The Hechinger Debacle
A Clockwork Orange has attracted more than its share of
controversy, both as book and later as movie. Little wonder then that,
when the film was attacked in the New York Times op-ed pages as an
example of what the author, Fred Hechinger, called 'the voice of fascism',
no less an exigiter of the film than Stanley Kubrick himself joined in the
debate. Usually reticent regarding his personal interpretations, Kubrick,
in this instance, reveals himself to be a passionate exponent of specific
thematic ideas, and the way in which film can be used to exposit them. It
all began with a relatively harmless promotional piece; from the January
4, 1972 issue of The New York Times<.....
"One of the important things about seeing run-of-the-mill Hollywood films
eight times a week was that many of them were so bad," the 43-year-old
filmmaker said. "Without even beginning to understand what the problems of
making films were, I was taken with the impression that I could not do a
film any worse than the ones I was seeing. I also felt I could, in fact,
do them a lot better."
Few critics and moviegoers would dispute this. As the creator of Paths
of Glory, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space
Odyssey and now A Clockwork Orange, Mr. Kubrick has firmly
placed himself in the highest rank of international filmmakers. Last week
the New York Film Critics named A Clockwork Orange the best movie of
the year, and Mr. Kubrick was voted best director.
Mr. Kubrick now lives in a sprawling home in Borehamwood, 30 minutes
out of London, with his third wife, Christiane, an artist, and their three
daughters, together with seven cats and three golden retrievers. The house,
enclosed by a brick wall, also contains the director's offices and editing
facilities.
"It's very pleasant, very peaceful, very civilized, here," Mr. Kubrick
said in an interview. "London is, in the best sense, the way New York
must have been in about 1910. I have to live where I make my films and
as it has worked out, I have spent most of my time during the last 10
years in London."
Mr. Kubrick discusses his work -- and his career -- with some
difficulty. He speaks gently, and unaffectedly, with a New York accent,
but remains tense and somewhat distracted.
At a restaraunt near his home, he sat down wearing a heavy wind-
breaker, polished off his lunch in 15 minutes, then absently removed the
coat. He relaxed slowly and discussed A Clockwork Orange, which was
taken from the chilling novel by Anthony Burgess.
"The book was given to me by Terry Southern during one of the very
busy periods of the making of 2001," he recalled. "I just put it to
one side and forgot about it for a year and a half. Then one day I
picked it up and read it. The book had an immediate impact."
"I was excited by everything about it, the plot, the ideas, the
characters and, of course, the language. Added to which, the story was
of manageable size in terms of adapting it for films."
The film itself is a merciless vision of the near-future. Roving
gangs rape, kill, maim and steal. Citizens live in a vandalized pop art
culture, gaudy, icy and filthy. Politicians and the police are vicious.
The film's central character, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is transformed by
scientists from an underworld tough to a defenseless model citizen only
to be resurrected, at the end, to his savage original state by the "good"
forces.
"The story functions, of course, on several levels, political,
sociological, philosophical and, what's most important, on a kind of
dreamlike psychological-symbolic level," Mr. Kubrick said.
"Alex is a character who by every logical and rational consideration
should be completely unsympathetic, and possibly even abhorrent to the
audience," he went on. "And yet in the same way that Richard III gradually
undermines your disapproval of his evil ways, Alex does the same thing
and draws the audience into his own vision of life. This is the
phenomenon of the story that produces the most enjoyable and surprising
artistic illumination in the minds of an audience."
"I think an audience watching a film or a play is in a state very
similar to dreaming, and that the dramatic experience becomes a kind of
controlled dream," he said. "But the important point here is that the
film communicates on a subconscious level, and the audience responds to
the basic shape of the story on a subconscious level, as it responds to
a dream."
"On this level, Alex symbolizes man in his natural state, the way
he would be if society did not impose its 'civilizing' processes upon
him.
"What we respond to subconsciously is Alex's guiltless sense of
freedom to kill and rape, and to be our savage natural selves, and it is
in this glimpse of the true nature of man that the power of the story
derives."
As an artist, Mr. Kubrick has a point of view that is undeniably
bleak. "One of the most dangerous fallacies which has influenced a
great deal of political and philosophical thinking is that man is
essentially good, and that it is society which makes him bad," he said.
"Rousseau transferred original sin from man to society, and this view
has importantly contributed to what I believe has become a crucially
incorrect premise on which to base moral and political philosophy.
A film craftsman who associates say is obsessed by his work, Mr.
Kubrick rarely goes to parties or takes vacations. (His last one was
in 1961 when he completed Lolita). Characteristically, he is now
spending days and nights checking prints of A Clockwork Orange, and
expects to view about 50 in the next few months as the film is
released around the world.
