Getting It Wrong -- A Clockwork Orange

Photo: from the MSN article linked below. You've got to see this movie. A disturbing masterpiece.

I recently read an MSN photoslide article of 40 movies that critics got completely wrong. (Click that to read it.) Some made me so upset that I had to vent--I mean, blog--about them. For example:

“Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Of all the movie critics I've read over the years, I agreed with Roger Ebert most. (Though I am most frustrated with his review of Dead Poet's Society, but that wasn't one of MSN's 40 here, so that's a blog for another day.)

But he got this one wrong. (See the movie if you haven't.) A Clockwork Orange is not paranoid right-wing fantasy. That's Trump-land, a country that Kubrick would never consider visiting. Though he had his share of really out-there thoughts (and don't we all), Kubrick did not feel Britian's (which is where he lived, let's not forget) police force was in danger of dominating his country with a tight fist.

It is an Orwellian warning, in a way, but not as criticized here. Certainly Orwell's lesson of "beware of who you elect to control you," and, for that matter, "beware of those who you let control you" is in play here--but that's not what the movie is really about.

A Clockwork Orange says to beware of a totalitarian police state (with the emphasis on the police), but it also says that we do need a large and controlling police presence, because human nature sucks, and left to our own devices, chaos will reign. That's the irony Kubrick was trying to show. Kubrick was all about irony, all the time. And so it is here.

Alex isn't the criminal, the movie says. His society is criminalizing, and he is a criminal as a byproduct. Though Alex is individually responsible for his own actions, the bureaucracy that tries to "civilize" him just makes him worse. This movie is definitely an attack of that bureaucracy. Remember the scenes of the guard transferring Alex? Remember the bureaucratic forms that had to be filled out? Remember how long that took, especially that ingenious shot of the guard separating the perforated portion after that's signed? Who wouldn't be driven to anger or mindlessness in that nihilistic setting of dominant mindlessness? When the bureaucracy is all that matters, we're all lost.

The insinuation here is that we are all Alex, or at least potentially so. So the movie doesn't pretend to oppose the police state. It does oppose the police state--as depicted as a mindless bureaucracy. It's not paranoid at all--often, human nature does suck, and at our core, no matter how much we think we're civilized, we're all still baseless and base. (That was the point of 2001, too. Remember the million-year flashforward bone-flip? Despite all our technology, all our civilizations--on Earth and on the moon--we're still just a base, bone-loving species. Some of us are okay with that, but some of us strive to be more than that, a new species, maybe, capable of so much more.) Burgess's novel somewhat says the same thing, and this movie beats it over our heads.

Since we're all capable of being Alex--some more so than others--we do need a heavy police presence. But too large a police presence (and it's mind control) is just as bad, if not worse, as having too many criminals. So it's bad to have, but we do need it, to some degree. What degree is that? Well, in the movie, it was too much. In the beginning of the movie, it wasn't enough. So where's the line? Kubrick didn't know, and he's saying we don't know, either. Recent events in America since Ferguson show we still don't know. (Art imitates life, right?)

And so the movie doesn't celebrate the nastiness of Alex as much as it uses that behavior to prove its point. In very broad strokes, written large, the movie showcases the all-too-human negative "celebration" of the nastiness in us all. Kubrick (and Burgess) say: We're all potentially that nasty. Which is why mind control and a police body politick aren't the answers. The answer has to come from within us, individually. In only that way can we create a "civilized society," which is a Nietzschean umbrella term that really doesn't exist--another point that Kubrick makes here. The movie is all about that irony, painted with very broad strokes to the point of satire and farce--but, let's face it: Isn't civilization, society, and other umbrella terms all a farce anyway?

Look around you. Look at American politics right now. Look at what we call our civilized society--a culture that actually does celebrate the dehumanization of women, minorities, LGBTs and, really, anyone else who is not a self-satisfied, arrogant, pompous, self-loving rich white male. (We don't seem to understand the difference between self-serving "facts" and actual facts, either.) And, by the way, our American society is still one of the best, most stable ones out there in the whole world.

That's the reality right now. It's that million-year bone flip in 2001: Despite our technology, despite what we call our civilized society, we're all still a bunch of bone-wielding, power-wielding, blood-loving savages. And no matter how we're trying to control ourselves--with prisons, politics or mind-control (and those last two are often the same thing, by the way) we're always going to be like that.

Because we're human, and that's our human nature.

That's not a very negative, twisted farce?

It's A Different Time: Today's Disrespect of Intelligence

Concord Days is an interesting little book, if you're interested in the Alcott family, or the Transcendentalists, or about how an intellectual thought in New England circa 1870, and a little before. It was originally published in 1872. The one I read is a reprint of the original, and therefore a little hard on the eyes, since the original wasn't perfectly printed to begin with. It's got pages that were unnecessarily bolded and overinked, and other pages where the print is slim, and under-inked. Some pages were in the middle. Alcott was not as heavily published as were his popular daughters, and this shows. He was highly influential, especially in education, and highly respected by his Transcendentalist peers, but this does not necessarily translate into sales.

