I've participated lately in some ListServ and Facebook discussions of what a professor can get into trouble for teaching nowadays, and two closely related works that came to mind were Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 CLOCKWORK ORANGE film, at least as I taught them at conservative Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) — in John Boehner's Congressional District, alma mater for Paul Ryan — in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries.
They are interesting works to teach.
In my classes, the film was much more controversial than the novel even though Burgess cheerfully admits in his preface to the reprint we used that his novel is heretical in Christian terms and most of my students were pretty orthodox Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (with a few theologically radical evangelicals thrown in). The 21-chapter British version of the novel — unlike the initial 20-chapter US edition and the film — is "Pelagian," Burgess says, claiming for human beings an essential goodness and the freedom to choose the good. St. Augustine of Hippo would not have approved, and Augustinian views on Original Sin and a variety of innate, essential depravity are orthodox in Christian tradition — and my generally pious students didn't give a rat's ass. What concerned those who disapproved were the images of sex and violence in the film, and Burgess's once damnable, burn-at-the-stake heresy was no big deal.
As I said: interesting.
Also interesting and highly instructive were my students' fairly typical perceptions of the sex and violence in the film.
To start with something memorable, the Rape Scene in the film and how my students remembered the rape but sometimes forgot that this is also the Crippling Scene. Kubrick's camera pays a lot of attention to the rape of Mrs. Alexander, a woman in young middle age, but it also shows in graphic detail the beating of Mr. Alexander, a man entering a vigorous old age — until that crippling beating and being forced to watch the rape. (Adding to the trauma, Mr. Alexander tells us that the rape killed his wife, but we only have his word for that, plus the problematic trope of rape being lethal to virtuous women. We can be confident, however, that Mrs. Alexander has died.)
My students' attenuated concern for Mr. Alexander got me asking myself for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE a question from studies of Christopher Marlowe's plays on how audience's perceive violence. So I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the on-screen violence in the film and asked my students for their estimates of how much time we got to see violence against various characters.
One of the reasons I'd probably get into trouble teaching Kubrick's film is that I think it ethical for a critic to sit with a stopwatch and get some numbers on who on screen is messing over whom and to what degree and for how long. Period. However much in Trumpian times the Left has endorsed fact-base studies, there were academic attacks on Empiricism in the late 20th/early 21st, and I suspect some of that ill-will toward number-crunching horrors still remains.
It depends on how you evaluate such things, but the major victim of violence in A Clockwork Orange (novel and film) is its nasty antihero, Alex. My students were surprised with this because (I would argue),
* In the tradition of audiences going back to that of the first English theatrical blockbuster, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, my students judged violence to a large degree in terms of the victims' worth, and Alex was an attractive but still violent, dangerous, and misogynistic little shit who had it coming. Except with Tamburlaine most of the audience apparently identified with a noble superman, the serial mass murderer Tamburlaine, and not his banal victims.
* My students sometimes didn't see violence committed by the State and other authorities as violence. I told them that the State's claim was a monopoly on legitimate violence, but that the traditional idea was to allow that violence is violence, and they didn't argue the point; still, they didn't see justified violence as violence. Alex's acts of violence were violence; the violence of State authorities against him were in some sort of unnamed limbo.
* Etc.
My students' attitude was something like that mocked in the 1960s with the joke, "I hate violence and them violent demonstrators. Violent people should be taken out and shot!"
Returning to A Clockwork Orange as novel and film would be interesting nowadays for how different groups would value the value put upon freedom by the story and the question of how much freedom should be restricted to protect decent folk from young monsters like Alex and his drugs. Not to mention how much young readers should identify with decent older people as opposed to guys nearer their age, however despicable those guys — or how much old teens and 20-somethings should be on the lookout for, and push back against, youth-bashing. And it would be fascinating in terms of victims.
US President Donald J. Trump at least claimed to be appalled by the violence of killing babies with poison gas in Syria, so he blew up property and (enemy) people with Tomahawk missiles, and then went on to use in a related battle the MOAB ordnance: a very large explosive device. Justified or not we can argue about; what I find downright fascinating is the many Americans would not see Mr. Trump's actions as violent. It's unlikely Americans generally could have a rational argument about the actions of the all-too-real Mr. Trump; it's possible we could have one about Burgess's and Kubrick's fictional Alex.
