A Clockwork Orange (1971)

 

A Clockwork Orange (1971)  

 

“In January 1972 a film entitled ‘A Clockwork Orange’ appeared in the Warner West End Cinema in Leicester Square … this would be no ordinary film. It proceeded to ignite a serious controversy that penetrated all sections of society in a way that was unprecedented in the history of cinema in Britain … During the sixty-one weeks that it played to the British public, it preoccupied the attention of politicians, the media, the church, the so-called protectors of morality as well as the youth, police and local authorities of towns up and down the country before its director, Stanley Kubrick, in the face of this pressure finally banned the film from public exhibition.”

 

--- Christian Bugge

 

11. Introduction and plot

 

This is one of three SF film’s Directed by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, it’s a Near-Future Dystopian nightmare that appears on more lists of “Greatest Films Ever Made” than you can shake a stick at. But I, a Heretic and Blasphemer, think it’s junk. Given its towering reputation, historical context, and the complex ideas behind it (which I’ll admit are there even as I hate it), it does require in-depth analysis, so, I apologize in advance for how long this is.

 

OK, it’s well-made and in some ways revolutionary, but it’s also thematically warped and expresses a contempt for Humanity and all Moral systems in a manner that makes it almost unique in the history of cinema. One could watch a Nazi propaganda film like “Hitler Youth: Quex, Our Flag Leads Us Forward” (1933) and come away feeling less unclean than this one, because though the Nazis hated lots of people, they didn’t hate absolutely everybody the way this movie does.

 

Further, the female characterization is piss-poor and that, a far too typical form of cinematic misogyny, is grotesquely celebrated, best demonstrated with a then-unprecedentedly visceral torture/gang-rape/murder scene that shockingly demeaned the Victims. Ken Eastleigh wrote (referring to not only that one scene, but the tone of the entire film) that it was "unparalleled in its concentrated parade of violence, viciousness and cruelty."

 

I should note that though the film is quite visceral, it is never as graphic as it seems. Released in an era when Hard-Core Pornography was suddenly semi-legal and hugely profitable, “A Clockwork Orange’s” most notorious scenes had an impact of explicitness that went far-beyond what was actually shown on film.

 

It’s based on Anthony Burgess’ novel of the same name (first published in 1962) and set in what appears to be a reasonably economically stable Near-Future (1980, so eight years beyond the film’s release date) yet everything is falling apart anyway because of some deep, but ill-defined, moral malaise. This has created an enraged Youth Culture who indulge in drug-laced milk and meaningless violence for lack of anything better to do.

 

The main character is the vicious, but also tremendously charismatic, 15-year-old delinquent named Alex Delarge (played by Malcom McDowell, who was nearly 30-years-old at the time). He’s leader of a vile foursome of teenage “Droogs” whose other members are Dim (Warren Clarke), a slow-witted bruiser, Georgie (James Marcus), resentful of his secondary position, and Pete (Michael Tarn, the only actual teenager playing a teenager), who’s mostly along-for-the-ride because he wants the protective comradery and to indulge in “Ultra-Violence.”

 

One night, roughly half-way through the film, they go too far, pointlessly beating and crippling Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) and gang-raping and murdering his wife, Mary (Adrienne Corri), while singing a song. Days later, when the police come, only Alex is captured, in part because his gang has started to turn against him. He’s sentenced to fourteen years in Prison (that seems a little light to me, but remember, despite his appearance, Alex is supposed to be 15, so a minor).

 

A Prison Chaplin (Godfrey Quigley) tries to reform Alex but is cruelly mocked in Alex’s voice-over (like almost all Kubrick films, it relies heavily on narration). Two years into his sentence, Alex agrees to undergo the experimental Ludovico Treatment, an Aversion Therapy promising to rehabilitate even the most hardened Criminals in only two weeks. When Alex says, "I just want to be good," he’s lying, he doesn’t think the experiment will work, he just can’t wait for new opportunities for mayhem and rape. Importantly, his joining the program comes only moments after a scene wherein he attended Bible study and had a sexualized fantasy of being a Roman Centurion at Christ’s Crucifixion; he likes the Ultra-Violence peppered throughout the Bible, but is immune to its Moral instruction.

 

Chaplain responds, "The question is whether or not if this technique really makes a man good. Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."

 

As the film mocks the Chaplin for this naïve morality, so maybe Kubrick was arguing that it is actually a good idea to have some of the irredeemable re-programed by the awesome power of the State, that some Droogs deserve Brain-Washing.

 

Except that Kubrick then mocks that idea too.

 

One of the side-effects of the treatment is that Alex can no longer tolerate the sound of beautiful Classical music (specifically Symphony No. 9 by Ludwig Beethoven (composed between 1822 - 1824)). This is an absurd notion, but it’s in the book, proves to be an essential plot point, and an important bridge into how Kubrick was using the film as his explication of the philosophies of German Philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche. The Nietzsche part represents the film’s most important break from the novel, which it’s otherwise surprisingly faithful too (I’ll address that more fully, later).

 

Alex is released from prison, but is homeless. Though the Aversion Therapy has successfully left him incapable of hurting others, it also left him incapable of defending himself. He’s repeatedly, viciously, humiliated and beaten. He’s even unjustifiably assaulted by the Police because their ranks are now filled with ex-gang members, notably Dim and Georgie.

 

After these humiliations and attacks, Alex accidently lands up at back Frank’s house. Frank takes him in, and is kind to him, but only because he doesn’t immediately recognize that Alex is the young man who crippled him and raped and murdered his wife. When Frank realizes who Alex is, he and his friends conspire to drive Alex to suicide by bombarding him with Classical music.

 

Alex barely survives. There’s a public outcry about the cruelties of the Ludovico Treatment, so Alex is re-conditioned. The film ends triumphantly as Alex is freed from the Brain-Washing to become the same vicious Predator he was when the film began.

 

22. Some stuff about the novel: the language

 

The film does maintain a lot, but not all, of the Burgess’ novel’s philosophical themes -- present and accounted for are the arguments about the nature of free will and attacks on the ideas B.F. Skinner, but the most important thing retained was the novel’s amazing language. The novel was mostly first-person narrative told in an invented Russian/English Argot called "Nadsat" (taken from the Russian suffix for “teen”). Its words are both alien and lucid. The opening lines of the novel were:

 

“'What's it going to be then, eh?'

“That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.”

 

These sentences should make no sense at all, but magically they do, a perfect demonstration of Burgess’ genius.

 

Watching the movie, as opposed to reading the book, is easier on the audience, because Actors give the cold-text emotional inflection and physical demonstration. Think about reading vs watching the works of William Shakespeare -- the meanings of many of the words have changed meaning over the last 400-plus years, so, seeing it, we know it better than when we read it.

 

The first version of this story was not SF, and penned when Burgess was certain his was soon to die of brain cancer. Surprisingly surviving, and wanting to expand on the story, Burgess realized that if continued using the then-current slang of his day’s Delinquent sub-cultures, the Suedeheads, Teddy Boys, Mods, and Rockers, the work would be dated faster than he could get it published, so he made the tale SF and invented his now famous, and decades later, still compelling Argot.

 

The Russian basis was in part because Burgess was fluent in it, in part because it was a sly joke to make use of it during the height of the Cold War (the worst year of the Cold War was 1962, the same year the book was published), but also driven by personal experience. In 1961 Burgess spent a summer in Soviet Russia where he observed that the Oppressive Regime was having almost as much trouble controlling its disenchanted Youth Culture as the more Liberalized England and USA. The Russian delinquents were known as the “Stilyagi,” or “Style-Boys.” Burgess later said, “It struck me that it might be a good idea to create a young kind of hooligan [that] … spoke an argot compounded of the two most powerful political languages in the world -- Anglo-American and Russian. The irony of the style would lie in the hero-narrator being totally unpolitical.”

 

33. Some more stuff about the novel: Christianity

 

Burgess was a lapsed-Catholic who remained obsessed with the self-declared “Universal” faith for the rest of his life. He saw this story as “a sort of allegory of Christian free will. Man is defined by his capacity to choose courses of moral action. If he chooses good, he must have the possibility of choosing evil instead. I was also saying that it is more acceptable for us to perform evil acts than to be conditioned into an ability only to perform what is socially acceptable."

