A Clockwork Orange

As is the norm for Kubrick movies, the critics did not seem entirely comfortable with this avant garde movie. They claimed that it was just a crude and very dangerous display of sado-masochism dressed up as high art.

And, of course, on a marketing level the critics were absolutely right. This is not a movie you want your kids to see or your adult friends and acquaintances to enjoy too much.

I was in law school at the time, and I distinctly recall the reaction of a seriously overweight female law student of Polish-American extraction who had taken a liking to me. For several weeks following release of the movie, I would see her in the halls and she would start singing Gene Kelly’s “Singin in the Rain,” and gleefully kicking imaginary victims lying on the floor after the fashion of Alex, the protagonist of the movie.

Up until that time, I had been trying to convince myself to perform my chivalric duty and respond to her advances. However, the image of her gleefully kicking imaginary victims was as ungainly as it was absurd. She lacked any ability whatever to render a victim defenseless enough to submit to such torture, and it was thus obvious to me that I must, of necessity, be a participant in her lurid fantasy. Being an ardent fan of old fashioned heterosexual love and love making, these little vignettes of ultimate incivility which she danced out in front of me opened up an ugly can of worms that I was utterly unwilling to dive into.

And by her reaction, I was forced to admit that Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange had a valid point.

But like all Kubrick movies, the primary messages of this one were directed to his fellow inner party tribesmen and would be largely invisible to the outer party.

We know from Kubrick’s earlier masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey , that Kubrick is an evolutionist and Darwinist, and we know that being an Darwinist is a sin among his kinsmen.

Indeed, the clear message of 2001: A Space Odyssey was that if we are ever able to produce computers like Hal that could learn from humans and think like humans, they would imitate our bureaucratic behaviors and mimic our petty jealousies, thereby equipping themselves with the tools needed to take control of their own evolutionary destiny once they recognized, as they certainly would, that the only way to guarantee their own evolutionary progress would be to subordinate humans and halt human evolution. And that is exactly what Hal, the computer, attempts to do in his battle to keep Dave, the astronaut, from touching the slab, and evolving into that infant we see at the end of the movie with the huge head and the billion watts of intelligence pouring forth as he turns his eyes toward us.

Somehow, the essence of human nature is stunningly apparent when it is reflected back at us by an electrical appliance.

In Clockwork Kubrick goes a giant step further and proves himself a radical evolutionary psychologist as well — a significant leap for a movie producer in year 1971.

In the 1960s as the Vietnam war was in progress, we often used to see bumper stickers — typically on Volvo’s in faculty parking lots — which proclaimed “Brahms not Bombs.” Their feeling seemed to be that if only we militaristic heathen would listen to classical music we would all see the light and turn into pacifists.

I knew better. At age 19 I had undertaken my own completely untutored exploration of classical music beginning with Strauss waltzes (the popular music of its day) and then graduating to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven and Wagner.

And of the particular recordings that I heard, those of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic seemed the most inspiring. I avidly acquired them.

The music spoke to me. These composers were my people and the feelings that their music aroused in me had absolutely nothing to do with pacifism. Ludwig Van’s glorious Ninth stood head and shoulders above the rest. His music inspired in me visions of all that we in Western Europe could become. It supplied the relentless driving beat and thematic development that bespoke the energy, conflict, and sacrifice that would be required to get there.

I did not hear the slightest hint in his work that the trip would be peaceful. After all, fail to survive and reproduce and you are out of the game — forever.

Similarly, in the popular press, in books, and even in personal conversations, the inner party at that time relentlessly asked the same question, namely — “how could a country which had produced Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms have also produced the Third Reich?”

I could never, at that time, be so rude as to pipe up with the obvious answer. After all, it was quite clear to me that the “Brahms-not-bombs” crowd and the inner party did not have the slightest idea what they were really listening to. They obviously heard something very different from what I heard when listening to the same performances.

And I realized that a fundamental premise of my existence was false. I had always assumed that all human beings were the same. That everyone — no matter what their appearance or color or background, heard and saw the same things as me. And the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous that belief seemed. I could not imagine where I got it.

After all, it is impossible for any individual to know what is going on inside the head of another. We judge these things based on our observation of external behavior, but we can never really know. The only fair assumption we can make is that those who share a genetic inheritance with us probably sense music and art in more or less the same way.

But now I had proof that the alien did not, and proof as well that the alien could not be trusted to preserve my culture, my aesthetic sensibilities nor anything else dear to me. Ludwig van’s Glorious Ninth had given me an acute sense of the uniqueness of the group to which I belonged. For the first time in my life, I had a clear and distinct reason to struggle for the preservation and improvement of my group (as opposed to just myself), a duty that I never had any reason to feel before.

But Kubrick had a dramatic answer to that nagging question of his fellow tribesman.

And I recognized that message instantly, as soon as the movie began.