"The laboratory is quite capable of making dreadful mistakes," said
the director, who was a Look magazine photographer at 17. "Just the other
night I saw Paths of Glory on television, and the lab had printed
several
reels a word out of synchronization. Printing machines can make the print
too dark, too light or the wrong colors. There are many variables
involved."
Discussing his role as director, Mr. Kubrick said: "In terms of
working with actors, a director's job more closely resembles that of a
novelist than of a Svengali. One assumes that one hires actors who are
great virtuosos. It is too late to start running an acting class in front
of the cameras, and essentially what the director must do is to provide
the right ideas for the scene, the right adverb, the right adjective.
"The director must always be the arbiter of esthetic taste," he
added. "The questions always arise: Is it believable, is it interesting,
is it appropriate? Only the director can decide this."
Mr. Kubrick said that film criticism, good or bad, rarely affected
him. "No reviewer has ever illuminated any aspect of my work for me,"
he observed.
The director said that his next film will deal with Napoleon, but
that someday he hopes to do a film in New York. "I would like to capture
some of the visual impressions I have of the Bronx and Manhattan," he
said. "I love the city -- at least I love the city that it used to be."
...but, even as SK waxed rhaspsodic over the charms of Olde New York, the
natives had begun cranking up their siege-engines...another interview
with Kubrick conducted by Craig McGregor formed the basis for the following article;
despite Kubrick's valiant efforts to explain, with all modesty and no small
effort at lucidity and reasonableness, his purposes in making the film,
McGregor manages to make his article a model of slanderous innuendo (or
something close to it, anyway). From The New York Times, Sunday,
January 30, 1972, Part II, Page 1...
But by the time you're 43, and Movie Director of the Year, and a Cult
Figure as well, you change. You live in a big manor house with a high wall
around it, and you drive a Mercedes, and communicate through a
radio-telephone, and what you do see of the real world you often don't
like; and so you end up, years later, making a movie like A Clockwork
Orange: a macabre, simplistic, chillingly pessimistic film whose main
themes are rape, violence, sexual sadism, brutality, and the eternal
savagery of man.
"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage," says Kubrick,
reaching for the iced water. "He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly,
unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved
- that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature
of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create
social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed
to failure."
Kubrick's vision of society is just as bleak -- it can make
man even worse than he naturally is. "The idea that social restraints
are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man," he
says. "But in this movie you have an example of social institutions
gone a bit berserk. Obviously social institutions faced with the
law-and-order problem might choose to become grotesquely oppressive.
The movie poses two extremes: it shows Alex in his precivilized state,
and society committing a worse evil in attempting to cure him."
Though A Clockwork Orange is ostensibly about the future,
Kubrick thinks it is of immediate relevance to cities in the United
States. "New York City, for example, is the sort of place where people
feel very unsafe. Nearly everyone seems to know someone who's been
mugged. All you have to do is add in that a little economic
disappointment, and the increasingly trendy view that politics are
a waste of time and problems have to be solved instantly, and I
could see very serious social unrest in the United States which
would probably be resolved by a very authoritarian government.
"And then you could only hope you would have a benevolent
despot -- rather than a Stalin of the Right."
In A Clockwork Orange, then, Kubrick feels he is satirizing
both Man and Society. The trouble is, for most of the film, it's
impossible to tell from what standpoint the satire is being made;
Kubrick has deliberately changed Anthony Burgess's novel to make all
the victims of Alex's aggression even more detestable than Alex
himself. Such values as appear to exist are shifting, ambiguous,
perverse: satire is a moral act, but Kubrick's film ends by being
glitteringly amoral.
The closest it gets to a point of view is the prison chaplain's
thunderous proclamation of the need for choice, which has the weight
of Kubrick's own deeply held belief behind it: "It's the only non-
satirical view in the film, I mean he's right!" says Kubrick. But
the film's ending which also celebrates free will, is "obviously
satirical -- you couldn't take it seriously." We (and Alex) are back
to where we started.
Yet Kubrick maintains he doesn't feel "isolated" from people. "I have a
wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka,
sitting alone and suffering." In fact, he says he would like to make a
movie, sometime, about contemporary life -- if only he could find the right
story. "A great story is a kind of miracle," he says. "I've never written
a story myself, which is probably why I have so much respect for it. I
started out, before I became a film director, always thinking, you know, if
I couldn't play on the Yankees I'd like to be a novelist. The people I
first admired were not film directors but novelists. Like Conrad."