 

Burgess was born of a minority Religion in a country, England, that had a long history of oppressing his Church, though that was not so much an issue by the 20^th c. His awareness of past oppressions remained keen though, and this might seem to make him more likely to conform to the Papacy than rebel, but somehow the lessons of oppression he learned from England’s older, darker, days hurt his personal relationship with the Church that dominated him. Over-simplifying, I’d suggest that the guy who should’ve become more Catholic because of stories about evils of Henry VIII, became less Catholic because his local Priest reminded him of Henry VIII. From his essay, “The God I Want” (1967):

 

“The God my religious upbringing forced upon me was a God wholly dedicated to doing me harm. That’s pretty much what my elders said — priests and nuns and relatives, as well as the penny catechism. A big vindictive invisibility.”

 

Elsewhere he stated, “As an English schoolboy brought up on the history of the Reformation, I came to reject a good deal of Roman Catholicism, but instinct, emotion, loyalty, fear, tugged away.”

 

Breaking with Catholicism, he flirted with both Islam and Manichaeism (a dualistic, and almost extinct, religious community that never-the-less continues to evoke fascination among many dissatisfied with the faith they were brought up with). Surprisingly, the Liberalizing Vatican II reforms (issued in 1962, the same year the novel was published) didn’t impress him, but he was also unimpressed with the various Protestant doctrines, so he was ever-circling the faith of his birth, never embracing, never letting go. Burgess, himself, remarked, “I want to be one of them, but wanting is not enough”

 

In 1989, Burgess stated, “Christ used the term ‘the kingdom of heaven’ — it is a metaphor. I don’t think it refers to a real location. I think it is a state of being in which one has become aware of the nature of choice, and one is choosing the good because one knows what good is.”

 

This is reflected in much of his fiction, and specific to this novel, was this observation, “The novel is an unredeemabley profane form, and that saints can’t belong there [except maybe they] can, so long as they are willing to be sinners first.” Apparently, Burgess’ favorite Catholic Philosopher was Augustine of Hippo, who was a bit of a party-animal when he was young, but lived a life of austere spiritualism later. Augustine’s most famous, funniest, and most disingenuous, line was, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."

 

Probably important was Burgess’ attraction to the 5^th c. Pelagian Heresy, which, ironically, Augustine spent a good part of his Church career railing against. The Heresy denied the concept of Original Sin and therefore the necessity of Baptism, and stated were we born essentially good, our corruption and redemption are self-created, so it stressed Free Will more than most other expressions of Christianity. It’s founder, Pelagius, found most Christians morally slack because they were blindly obedient, and so argued that obedience wasn’t the source of true Grace or Morality, though instruction could be a good guide to harnessing the power of Free Will for the Good. Augustine counter-argued the man was dependent on God’s Grace and Doctrinal Rigor to be redeemed, and without Divine Intervention, man was largely helpless against the allure of sin. Augustine ultimately won the argument and Pelagius was excommunicated in 418.

 

This suggests that the novel was a secularized version of a running argument between Augustine and Pelagius. Kubrick’s statements seem to reflect this, but without any hint of Christianity, “I think that when [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau transferred the concept of original sin from man to society, he was responsible for a lot of misguided social thinking which followed. I don't think that man is what he is because of an imperfectly structured society, but rather that society is imperfectly structured because of the nature of man. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.”

 

Vital here is the novel’s legendary “lost chapter,” chapter Twenty-One (a symbolic number), that was initially missing only from the USA editions, but restored decades ago in every edition published now-a-days.  Kubrick’s mostly-faithful adaptation chose to exclude it, so we never get to see the Monstrously Evil Alex tire of his own Violence and begin to ponder integrating more responsibly into Society, despite his earlier triumphs over all attempts of both Reform and Control, so Alex’s consideration of Redemption was rebellion against, not any System, but his current Self.

 

Georgie, unlike in the film, wasn’t one of Alex’s later tormentors, but dead after a pointless fight. And Pete proved to be a self-reformed man. Contrasting his life to Pete’s, Alex fears his own future children will prove to be as bad, or worse, than he. Alex even allows a tender fantasy to intrude:

 

“There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa [girl] all welcoming and greeting like loving. . . . I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted. . . . For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son. . . . I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.”

 

It's actually pretty sad, because I think most readers will not believe Alex can Reform, but that’s not really the point -- Alex is thinking about Reforming, and whether he succeeds or not, he wants it, and he reached that want on his own.

 

Though USA publishers had deleted that chapter (it is still a matter of debate of how hard Burgess objected to this), Kubrick lived in England at the time, so it’s improbable that he was unaware of it. Kubrick’s explanation sounds self-serving, but was perhaps sincere, “I had not read this version until I had virtually finished the screenplay … as far as I am concerned, unconvincing and inconsistent with the style and intent of the book. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the publisher had somehow prevailed upon Burgess to tack on the extra chapter against his better judgment, so the book would end on a more positive note. I certainly never gave any serious consideration to using it.”

 

So, this is a film with one of the rawest rape scenes in cinema history, made worse because there’s no sympathy for the victims, and the Droogs are engaging in the cruelty in a manner they perceive as comical; it totally ignores Burgess’ themes of Moral consideration, and equally demeans the Spiritual impulse to Reform and the Authoritarian impulse to Control. The film’s ultimate message seems to be that nothing can be done with Alex because he’s just a demonstration of “boys will be boys,” and, in fact, celebrates that.

 

44. Some more stuff about the novel: B.F. Skinner’s mommy wears army boots.

 

Burgess argued that Free Will must exist, and if it doesn’t, we are a false biology, more a robot, “A Clockwork Orange.” Humans really need to have to have more to say for themselves than Pavlov’s dogs, that famous experiment from the 1890s wherein Psychologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated he could manipulate certain biological functions through outside conditioning. The demonstration was that if you ran a bell before feeding the dog, eventually the bell ringing would trigger the dog to salivate even if it couldn’t see or smell the food.  This would become the basis of all Therapies that emphasize Route-Conditioning. The fact that this foundational research is so much older than the novel has some baring on the next few paragraphs.

 

Importantly, Burgess wasn’t raging against Pavlov, as the novel implicitly supports some mannerisms of the Conditioning Pavlov’s research demonstrated -- the story is explicit that the out-of-control Youth Culture is dangerous because, well, Youth Culture was out-of-control. Alex viewed Authority Figures (specifically Prison staff) as idiots, but they didn’t come off as idiots to the reader.

 

Criminologists have long observed that the worst crimes are generally committed by people younger than 35-years-old (usually male). In the novel has Alex is reconsidering his idiot violence at (presumably) the age of 21.

 

Burgess simultaneously distrusted State-established Moralities and saw Punishment, or at least Discipline (both forms of Conditioning), as necessary for keeping kids from becoming Monsters in those three-long-decades before their own biology kicks in to make them (usually) less Monstrous (almost) automatically. (I should note that Burgess was nearing 50 when he wrote the book). So, Burgess wasn’t attacking Pavlov, but instead, another guy influenced by Pavlov, namely B.F. Skinner.

 

Skinner was another Psychologist, born in 1904 so almost the exact moment Pavlov’s research became well-known. Pavlov was a Russian whose major work was under the last two Czars, so just barely before Communism became a Civilization-redefining Political force. Skinner, on the other hand, was from the USA, raised with all the benefits of Liberal Democracy, but saw little value in it:

 

“When Milton's Satan falls from heaven, he ends in hell. And what does he say to reassure himself? 'Here, at least, we shall be free.' And that, I think, is the fate of the old-fashioned liberal. He's going to be free, but he's going to find himself in hell.”

 

Skinner believed in the perfectibility of man, and committed his professional life to figuring out how to do it. Not believing in Free Will even on the conceptual level, he saw all choice as dependent on consequences of previous actions, an obvious idea called the “Principle of Reinforcement” but could also be summarized as “once burnt, twice shy.” If the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance it will not be repeated; if the consequences are good, the probability is that the action will be repeated is high. Turning that into a practical Therapy is called “Radical Behaviorism.”

