The Politics of Stanley Kubrick--and of A Clockwork Orange

It is very common for those discussing works of art and their creators to flub the characterization of their politics at their most basic level. Sometimes this is because the works and creators are genuinely complexly multi-sided, uncertain, drawn in different directions at once. However, it seems to me more common for them to get such things wrong because they are simply political illiterates--with this compounded by the way that some never miss a chance to confuse the issue.

One such case is Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange. Interviewed in the New York Times by Bernard Weinraub and Craig McGregor in January 1972 Kubrick attacked as "[o]ne of the most dangerous fallacies" of politics and philosophy "that man is essentially good, and that it is society which makes him bad." He specifically singled out the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau for criticism here, saying that "[m]an isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage . . . irrational, brutal . . . unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved . . . violent," while specifically criticizing Rousseau's "transferr[ing] original sin from man to society"--his view of man as good and society as corrupting--as having led to that fallacy, "creat[ing] social institutions" on which basis "is probably doomed to failure."

No one the least bit conversant in political philosophy should find these statements to be ambiguous in their political content. Here Kubrick zeroed in on the fundamental issue in modern political philosophy--the nature of human beings and their societies and what this means for attempts to bring about a more humane and justice order--and clearly took one side. Where the liberal-radical Enlightenment held humans to be rational, the conservative Counter-Enlightenment (the tradition of Burke, de Maistre et. al.) held humans to be irrational. Where the rationalistic and secular Enlightenment rejected talk of original sin, the Counter-Enlightenment regarded it as fundamental to its view of human irrationality, and human badness, which they held shut the door on all hope of "social institutions" that would be more free, more equal, more just, more humane than those existing. In his remarks Kubrick explicitly took the side of the conservative Counter-Enlightenment here (without even trying to dress it up in the "psychologism" that had become so fashionable by his time), underlined his stance with his criticism of Rousseau by name--and indeed, while expounding upon how "many aspects of liberal mythology are coming to grief now" was alert that he was "going to sound like William Buckley" (emphasis added).* The apparent inclination of Kubrick to a view of humans as "risen apes," specifically based on the work of the deeply pessimistic science writer Robert Ardrey, his combination of his pessimistic view of humans and human reason with a quasi-religious "hope" nin the thought of "God-like" "intelligence . . . outside the earth"--both of which aspects of his thinking could seem on pointed display in his preceding 2001: A Space Odyssey--would seem to complement, if not affirm, rather than contradict the view of Kubrick as deeply right-wing in his views. So too what his film seemed to say about welfare states, socialism, therapy as an alternative to "law and order" policies as a way of dealing with crime, Russian cultural influence, and much else.

Granted, Kubrick's career was a long and unusual one, and it seems plausible that there were shifts in his thinking and feeling through it. (It may seem difficult to reconcile Kubrick's statements here with the deeply humane and ferociously critical sensibility of his World War I film Paths of Glory, for example. Indeed, David Walsh has read Kubrick's career as, after the initial display of a "humanitarian impulse" going by that film, "a slow descent into the slough of misanthropy followed by, if not a climb out of it, at least a playing about on its far bank," with Kubrick "seeming to touch bottom" in A Clockwork Orange.) It seems plausible, too, that his outlook had its idiosyncrasies, that if philosophically very much of the right he may still have felt less than fully at home on the "actually existing" right per se. (Why should a right-winger be abashed about sounding like William Buckley?) Still, given what he himself said about his view of the world at the time it seems no oddity but quite natural that Kubrick was attracted to the idea of adapting a novel by a T.S. Eliot-influenced writer of similar religious-monarchical sympathies who rubbed this dark view of humanity in his reader's faces (to which work Kubrick admitted "respond[ing] emotionally . . . very intensely")--just as Kubrick was attracted a little while before to the work of another right-wing writer who had made a stir with material that, going by what Nabokov said about his own intentions, he had intended to provoke (Vladimir Nabokov)--and that Kubrick was well aware of what he was presenting as an artist, what his film was saying about humans and society. By the same token it seems that those who, like Roger Ebert and Fred Hechinger, recognized a very right-wing work at the time--part of a stream of right-wing work in Hechinger's view that was as much a part of the history of the New Hollywood as more left-wing fare--were quite correct to do so, whatever else one may say about any other rights or wrongs on the part of any of those involved.

* William Buckley, founder of the National Review, was of course a pillar of post-war conservatism in America.