Stanley Kubrick and the "F" Word

Some time ago I looked over those charges and countercharges about the politics of A Clockwork Orange between its director Stanley Kubrick and the journalists of the New York Times at the time of the movie's release (back when they really did have liberals writing for them). Going by Kubrick's remarks there seemed to me no question of his, at least at the time, having been a right-winger, certainly if one takes as the standard for that the fundamental matter of human nature at the individual and group levels, and what it means for whether society can be rationally changed to produce a freer, more egalitarian, more thriving order. (Indeed, Kubrick joked in one interview that he gave at the time that if he went on he was "going to sound like William Buckley.") However, Kubrick took great umbrage at the use of the word "fascism" to describe his film, and at least by implication himself. Especially given the way in which he argued (he attacked those who used the term, rather than trying to disprove them) one could wonder whether he was simply reacting against having the highly charged label applied to him, even if it was being applied fairly (fascists often do object to being called fascists, because of the term's charge for many), or whether he really did have grounds for being thought not a fascist.

Certainly the pessimistic view of human beings and the prospects for society's redress of its ills, his contempt for "liberals," etc., that Kubrick expressed at the time are views he at least shared with fascists, as he did with the right more broadly. Yet the argument for fascism as a distinct tendency (rather than a synonym for "extreme right," a species of horseshoe theory-minded totalitarianism, a mere slur, etc.) is based on its mobilization of part of the public behind a right-wing agenda for the sake of preserving a bourgeois-capitalist order in the face of a radical challenge that can only be defeated through illiberal methods of government. Of course, in the aforementioned interview Kubrick did quip that the insecurity people felt because of crime, combined with "a little economic disappointment, and the increasingly trendy view that politics are a waste of time and problems have to be solved instantly," could translate to "very serious social unrest in the United States," and ultimately to "very authoritarian" government "of the Right," but his attitude toward this expectation was ambiguous. After all, to say that a thing is plausible, or even likely, is not to endorse it--even if one allows for some pathways being better than others. (In such a situation "you could only hope you would have a benevolent despot rather than an evil one. A Tito rather than a Stalin . . . of the right" he said.) The result is that there are grounds for rejecting the view of Kubrick as having himself been a fascist--though it also seems only fair to admit that much of what he said, as a filmmaker and in his interviews--has been grist to a fascist's mill, enough so that those who accused Kubrick of being one were far, far, from groundless in doing so. Indeed, even if Kubrick may not be a fascist, there seem few grounds for denying that A Clockwork Orange "works" as a piece of fascist propaganda.