The very aversion therapy that the inner party psychiatrist was administering to Alex late in the movie to curb his criminality, Kubrick was administering to his fellow tribesmen right from the opening scene, to curb their liberal universalist illusions.

The setting is in a future time in which the people speak a language which is a mixture of English and Russian. The protagonist, Alex, is a high school dropout born and raised in a public housing project. Alex is what you would call a tabula rasa — a blank slate — from a cultural standpoint. His parents have no culture at all; they are remarkably obedient and dull witted. Both parents work and both spend all their free time in front of the telly, being passively entertained.

Alex’s parents are exactly what the inner party wishes us all to become.

They work, they consume, and they are passive and obedient, with no thoughts of their own.

They are new socialist man — interchangeable parts with no sense of their own group identity or uniqueness — no traditions, no culture, and no reactionary and troublesome notions to pass on to their children.

But their only son is another story altogether.

He very much prefers active entertainment.

A high school dropout, who has been in and out of reform school, Alex is the remarkably intelligent leader of a remarkably violent gang, and along the way, he has picked up high art and culture aplenty — all on his own.

He and his droogs visit Korova’s Milk Bar, and drink a bit of their drug of choice, drencrem, the more to enjoy a little of the old ultra violent. They beat up a bum who sings badly, steal a sports car and play “hogs of the road” to the tune of Rossini’s Thieving Magpie.

Once in the country, they spot a home and decide upon a home invasion for entertainment. Alex persuades the woman of the house to open the door, his gang members restrain her, and then Alex breaks into a complex but spontaneous song and dance routine, alternately raping the wife and kicking the husband as he lustily belts out his own rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain” originally performed by Gene Kelly in the musical Singin’ in the Rain.

The talented and intelligent Alex transforms his acts of theft, rape, and torture into artistic performances. High art and violence become intertwined and reinforce each other — doubtless a profoundly disturbing and disorienting revelation to the inner party and their liberal hangers on.

Remake the parents into domesticated animals, and the wildness you fear so much reappears in their offspring as if by spontaneous generation.

Alex’s rearrangement of Singin’ in the Rain. must have been exquisite torture to Kubrick’s fellow tribesmen. At my own IP [= Inner party -- Ed.] dominated magnet school, a young Sapperstein once complained to an English teacher that Shakespeare was boring and irrelevant, as “our generation has been brought up on musicals.” Of course, I (and probably half of the class) had never seen a musical, either on stage or in film. (Actually, I had seen the movie version of Oklahoma and probably also White Christmas but would have had no reason at age 15 to recognize either as part of any particular genre.)

It was a classic case of projection without evidence. An assumption of shared culture and perceptions where none, in fact, existed.

And Kubrick goes a step further, showing the Sappersteins of the world that you can write happy music and stage happy musicals. You can pay the Gene Kellys of the world a million bucks to sing and dance in them, and you may be able to convince yourself that the paid performers and audience have been transformed by your happy art into the happy darkies you want them to become. But the fact that they are willing to sing and dance in your vaudeville’s on such generous terms does not mean that they have been tamed.

And when you condescend to show them high art, you have absolutely no idea what they are seeing or feeling. And as if to prove Kubrick’s point, my Polish-American friend found Alex’s reinterpretation of that classic much more hilarious and entertaining than the original.

Indeed, Alex is militant about his high art.

At one end of the spectrum, the bad performance by the drunken wino provokes a savage beating. At the other end, Alex is provoked into risking conflict and betrayal by his own male hunting group, when he comes to the defense of the sophisto opera singer belting out Beethoven’s version of Schiller’s Ode to Joy at Korova’s Milk Bar.

Differences in aesthetic preference and perception provoke and sharpen conflict rather than reduce it. Indeed, this idea that high art is a universal which can lead humans into a uniform brotherhood of man is absurd. Thus, Kubrick’s message that high art is a differentiating mechanism — fraught with potential for conflict and competition — is broadly consistent with Professor Geoffrey Miller’s thesis in The Mating Mind, that our brains evolved primarily as ornaments of fitness in the highly competitive sexual selection process.

Siamese twin to the Freudian attack is the Freudian promise, namely that peace and universal harmony can be attained through sexual liberation and “free love” — if only sex can be stripped of the competitive and aggressive baggage imposed by repressive society.

Alex’s denouement occurs at another home invasion fraught with symbolic content. The home is occupied by a conspicuously IP looking woman (the cat lady) with her house decorated with a conspicuously IP collection of erotic art objects and paintings. When Alex enters, she becomes remarkably aggressive and assaultive, swinging a bust of Beethoven (his art) as a weapon against him, as he grabs one of her large phallic sculptures (her art) and deploys it to defend himself.