Or not: I'm not sure one could nowadays — or at least not this off-White male "one" — could teach A Clockwork Orange; and that would be unfortunate.
Showing posts with label a clockwork orange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a clockwork orange. Show all posts
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Monday, March 23, 2015
Victims Who Count and Don't Count: PRISONERS and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (26 Sept. 2013)
Note: The date on this essay (again) is 26 Sept. 2013, and it deals with movies. The topic, however, is relevant for real-world police shootings, media coverage of kidnapping and child abuse, and a number of other topics. The analysis of how audiences evaluate the suffering and deaths of dramatic characters goes back to studies of Christopher Marlowe's 16th-c. play Tamburlaine the Great, especially Part I, which celebrates the historical mass murderer.
====================================
All fiction requires some "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," but the excellent 2013 movie Prisoners requires a good deal of suspension of disbelief for a bit over two-and-a-half hours. Among other things, you have to believe, tentatively, that the citizens of a small Pennsylvania town would comb the area strenuously searching for two missing little girls, but that a brain-damaged young man (Alex Jones) who is a person of strong interest to the police on the case can drop out of sight for a goodly while without much attention being paid by anyone. The point for this essay is that that nonchalance about the disappearance of a marginal young man really isn't difficult to believe, and not just tentatively. Nor, for the point of this essay, should we ignore that it's no spoiler if I tell you that audiences are only moderately upset by the on-screen torture of that brain-damaged, marginal young man, while they would not tolerate — indeed, law-enforcement officials might prosecute — on-screen torture of the little girls, even if the images with the tortured girls were in some advanced-version CGI or animation and there was no question of harming or exploiting actual child actors.
Discussing Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, my students would talk about "the Rape Scene" and strongly condemn, justly, the vicious young thug Alex "DeLarge" for leading a home invasion and gang rape. They would also condemn him for murdering the victim, Mrs. Alexander, and I would have to tell them to hedge a bit there: our source for the cause of her death, a while after the rape, is the testimony of her husband, who is not in sound mental health; and death by the trauma of rape is a convention going back to at least the 18th-century novel Clarissa, and is a convention with problems. In any event, if they want to condemn Alex further, I would tell them, they can note that Alex also batters Mr. Alexander, and then forces him to watch his wife being raped; when we next see Mr. Alexander, he is crippled and crazy. "After this, therefore because of this" is a logical fallacy in the real world but standard in stories: If Mrs. Alexander is horribly raped and then dies; it's legitimate for many in the audience to take that to mean that, as her husband is convinced, she died from the rape; if Mr. Alexander is battered with savage artistry — Alex stomps him while singing "Singing in the Rain" — and then goes mad; it's legitimate for audience members to infer that the pain and horror visited upon his wife and him drove him mad.
In our discussion of the film, a number of my students needed to be reminded that it wasn't just "The Rape Scene" but "The Rape, Battery, and Crippling Scene": Mrs. Alexander is a victim, but so is Mr. Alexander.
This got me interested, so I did some timing on the film and an informal (as in totally unscientific) survey of a couple of classes asking about victims of violence in A Clockwork Orange. Few of my students caught that in terms of screen time, the primary victim of violence in the film is, at least by my rough calculations, the ultraviolent sociopath, Alex.
My conclusion was that violence against Alex really didn't count much for my students or for audience members generally for Kubrick's Orange; and I pushed this issue a bit with my students as to why this happened with Orange, and more generally. (Definitely more generally: for one thing, audience reaction to violence is an important issue in studies of the plays of Shakespeare and, maybe more so, those of Christopher Marlowe.)
Primarily, my students didn't count as violence what they saw as more or less legitimate punishment by agents of State and society. This is common: unless they're reading about something grotesquely cruel like breaking on the wheel, most people don't consider even executions acts of violence. They are. The State claims a monopoly on legitimate violence — although that gets complicated — but even the most legitimate violence by the State is still violence. Less extremely, one of the reasons school violence has decreased greatly in the last century or so is that school children, especially schoolboys, are no longer routinely beaten. Having lived thirty-five years more or less around the corner from a large high school, I would protest only moderately against the reintroduction of flogging in the schools — but no honest debate about hitting kids can proceed without the basic observation that hitting people to cause them pain — especially when the people you hit are small and weak — is an act of violence (injuring them with the blows is evil).