 

In fairness to Skinner, up to a point, his ideas work, just as, up to a point, everything obvious works. As Burgess was attacking Skinner, the question begs, was Skinner really that much of an over-the-top radical? Well, Skinner’s most important work was “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” (1971, the same year the film was released, I’ll get back to that). In it he stated:

 

“What we need is a technology of behavior… [and that is] already well advanced, and it may prove commensurate with our problems … scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame [for behavior] to the environment … [and doing so makes consideration of the] mind … an explanatory fiction.”

 

Skinner’s Political Ideology was a little hard to pigeon-hole as Left- or Right-leaning because, though a lot od it is Authoritarian, the concept itself could lean either way. I favor Stephen Foster’s interpretation, suggesting Skinner was closest to the Marxists:

 

“I will take B. F. Skinner to be the principal representative of behaviorism. It is my contention that both Marxism and behaviorism as complete views of man (which they both claim to be) are forms of dogmatic ideology. … I would emphasize the term ‘visionary’ in this definition and apply it to both Marxism and behaviorism to emphasize the fact that both systems extend their visions into political programs, that is, both envisage their systems as potential social systems which vastly improve human conditions.”

As far as I know, Skinner never explicitly, publicly, embraced Communist Re-Education Camps, but I find it impossible to conclude he hated the idea behind them, because the idea was sorta his.

 

“A Clockwork …” was one of only a handful of SF novels Burgess published during a career that spanned more than fifty books, including at least twenty-two book-length fictions. Here, he tapped into ideas common in Dystopian SF that were as old as the Genre itself, but the best of the early articulations was probably Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” (1932), a Dystopian vison of Radical Behaviorism that included the masses being forced through Route-Conditioning to reinforce a caste system and Pharmaceutical manipulation of emotions, and it came out before any of Skinner’s major publications.

 

Skinner, himself, started getting broadly known with the publication of his own SF novel, “Walden Two” (1948), a Utopian vision based on his ideology. His ideas were strengthened and further radicalized in his non-fiction, “Verbal Behavior” (1958). The latter inspired a savagely critical analysis by the famously Left-leaning Linguist Noam Chomsky, which would eventually have equal impact on practical Therapies as Skinner, and today, probably more.

 

One would think that the traumatic experience of both Hitler and Stalin should’ve made the West more resistant to these Tyrannical ideas, but the terror that Hitler and Stalin somehow perversely made them more attractive, like a love of Tyranny that dare not speak its name. On both the Left and Right many who gave lip-service to rejecting Tyranny quickly turned around and did the exact same thing that they condemned. Skinner, himself, seemed influenced by fear of Nuclear Armageddon, believing that only Radical Behaviorism could save mankind from destroying itself.

 

So, Skinner’s ideas evolved from ideas that pre-date him, and were known as his ideas even before his most famous book came out in 1971. Much of SF prose and film expressed a profound hatred of these ideas even in cases where it is unlikely the Writers and Directors were aware of who this guy actually was; the films “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “It Conquered the World” were both released the same year, 1956, and both were centrally concerned with Ideological denigration of Free Will and loss of Individuality and Emotion in service of some Utopian abstract; both were obviously politically-minded films, but one would be hard-pressed to definitively establish if either were Left- or Right-leaning. Seemingly Leftist Skinner’s most effective critic was Leftist Chomsky. Burgess, whose stated politics was a highly-exotic form of Conservativism that sometimes flirted with Anarchism, had a Right-wing government applying Skinner’s ideas in its reaction to their fears of out-of-control Youth Culture.

 

All this underlines the meaningless-ness of Right/Left arguments in this context. Ideologies seem to be a caboose attached to Realpolitik (“politics or diplomacy based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral and ethical premises”), and the foundation of everything, Left or Right, seems to be we’re all fundamentally afraid of the same things.

 

If fairness to Kubrick, the Skinner-hatred is part of the novel that he totally nailed. Kubrick himself said, “It is a story of the dubious redemption of a teenage delinquent by condition-reflex therapy. It is, at the same time, a running lecture on free-will.”

 

Death Penalty politics play into all this even though the Death Penalty is not an issue in either novel or film (again, because, no matter how old he looked in the film, Alex was only 15). The Death Penalty was still legitimate in England when the novel was published, but abolished by the time the film came out. The last two men executed legally in England were Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen in 1964, they were guilty of a pointless murder during a petty robbery that reflected the same idiot savagery of the novel’s Droogs. Evans and Allen died the same year of their crime, suggesting there was political pressure to get the executions over-with fast, because the Death-Penalty was increasingly, politically, unpopular. Since the executions, Evans has received the most attention because of evidence of severe mental illness -- had that been argued at his trial, he likely wouldn’t have been hung.

 

Kubrick was clearly conscious of the Death-Penalty debate, but didn’t view his fictional Alex and a stand-in for the Real-World Evans. “It must be clear that it is wrong to turn even unforgivably vicious criminals into vegetables, otherwise the story would fall into the same logical trap as did the old, anti-lynching Hollywood westerns which always nullified their theme by lynching an innocent person. Of course, no one will disagree that you shouldn't lynch an innocent person -- but will they agree that it's just as bad to lynch a guilty person, perhaps even someone guilty of a horrible crime? And so, it is with conditioning Alex.”

 

This brings up how little SF is actually in the novel or the film, most of the story was bleakly of-the-moment. The SF seems restricted to the visualization of this exceptionally convincing Near-Future (Production Design by John Barry, Costumes by Milena Canonero). Also the idea of recruiting Police from Criminal Gangs, which was not a policy in England at the time, had been repeatedly employed in the past (those who know Irish History realize the Easter Rebellion of 1916 would’ve impossible if the Radical Republicans hadn’t been able to win over those who would’ve been satisfied with Home Rule, and the radicalization of the Home Rule guys was largely because the English had recruited their vilest enforcers, the Black and Tans, straight out of prison and unleased those thugs on the innocent). As for the Ludovico Treatment, it’s an exaggeration, but only barely -- extremely cruel Aversion Therapies were already in common use, they just weren’t as effective as the film’s SF version.

 

Alex being tortured by the State is as famous a scene as the torture/gang-rape/murder that he committed earlier in the film. He’s injected with a drug that induces nausea and must then watch films of the kind of violence he was guilty of, his head immobilized and eyelids held open so he can’t look away (Actor McDowell’s eye was injured while filming that scene). Classical music is played during this display. Before long, any thought of violence or hearing the music caused him to collapse and vomit even without the drug.

 

Even before the novel was published, Doctors were trying to “cure” Homosexuals by injecting them with Apomorphine, a nausea-inducing drug, while showing them pictures of male nudes.

 

Aversion Therapies were applied to other conditions as well. One of the films early defenders was Peter Thompson, Chairman of the “Festival of Lights,” part of a campaign against permissiveness in media that allowed films like “A Clockwork …” to exist. He seemed an odd defender, especially since he led the crusade against Director Ken Russell’s film, “The Devils,” the same year, but with “A Clockwork …” he was influenced by personal experience -- he’d been a patient in Broadmoor's Special Hospital from 1965-69:

 

“To someone who has committed violent acts of and who has been mentally ill, this film has a lot to say to society. It is my honest opinion that this is the best film I have ever seen. I felt like I was reliving my own experiences. In Broadmoor they have drugs that bring you out in rashes ... Alex's aversion therapy seems to me to be the exact equivalent to 900mg of Largatil.”

 

The cruel applications of Skinner’s ideas are not really in dispute anymore, but an important thing to remember is that cruel treatments of the mentally ill are still treatments for illness. Nothing in the novel or film suggest Alex is mentally ill (not even having a presumed illness that’s not actually an illness, like Homosexuality), he’s just a bad kid. Law tries (imperfectly) to make that distinction, and in our own lives, I think we all do, being more tolerant of the confused than the vicious. Skinner’s ideas led to bad treatments for bad diseases, but when applied to a man who is not diseased, but simply morally bad, like Alex, it is pure Totalitarianism.