As for the critics -- "I find a lot of critics misunderstand my films;
probably everybody's films. Very few of them spend enough time thinking
about them. They look at the film once, they don't really remember what
they saw, and they write the review in an hour. I mean, one spent more
time on a book report in school. I'm very pleased with A Clockwork
Orange. I think it's the most skillful movie I've made. I can see almost
nothing wrong with it."
Given his despairing view of man and society, it's hardly surprising
that Kubrick has turned away from the contemporary world. He immerses
himself in his work. His last three movies have been set in the future,
his next will be set in the past. And in recent years he has moved into
his own private form of transcendentalism.
Why?
"Well, I mean, one would hate to think that this was it."
How did Kubrick come to such a pessimistic view of mankind?
"From observation," he replies laconically. "Knowing what has happened
in the world, seeing the people around me." He says it has nothing to
do with anything that's happened to him personally, nor with his Jewish
background. "I mean, it's essentially Christian theology anyway, that
view of man."
He's wrong, of course. Kubrick's concept of man as essentially
evil is straight Manichean, one of the most perverse yet persistent
of Christian heresies, and it's hardly an accident that he should
seize upon a novel from the tortuous Catholic conscience of a writer
like Burgess: says Kubrick, "I just found I responded emotionally to
the book very intensely."
He doesn't believe that a work of art should have as its
primary purpose "a political or philosophical policy statement," and
Burgess's novel had everything: great story, great ideas, and a main
character, Alex, who summarizes what Kubrick thinks natural man is all
about. "You identify with Alex because you recognize yourself," he
says. "It's for this reason that some people become uncomfortable."
And so, for the first half of the movie, Kubrick throws endless,
garishly imagined scenes of sadism, gang rape, torture and terrorism onto
the screen; dwelling on each with loving and lascivious detail. To the
criticism that this is gratuitous, because it has little intellectual and
no satiric point behind it, he has a standard reply: "It's all in the
plot." He continues: "Part of the artistic challenge of the character is to
present the violence as he sees it, not with the disapproving eye of the
moralist but subjectively as Alex experiences it."
Kubrick believes the cinema is a sort of daydreaming, wherein
we can enact fantasies which our conscious mind normally represses.
But for some reason or other he doesn't believe he's doing that in
A Clockwork Orange, neither for himself (though he admits he is
fascinated by violence) nor for those who might like a bit of the
old vicarious rape, torture and ultraviolence in superscreen
glory-color.
"That wasn't my motivation. I don't think it has that effect."
Yet surely the violence and sexual sadism was one of the
reasons Burgess's novel appealed to him? Kubrick is plainly ambivalent
about that. "Anyway, I don't think it's socially harmful. I don't
think any work of art can be," he concludes. "Unfortunately, I don't
think it can be socially constructive either."
But don't works of art affect people at all? "They affect
us when they illuminate something we already feel, they don't change us.
It's not the same thing." Art doesn't influence us? "I certainly
wouldn't have said my life has been influenced by any work of art."
So what does that leave Stanley Kubrick doing?
Making entertainments, I guess. And, come to think of it,
that's all A Clockwork Orange is: a marvelously executed,
sensationalist, confused and finally corrupt piece of pop trivia,
signifying nothing. The old horrorshow (Burgesspeak for "good")
has always been a surefire theatrical recipe, and Kubrick's mod
sci-fi movie will probably be a great success. It's like a high
class Russ Meyer pornyshow (no wonder these lipsmacking stills
should seem so perfectly at home in this month's Playboy) with
some Andy Warhol freakery thrown in for shockpower. But, like
2001, its intellectual poverty limits it to popfad art. Ultimate
effect? None.
And, saddest part of all, that's just how Stanley Kubrick
seems to think it has to be.
...and that was not all -- on page thirteen of the same section in the same
issue, there was this, written from an interview with Malcom McDowell; The New
York Times, Sunday, January 30, 1972, Part II, Page 13....
And then, abruptly, from one of his brief contemplative
silences, comes this: "People are basically bad, corrupt, I
always sensed that. Man has not progressed one inch, morally,
since the Greeks. Liberals, they hate Clockwork because
they're dreamers and it shows them realities, shows 'em not
tomorrow but now. Cringe, don't they, when faced with the
bloody truth?"
Not that those are his opening remarks: there's a
gentlemanly reserve about him at first. Though he has been
famous for three years, since his striking impersonation of a
young revolutionary in Lindsay Anderson's if...., he's not
accustomed to talking about himself.
Of the dawn of A Clockwork Orange, for instance, he
simply says, "Uh, well, Kubrick rang me up one day two years
ago; we'd never met. 'Can you come and see me?' he said.
Out at Borehamwood, where he lives, we chatted, then he said,
'Got a book for you to read, by Anthony Burgess.' Asked him
what it's about. 'You tell me after you read it,' he said.
