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Our Faith in Evil
Introduction: Ultraviolence and Beyond

Assessing the results of over one thousand studies on the effects of entertainment violence, the American Psychiatric Association asserts with conclusive finality: “The debate is over. Over the last three decades, the one overriding finding in research on the mass media is that exposure to media portrayals of violence increases aggressive and violent behavior” (APA, 2004).

        Surveying the same research, University of Houston professor Jib Fowles and University of Toronto Professor Jonathan Freedman independently arrive at a very different conclusion, emphatically paraphrased by Richard Rhodes of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression: “There is no good evidence that taking pleasure from seeing mock violence leads to violent behavior, and there is some evidence... that leads away. Bottom line: To become violent, people have to have experience with real violence. Period. No amount of imitation violence can provide that experience. Period” (Rhodes, 2004).

        Obviously the debate is not over—at least for the American public. Between these equally vehement and certain conclusions the public is left in the middle with the task of deciding what to believe about the effects of entertainment violence.

        Addressing the confusion surrounding the stalemate, the following chapters present the results of a critical inquiry into effects generated from the convergence of three overlapping contexts of social influence:

        1) The media: violent entertainment, especially film and adapted and related literature

         2) The consumer: the audience for violent entertainment—which includes nearly everyone

        3) The culture: the broader backdrop of practices and attitudes within which violent entertainment is conceived, produced, and partaken

Because of the number and complexity of intersecting variables involved, such an inquiry is daunting to the point of seeming futile in relation to the goal of finding conclusive answers to questions concerning cycles of causes and effects. The complexity of the intersection of these variables is not made any clearer by the circumstance that cultural context plays a strong role in the creation of consumer appetites and consumer appetites in turn serve to re-create and reinforce cultural context. Nevertheless, in order to say anything pointedly to the issue of entertainment violence and its potential impact on consumers, it is necessary to take into consideration these converging spheres in a simultaneous juggling act—while attending to loose pins as well as possible. The result of such an inquiry may not prove decisive for many. But it is certain to provoke some and possibly persuade others while hopefully altering the balance of opinion through an improved understanding of those contexts in which violent entertainment may have beneficial effects as well as those contexts in which it may have unproductive or outright harmful effects. Before commencing a brief account of the contemporary state of the cultural debate on entertainment violence and the line of argument pursued, it will prove helpful in exposing the key issues involved to take a short excursion back in time for a review of a classic case history. To illustrate what is at stake, it is hard to improve upon the questions, alarms, and quandaries presented in the controversy that grew following the release of the film that introduced audiences to “ultraviolence.”


Clockwork Orange

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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