 

 

5.  Now the Movie: where Kubrick’s Alex is at odds with Burgess’

 

"Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven"

 

n From the original movie poster

 

Subtly, but significantly, the novel’s Alex is different from the film’s. Both are more intelligent and charismatic than their fellow Droogs, but the novel’s Alex is more given to self-pity as a mechanism for Moral Evasion than the film version. He’s also worse a Predator in the book, committing more Murders and Rapes (including two 10-year-old girls) and is cruel to animals. In a way, this makes McDowell’s tremendously powerful performance perversely one of the reasons why the film went so wrong: In the novel’s Alex likes to feel like a God, but he’s really a loser (and a child), while the film’s Alex is always smiling, never a hypocrite during his voice-overs, and is convincingly beyond concerns of Good and Evil (and appears as a full-grown man). Worse still, when the Treatment is reversed and he gets his pseudo-God-hood back, the film ends right then-and-there, triumphantly, or, as the Alex’s narration tells us, “I was cured all right.”

 

Critic Roger Ebert, who hated the film, nailed the distinction between the two Alex’s perfectly, “Yet I don't pin the rap on Burgess. Kubrick has used visuals to alter the book's point of view and to nudge us toward a kind of grudging pal-ship with Alex.”

 

Before the film is over, Kubrick was attacking the Left and Right almost equally. The Conservative Minister of the Interior, Fredrick (Anthony Sharp), is a Villain because he embraces the Ludovico Treatment as a short-cut to a more perfect Social Order, while Victim, Frank, becomes a Villain because he extracts Revenge on Alex for the opposite ideological reasons; he and his friends are all saying that what they are doing was to end:

 

“Recruiting brutal young roughs into the police; proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we've seen it all before in other countries; the thin end of the wedge! Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism.”

 

That’s supposed to mean that their reason for driving Alex to Suicide will bring down the corrupt Government.

 

Screw what Frank says, he wants personal Revenge, the lowest of our Moralities, born of unbearable pain. But as Kubrick treats Frank with no compassion, it is as if Kubrick actually thinks what Frank says is his actual motivation. Frank is less likable than Alex, but then, everyone is less likable than Alex, not any Victim, not any Reformer, not any Authoritarian, only the pure Predator is appealing.

 

Kubrick said Alex, "[H]e has winning qualities: his total candour, his wit, his intelligence and his energy; these are attractive qualities and ones, which I might add, which he shares with Richard III … You should feel nothing but dislike towards Richard, and yet when the role is well played, with a bit of humour and charm, you find yourself gradually making a similar kind of identification with him. Not because you sympathize with Richard's ambition or his actions, or that you like him or think people should behave like him but, as you watch the play, because he gradually works himself into your unconscious, and recognition occurs in the recesses of the mind.”

 

Umm … but in “Richard III” (play written c. 1592–1594) William Shakespeare didn’t display disdain for every other character except for wicked Richard.

 

Burgess’ novel was Christian parable (though in a very weird way), while Kubrick’s film was pure Nietzschean.

 

66.  Kubrick’s love of Nietzsche

 

The Nietzschean idea (or ideal) seems to have its origins in Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution (“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” 1959). Fredrick Nietzsche saw life as "a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, strength is the only virtue, and weakness the only fault." This is often called “Social Darwinism,” though Darwin himself found the idea despicable.

 

Nietzsche, though an Atheist, used the Divine as a metaphor, arguing that the spirit of man is best expressed in the contrast between two Classical Greek gods: Dionysus and Apollo.

 

Dionysus was "the god of wine and revelry, of ascending life, of joy in action, of ecstatic emotion and inspiration, of instinct and adventure and dauntless suffering, the god of song and music and dance and drama."

 

Apollo, on the other hand, was "the god of peace and leisure and repose, of aesthetic emotion and intellectual contemplation, of logical order and philosophic calm, the god of painting and sculpture and epic poetry."

 

In Nietzsche's eyes, primitive man is Dionysian in spirit, led by instinct and living in the moment, but lacking intellectual abilities. Modern man artificially made himself Apolloniean, conquered by Democracy, Socialism, Judeo-Christianity and Buddhism. There was a threat that the last vestiges of instinct could be extinguished by the Apolloniean. Though Nietzsche, himself, was raised in comfort, and in a Christian house-hold, he seemed obsessed with the inner-Barbarian that, in Real Life, he seemed to never express outside his writings.

 

Nietzsche maybe the greatest writer to explore Ecstatic Nihilism, he clearly wanted to burn it all down, then dance in the ashes, believing that purity could only emerge after all hypocrisy was washed away. He rejected Reform and wanted something even more dramatic than Revolution, which was why the Nazis were attracted to him, even he didn’t hate Jews and held Nationalism in contempt, so one must wonder if his Nazi fans ever actually read him.

 

Importantly, Nietzsche believed in the idea of an “Übermensch,” or Superman, a Dionysian, “return to nature, although it is not really a going back but an ascent - up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness." The Übermensch would regain man's lost instinct, be Beyond Good and Evil, and entitled to anything and everything simply because of his superiority.

 

But, to Nietzsche, the Übermensch wasn’t the final fulfillment of mankind’s destiny, but a step along the way to a kind of mortal God-hood, and maybe not-so-nasty when the day was done -- but the not-so-nasty could only be achieved after a Transcendence that required the whole corrupt world burn down first. Weirdly, in this Post-Apocalyptic landscape, sounding so much like a “Max Max” movie (first film 1979), Nietzsche seemed to think we’d all become monks. 

Kubrick referred Alex as "natural man in the state in which he is born, unlimited, unrepressed." The film included that in the dialogue, "Thinking was for the gloppy [stupid] ones. The oomny [intellectual] ones used, like, inspiration..." Alex existed in a weird plane between the stupid and the intellectual. As inspiration was supposed to be Dionysian, while contemplative thought is Apollonian, and Alex chooses the stupid, and Kubrick made a clear choice by elevating Alex to Übermensch which clearly wasn’t in the novel.

 

Kubrick wrote this script with less input from others than was the case in most of his other films. Alex is this movie’s only well-developed character, and because of that, McDowell offers the film’s only really compelling performance. Kubrick’s world, even more than Burgess’, it’s Alex, and only Alex, all the way through.

 

Alex's love of music is not sophisticated, purely emotional, and in Alex’s head, it was the inspiration for murder and rape, which is the most anti-Apollonian response to Beethoven that one could imagine. It also helped encourage cinema’s increasingly frequent use familiar songs ironically in violent sequences, like how Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song “Free Bird” (1973) was used in the climax of the film “The Devil’s Rejects” (2005). Kubrick was decades ahead of Director Rob Zombie, and I think we can safely associate Alex’s love of Beethoven with Real-World Nazis well-documented love of Classic Music.

 

Kubrick, defending his film, said something that suggests maybe what we saw wasn’t what he intended. “Although he is partially concealed behind a satirical disguise, the prison chaplain, played by Godfrey Quigley, is the moral voice of the film. He challenges the ruthless opportunism of the State in pursuing its programme to reform criminals through psychological conditioning. A very delicate balance had to be achieved in Godfrey's performance between his somewhat comical image and the important ideas he is called upon to express.”

 

I saw no delicate balance, and nor did anyone else. Going over contemporary reviews, I saw not one, not even the film’s many champions, that singled out the Chaplain character as being even remotely like what Kubrick claimed he was.

 

77. Critical response

 

Oddly, the critics mostly seemed to havelove it. From the “Newsweek” review, “At its most profound level, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is an odyssey of the human personality, a statement of what it is to be truly human.”

 

Vincent Canby in the ‘New York Times’ praised McDowell and the film’s mannerisms especially:

 

“McDowell is splendid as tomorrow's child, but it is always Mr. Kubrick's picture, which is even technically more interesting than ‘2001.’ Among other devices, Mr. Kubrick constantly uses what I assume to be a wide-angle lens to distort space relationships within scenes, so that the disconnection between lives, and between people and environment, becomes an actual, literal fact.”