My students were also willing to judge leniently, and often enjoy, acts of violence done for revenge and acts of violence performed subtly: In a central sequence, Alex is immobilized in a chair and tortured, but tortured pharmaceutically, with nothing immediately perceptible by the audience except Alex's squirming, voice-over distress, and eventual screams. By means of the torture sessions — politically formulated, application of "The Ludovico Technique" of aversion therapy — with the conditioning sessions, Alex is rendered harmless and released, to be attacked one way or another — and symmetrically with his attacks on them — by his former victims.
So a main criterion here — as Elizabethan dramatists knew — regards who is doing what to whom. Watching A Clockwork Orange, audience members who might feel a little guilty identifying with Alex in his criminal violence can enjoy a bit more freely the cruel but esthetically appropriate (if also illegal), revenge-violence against Alex. And that's, against Alex and against many other eventually victimized victimizers through the great tradition of Revenge drama running from Hamlet and its less respectable tragic and melodramatic cousins to the first Mad Max movie to the Dirty Harry and Death Wish films to I Spit on Your Grave to, well, to a whole genre including by one recent count at least 140 movies.
More problematic is that Alex is a physically healthy young man, in the film of ambiguous age, but definitely older than the juvenile juvenile delinquent of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and definitely intelligent, lacking the excuses and pathos of Prisoner's Alex Jones. With Alex "DeLarge," we encounter a variation of what Robert Martin and I have called "The Law of Todd.".
Todd was a film-studies student writing on gender issues in how "the camera" handles violence. He noted that feminist critics were correct, that the camera often luxuriated in images of violence against women; he added, though, that the camera is often casual in handling violence against men, especially young, healthy men: a casualness rarely seen in the handling of violence against women and never seen, as far as he could tell, with violence against children.
I came of age during the Vietnam War as a healthy, draftable young male who got pissed to hell at my fellow Americans who, occasionally, got strongly distressed by the occasional accidental killing of women, children, and old people in Vietnam but weren't overly upset by the routine intentional killing of young, healthy, usually conscripted male fighters. Many of my fellow Americans also didn't get upset by our killing of National Liberation Front "Viet Cong," female fighters or killing children or other noncombatants by aerial bombardment — but that gets into other issues.
Relevant here and now — in an essay written in 2013 — is that "Law of Todd" casualness of the camera-work in hundreds of fictional movies reflected a cultural attitude on the expendability of young men and in turn reinforced that attitude — and was thereby directly dangerous to actual young men.
And to others, given that once wars get going, a lot of people beyond the various warriors are going to end up dead; but that, too gets to those other issues.
I was a healthy young man when my political consciousness got formed and was considered White by most people. I was insufficiently aware of my privileged status at the time, but even looking back I'd say that that privilege was balanced in part by my expendability as far as the camera was concerned, and as far of much of the US government and people were concerned.
It is a kind of progress that the camera nowadays can dwell on the suffering of men as much as that of women. And it is unambiguously good that the cinematic taboo remains against handling casually violence against children; and it is better that casual violence against children is becoming increasingly taboo in much of the real world.
Still, it is bad that violence against children remains, but also bad that violence against older boys and young men is not taken seriously enough; it is bad that State violence and acts of violence by other authorities are usually not seen as violence at all.
The State usually demands a monopoly on legitimate violence. In the United States we balance that doctrine with the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms and loose laws on self-defense and a cultural acceptance of much "self-help justice."
Violence is violence. Some violence is justified: up to and including lethal violence in self defense, up to and including shredding people with high explosives if warfare is the least evil of your options. Most violence is not justified, and just about none is good.