Read it three times, told him I thought it a modern classic.
He said, 'Great, Malc, great.' Asked him to come to my house
and talk, not realizing that Stanley never leaves home unless
absolutely forced to, but he came, and again we chatted. Finally
I said, 'Uh, Stanley, you're going to make a film of this?
And you want me to play it?' He looked quite startled. 'Oh,
yeah, Malc, that's what this is all about.'"
Kubrick, who vastly admired if...., hadn't considered
anyone else for the role, but by the time shooting began nine
months later, Malcolm had finished Long Ago, Tomorrow and had
studied the Clockwork script relentlessly, "and still I had no
idea of how Stanley would handle this story, and no idea of how
to play my part. I couldn't draw on experiences of my own, and
with Alex, you're not so much playing a character as this -- force.
"And much of the film was never in the scenario. When
we got to the scene where the writer is beaten and his wife raped,
Stanley suddenly called, 'Hey, Malcolm, can you sing and dance?'
I can't do either. I said, 'Oh, yes, Stanley, sure,' and just
sort of started dancing, then kicking the writer. And I began
'Singin' in the Rain,' as it's the only song I know. Within
three hours, Stanley had bought the rights to it. You see, this
was the kind of thing I knew I must look for: Alex larking about
happily while doing this terrible violence. It's the kind of
contradiction, the extra dimension that I had to find for him."
If Kubrick is not exactly given to logorrhea, neither,
according to Malcolm, is Bryan Forbes, or Joseph Losey, who, in
1970, guided him and Robert Shaw through the markedly ignored "Figures
in a Landscape." Possibly all his directors have sensed that they'd
best leave him to his own instincts. "The cripple in Long Ago,
Tomorrow, now he was quite easy, he's a bit of a lad, y'know, and
one has been a bit of a lad, and it's not hard to imagine his
bitterness when he's paralyzed.
"But I was naive. I thought I'd learned everything about acting from
if.... and I hadn't scratched the bloody surface. One thing I
discovered: it's no good talking about a character, what he had for
breakfast an' like that, who the hell cares? I want to know what the
scene's about, and then concentrate every emotion, like a ray gun, on that
and make the audience believe that, if you aren't totally
concentrated your eyes go dead, and on the screen it shows, even in the
briefest shot. Remember in A Clockwork Orange when I come home
after prison and my parents have replaced me with this lodger? And I say,
'There's a strange fellow sitting on the sofa, munchy-wunching lomticks of
toast.' Well, the scene went fine, but somehow I had a hell of a time
coming through the door naturally at the start of it. Can you remember me
entering? No? Good, terrific! If you could, I'd have done it all
wrong...
"An' it's all bloody 'ard work, it is," he adds, grinning for
the first time, demoniacally. Room service has not yet accomplished
delivery of the coffee he's ordered; jumping up, he dials and deals
wryly but politely with them, then glances with a gargoyle smile at
the typed biography of him that the film's press agent has left in
the suite. 'Only one page, eh? For Long Ago, Tomorrow it was two."
It's stated on the sheet that he was born in June, 1943, in
Leeds, which is in England's gray industrial north. Asked about that,
he frowns, and the dark sky of his eyes looks threatening. Again his
enunciation is precise. "In a sense, the British class system is good,
I agree with it, because if you're born working-class as I was, you've
got something to fight against. That's why New York is such an
incredible city, you've got to fight it! If I'd not been aware of class
early on, I'd still be working placidly at the coffee factory."
Which is what he did do for, for a time: instead of attending a
university, he attended customers in his father's public house in
Liverpool, before matriculating to a salesman's job with the Yorkshire
office of an American coffee firm. "Yorkshire is England's largest county,
and I had to drive the whole of it, selling coffee from restaurant to
prison to mental home to nuclear power station, and it was horrendous."
His girl's teacher was "a dear old lady of 82 who loved to tell stories
about her silent picture days. I found her totally absorbing. She was a
parent-figure -- that's getting pretty Jungian -- a light to follow, she
convinced me that acting was not a degrading profession. I knew I'd been
muckin' about for years waiting for this." After months of private study
("I had to get rid of that Yorkshire accent"), he joined a repertory
theater on the Isle of Wight ("I'd learned my entire part in the first play
before I arrived. I actually did not know there would be rehearsals"), and
a year and three auditions later was accepted by the Royal Shakespeare
Company. "And spent 18 months carrying a spear. I loathed it. With
venom. The world's great ensemble troupe? It's an arse-creeping
hierarchy without the slightest interest in what talent there may be among
the lesser company members. Herded us 12 to a dressing room like cattle.
