The Evolution of Cinematic Violence

Of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Pauline Kael wrote:

The movie’s confusing — and, finally, corrupt — morality is not, however, what makes it such an abhorrent viewing experience. It is offensive long before one perceives where it is heading, because it has no shadings. Kubrick, a director with an arctic spirit, is determined to be pornographic, and he has no talent for it.

After writing on Mary Harron’s satirical take of 80s society in American Psycho, I began wondering about the evolution of violence in cinema… It’s argued in numerous intellectual circles that Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is a marvelous work… but I can’t help feeling that we’re looking at the film through the lens of history, disregarding its place as the first of a kind, leaning toward a film that appears to argue against violence, yet seems to revel in it. The only problem is that it only seems to…

Harron’s piece is far more satirical, with caricatures of society that would be bordering on the nonsensical if they were occurring in any other decade… But the 80s were, in fact, a decade of archetypes who behaved nonsensically. There are several dimensions along which American Psycho is a decidedly superior film to Kubrick’s krankenspiel.

Kubrick’s vision uses society as a framework for examining the character of Alex. In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman is merely one symptom of a larger, diseased society. In the latter, we get a strong sense of that society that takes itself seriously, though Bateman is not to be taken seriously… and there’s a reason for this. Alex is made out to be the victim, but Harron’s film doesn’t make this error… Bateman is not a victim. Yes, Bateman is a nobody… but he’s not a victim. Kubrick, instead, chooses to infer that a society that acts criminal towards criminals deserves what it gets. Does anyone learn anything in such a society? Is there any lesson to be learned in such a film?

In Kubrick’s Clockwork, everyone in society seems to be an extreme caricature, against which Alex plays the relatively “normal” individual for whom we are intended to feel pity.

Kael writes:

The writer whom Alex cripples (Patrick Magee) and the woman he kills are cartoon nasties with upper class accents a mile wide. (Magee has been encouraged to act like a bathetic madman; he seems to be preparing for a career in horror movies.) Burgess gave us society through Alex’s eyes, and so the vision was deformed, and Kubrick, carrying over from Dr. Strangelove his joky adolescent view of hypocritical, sexually dirty authority figures and extending it to all adults, has added an extra layer of deformity. The “straight” people are far more twisted than Alex; they seem inhuman and incapable of suffering. He alone suffers. And how he suffers!

Roger Ebert notes:

Kubrick’s most obvious photographic device this time is the wide-angle lens. Used on objects that are fairly close to the camera, this lens tends to distort the sides of the image. The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the wide-angle lens almost all the time when he is showing events from Alex’s point of view; this encourages us to see the world as Alex does, as a crazy-house of weird people out to get him.

One gets the impression it was here, in this film, that the nexus between hero and antihero was crossed… Alex is the good guy, or so the director wants us to believe. Patrick Bateman, by contrast, is not ever to be mistaken for a good guy. Yes, he has idiosyncrasies that make him seem human, but deep down there isn’t any substance to him. He rattles off his critiques of music, art and current events as though they are not his own thoughts, but preprogrammed commentaries he must have read in a magazine. This, however, is entirely consistent with Bateman’s character.

The interesting thing is that Bateman knows there is something wrong with him, he even appears to confront it (though nobody believes him). It’s not remorse Bateman is feeling. It’s not absolution he’s seeking. His self-analysis is the product of both his lack of a conscience, and his insanely amplified ego. He is not crying out for help. He’s crying out for recognition. Alex demonstrates not even an egotistically-motivated introspection, and incidentally makes a far less convincing criminal. In the end of Clockwork, Alex escapes into a sexual fantasy. Initially, we believe Alex is escaping his choices in life, but if you think about it, it’s really Kubrick escaping the accountability there.

Where Harron manages to make Bateman an entertaining character who does harbor lessons about the excesses of the younger generation and their ability to get away with murder (literally) facilitated only by the fact that everyone is too self-absorbed to notice the horrific things occurring in the world around them, Kubrick manages to fail on both counts… Which is not to say Kubrick’s vision isn’t stunning. However, Kubrick’s vision is stunning in the way that a roadkill sculpture would be stunning… but that only works the first time you see it.

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