 

John E. Fitzgerald, writing in (of all places) "The Catholic News”:

 

“The film seems to say that to take away a man's choice is not to redeem him but merely to restrain him. Otherwise we have a society of oranges, organic but working like clock-work. Such brainwashing organic and psychological, is a weapon, that to totalitarians in state, church or society might wish for an easier good even at the cost of individual rights and dignity. Redemption is a complicated thing and change must be motivated from within rather than imposed from without if moral values are to be upheld. But Kubrick is an artist rather than a moralist and he leaves it to us to figure what's wrong and why, what should be done and how it should be accomplished.”

 

There were even scientific professionals endorsing the film. Psychiatrist Aaron Stern, the former head of the USA’s Motion Picture Association ratings board, believed that Alex represents man in his natural state, the unconscious mind. Alex becomes "civilised" after receiving his Ludovico "cure" and the sickness it caused him was a "neurosis imposed by society."

 

The film received an “X” rating in England, but back then that meant something a little different than what it would only a few years later. The “X” was applied by John Trevelyan, Chairman of The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), but he also said that the film was "an important social document of outstanding brilliance and quality," just not appropriate for children.

 

Before too long, Kubrick would be attacked because of the film (that’s the focus of the section on Censorship) but before then, he received extraordinary accolades, which he, himself, was more than happy to list when challenged, “‘A Clockwork Orange’ has received world-wide acclaim as an important work of art. It was chosen by the New York Film Critics as the Best Film of the year, and I received the Best Director award. It won the Italian David Donatello award. The Belgian film critics gave it their award. It won the German Spotlight award. It received four USA Oscar nominations and seven British Academy Award nominations. It won the Hugo award for the Best Science-Fiction movie.

 

“It was highly praised by Fellini, Bunuel and Kurosawa. It has also received favourable comment from educational, scientific, political, religious and even law-enforcement groups. I could go on.”

Why did it get such praise? This is hard to fathom except in historical context – the same year saw the more explicit (but also more heavily censored) “The Devils” from Ken Russell, and “Straw Dogs” from Sam Peckinpah, which was equally explicit, and also a much better film. Only four years later, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film was released, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975) which was far more explicitly Sadistic and Pornographic, almost as contemptuous of the human part of human beings, and far more poorly plotted, but also garnered substantial praise.

 

It’s also important to remember, none of these were straightforwardly titillating sex-romps like the more normal Porno films “Deep Throat” or “Behind the Green Door” (both released in 1972). Instead, they were screaming at the top of their lungs “I am ART!” Weirdly, none of these Art Films made their explicit sexual content look especially pleasurable.

 

Even given that, the praise is still a bit hard to fathom given that Kubrick’s immediately-prior film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), a bold exploration of human Aspiration and Transcendence, devoid of either Sex or Violence, was savaged by most critics early on. Of course, “2001 …” quickly proved to be one of the greatest financial and artistic triumphs in the history of cinema, so maybe the Critics embarrassed by getting “2001 …” so wrong somehow felt compelled to rubber-stamp anything the enfant terrible Kubrick did after that.

 

There’s a bond between these two films, as they represent Kubrick’s most explicit explorations of his fascination with Nietzsche. “2001 …” explored Nietzsche’s ideas of Transcendence (spelled out in the book, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None” (1885)), while “A Clockwork …” explored Nietzsche’s contempt for the whole of Society and what he viewed as the “Slave Moralities” of the Judeo-Christian world (spelled out in the book “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886)). In the former film, Nietzsche’s more unpleasant notions are tempered by Kubrick’s collaboration with the Humanist SF Autor Arthur C. Clarke, who wasn’t a Christian but whose work was often influenced by Christian metaphysics. Here, there was no script-collaboration with Author Burgess, and ultimately, the film proved smugly contemptuous of Burgess’ struggling Christian faith.

 

I’ve been recently watching reruns of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” (TV show, first aired in 1968) and one of the recurrent skits is a fashionable cocktail party where everyone pretends to be intellectual, but repeatedly prove themselves to be nothing but dumb drunks. Given that this film, attacking Skinner, came out the same year as Skinner’s most famous book (a summation of his already pretty-well-known ideas), made me think of the Real-World cocktail parties of the day (I never attended any, I only was five years old). The film’s attack on Skinner was its best perseveration of the ideas of the novel, so I think the cocktail-party circuit (what Author Tom Wolfe had already named the “Radical Chic” in 1970) may have been driving some of the film’s irrational praise among the pseudo- Intelligentsia of the “Smart Set.” All would’ve been aware of the novel, most would’ve read it, everyone would’ve seen the movie, and if they hadn’t gotten around to reading “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” yet, they would’ve at least read articles based on it.

   

Interestingly, one of the critics not sucked in was Roger Ebert, who, only a couple years earlier, had been an early champion of the Kubrick film most others initially hated, “2001 …”:

“‘A Clockwork Orange’ is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex…

 

“Now Alex isn't the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British movies of the early 1960s. No effort is made to explain his inner workings or take apart his society. Indeed, there's not much to take apart; both Alex and his society are smart-nose pop-art abstractions ... If we fall for the Kubrick line and say Alex is violent because ‘society offers him no alternative,’ weep, sob, we're just making excuses…”

 

Perceptively, Ebert attacked the exact same cinematic mannerisms that Canby praised:

 

“Kubrick's most obvious photographic device this time is the wide-angle lens. Used on objects that are fairly close to the camera, this lens tends to distort the sides of the image. The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the wide-angle lens almost all the time when he is showing events from Alex's point of view; this encourages us to see the world as Alex does, as a crazy-house of weird people out to get him.

 

“When Kubrick shows us Alex … he either places him in the center of a wide-angle shot (so Alex alone has normal human dimensions,) or uses a standard lens that does not distort. So, a visual impression is built up during the movie that Alex, and only Alex, is normal”

 

Other notable devises are in the lighting and sound. Though essentially a Crime film, there are few scenes with dark shadows. Kubrick came out of Film Noir, but mostly rejected those mannerisms here, featuring many scenes that were deliberately lit just a little-bit too harshly, and with that, most of the dialogue is just a little bit too loud. Kubrick, from the USA but living in England, especially defied the mannerisms of English cinema in this, but to say the film is more USA-like than English misses the point, as he went far beyond what even most USA film-makers would in terms of harsh lighting and exaggerated audio. Also, as was his habit, he only personally operated the camera for hand-held shots, but this movie has more hand-held shots than any other Kubrick I can think of. So, in this film, with a script he wrote more alone than usual, he was also largely his own Cinematographer. My main objections to this film are its treatment of content and characterization, but I got to admit, Kubrick’s bold mannerisms also annoyed my eyes and ears.

 

Ebert again, “In a world where society is criminal, of course, a good man must live outside the law. But that isn't what Kubrick is saying, he actually seems to be implying something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.”

 

 

88. The novel and film’s relationship with Youth Culture

 

Even before the novel was written the Youth were running wild in the streets. Demographics played a role, there was a post-WWII baby-boom, and by then the young seemed to out-number the old -- mathematically, they didn’t, but in cultural influence, they certainly did. The excitement that the novel created reflected this, as Burgess observed, "Rock-groups called ‘Clockwork Orange’ began to spring up." In 1965 the Rock-group the Rolling Stones explored making a Musical film of the book. That never materialized, but the same year, Andy Warhol made the first film adaption, “Vinyl,” which received almost no distribution and was unwatchabley incompetent in its execution; it’s mostly notable because it didn’t even try to retain the novel’s language, perhaps because Warhol’s non-actors couldn’t handle it.

 

Burgess’ novel, according to Theodore Dalrymple, “intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums.”

 

This is directly addressed in the novel, wherein Alex’s father is meek before his 15-year-old son, unable to even try and stop Alex’s late-night romps. When Alex offers his father some (stolen) money to go to a pub, his father says: “Thanks, son … But we don’t go out much now. We daren’t go out much, the streets being what they are. Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks.”

 

The Youths who were fans of the novel and/or film back-in-the-day had interesting things to say about its impact on them years later.

