clockwork works well

Rating: Null/10 (2 September 2002)

I have this interview of Kubrick and he said something interesting about'Clockwork' and censhorship.Here's an Excerpt from the interview: Kubrick: There is no positive evidence that violence in films or television causes social violence. To focus one's interest on this aspect of violence is to ignore the principal causes, which I would list as:
1. Original sin: the religious view. 2. Unjust economic exploitation: the Marxist view. 3. Emotional and psychological frustration: the psychological view.
4. Genetic factors based on the 'Y' chromosome theory: the biological view.
5. Man, the killer ape: the evolutionary view. To try to fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life. Furthermore to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis, in a posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures.

Is there any kind of violence in films which you might regard as socially dangerous?
SK:Well, I don't accept that there is a connection, but let us hypothetically say that there might be one. If there were one, I should say that the kind of violence that might cause some impulse to emulate it is the 'fun' kind of violence: the kind of violence we see in the Bond films, or in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Unrealistic violence, sanitized violence, violence presented as a joke. This is the only kind of violence that could conceivably cause anyone to wish to copy it, but I am quite convinced that not even this has any effect. There may even be an argument in support of saying that any kind of violence in films, in fact, serves a useful social purpose by allowing people a means of vicariously freeing themselves from the pent up, aggressive, aggressive emotions which are better expressed in dreams, or in the dreamlike state of watching a film, than in any form of reality or sublimation.

Isn't the assumption of your audience in the case of Clockwork Orange likely to be that you support Alex's point of view and in some way assume responsibility for it?
SK:I don't think that any work of art has a responsibility to be anything but a work of art. There obviously is a considerable controversy, just as there always has been, about what is a work of art, and I should be the last to try to define that. I was amused by Cocteau's Orpheé when the poet is given the advice: 'Astonish me'. The Johnsonian definition of a work of art is also meaningful to me, and that is that a work of art must either make life more enjoyable or more endurable. Another quality, which I think forms part of the definition, is that a work of art is always exhilarating and never depressing, whatever its subject matter may be.
In view of the particular exhilaration of Alex's religious fantasies, has the film run into trouble with clerical critics?
SK:The reaction of the religious press has been mixed, although a number of superb reviews have been written. One of the most perceptive reviews by the religious press, or any other press, appeared in The Catholic News written by John E. Fitzgerald, and I would like to quote one portion of it:
"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 buffoon but ends up 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 a man's choice is not to redeem him but merely to restrain him: otherwise we have a society of oranges, organic but operating like clock-work. 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. 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." 8/10