I never even met Peter Hall, the director then, until the day I left."
He worked for a while as a messenger, began getting television roles,
and Lindsay Anderson, who'd seen him on the tube, called about a picture he
was planning, set in a British public school. When "if...." opened, it
looked as though Malcolm would never again carry a message, or a spear.
"Of course I had luck," he says of this rapid ascent, frowning. "My
mother and dad -- they're retired now, got a little house and garden outside
London -- and my two sisters, they're proud, my mother likes to show the
awards I won. But I'm not going to do the false modesty bit with you. I'm
not really a modest person. I've not said this before, it sounds conceited
and presumptuous, but I do consider myself an artist. I know exactly what
I will do: direct a film, within five years, when I've accumulated enough
knowledge. It's the director who's the real film artist. You didn't think
I wanted to be just an actor, did you? Never! I think that if you're
semi-coherent, semi-intelligent...you could not remain long an actor,
unless you're content to let yourself become a monster. That's the only
way to survive it."
He's speaking quietly again, subdued by the melancholy that frequents
hotel rooms at dusk. A dark, beautiful girl enters, they smile,
introductions are made, she murmurs politely and retires to the bedroom.
She is Margot Bennett, once an actress, once the wife of Keir Dullea, who
has been with Malcolm two years; all further questions about her he
cheerfully deflects by pouring Scotch and lighting lamps. Life should be
simple, he asserts: he lives in a studio in Kensington and isn't moving
soon. "I have only one friend whom I lean on heavily. When I can't see
the wood for the trees, I've got to go to him. He's a director: Lindsay
Anderson."
Malcolm's next movie, O Lucky Man, is based on his own idea and
Anderson will direct. "I'd play the tiniest part for Lindsay," he adds,
and in the same breath, "Come on, let's go out for a drink." Downstairs in
the bar he orders a small white wine and indicates that he has not been
over-awed by the reporters who've interviewed him. "They ask, 'What is
Clockwork Orange about?' and 'Are you in favor of violence?'
Jesus! I hate violence, but it's a fact, it's the human condition. Why
would movie violence necessarily make people who see it more violent?
Movies don't alter the world, they pose questions and warnings. The
Clockwork violence is stylized, surreal, Kubrick uses it only to
warn us."
Of something that's already past remedy? "No, I see a hope in this
vision of Stanley's. People are discussing Clockwork endlessly, and
maybe, maybe that will lead to something actually being done about street
crime. The English are violent, too, no question; but you've got 88 rapes
a day in New York alone. Okay, but you are getting together about your
police, with the Knapp Commission. Enough of that sort of thing, and
you'll see improvements. Why, this is a country where things like the
Pentagon Papers can get published! That's a mark of hope."
The stage was set. From The New York Times, Sunday, February 13,
1972, the essay by Fred Hechinger....
"Movies don't alter the world, they pose questions and warnings,"
said Mr. McDowell. This is close to the truth. Movies reflect the mood
of the world because they pander to the frame of mind of their potential
customers.
During the Depression years, Hollywood offered those eye-filling and
mind-soothing productions that took a despondent public's thoughts off the
grim realities. Occasionally, the diverting tinsel was laced with some
"Grapes of Wrath" realism.
During and after World War II, Hollywood reflected the American mind
with an outpouring of syrupy patriotism and comic-strip anti-Nazism. Minor
modifications allowed the technique to be adapted, as in The Manchurian
Candidate, to the subsequent spirit of the Cold War.
More recently, the movies, chasing the youth buck, have wallowed in
campus revolution, alienation, radical relevance and counter-culture.
The plastic greening of Hollywood did little, one must agree with Mr.
McDowell's thesis, to alter the world: it was merely the industry's
frantic attempt to keep abreast of society's changing script.
It is precisely because Hollywood's antennae have in the past been
so sensitive in picking up the national mood that the anti-liberal trend
should indeed "pose questions and warnings," though not in the manner
intended either by Mr. McDowell or by Stanley Kubrick, Clockwork's
director.
The script writers were accurately picking up the vibrations of a
deeply anti-liberal totalitarian nihilism emanating from beneath the
surface of the counter-culture. They were pandering as skillfully to the
new mood as they had earlier to The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Now the virus is no longer latent. The message is stridently anti-
liberal, with unmistakably fascist overtones.
Listen to Mr. McDowell: "People are basically bad, corrupt. I always
sensed that. Man has not progressed one inch, morally, since the Greeks.
Liberals, they hate 'Clockwork' because they're dreamers and it shows them
the realities, shows 'em not tomorrow, but now. Cringe, don't they,
when faced with the bloody truth?"
