Revisiting the Philosophical Controversy Over Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

When Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange hit theaters the movie was instantly and significantly controversial--not only for its brutal violence, but because of its politics, and in a way that seems of particular interest today. Where today it is standard to equate "liberal" and "conservative," "left" and "right" with grab-bags of opinions about laundry lists of hot button issues, the argument over Kubrick's movie addressed what these words have traditionally meant to the politically literate--stances toward that fundamental question of political philosophy since the Enlightenment, namely the nature of human beings, what this means for the possibilities for society's shape, and especially whether or not reason can be used to bring about a freer, more equal, more just, more flourishing order of things. It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that A Clockwork Orange, true to Anthony Burgess' source material, espoused a deeply pessimistic view of the matter identifiable not with the Enlightenment's liberalism, but the Counter-Enlightenment's anti-liberalism--the right, indeed the hard right, rather than the left, with this today bolstered by Kubrick's consistent, explicit, political statements at the time (in two interview-based pieces in the New York Times, and then again in a piece in the pages of that same publication). Moreover, at the time liberals called out the film as such--as a right-wing and even fascist movie (with it seeming significant that while Kubrick denied the film was fascist, he reiterated what would be conventionally taken as very right-wing views).*

Where the lack of comparable controversy over a piece of pop culture in a long time is concerned, it seems to me that besides the decline of the political literacy that made such argument possible there has been, essentially, a triumph of deeply conservative views among the mainstream commentariat--even those members of it who would not identify as conservative. In the view of a great many observers, David Walsh has remarked, "realism" has come to mean "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light," with filmmakers endeavoring to "outdo each other . . . in their depictions of people’s depravity and sadism," not least by "sticking in all the sordid details one can think of," while far from being "indignant" at the state of the world, they show "a warm, almost grateful acceptance of the filthiness" that they hold to come "from the rottenness of humanity itself"--often, I would add, in a tone of self-satisfied, trollish, "Welcome to the real world!" swagger. They have thus come to take the kind of politics A Clockwork Orange presented in stride, as unworthy of remark, as mere conventional wisdom, with any other outlook so "dated" or otherwise out of touch with "reality" as to not be worth answering--a result not just the right but the political Center fought to achieve.

* Indeed, the film's star Malcolm McDowell remarked in an interview liberal dislike of the film. Sounding like what would today be called a troll ("Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers and it shows them realities . . . Cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth?" which was that "People are basically bad, corrupt," as he had "always sensed") McDowell claimed later in a letter to the Times that his remark was not "gleeful" but "despondent" (odd as that may seem to one who reads the whole interview, and little as this actually changes).