As a reward for the non-Dutch speaking visitors of this blog (apparently there are some thousands of them!), I will post some English content from time to time. Now that my hometown Ghent hosts its yearly Film Fest again, I searched my writing archive for a paper about movies. This one on Stanley Kubrick was written more than 10 years ago, but still feels relevant. Enjoy!
The innovative works of director Stanley Kubrick seem to be overshadowed by the controversy enclosing them. One of the most fiercely discussed debates concerning Kubrick’s films was the famous Hechinger Debacle about the impact of violence on screen. As I follow its occurrence in all possible shapes up to the film A Clockwork Orange (1971), you will be withheld from the sexually provocative items in Kubrick’s films, like bisexuality in Spartacus (1960), paedophilia in Lolita (1962), or adultery in Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Already in his earliest works, Kubrick tackles the theme of war and might. His first long-player Fear and Desire (1953) concerns a team of soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a fictional war. In the finale, the men realize the faces of their enemies are identical to their own (the characters are played by the same actors). This presumably expresses Kubrick’s early pacifist vision on the pointlessness of war.
With Paths of Glory (1957), as critic Kim Newman argues,
‘Stanley Kubrick kept returning to the theme of war. Humphrey Cobb’s novel [Paths of Glory, which served as the basis for Kubrick’s film of the same name], about an actual shameful incident which took place in the French army in World War I, was adapted (…) into a powerful film – one that is all the more effective for the director’s matter-of-fact coolness in dealing with the unthinkably horrible.’ (SCHNEIDER, S. J., et al., 1001 Movies You Must See before You Die, Quinted Publishing Limited, London, 2004, 960 pp.)
The story of three so-called coward soldiers being accused and executed by their hypocritical superiors reveals the cynical corruptness of the military police. Although presenting rather idealistic and pacifistic ideas, the film provoked a lot of negative response from war veterans. It was put out of production for some time in Belgium, while France kept prohibiting displays until 1974 and Israel, the Berlin film festival and the American army bases even put it on the black list.
Kubrick’s next mention of the madness of war is cloaked in the black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a satire on the patriotism and paranoia brewing in the early sixties. Kubrick’s peaceful attitude seems to be gradually gliding into a more ironic, pessimistic sense of detachment. Despite the light-hearted tone, Kubrick shows a sexually frustrated and fascistic male society, which proves to be unable to cope with stress. Evidently, Kubrick sensed quite a lot of US government objections. Later on, as Angela Errigo says,
‘Kubrick would return (…) to institutional and political violence in A Clockwork Orange, and to the savage, surreal madness of war in Full Metal Jacket (1987).’ (SCHNEIDER, S. J., et al., 1001 Movies You Must See before You Die, Quinted Publishing Limited, London, 2004, 960 pp.)
Although Kubrick already showed the dark and immoral aspect of violence in Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory, the link with psychotic behaviour is but mentioned in A Clockwork Orange, showing a total loss of trust in the innate goodness of mankind. The film was extremely controversial due to its depictions of teenage gangs committing acts of rape and violence. Kubrick and his family even received death threats so he was forced to stop the screenings. Even Anthony Burgess, writer of the 1962 novel on which the film was based, would eventually withdraw admitting that art can truly lead to violence. Together with Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), A Clockwork Orange gave rise to a media debate on the influence of cinematic violence on society, known as The Hechinger Debacle.
This polemic discussion was launched by Fred M. Hechinger, who would boldly accuse Kubrick of spreading fascist ideas (HECHINGER, F. M., ‘A Liberal Fights Back’, The New York Times, Sunday, Februari 13, 1972). Fred M. Hechinger (1920-1995) was the former education editor of The New York Times. His articles, columns and books reflected his abiding concern for the impact of education on shaping individuals and the nation.