This is more than a statement of what Mr. McDowell considers to be
a political fact. There is a note of glee in making the liberals cringe
by showing them what heads-in-the-clouds fools they are. If they were
smarter, would they not know "the bloody truth" and, one must conclude,
adjust to it with a pinch of Skinnerian conditioning?
Is this an uncharitable reading of Mr. McDowell's -- and the film's --
thesis? The thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt is the
essence of fascism. It underlies every demand for the kind of social
"reform," that keeps man down, makes the world safe for anti-democracy
through the "law and order" ministrations of the police state.
It might be possible to dismiss the McDowell weltanschauung as the
aberration of an actor dazzled by critical acclaim and dabbling in
political
ideology. But he, in fact, accurately echoes his master's voice. "Man
isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage," says Stanley Kubrick. "He
is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything
where his own interests are involved....And any attempt to create social
institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to
failure."
If this is the motion picture industry's emerging view -- as it seems
to be, not only in Clockwork but in a growing number of films such
as
Straw Dogs and even, on the precinct rather than the global level,
"The
French Connection" -- then what sort of social institutions are to be
built on that pessimistic, antiliberal view of man's nature? They will --
they must, if logic prevails -- be the repressive, illiberal, distrustful,
violent institutions of fascism. "We hold these truths to be
self-evident..."
Ridiculous! "Government by the people..." Absurd! Jefferson, not to
mention Christ, were clearly liberals who could not face "the bloody
truth."
It takes the likes of Hitler or Stalin, and the violence of inquisitions,
pogroms and purges, to manage a world of ignoble savages.
Straw Dogs may have been even more perceptive in picking up the
neo-fascist message. Its symbolic man is the confused, nonviolent,
cringing, idiotic, nonvirile liberal who in the end is redeemed -- by
what? By proving his manhood through savagery among the savages. Liberals,
Awake! Be as lip-smacking bloody as anybody. That will take care of the
street crime problem, too. And perhaps make the trains run on time.
Some of us unreconstructed liberals will, of course, continue to hope
that the industry has for once picked up the wrong vibrations, that it is
for the first time misreading the nation's mood; that the majority of
Americans do not believe, as those who unleashed the stormtroopers and the
M.K.V.D. and the RedGuard said they believed, that Man the Beast
will
be conquered and domesticated only through the purifying powers of
violence.
Optimism is the incurably silly liberal quality which the new celluloid
realism considers ludicrous. One prays that American moviemakers
may identify in the popular mood some of those vibrations that led to the
creation of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Europeans who knew
fascism apparently still believe that the evil and the violence, rather
than being inherent in man and thus inevitable, became dominant only
because the few succeeded in ruthlessly turning violence into political
power over the many. The liberals were not without blame, but they were
not the villains. In the end, their faults seemed excusable when measured
against the monstrosity of those who regarded men as ignoble savages.
The liberal makers of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis do not seem
to
have cringed at the bloody memory of those black days in Europe when,
antiliberalism having triumphed, the human vermin crawled out of the
clockwork.
If there is anything to make American liberals cringe here and now,
it is the possibility that, in a reversal of history, Europe may this
time be more sophisticated than America about the nature of the fascist
threat. This is why American liberals have every right to hate the
ideology behind A Clockwork Orange and the trend it symbolizes.
One would not expect Kubrick to take such provocation sitting down;
herewith is Kubrick's response; it was printed on February 27, 1972,
section 2, pp. 1 & 11...
NOW KUBRICK FIGHTS BACK
To the Editor:
"An alert liberal," says Fred M. Hechinger, writing about my film A
Clockwork Orange, "should recognize the voice of fascism." They don't
come any more alert than Fred M. Hechinger. A movie critic, whose job
is to analyze the actual content of a film, rather than second-hand
interviews, might have fallen down badly on sounding the "Liberal
Alert" which an educationist like Mr. Hechinger confidently set
jangling in so many resonant lines of alarmed prose.
As I read them, the image that kept coming to mind was of Mr.
Hechinger, cast as the embattled liberal, grim-visaged the way Gary
Cooper used to be, doing the long walk down main street to face the
high noon of American democracy, while out of the Last Chance saloon
drifts the theme song, "See what the boys in the backlash will have
and tell them I'm having the same," though sung in a voice less like
Miss Dietrich's than Miss Kael's. Alert filmgoers will recognize that
I am mixing my movies. But then alert educationists like Mr. Hechinger
seemingly don't mind mixing their metaphors: "Occasionally, the
diverting tinsel was laced with some 'Grapes of Wrath' realism," no
less.