In A Clockwork Orange, punishing Alex is appropriate, and imprisoning him is an act of societal self-defense. Torturing Alex is wrong, as is depriving him of effective free will, which is the upshot of the Ludovico Technique "therapy" that makes him unable to strike back. In Prisoners, torturing Alex Jones is understandable but wrong, and it is to the credit of Prisoners that it explores the complexity of the moral issues of that torture. The problem remains with the audience: we should be far more upset by the torture of the Alex of Prisoners and a bit more upset by the torture of Alex of A Clockwork Orange.
Generally, violence in films is something we should think about more and enjoy less. Violence in the real world is something we should think about a hell of a lot more and tolerate one hell of a lot less.
====================================
All fiction requires some "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," but the excellent 2013 movie Prisoners requires a good deal of suspension of disbelief for a bit over two-and-a-half hours. Among other things, you have to believe, tentatively, that the citizens of a small Pennsylvania town would comb the area strenuously searching for two missing little girls, but that a brain-damaged young man (Alex Jones) who is a person of strong interest to the police on the case can drop out of sight for a goodly while without much attention being paid by anyone. The point for this essay is that that nonchalance about the disappearance of a marginal young man really isn't difficult to believe, and not just tentatively. Nor, for the point of this essay, should we ignore that it's no spoiler if I tell you that audiences are only moderately upset by the on-screen torture of that brain-damaged, marginal young man, while they would not tolerate — indeed, law-enforcement officials might prosecute — on-screen torture of the little girls, even if the images with the tortured girls were in some advanced-version CGI or animation and there was no question of harming or exploiting actual child actors.
Discussing Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, my students would talk about "the Rape Scene" and strongly condemn, justly, the vicious young thug Alex "DeLarge" for leading a home invasion and gang rape. They would also condemn him for murdering the victim, Mrs. Alexander, and I would have to tell them to hedge a bit there: our source for the cause of her death, a while after the rape, is the testimony of her husband, who is not in sound mental health; and death by the trauma of rape is a convention going back to at least the 18th-century novel Clarissa, and is a convention with problems. In any event, if they want to condemn Alex further, I would tell them, they can note that Alex also batters Mr. Alexander, and then forces him to watch his wife being raped; when we next see Mr. Alexander, he is crippled and crazy. "After this, therefore because of this" is a logical fallacy in the real world but standard in stories: If Mrs. Alexander is horribly raped and then dies; it's legitimate for many in the audience to take that to mean that, as her husband is convinced, she died from the rape; if Mr. Alexander is battered with savage artistry — Alex stomps him while singing "Singing in the Rain" — and then goes mad; it's legitimate for audience members to infer that the pain and horror visited upon his wife and him drove him mad.
In our discussion of the film, a number of my students needed to be reminded that it wasn't just "The Rape Scene" but "The Rape, Battery, and Crippling Scene": Mrs. Alexander is a victim, but so is Mr. Alexander.
This got me interested, so I did some timing on the film and an informal (as in totally unscientific) survey of a couple of classes asking about victims of violence in A Clockwork Orange. Few of my students caught that in terms of screen time, the primary victim of violence in the film is, at least by my rough calculations, the ultraviolent sociopath, Alex.
My conclusion was that violence against Alex really didn't count much for my students or for audience members generally for Kubrick's Orange; and I pushed this issue a bit with my students as to why this happened with Orange, and more generally. (Definitely more generally: for one thing, audience reaction to violence is an important issue in studies of the plays of Shakespeare and, maybe more so, those of Christopher Marlowe.)
Primarily, my students didn't count as violence what they saw as more or less legitimate punishment by agents of State and society. This is common: unless they're reading about something grotesquely cruel like breaking on the wheel, most people don't consider even executions acts of violence. They are. The State claims a monopoly on legitimate violence — although that gets complicated — but even the most legitimate violence by the State is still violence. Less extremely, one of the reasons school violence has decreased greatly in the last century or so is that school children, especially schoolboys, are no longer routinely beaten. Having lived thirty-five years more or less around the corner from a large high school, I would protest only moderately against the reintroduction of flogging in the schools — but no honest debate about hitting kids can proceed without the basic observation that hitting people to cause them pain — especially when the people you hit are small and weak — is an act of violence (injuring them with the blows is evil).