 

Tony Parsons: "‘A Clockwork Orange’ was like seeing your little life blown up and put on the big screen. It took all the consolations of being a teenager in the early 70s ... and made them mythical, monumental, glorious … [W]e saw the film and then we read the book and then we saw the film again. And even the lads who never read books - the thickos, the hard-core thugs, the dims made flesh, blood and bone - all read Burgess' black masterpiece…

 

"It was a violent film for violent days ... I saw truncheons coming down on number two crops, away fans invading the home fans' end and trying to take it, bodies tumbling down terraces, feet and fists flying as one of those sickening gaps appeared in the crowd to give violence some room ... the football grounds of England in the early 70s played host to weekly riots. So, the highly ritualised violence in 'A Clockwork Orange' did not shock us. We could get all that at home…

 

“‘A Clockwork Orange’ was about our Britain. Not the country of someone else's mythology -- The Blitz spirit of World War II, the saucy charm of the swinging 60s -- but the way we were. Fishfingers and football pools and furniture that was a fire hazard. Parents that were losing their grip and politicians that couldn't get you to turn up. Authority was crumbling on every side and teenage rebellion was turning nasty.”

 

During his defense of the film, Parson admitted that the idea that “A Clockwork…” was a morality tale was lost on the Youth. “[W]e brooded in Ted Heath's Britain [Conservative Prime Minister of England, 1970 - 1975], we didn't feel we had any choices. A morality tale? Perhaps, but 'A Clockwork Orange’ … was a subversive tribute to the glory of youth."

 

Mic Martin was asked about the film inspiring violence among his cadre and he answered, "No, definitely not. Maybe it was a validation of our lifestyles, but we were not about to rape or kill anyone. We had seen our fair share of violence both on the giving and receiving end, but it wasn't about beating people up, it was about fighting other groups, allegiance to your football team or protecting your friends, whether or not ‘A Clockwork Orange’ had been made, this would have gone on regardless. The film was just a stylised version of the lives we were leading."

 

Football thugs were, and still are, an issue in England, but there were none in “A Clockwork …” The sport the film referenced was, ironically, Cricket, and only in Canonero’s iconic costumes. Those were inspired by Actor McDowell’s choice of wearing a Cricket uniform to one of his rehearsals.

 

Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called ‘ultra-violence’ … of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still, even a merely sartorial identification with psychopathic violence shocked me, for it implied an imaginative sympathy with such violence”

 

This was in the context of Violent Crime in England skyrocketing, which was true even before the book was published, and worsened afterwards, so “astonished and horrified” was not an uncalled-for reaction.

 

99. The Censorship Debate

 

Despite the Critical Acclaim, the Censorship Debate that followed was hot-and-heavy, and way more intense in England than the USA.

 

I should make it clear, hating a film, and wanting it Censored, are two different things. “Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation” (1986) is a contemptable, and deeply cynical, sorry excuse for cinema intended only subversively market a toy-line, but I would not recommend Censoring it unless you could show me scientific proof that its syrupy sentimentally actually induced diabetic shock on unsuspecting viewers.

 

My view is that censorship, a form of force, should be evaluated a bit like killing people. Killing is a sin, but not so if done in defense of yourself or another; if you start with the idea that it’s a sin, that should remind you that that killing must be applied with maximum restraint. Censorship is similarly (but not equally) sinful, and should be viewed similarly when considering applying it. I support Censoring Terrorist Threats, Child Pornography and explicit lies that encourage violence and/or protect the violent, like Holocaust Denialism. (Note: Though many Liberal Democracies have State-mandated Censorship of Holocaust Denialism, England and the USA do not. We rely on Social Pressure and Editorial Integrity to crush those lies). Unlike killing, the sin of Censorship allows some room for contemplation before pulling the trigger, but despite the extra-room to think, we seem happier to Censor each other than kill each other, maybe because we believe that if we Censor well, we’d kill each other less.

 

Both the USA and England had a long history of cinema Censorship, but England seemed fonder of it than the USA. England was once the most important foreign market for USA films, so England’s rules often dictated USA film-making. The USA’s Universal Pictures essentially owned the Horror market starting in 1923 with “The Hunchback of Norte Dame” and held on to that title with the remarkable consistency of the quality of its films up to “The Wolfman” in 1941. The quality of Universal’s Horror movies declined quickly after that, and there are many reasons why, but an important contributor was increasing English Censorship, and Universal’s response was to make the films increasingly infantile, and therefore less potentially offensive.

 

England, or at least the British Isles, gave us the three most foundational novels of the Horror genre, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (1818), “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886) and “Dracula” (1887), yet it essentially Banned all Horror cinema for almost a decade. The BBFC were revised in 1951 to deal with movies that were not "merely sordid films dealing with unpleasant subjects, but films which while, not being suitable for children, are good adult entertainment films which appeal to an intelligent public," or, the original “X” rating.

 

The response by the newly liberated film-makers was immediate. “The Quartermass Xperiment” (1955), whose title mocked its “X” rating, was one of the finest SF/Horror films of the 1950s and saved its studio, Hammer Film Productions, from bankruptcy. This increased the international market for Horror dramatically and made the stogy old English, specifically Hammer, the World Leaders in most Horror up to about 1968.

 

More things, outside of cinema, soon followed, and maybe the non-film stuff was more important to the Censorship Debate than what was actually unfolding in the cinema.

 

The novel was published in the context of a quickly transforming England, while the film was released into an England already transformed. In 1961, the contraceptive pill was legalized for married women only, but those rights were expanded in 1967. That same year saw the "Sexual Offences Act" which finally stripped Homosexual behavior of the Criminal stain, the "Abortion Act," legalized a woman’s right to choose with only minimal restrictions, and the “Divorce Reform Act," brought England’s restrictive Divorce Laws in-line with most of the more Liberal USA (a little late for Anne Boleyn though, executed on trumped-up charges in 1536 by Henry VIII because she only bore him a girl-child, so poor, sweet, Henry had few other options than kill her). Finally, in 1969, Home Secretary James Callaghan made the abolition of the Death Penalty permanent. To all this one must add non-legislative actions, like the Counter-Culture, the Drug-Culture, the Sexual Revolution, a nastier attitude in Rock Music, mini-skits, and most horrifying of them all, polyester leisure suits.

 

Most of this is not shocking now (well, except for the polyester), but for many who’d passed their 35th birthday at the time, it must have been as dizzying and nausea-inducing as a dose of Apomorphine.

 

Despite my contempt for this film, I’m easily swayed to opposing to Censoring it, not only because of my long-standing, and thoughtfully considered, philosophical stands, but because of one name:

 

Mary Whitehouse.

 

For any life-long fan of SF,F&H, that woman is like the Wicked Witch of the West (though technically, she was somewhat east of my home in New York City). She not only targeted this film, and cinema in general, but also TV, and had more success against pretty inoffensive TV than obviously offensive cinema. She threw the production of my favorite TV show, “Doctor Who” (first aired in 1963), into chaos by managing to get the show repeatedly argued on the floor of Parliament over its alleged  "teatime brutality for tots" (that phrase specifically concerned the serial “Genesis of the Daleks” (1975) which is now remembered as one on the strongest anti-War statements in the history of TV in any country).

 

Whitehouse, predictably, hated this film, calling it, "sickening and disgusting ... I had to come out after twenty minutes." Which, of course, meant she missed the really nasty stuff.

 

In another interview she stated, "Since it has been shown we have witnessed muggings and the start of the dreadful gang bang syndrome. One gets tired of the irrational, pretentious arguments film makers use to defend their works."

 

She certainly wasn’t alone, Member of Parliament (MP) Maurice Edelman saw “A Clockwork …” as an incitement to violent crime, “the adventures of the psychotic Alix[sic] rampaging to music, are likely to have a more sinister effect on those who see for the first time see a fantasy realised on the screen. -- a fantasy of exciting violence."

 

Though Whitehouse was a Conservative, Edelman represented the more Liberal Labor Party.

 

Reverend John Lambert, former chaplain to Pinewood Studios, which Kubrick was associated with, was even more harsh, "I am utterly convinced in my own mind -- and from talking to many young people -- that this celluloid cesspool has done damage to more young people than just the boy who beat out a meths drinkers brains with a brick … Old people tremble to go out of doors and young girls are abused by bands of louts imitating your bizarre world.”

