Kubrick's Reply | Malcolm's Reply
Fred M. Hechinger |
New York Times 2/13/72
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 the film represents. An alert
liberal should recognize the voice of fascism.
"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 or 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 bad seeds had been sown during the period of mindless youth-culture
exploitation. Anthony Quinn, who played Zorba the Prof in "R.P.M.,"
that ersatz ideological movie about the campus revolt, was the anti-liberals'
perfect prototype of the superannuated, well-intentioned but ultimately
ineffectual, obsolescent, self-destructive liberal. "Getting Straight"
delivered the same cumulative message. The liberal in "Easy Rider," a
pathetic, confused drunk, was intended to show the fate that ultimately awaits
the bleeding hearts. Even his death, at the hands of fascist bullies, carefully
avoided being either heroic or central to the picture's mood. Too bad about the
fuzzyminded fellow, but what can you expect.
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, anti-liberal 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.
That is the message lately flashed from the screen. The inherently
anti-liberal
nihilism of Hollywood's counterculture phase was the subliminal preparation --
filmland's Weimar Republic -- for the ugly "truth" to come. Mr.
McDowell, in trying to find some socially redeeming value (as the courts put it
when describing "good" pornography) in Clockwork's violence, muses
that "maybe that will lead to something actually being done about street
crime." What might that "something" be? Surely not anything
cooked up by those liberal "dreamers" who cringe when faced with
"the bloody truth." More likely a dragnet arrest of all those people
who look like trouble. How else would one sensibly deal with 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,
non-virile 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 Red
Guard 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,
anti-liberalism 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.
By Stanley Kubrick | New York Times 2/27/72
London -
"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 or 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 or 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
unfocussed a piece of alarmist journalism. Hechinger is probably quite sincere in what he feels. But what the witness
feels, as the judge said, is not evidence - the more so when the charge is one
of purveying "the essence of fascism."
"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.
It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one
Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative - but, in order to
avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage, rather than an
ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one to be regarded
as a tyrant (I hope). At least the film critic of The New York Times, Vincent
Canby, did not believe so. Though modestly disclaiming any theories of initial
causes and long range effects of films - a professional humility that contrasts
very markedly with Mr. Hechinger's lack of the same - Mr. Canby nevertheless
classified A Clockwork Orange as "a superlative example" of the kind
of movies that "seriously attempt to analyze the meaning of violence and
the social climate that tolerates it." He certainly did not denounce me as
a fascist, no more than any well balanced commentator who read "A Modest
Proposal" would have accused Dean Swift of being a cannibal.
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
buffoon, 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 achievements 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 ostracism. 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 hypocrisies 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."
Ardrey elaborates in African Genesis: "The idealistic American is an
environmentalist who accepts the doctrine of man's innate nobility and looks
chiefly to economic causes for the source of human woe. And so now, at the peak
of the American triumph over that ancient enemy, want, he finds himself harassed
by racial conflict of increasing bitterness, harrowed by juvenile delinquency
probing championship heights."
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.
To the Editor:
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.
Your humble narrator and friend,
Malcolm McDowell
London
From Lindsay Anderson's Diary - February 13, 1972
Malcolm rings me, wakes me up to say he's been called a goose-stepping Fascist
in the NY Sunday Times. Must help him reply. He comes in with the article, which
turns out to be much less than sensational, quite dull in fact, and not really
worth answering. Stanley [Kubrick] has written a 2,000 word answer and told him
he needn't bother. So of course he's determined. I write him a letter, which is
quite clever. He's delighted.'
© New York Times
Archived 200-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net