It is baffling that in the course of his lengthy piece encouraging
American liberals to cherish their "right" to hate the ideology behind
A Clockwork Orange, Mr. Hechinger quotes not one line, refers to not
one scene, analyzes not one theme from the film -- but simply lumps it
indiscriminately in with a "trend" which he pretends to distinguish
("a deeply anti-liberal totalitarian nihilism") in several current
films. Is this, I wonder, because he couldn't actually find any
internal evidence to support his trend-spotting? If not, then it is
extraordinary that so serious a charge should be made against it (and
myself) inside so fuzzy and unfocused a piece of alarmist journalism.
"Is this an uncharitable reading of...the film's thesis?" Mr.
Hechinger asks himself with unwonted if momentary doubt. I would
reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an
insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from
advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the
new psychedelic fascism -- the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic,
drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings -- which
many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and
the beginning of zombiedom.
Anthony Burgess is on record as seeing the film as "a Christian
Sermon" -- and lest this be regarded as a piece of special pleading by
the original begetter of A Clockwork Orange, I will quote the
opinion
of John E. Fitzgerald, the film critic of The Catholic News, who, far
from believing the film to show man, in Mr. Hechinger's "uncharitable"
reading, as "irretrievably bad and corrupt," went straight to the heart
of the matter in a way that shames the fumbling innuendos of Mr.
Hechinger.
"In one year," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote, "we have been given two
contradictory messages in two mediums. In print, we've been told (in
B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity) that man is but a
grab-bag
of conditioned reflexes. On screen, with images rather than words,
Stanley Kubrick shows that man is more than a mere product of heredity
and-or environment. For as Alex's clergyman friend (a character who
starts out as a fire-and-brimstone spouting buffon, but ends up as the
spokesman for the film's thesis) says: 'When a man cannot choose, he
ceases to be a man.'
"The film seems to say that to take away man's choice is not to
redeem but merely to restrain him; otherwise we have a society of
oranges, organic but operating like clockwork. Such brainwashing,
organic and psychological, is a weapon that 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."
"It takes the likes of Hitler or Stalin, and the violence of
inquisitions, pogroms and purges to manage a world of ignoble savages,"
declares Mr. Hechinger in a manner both savage and ignoble. Thus,
without citing anything from the film itself, Mr. Hechinger seems to
rest his entire case against me on a quote appearing in The New York
Times of January 30, in which I said: "Man isn't a noble savage, he's
an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be
objective about anything where his own interests are involved...and any
attempt to create social institutions based on a false view of the nature
of man is probably doomed to failure." From this, apparently, Mr.
Hechinger concluded, "the thesis that man is irretrievably bad and
corrupt is the essence of fascism," and summarily condemned the film.
Mr. Hechinger is entitled to hold an optimistic view of the nature
of man; but this does not give him the right to make ugly assertions of
fascism against those who do not share his opinion.
I wonder how he would reconcile his simplistic notions with the
views of such an acknowledged anti-fascist as Arthur Koestler, who
wrote in his book The Ghost in the Machine, "The Promethean myth has
acquired an ugly twist: the giant reaching out to steal the lightning
from the Gods is insane...When you mention, however tentatively, the
hypothesis that a paranoid streak is inherent in the human condition,
you will promptly be accused of taking a one-sided, morbid view of
history; of being hypnotized by its negative aspects; of picking out
the black stones in the mosaic and neglecting the triumphant achieve-
ments of human progress...To dwell on the glories of man and ignore the
symptoms of his possible insanity is not a sign of optimism but of
ostrichism. It could only be compared to the attitude of that jolly
physician who, a short time before Van Gogh committed suicide, declared
that he could not be insane because he painted such beautiful pictures."
Does this, I wonder, place Mr. Koestler on Mr. Hechinger's newly
started blacklist?
It is because of the hysterical denunciations of self-proclaimed
"alert liberals" like Mr. Hechinger that the cause of liberalism is
weakened, and it is for the same reason that so few liberal-minded
politicians risk making realistic statements about contemporary social
problems.
The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began with the
opening sentence of Rousseau's Emile: "Nature made me happy and
good,
and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault." It is based on two
misconceptions: that man in his natural state was happy and good, and
that primal man had no society.
Robert Ardrey has written in The Social Contract, "The organizing
principle of Rousseau's life was his unshakable belief in the original
goodness of man, including his own. That it led him into most towering
hypocrises must follow from such an assumption. More significant are
the disillusionments, the pessimism, and the paranoia that such a belief
in human nature must induce."
Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man,
not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves
and reality. This view, to use Mr. Hechinger's frame of reference, is
solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads
to despair.