 

Rebels within the BBFC issued this statement, "Up to the last war the Board clearly considered itself the guardian of public morality, allowing no departure from the acceptable code of conduct and behavior, the protector of the and image of the Britain in the other countries and the protector of cinema audiences from such dangerous themes as those involving controversial politics … the success of the cinematograph had been obtained by the fact that it was clean and healthy to which ladies and children could go in safety."

 

Perhaps the most absurd expression of the hysertia the film evoked came from the Scientific (or pseudo-Scientific) field. Dr. Malcolm Carruthers, Senior Lecture in Chemical Pathology at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, and Dr. Peter Taggart, Lecturer in Medicine at Middlesex Hospital, ran an experiment wherein 34 people, many of whom were Medical Professionals, who watched the film while hooked up to heart monitors. The very next day (so before the experiment could be peer-reviewed) the newspaper headline was "Viewers' Hearts Slowed by ‘A Clockwork Orange’."

 

Ummm … slowed heart-rates aren’t associated with impulsive violence, they are associated with falling asleep.

 

This hysteria didn’t suddenly appear in 1971, the limits of permissiveness proved a major political issue the year prior, with the surprise victory of Conservatives in June 1970, and the election of the above-mentioned Heath. (Heath, dogged by rumors of being a Homosexual for the whole of his career, became the subject of 42 complaints of child sexual abuse ten years after his 2005 death. All of the allegations concern the time before his Political elevation, but were unknown to the public until 2015. A few of these allegations were proved to be hoaxes and none were ever substantiated.)

 

Related to this, ‘70 saw the underground magazine "International Times” indicted for containing advertisements that were alleged "to induce readers to resort to the said advertisers for the purpose of homosexual practices and thereby to debauch and corrupt public morals [and] conspired to outrage public decency by inserting advertisements containing lewd, disgusting and offensive matter." A series of lithographs by Musician John Lennon were seized during a raid of a London Art Gallery. BBFC’s Trevelyan, who attempted to defend this specific film, went after a Warhol movie; not his adaptation of “A Clockwork …” but the Homosexual-friendly "Flesh" (1962), and that raid involved 32 Policeman.

 

Once making it to court, most, or all, of these cases fell apart, but they generated enough publicity that on March 12^th, 1970, Home Secretary James Callaghan, announced to the House of Commons:

 

“There is a great deal of pornography about that is causing a great deal of concern to many people in this country ... Broadly speaking, I want the House to know that I shall support the police … in investigating these matters. It may be that, On, occasions, they will make mistakes of judgement, but I know perfectly well that the country as a whole is extremely alarmed at what is going on in this field.”

 

It kept getting crazier. On April 21^st, 1971, Victor Noel-Paton, or Lord Ferrier, gave a speech in which he assured the House of Lords that, “Some time ago, a definite link between International Communism and the distribution to adolescents of certain pornographic material was established by a specific case in Scotland of which I can give the noble Earl details, if he wishes.”

 

One should note that the word “Homosexuality” has come up a lot in the previous paragraphs. There’s actually no Homosexuality in the book or film. The Moral Panic was really about everything happening, all at the same time. Of course, Homosexuals got blamed, but they always do.

 

According to Christian Bugge (and much of what you read in this section comes from his writing), before 1969, the BBFC had actually been more Liberal than ’69 to ’71, the period that most effected “A Clockwork …” (though I personally suspect that the BBFC’s greater, earlier, Liberalism might be because before ’69, the film-makers simply weren’t pushing their luck so much). Even given that Administration using more enforcement power, the outrage was increasing even faster, fueled in part because England’s censorship laws were full of incoherencies and loop-holes. It was a broken system, and everyone knew it had to be revised, so the only question was, who got to revise it, and what was their underlying agenda.

 

The forementioned "The Festival of Light," launched in 1971, and intended to warn the populace of the "moral pollution" that was besieging their cinemas. It was a Christian coalition, including Catholics, Mainstream Protestants, and Evangelicals (notably, USA Evangelicals were prominent). Their literature called on the English nation to recover, "the pure idealism of Christ, the Light of world, who taught that real love always wants what is best for others and defends the weak against exploitation by the corrupt."

 

Things got off to a bad start for them in September ’71 when their initial rally at the Westminster Central Hall was invaded by the Gay Liberation Front, dressed in drag, releasing mice, sounding horns, and turning off all the lights. Things seemed to improve after that, journalists noting that even with the frequent hecklers, the crowds were large, mostly positive towards the Festival’s goals, and the percentage of young people was far higher than expected. Despite this, the Festival proved a short-lived movement, though it did not entirely disappear, eventually morphing into what is now known as the Christian Action Research and Education movement.

 

Author Burgess, himself, was notoriously uncomfortable with the film, and more so as the decades unfolded. Early on, though, he was a defender of the film, but maybe more because he defending it from Censorship, as he novels could easily have faced the Whitehouse rage just as much as Kubrick movie. He joined Actor McDowell on the publicity tour, while the increasingly reclusive Kubrick chose to stay home (though he did give of interviews). Burgess made the following statements over the course of several interviews:

 

"It was the dawn of the age of candid photography that enabled Kubrick to exploit, to a serious end, those elements of the story which were meant to shock morally rather than merely titillate."

 

Then, explaining why the movie was more of a "shocker" than the book, "to tolchock a chelloveck in the kishkas does not sound so bad as booting an old man in the guts...But in a film little can be implied; [in film] everything has … to be shown. Language ceases to be an opaque protection against being appalled and takes a very secondary place."

 

Finally, "The sheer power and brilliance of Kubrick's ‘A Clockwork Orange’ undoubtedly contributed to the outrage at the film. The images were so effective that many viewers were led to believe that the film was more explicitly violent than it was."

 

Moreover, there were mounting reports of copy-cat crimes. Many of the claims were dubious, just tabloid sensationalism with little basis in fact. Journalist Edward Laxton wrote, “The terrifying violence of the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ fascinated a quiet boy from a Grammar School...And it turned him into a brutal murderer … The boy viciously battered to death a harmless old tramp as he acted out in real life a scene straight from the movie …” Only problem was that it turned out that the 16-year-old Perp, James Palmer, had never seen the film.

 

In another heavily sensationalized case, the film was linked to the murder of a 79-year-old woman, killed while "praying at her friend's grave side." But this Perp’s confession seems to belie any connection, "Sometimes I think I am Jack the Ripper, a vampire, or something like that."

 

The Criminal Court system got sucked into this. A Psychiatrist testified before Oxford Crown Court, "It seems as if, momentarily, the devil had been planted in the boys' subconscious ... planted there was ... the violence of ‘A Clockwork Orange’."  During a minor assault case regarding a 15-year-old boy beating a 16-year-old, the Judge, Desmond Bailey, stated the “A Clockwork …” presented "an unassailable argument for a return to censorship." And the Police themselves would state to the press that they were seeking a "Clockwork Orange Gang" in the context of crimes not unlike the murder that led to Evans’ and Allen’s execution in 1964 (meaning before the film was even made).

 

Opportunistic Defense Attorneys also jumped on the band-wagon. Mike Purdy, who had worked for the Metropolitan Police Solicitors, observed, and complained, that:

“[W]e kept seeing people on assault charges who had seen the film [claim to have] been impelled to go out and beat someone up. Most of us who worked at the court thought this a load of rubbish but unfortunately such cases got a lot of publicity and many judges would impose lesser sentences in these cases. It got to the stage when we referred to these cases as 'Clockwork Orange defenses' and it came almost boring as one after another tried using this excuse.”

 

There was some Official Censorship of the film, but only on the local level, and often mandated by people who hadn’t even seen the film before Banning it.

 

Burgess, again defending against censorship, "No evidence has ever been adduced in a court of law to prove beyond a doubt that a work of art can stimulate anti-social behavior … The notorious murderer [John] Haig who killed and drank their blood said he was inspired by the sacrament of the Eucharist - Does that mean we should ban the Bible?"