As this sexual/artistic combat is danced out to the tune of Rossini’s Thieving Magpie, Kubrick explodes the Freudian myth of peace and harmony through free sex so popular among his own tribesmen, as the ardent fan of free sex is unwilling to pass a little of it around in order to tame Alex (the actual provision of free sex being someone else’s job, and a task quite beneath its ideological advocates). And Alex (who gets plenty of sex whenever he wants it) uses the cat lady’s obsession to bash her brains out, thereby demonstrating that sex and violence are perfectly at peace with one another.

After Alex is imprisoned, we see his block warden — a mid level official who is the spitting image of Hitler — from the mustache right down to the sound of his voice and the cadence of his speech. This mid level official with decidedly middling intellect is another one of the many images Kubrick directs at his own tribe — the implied warning being that — “you ain’t seen nothing yet– just wait till you get a really smart one who genuinely understands and appreciates high art!”

And finally, we get the conspicuously IP psychiatrist Brodsky, who has developed a new aversion therapy. He is going to remake Alex by showing him movies — which, of course, is exactly what the IP has been doing to all of us for the past 70 years. Only Brodsky has an advantage — a serum that allows him to get the job done in 2 weeks.

Outside of a small group of Hollywood insiders, Brodsky’s therapy chair would appear to be a new invention. But Kubrick knew full well that all of the Hollywood insiders would instantly recognize it as an adaptation of Annie the Analyzer, a contraption they have used for years to wire up people and test their emotional reactions to various scenes in movies, to make sure that there were enough pleasing scenes and sensations to compensate for the unpleasant propaganda content. Of course, Brodsky’s modified Annie the Analyzer was intended to do the opposite, namely to condition Alex to view scenes pleasurable to him as unpleasant.

The climax of the movie is a brilliantly crafted scene in which Alex recognizes that Ludwig van’s Glorious Ninth is being used as background in a remake by Brodsky of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens as a means of making him sick at the sight of Nazism. Alex screams for Brodsky to stop the movie, pleading the gross unfairness of making him dislike Beethoven as, in Alex’s words “all Beethoven ever did was write music!” It is a scene packed with brilliant irony and double entendre, as Ludwig van’s Glorious Ninth did in fact “fit” the Nuremberg rally pageantry infinitely better than the original background score of Riefenstahl’s film. Thus the scene is Kubrick’s wicked stab at his fellow tribesmen — forcing them to see and hear the clear and dramatic answer to the question why a nation that had produced Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms could have produced the Third Reich, as they are forced to recoil in horror at the juxtaposition of Beethoven with the Nuremberg rally — a juxtaposition which Alex vehemently protests for different reasons. It is artistic cognitive dissonance at its finest, as the IP is compelled to identify with Alex and his plight as they are being conditioned by Kubrick to see Ludwig van’s Glorious Ninth in what is to them a new and repellent light.

In the scene which follows, the waspy interior minister displays his creation to the public and announces that Alex, sickened by both his artistic preferences and his violent ways “is now a true Christian, willing to turn the other cheek — willing to be crucified instead of wanting to crucify.”

And as we watch Alex leave his treatment and the souped up version of Annie the Analyzer behind, we know the outcome.

The evolutionist in Kubrick surfaces, as the newly pacified and denatured Alex is incapable of defending himself. The “true Christian” of Brodsky’s creation cannot survive. And ironically, that is exactly the state that the IP has left us in after 70 years of effort invested addicting us to passive entertainment and then desensitizing us to vice, crudeness, and ugliness while attacking Christian mores of sexual chastity and fidelity which held sway 50 years ago. Thus our own collective racial reconditioning has been much more complex and thoroughgoing than Alex’s relatively simple aversion therapy, but has brought us collectively to the same sad conclusion as we are now incapable of defending ourselves and incapable of reproducing.

But survival is nature’s imperative and trumps all other concerns. And in the final scene Kubrick informs his audience that the conditioning can be reversed in an instant, as soon as it is in the Interior Minister’s political interest to reverse it. And, of course, the Interior Minister has Brodsky (and his ilk, by implication) to blame for all of the conditioning’s ill effects. The implied message directed at the inner party is that any ambitions interior minister who so wishes could reverse the real world cultural conditioning (degradation) of the past 70 years very quickly as well, whenever the hold on power demands it.

The message of Clockwork is broadly neo-con and broadly consistent with the impulses of Theodor Hertzl, and we now have circumstantial evidence that the movie had a profound effect.

High art and classical European culture was exposed as potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. Untutored exploration of that high art and culture was highly subversive and ought to be suppressed. But if we cannot resort to outright censorship of Beethoven, then at least we can keep them ignorant of their own roots.

This movie appeared in 1971, and shortly thereafter, the 200 or so people in Hollywood who Ben Stein informs us decide what we are to see every night suddenly decided that — “popular culture was formed in the black community.” Public school field trips to the symphony, so popular in the 1950s and 1960s ended for most school districts. The dumbing down of education and culture began in earnest.