It is true that Kubrick said on Full Metal Jacket that
‘there is more to say about war than it is just bad’. (SISKEL, G., ‘Candidly Kubrick: A Private Man Talks Openly About Life, Movies and the Fate of the Free World’, Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1987)
Michael Herr even proclaimed in Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Jan Harlan, 2001) that
‘[Kubrick] also accepted to acknowledge that, of all the things war is, it is also very beautiful’,
suggesting Kubrick saw a somehow aesthetic value in violence. However, Kubrick also states that he chose Hasford’s book (The Short-Timers (1979), on which Full Metal Jacket is based) because it is
‘neither anti-war [n]or pro-war’ and has ‘no moral or political position’, but, on the contrary, is concerned with ‘the way things are’. (SISKEL, G., ‘Candidly Kubrick: A Private Man Talks Openly About Life, Movies and the Fate of the Free World’, Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1987)
Thus, Kubrick is keen on showing a true image of society, and since this image comes across as rather unattractive, he reasons that man himself must be evil by nature, or as he states,
‘[m]an 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 – that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him.’ (McGREGOR, C., ‘Nice Boy from the Bronx?’, The New York Times, Sunday, January 30, 1972)
Violence as an essential part of mankind was already faintly present in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he puts on two rivalling anthropoid clans who discover the evolutionary beneficial violence and thus ‘become human’. (DUYNSLAEGHER, P., ‘Stanley Kubrick’, Focus Knack, Brussel, 2006 , p. 24)
Consequently, Kubrick, supported by the authors Ardrey and Koestler, completely objects the prevailing vision on society as put forward by Rousseau. Robert Ardrey (1908-1980) and Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) are authors Kubrick quotes in his defence against Hechinger. Both search for the cause of humanity’s capacity for death and destruction and both, like Kubrick, are suspicious of the liberal belief in the innate goodness of mankind. As Kubrick responds to Hechinger,
‘[t]he 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. (…) 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.’ (KUBRICK, S., ‘Now Kubrick Fights Back’, The New York Times, Sunday, February 27, 1972)
Because Kubrick tends to see violence as man’s natural state, he believes attempts at repressing this innate urge might cause neuroses. In A Clockwork Orange, for example, the young offender Alex is re-educated by society, which turns him into a slavish ordinary little man, deprived of his essential humanity, who will finally become himself a victim of violence. As Kubrick observes,
‘[t]he movie poses two extremes: it shows Alex in his pre-civilized state, and society committing a worse evil in attempting to cure him.’ (McGREGOR, C., ‘Nice Boy from the Bronx?’, The New York Times, Sunday, January 30, 1972)
On the other hand, no matter how evil man may be, the question arises as to whether by showing violence, Kubrick may be considered responsible for the imitation of violence. In fact, England did suffer similar crimes from copycats wearing exactly the same costumes as the characters in A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick brushed aside the impact of the film, claiming that
‘[he] [doesn’t] think it’s socially harmful. [He] [doesn’t] think any work of art can be. Unfortunately, [he] [doesn’t] think it can be socially constructive either.’ (McGREGOR, C., ‘Nice Boy from the Bronx?’, The New York Times, Sunday, January 30, 1972)
Moreover, he suggests that the violent tendencies should already be present, declaring that
‘[works of art] affect us when they illuminate something we already feel, they don’t change us’ and that ‘[y]ou identify with Alex because you recognize yourself. It’s for this reason that some people become uncomfortable.’ (McGREGOR, C., ‘Nice Boy from the Bronx?’, The New York Times, Sunday, January 30, 1972)
Thus, broadly speaking, Kubrick neither approved nor rejected violence, but rather showed mankind as it is, including its less pretty qualities. He believed that
‘[p]art 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.’ (McGREGOR, C., ‘Nice Boy from the Bronx?’, The New York Times, Sunday, January 30, 1972)
This is completely in line with his view on cinema as a form of art meant to force the audience to linger over universally accepted values and draw their own conclusions. It was no accident that he replied to a question on the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that
‘[i]f the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.’ (GELMIS, J., Film Director as Superstar, Doubleday and Company, Garden City, New York, 1970, 316 pp.)
Besides, as critic Keith Uhlich remarks in Senses of Cinema,
‘(…) A Clockwork Orange does remain Kubrick’s most immoral film. Then again, where is it written that the cinema be moral for always and ever?’
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Kirsten Malfroid 