 

Kubrick responded even more forcibly, “No one is corrupted watching ‘A Clockwork Orange’ any more than they are by watching ‘Richard III.’ …  [T]the point I want to make is that the film has been accepted as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm, though a great deal of social harm has been done by those who have sought to protect society against works of art which they regarded as dangerous …

 

“The simplistic notion that films and TV can transform an otherwise innocent and good person into a criminal has strong overtones of the Salem witch trials. This notion is further encouraged by the criminals and their lawyers who hope for mitigation through this excuse. I am also surprised at the extremely illogical distinction that is so often drawn between harmful violence and the so-called harmless violence of, say, ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons or James Bond movies, where often sadistic violence is presented as unadulterated fun.

 

“I hasten to say, I don't think that they contribute to violence either. Films and TV are also convenient whipping boys for politicians because they allow them to look away from the social and economic causes of crime, about which they are either unwilling or unable to do anything.

 

“I think this suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men but it didn't do them, or anyone else, much good.”

 

But these statements fell short in the context of 1972, with violent crime still rising. It was also the worst year in Northern Island with orgies of Assassination and Terrorism that seemed more like reciprocal Gang-Warfare than acts serving a purposeful Ideology. Finally, a group of young men raped a 17-year-old girl in Britain as they sang “Singing in the Rain,” (lyrics by Arthur Freed and music by Nacio Herb Brown, from 1929) the same song sung by Alex in the film’s notorious torture/rape/murder scene (interestingly, an improvisational moment by Actor McDowell). That was copycat crime beyond question.

 

Following there were Death Threats were directed at Kubrick’s family. As Kubrick’s wife Christiane reported, “The final straw came when the police said we were in real danger. There were many moralists and religious groups and Mary Whitehouse, etcetera, who wanted us dead. I had my head in the sand — I didn’t think it was that bad — but when the police came I did get scared. We all did. So Stanley phoned Warner Bros [the studio behind the movie] and said please, could they pull the film. Those who had written to us had won.”

 

So, it wasn’t the English government, but Kubrick himself, who pulled the movie out of the theaters, but only England and Ireland. That self-imposed ban would remain in place until after Kubrick’s death in 1999, but Kubrick was also pulling a film that had already been in theaters for about two-years, so only the most serious film buffs even noticed.

 

I should note: While I was writing this essay, I also watched the movie, uncut, on Basic Cable. Oh, how times have changed.

 

In the decades that followed, “A Clockwork’s …” reputation continued to rise, though it remained unavailable legally in England or Ireland. Censorship rules kept going back and forth, like an empty bag held aloft by the winds, but the general tendency was towards toughly rules that proved increasingly difficult to enforce.

 

Censorship tightened after 1971 Stephen Murphy took over the BBCC. He was replaced by James Ferman in 1975, who was initially condemned for being too Liberal, until he was later accused of being too Conservative, most famous for stopping long-approved films, like the fore-mentioned “Straw Dogs,” from being released on VHS after the “Video Recordings Act 1984” (this became known as the “Video Nasties Controversy.”

 

Which brings us to 1993, so six-years before Kubrick’s ban was lifted, but it suddenly in the news again because of a horrific crime and Burgess’ public statements.

 

James Bulger was a 3-year-old boy who was kidnapped from a shopping mall while his mother was momentarily distracted. His abductors were two 10-year-olds and complete strangers to their victim, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. They tortured, sexually abused, mutilated, and then murdered him. It was not only a scandal in England, it was an international news story. The duo would prove to be the youngest persons convicted of murder in England in a century-or-more. Both boys were released, with conditions, in 2002, at age 17. Since then, Venables has been repeatedly re-incarcerated, mostly related to Child Pornography possession.

 

This crime was connected to the Horror film “Child’s Play 3” (1991), even though it was uncertain if one of the boys had even seen the film and the Police flatly denying the connection. This, of course, led to calls for even greater tightening of the Censorship laws.

 

This had an impression on Burgess, who was nearing 90-years-old. Six months before his death and already known to be uncomfortable with both his novel and the film version of it, made his boldest condemnation of it in a public forum. He decried the "cult of violence" in our media:

 

“It must be considered a kind of grace in my old age to abandon a conviction that the arts were sacrosanct, and that included the sub-arts, that they would never be accused of exerting either a moral or immoral influence, that they were incorrupt, incorruptive, incorruptible. I have quite recently changed my mind...I begin to accept that as a novelist, I belong to the ranks of the menacing.”

 

The Censorship pendulum swung back in the favor of more Liberalization in 1998, with “Straw Dogs” and film band from VHS, “The Exorcist” (1971) finally being permitted in that format. Freman retired from the BBCC the next year, the same year Kubrick died. This led to greater Liberalization still, and “A Clockwork …” returned to England in 2000.

 

That same year, England’s Channel 4, premiered a jaw-dropping, Horror-themed, extremely Dark, Skit-Comedy called “Jam.” The media’s Liberalization was brand know, and “Jam” explicitness and deliberate offensiveness, seem like a challenge for the BBCC to intervene.

 

And the BBCC did, and the show only ran six episodes, but it doesn’t seem like many were watching it anyway.

10.                  And now, just to make the Censorship controversy even more complicated, let me introduce you to Andrew Vachs

 

 

Andrew Vachs was raised in New York City and someone I’ve met twice, but if I told you I know him, I’d be lying. I do know a couple of people who knew him well and hold him in high regard. Before explaining how he fits into all of this, let me describe him first.

 

Average height, slim and obviously wiry-strong, he would strut into rooms like one of the Rockers of old that helped inspire Burgess’ novel. He’d be adorned in motorcycle boots, tight and apparently tailored blue-jeans, a black-leather jacket, his hair was a tight pompadour, and best of all, he had a pirate’s eye-patch (he’d lost an eye, and apparently preferred the sinister patch over a more socially-acceptable glass prosthetic). This is how he dressed at literary events wherein he sat next to British Baroness and Crime Novelist P.D. James.

 

Vachs is also a Human-Rights activist, working over-seas in Biafra, then as a Social Services Case Worker in New York City, and finally becoming an Attorney dealing exclusively with minors either abused by their guardians or the system. He’s also works on the integration and employment of young, violent, offenders returning to our larger society after their incarcerations.

 

But he’s best known as a Crime Novelist and says, probably not insincerely, that he turned to fiction because his non-fiction books on the same subjects had virtually no readership. But Vachs’ work, which is hugely entertaining, does not have the autopsy-specific dissection of our systems’ failures that he seems to have intended -- they are Revenge Fantasies, especially the Burke series (first novel published in 1985), concerning an ex-Con and unlicensed Private Eye who deals out savage Vigilante Justice towards those who abuse children and defenseless sex-workers with a Sadistic indulgence that none of us should support, but all of us secretly do. Yes, Revenge is the Lowest of our Moralities, but it still is a Morality.

 

I bring up Vachs because of the Censorship Debate. With their Sexual and Violent explicitness, the Burke novels would encourage the wrath of Whitehouse (though there was an ocean between them), but on the subject of Censorship, he was often surprising.

 

Above I quoted Kubrick, ““No one is corrupted watching ‘A Clockwork Orange’ any more than they are by watching ‘Richard III.’”

 

Is that really true? If the media can’t corrupt you, then why we the Nazis so devoted to propaganda? Near the top of this essay, I brought up the Nazi film, “Hitler Youth …” which was (dishonestly) based on the life and death of Real-World Herbert Norkus, a devoted Nazi who died at age 15 (same age as the fictional Alex) in a stupid street fight with Communists -- the Nazis and Communists were often clashing in the streets in 1932, acting much like “A Clockwork’s …” Droogs, or the Northern Irish IRA and Orangmen in 1972.

 

“Hitler Youth …” is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the most contemptable of Nazi propaganda films, that dubious honor falls on the (dishonest) documentary “The Eternal Jew” (1940) which was shown to encourage the staff at Nazi Death Camps.

 

Kubrick very effectively propagandized against B.F. Skinner in this film, and it may have had an impact. Given that, I have to ask, what else did Kubrick propagandized for?

 

Back to Vachs, because he, an obvious target of Censorship, spoke about Censorship in an interview decades ago. I apologize, I’ve long lost the interview, so you are stuck with my paraphrase:

 

“They say that art can elevate us, but then they say art can’t corrupt us. I don’t think you can’t have it both ways.”

 

Trailer:

A Clockwork Orange (1975) Official Trailer - Stanley Kubrick Movie - YouTube