of his accumulated works,
Kubrick refused to drop the ban and did not allow the film to be shown
in 1979.
Confirming
the fact that this decision was not merely a passing whim, Kubrick went
out of his way to enforce the ban again in 1993 when he discovered that
a bootleg copy of the film had been shown at the Scala Cinema in
London. He unleashed lawyers from the Federation Against Copyright
Theft who eventually charged the theater program manager and the
projectionist with violations of the British 1988 copyright law. Adding
to the general confusion, neither Kubrick nor Warner Brothers ever
issued a public statement explaining why the ban had been initiated and
why it continued to be enforced.
However,
Kubrick's unremitting ban of the film in the United Kingdom coincided
with continued reports of the film's role in copycat crimes in America
where Kubrick had less control over distribution and the ban was not in
effect. In June of 1990 Michale Anderson of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
admitted wearing A
Clockwork Orange T-shirt on the
day he impaled seventeen-year-old Karen Hurwitz six times in the torso
with a three-foot long samurai sword. Anderson's attorney Jon Botula
organized the defense strategy around the claim that Anderson was
driven to commit the crime by habitual viewings of the Kubrick film.
Botula showed the jury fifty minutes of the film as proof of its
dangerously seductive portrayal of violence. Nevertheless, the jury
convicted Anderson of the crime (LoBrutto, 370).
Just
as Kubrick's initial defense of the film against censorship was sparse
but vehement so also was his initial defense of the film's violent
content, which he articulated in two rare interviews in 1972. In
response to a question about the apparent celebration of violence in A
Clockwork Orange, Kubrick told Andrew Baily of the Rolling
Stone Magazine: “When you ask is it right for
violence to be fun you must realize that people are used to challenging
whether certain types of violence are fun. You see it when your western
hero finally shoots all the villains. Heroic violence in the Hollywood
sense is a great deal like the motivational researchers' problem in
selling candy. The problem with candy is not to convince people that
it's good... but to free them from the guilt of eating it. We have seen
so many times that the body of a film serves merely as an excuse for
motivating a final blood-crazed slaughter by the hero of his enemies,
and at the same time to relieve the audience's guilt of enjoying this
mayhem” (22).
This
account of cinematic violence corresponds to a cathartic theory of
effects—a theory that emphasizes viewer competencies relating
to the clear separation of fantasy and reality. Kubrick's endorsement
of this view is further supported by comments made to Paul Zimmerman in
a Newsweek
interview: “From his own point
of view, Alex is having a wonderful time, and I wanted his life to
appear to us as it did to him, not restricted by the conventional
pieties. You can't compare what Alex is doing to any kind of day-to-day
reality. Watching a movie is like having a daydream. You can safely
explore areas that are closed off to you in your daily life. There are
dreams in which you do all the terrible things your conscious mind
prevents you from doing” (29).
Following
the discovery of Kubrick's self-imposed ban of the film, some of his
supporters wondered if he had ultimately come to conclusions that
forced radical revision of the views he expressed in 1972. Others
speculated that the accumulation of criticism, controversy, and threats
relating to the film had progressed too far and that Kubrick had
finally had enough of it all.
Had
Kubrick ultimately decided that A
Clockwork Orange
was too dangerous in its graphic violent content and its featured
portrayal of a sadistic anti-hero? Was the line between fantasy and
reality too easily crossed by too many members of an impressionable
viewing audience? Does a film director owe more to the public than
entertainment? Since Kubrick never spoke publicly in his later years to
such questions, his answers were buried with him when he died in 1999.
In
retrospect, A Clockwork
Orange assumes the status
of one of the most emotionally charged and hotly debated films of the
20th century in relation to violent content and the question of the
effects of that content on a viewing audience. Tony Parsons has with
some justification claimed, “There are thousands of films
more violent than A
Clockwork Orange. But there is
not one equal to its inflammatory power” (5). As the debate
over the effects of the film progressed, it boiled down to an argument
over the power of imitative effects on the one hand—evidenced
in the copycat crimes credited to the film's
“droogs”—and cathartic effects on the
other hand—implied in Kubrick's early remarks in defense of
the film's violence. In the same paragraph Parsons goes on to claim
that A Clockwork Orange
“remains just
about the only example of art being a danger to society.”
Needless to say, Parsons' claim that A Clockwork Orange
has unique status among films as a “danger to
society” is a widely contested view.
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