“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?”
from an interview
with MALCOLM MCDOWELL by TOM BURKE
The New York Times, Sunday, January
30, 1972
§
A
LIBERAL FIGHTS BACK
by
Fred M. Hechinger
The New York Times, Sunday, February 13,
1972
“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.
“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 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, 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.
*
That
is the message lately flashed from the screen. The inherently antiliberal
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, 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.
§
KUBRICK FIGHTS BACK
Letter to the editor by Stanley Kubrick
February 27, 1972, Page 1 The New York Times
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 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” 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 he 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 spokes man
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 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 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
hypocrisies, as recorded in the ‘Confessions,’ is of no shaking importance;
such 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 on 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
original 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.
A few highbrow remarks:
When Kubrick calls
Henchinger an “educationalist”, he evokes a constellation of technocratic and top-down "social-engineering" assumptions/agendas, including those of Hegel, Marx., William James, John Dewey, Ivan Pavlov, B. F. Skinner... Rather than "liberal" I should characterize Henchinger's views as "technocratic"; in this case the appellation (indeed, packaging, a trademark) "liberal" is rather an ethical virtue-signal used to characterize his views as somehow "virtuous", "scientific", "progressive" (progressing from where to where, one might ask), and therefore "correct."
One is led to ask, does Hechinger represent the ideas
of people who view society and “culture” mechanistically, and who advocate not
only the utility of "torture" but also advocate its commonplace necessity?
Is this why
Hechinger was offended by the film and called Kubrick a fascist?
In
addition to his achievements as a journalist and publisher, Columbia University
named the “Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media” after him. The Columbia School of Journalism sponsors a Fred M. Hechinger Education Journalism Award. The Wilkipedia article on Hechinger is interesting. Please click HERE.
Kubrick cites film critic Vincent Canby, who properly classifies “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.'” How
do we go on to identify and characterize the features of a social climate that tolerates and nurtures violence? Unfortunately, such an investigation could show many of the
features of such a society are reflected in our own. Where does our analysis properly begin?
*This passage from Kubrick's letter serves as the epigraph to Emanations: Chorus Pleiades/My Other Body is Something Elf.
"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.
Click the cover images to view the Amazon description.
.jpg)
.png)