You would probably have to have an interest in one of the above things to get something out of this, but it's a quaint little hardcover book, and it's an honest writing of the thoughts of a smart, influential guy in Concord, MA and environs, including Harvard, southern to central NH, and...well, that's about it.

Amos Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. They had an interesting family and a curious dynamic. The family lived in poverty for a long time, until Louisa May started writing every single thing she could think of and the money started pouring in. (She wrote a lot more than Little Women. She wrote under many different names, fiction and nonfiction, and her first big successes were with novels of passion and of heaving bosoms, and the like. Picture a woman writing Harlequin Romances who one day wrote a classic about smart, independent young women and a quaint family life, and that's her.) Even after that, the family was more than happy to have their patriarch remain essentially unemployed, which allowed him to become a man of letters and thought, and to be respected as such. As I mentioned, this does not always translate to books sold, or to profitable lectures. But this was an altruistic family, and the mother and daughters were seriously happy to be the breadwinners as the father wrote letters in his study, and education tracts to pop-up education and lifestyle start-ups, all of which failed.

Maybe it was the time. In his journal you would see a lot of ideas about Pliny, Aristotle, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Goethe, Greeley, Plato and others. He writes about people you may not know, such as Phillips, Berkeley, Boehme, Carlyle, Landor, Pythagoras and Plutarch, and Swedenborg. He was known amongst his contemporaries, so his portrait of Hawthorne is correct. (He was as nervous and depressed as others say he was. Hawthorne would literally run away from a conversation.) He was spot on about Thoreau, who was apparently a bit of a respected drifter who didn't actually drift, but looked and acted like he did. Thoreau tested his friends, but he was not short of them. He seems to have been the type of guy who you respected for being so independent, so non-9 to 5, but whom you also wanted to tell to stop being such a bum and to get a damn job.

Alcott had the ability (and the time) to just read and write and think, without anyone telling him to get a damn job you bum, which makes me jealous as hell, though I wouldn't necessarily want to write about what he wrote about. He was amongst the last of the wave of privileged guys who would write about Ideas, with a capital I. He wrote about Morality, Virtue, Ideals, and the importance of one to be able to lecture well, and to be talented at smart conversation. This simply doesn't happen anymore, and it got me to wondering why.

I decided it was because my generation, and certainly the one after mine, has grown up with the idea that something is how it seems to me, but I understand it may not have the same seeming to someone else. In other words, we don't believe in universals anymore. (I know that's a universal, but let's accept the paradox and move on.) It also seems to me that nobody is renowned or respected for his intelligence anymore. Outside of luminaries like Hawking and Spielberg, who are extremely well-respected, if you are an extremely intelligent and intellectual person, but work 9-5, you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, lest people roll their eyes about you and say out loud that they don't have as much time to be smart as you do--the insinuation being that you're apparently smarter, but still somehow lesser, than they. Pointing out their latent insecurity does not help the matter any.

Sounds like personal, bitter experience, doesn't it?

Alcott was apparently one of those guys, but was well-respected, sought after, and appreciated for it. Such is simply not the case anymore. Period. He would not be so treated today; I guarantee it.

But I would also feel uncomfortable writing about Virtue and Morality these days. It is a different time. It's not the fault of political-correctness, exactly, as much as it is an ingrained understanding of the fallacy of universals. Morality for me, in suburban-hell New England, and Morality for the poverty-stricken of Ferguson, Missouri, for example, are probably two different things. Or, in other words, Yes, it's wrong to steal, but when you're starving and nobody's hiring you, you break a few universal rules every now and then. What's more Moral: to watch your children starve, or to steal some food for them?

And, yes, you have to be a man of leisure to have the time to contemplate Morality and Virtue and to write about it. I'd love to have that time, and I don't fault those who have it. For me, when I come home from work, I'm exhausted, mentally and psychologically, if not physically, and it's all I can do to write my short stories and novels and to send them out. I don't have a household of daughters supporting me financially and emotionally, and I'm not sure I'd let them if I did.

It's a different time.

Does it have to be? I don't know. I'm assuming I have more time (though it sure as hell doesn't seem it) to simply read as often as I do, and to write as many book reviews and blog entries as I do, and to write everything else that I do, and I've been told more than once (always with bitterness) that it's because I don't have a large family to support. I acknowledge this, as it's not wrong, though I could do without the tone that often comes with it. Not having a huge family is of course a choice as well.

And here we come back to Alcott. It's a different time. For the better, or not, I don't know.