The Enlightenment declared man's rational independence from the
tyranny of the Supernatural. It opened up dizzying and frightening
vistas of the intellectual and political future. But before this
became too alarming, Rousseau replaced a religion of the Supernatural
Being with a religion of natural man. God might be dead. "Long live
man."
"How else," writes Ardrey, "can one explain -- except as a
substitute for old religious cravings -- the immoderate influence of
the rational mind of the doctrine of innate goodness?"
Finally, the question must be considered whether Rousseau's view
of man as a fallen angel is not really the most pessimistic and hopeless
of philosophies. It leaves man a monster who has gone steadily
away from his nobility. It is, I am convinced, more optimistic to
accept Ardrey's view that, "...we were born of risen apes, not fallen
angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we
wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles and our irreconcilable
regiments?
"For our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies, however
seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may
be converted into battlefields; our dreams, however rarely they may be
accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how
magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not
our corpses."
Mr. Hechinger is, no doubt, a well-educated man, but the tone of his
piece strikes me as also that of a well-conditioned man, who responds to
what he expects to find, or has been told, or has read about, rather
than to what he actually perceives A Clockwork Orange to be. Maybe
he should deposit his grab-bag of conditioned reflexes outside and go
in to see it again. This time, exercising a little choice.
...and finally, in the same issue, The New York Times also printed
a letter from Malcolm McDowell (the Kubrickean symmetry now complete):
This letter is in reply to Fred M. Hechinger's article, which was
prompted in part by an interview that I gave to Tom Burke. I am an
actor, not a philosopher -- nor, thank God, a journalist. If a New
York Times interviewer questions me on philosophical, social or
political issues, he must expect to get answers that are inspired by
feeling and intuition, rather than by the steely logic of a Fred M.
Hechinger. But my comment on the sentimentalism of the "liberals" was
not gleeful -- it was despondent. (If I had been writing an article
instead of replying to questions, I would have put the word "liberal"
in quotes.)
As an actor, of course, I spoke emotionally -- from a violent
emotional reaction to the violence and hysteria with which New York
assails any visitor, and a violent and emotional reaction against the
complacency or cowardice of "intellectuals" too scared to face or to
interpret the harsh allegory which I believe Mr. Kubrick's picture to
be.
To call A Clockwork Orange fascist is as silly as to say that
if.... preached violence. But some people will never read the
writing on the wall.
MALCOLM McDOWELL
KUBRICK TELLS WHAT MAKES CLOCKWORK ORANGE TICK
LONDON, Jan. 3 -- Stanley Kubrick grew up on the Grand Concourse and 196th
Street in the Bronx, attending Taft High School with some infrequency but
eagerly showing up at the Loew's Paradise and R.K.O. Fordham twice a week
to view the double features.
by Bernard Weinraub
Special to The New York TimesOffice at Home
>A Merciless Vision
Man in Natural State
Providing the Right Ideas
NICE BOY FROM THE BRONX?
So what is a nice Jewish boy from The Bronx like Stanley Kubrick doing
making bizarre films like A Clockwork Orange? Well, says Stanley,
everybody starts off being a nice boy from somewhere. He smiles. He has a
good sense of humor. He is eating halibut in a restaurant, he is wearing
his habitual drab olive flak jacket, and with his brooding, bearded face he
looks not unlike the Napoleon he is going to make his next movie about. He
doesn't look like a genius, no apocalyptic lumina haloes his head, and with
his soft New York accent he could almost still be that mythical nice boy
from The Bronx.
by Craig McGregor*
*
*
*
MALCOLM McDOWELL: THE LIBERALS, THEY HATE 'CLOCKWORK'
There is literally nothing about Malcolm McDowell that remotely
suggests the dashing ogre Alex of A Clockwork Orange, or even
the more earthly, recognizable paraplegic of Bryan Forbes's
Long Ago, Tomorrow, none of the odd, sardonic, almost Gothic
intensity he is capable of on camera. In this quiet hotel
suite, he could be a forthright, articulate scholar just in on
holiday from Oxford. But you note something erratic behind
the alert eyes, which are the color of West Point uniforms.
by Tom Burke*
*
*
A LIBERAL FIGHTS BACK
"Liberals," said Malcolm McDowell, star of A Clockwork Orange,
"hate
that film." The implication is that there is something shameful in the
liberals' reaction -- that at the very least they don't know the score.
Quite the opposite is true. Any liberal with brains should hate
Clockwork, not as a matter of artistic criticism but for the trend
this film represents. An alert liberal should recognize the voice of
fascism.
by Fred M. Hechinger*
*
*
*
*
STANLEY KUBRICK
London.
MALCOLM McDOWELL OBJECTS, TOO
To the Editor:
Your humble narrator and friend,
London.