My students were also willing to judge leniently, and often enjoy, acts of violence done for revenge and acts of violence performed subtly: In a central sequence, Alex is immobilized in a chair and tortured, but tortured pharmaceutically, with nothing immediately perceptible by the audience except Alex's squirming, voice-over distress, and eventual screams. By means of the torture sessions — politically formulated, application of "The Ludovico Technique" of aversion therapy — with the conditioning sessions, Alex is rendered harmless and released, to be attacked one way or another — and symmetrically with his attacks on them — by his former victims.
So a main criterion here — as Elizabethan dramatists knew — regards who is doing what to whom. Watching A Clockwork Orange, audience members who might feel a little guilty identifying with Alex in his criminal violence can enjoy a bit more freely the cruel but esthetically appropriate (if also illegal), revenge-violence against Alex. And that's, against Alex and against many other eventually victimized victimizers through the great tradition of Revenge drama running from Hamlet and its less respectable tragic and melodramatic cousins to the first Mad Max movie to the Dirty Harry and Death Wish films to I Spit on Your Grave to, well, to a whole genre including by one recent count at least 140 movies.
More problematic is that Alex is a physically healthy young man, in the film of ambiguous age, but definitely older than the juvenile juvenile delinquent of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and definitely intelligent, lacking the excuses and pathos of Prisoner's Alex Jones. With Alex "DeLarge," we encounter a variation of what Robert Martin and I have called "The Law of Todd.".
Todd was a film-studies student writing on gender issues in how "the camera" handles violence. He noted that feminist critics were correct, that the camera often luxuriated in images of violence against women; he added, though, that the camera is often casual in handling violence against men, especially young, healthy men: a casualness rarely seen in the handling of violence against women and never seen, as far as he could tell, with violence against children.
I came of age during the Vietnam War as a healthy, draftable young male who got pissed to hell at my fellow Americans who, occasionally, got strongly distressed by the occasional accidental killing of women, children, and old people in Vietnam but weren't overly upset by the routine intentional killing of young, healthy, usually conscripted male fighters. Many of my fellow Americans also didn't get upset by our killing of National Liberation Front "Viet Cong," female fighters or killing children or other noncombatants by aerial bombardment — but that gets into other issues.
Relevant here and now — in an essay written in 2013 — is that "Law of Todd" casualness of the camera-work in hundreds of fictional movies reflected a cultural attitude on the expendability of young men and in turn reinforced that attitude — and was thereby directly dangerous to actual young men.
And to others, given that once wars get going, a lot of people beyond the various warriors are going to end up dead; but that, too gets to those other issues.
I was a healthy young man when my political consciousness got formed and was considered White by most people. I was insufficiently aware of my privileged status at the time, but even looking back I'd say that that privilege was balanced in part by my expendability as far as the camera was concerned, and as far of much of the US government and people were concerned.
It is a kind of progress that the camera nowadays can dwell on the suffering of men as much as that of women. And it is unambiguously good that the cinematic taboo remains against handling casually violence against children; and it is better that casual violence against children is becoming increasingly taboo in much of the real world.
Still, it is bad that violence against children remains, but also bad that violence against older boys and young men is not taken seriously enough; it is bad that State violence and acts of violence by other authorities are usually not seen as violence at all.
The State usually demands a monopoly on legitimate violence. In the United States we balance that doctrine with the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms and loose laws on self-defense and a cultural acceptance of much "self-help justice."
Violence is violence. Some violence is justified: up to and including lethal violence in self defense, up to and including shredding people with high explosives if warfare is the least evil of your options. Most violence is not justified, and just about none is good.
In A Clockwork Orange, punishing Alex is appropriate, and imprisoning him is an act of societal self-defense. Torturing Alex is wrong, as is depriving him of effective free will, which is the upshot of the Ludovico Technique "therapy" that makes him unable to strike back. In Prisoners, torturing Alex Jones is understandable but wrong, and it is to the credit of Prisoners that it explores the complexity of the moral issues of that torture. The problem remains with the audience: we should be far more upset by the torture of the Alex of Prisoners and a bit more upset by the torture of Alex of A Clockwork Orange.
Generally, violence in films is something we should think about more and enjoy less. Violence in the real world is something we should think about a hell of a lot more and tolerate one hell of a lot less.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)