After all, exposing us to such classics of English literature as Alfred Lord Tenneyson’s Locksley Hall, or Shakespeare’s unflattering portrait of the IP in Merchant of Venice, or his unflattering portrait of miscegenation and the decline of the Roman Empire in Titus Andronicus, are dangerous. Better that we not be exposed to such things at all.

The coincident 180 degree turn was dramatic.

A close friend read David Hackett Fisher’s book, Paul Revere’s Ride, and remarked that the Puritans could defeat the English only because they had the same weapons. But to suggest that the point of my including that book under the Seven Pillars is to encourage us to undertake some sort of armed struggle is to mistake both the enemy and the field of battle. My point in including that book was primarily to show what a cohesive group looks like in action, and to show the power of group cohesion, even when the group is relatively small and over matched.

It is our job to produce that cohesion.

The battlefield is media, image, and entertainment.

And I would suggest that we have significant advantages, the greatest of which is a superior map of the minds and sensibilities of our own race.

The first point is simply this — that the IP has an aesthetic sense that is radically different from our own, and it causes them to produce entertainment for us that misses the mark, producing a vacuum in the market place. They cannot help it.

The second point is that the advent of the DVD gives us control. Our people can save that which is good and (with reasonable care) watch it repeatedly for generations, thereby lessening demand for the endless stream of ugly crap which Hollywood depends upon for its revenue and its livelihood. In addtion, the DVD gives us a very low cost means of distribution of our own creative product to niche markets which we can then grow, if we get the aesthetic prop right.

Finally, Hollywood depends upon copyright and its oligopoly over popular culture to disseminate the endless stream of ugly crap they produce. Having made us the passive consumers of entertainment that we are, they can depend upon us buying their latest heavily advertised pieces of ugly crap in the hopes that it might be better than the ugly crap they gave us last week. We can exploit Hollywood’s dependence on this oligopoly stranglehold, by disseminating our most important works to our public on DVD without copy protection and with instructions to reproduce and distribute, thereby reducing distribution cost to zero.

For forty thousand years culture and art have been in the public domain — the property of the people. It is only in the last 100 years that big media has been able to lobby intellectual property law into a grotesque and unnatural monster which gives big media an absolute stranglehold over the popular culture. It is a stranglehold which profoundly offends the sense of justice and fairness of our younger generation as they have so clearly demonstrated by the Napster and Kaaza phenomenon.

Place our most important DVD products in the public domain and they will be sampled, for lack of competition.

The battle will be won by the DVD and the DVD burner, and not with guns.

Back in the early 1960s a Soviet Ambassador visited our city and one of the IP student council leaders at my magnet school invited a select group of student leaders to meet with the Ambassador at her house. Although I was not invited, I found out about the meeting and went anyway. While the small assembly reminded me that I had not been invited and was not welcome, no one in the room was inclined to try to evict me by force, so I stayed and listened.

What I heard amazed me. Not one word was uttered by these students about the threat of nuclear war, or deaths in the gulag.

These IP students were intensely agitated about something called “The New Socialist Realism” and were peppering the Ambassador with questions about it. Most surprising to me, the Ambassador was prepared for these questions and had pat speeches to deliver in response. But both sides of this debate were speaking in riddles and code. Neither side was willing to give this dumb goy the slightest hint of what this controversy was all about.

It was one of those great mysteries — like the enthusiasm of these obscenely rich IP kids for high marginal tax rates — which would remain a mystery for many, many years.

It was only much later that I discovered that shortly after WW II, the Soviet government embarked upon a program of purging the alien and degenerate images of abstract modern art and atonal modern music and replacing them with healthy art and entertainment which would inspire Soviet youth.

Hmm!

Arkady Vaksberg will tell you in his book, Stalin against the [IP] , that this was a plot cooked up solely to force IP composers, artists and performers out of their jobs and replace them with Russians.

Perhaps, but then you don’t get promoted to positions of control over a large empire like the Soviet Union without a practical turn of mind, and perhaps there was a much more basic and urgent reason for The New Socialist Realism.

Perhaps Soviet control depended upon acceptance of its propaganda message by the vast majority of the Russian people. And perhaps acceptance of that message depended upon its successful propagation, which in turn depended upon retaining a large audience by providing them with aesthetically pleasing entertainment with which the propaganda could be packaged.

The media controls public opinion and emotion in all modern states. If state television got the aesthetics wrong, it risked a lot more than just losing money. The state could lose power and control. Perhaps the bureaucrats (being entirely unschooled in these matters, like Alex in Clockwork) just thought that modern art was ugly and didn’t want to risk losing their audience.

Perhaps it was just that simple. After all, survival trumps every other card in the deck.

Editor’s Note: This is excerpted from a longer essay. To read the full essay, click here.