Tom Mohr wrote:
>
>Regarding "A Clockwork Orange", Iain Noble wrote:
>>
>>
>> If I'm baffled by anything it's Tom's description of the film as
>> 'decadent' and 'appalling'. I think he's confusing depiction with
>> approval.
>
>and
>
>> You might
>> disapprove of what something shows or says but that doesn't mean
>> it's bad art.
>
>I've tried before to articulate my disgust with this film, and I
>usually end up pointing to another Chicago critic:
>
>>> A Clockwork Orange
> Capsule by Dave Kehr
> From the Chicago Reader
>
>A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a
>perennial popularity, perhaps because its
>confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.
>It's a movie that Leopold and Loeb would
>have loved, endorsing brutality in the name of nonconformism. At best,
>Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film suggests an
>Animal House with bogus intellectual trappings. But the trappings--the
>rationalizations and spurious
>arguments--are what make it genuinely irresponsible, genuinely
>abhorrent. With Malcolm McDowell, Patrick
>Magee, and Michael Bates. <<
>
>A number of friends have told me to see "Silence of the Lambs", and
>I've avoided it for the same reasons that I dislike
>"Clockwork Orange". I don't think you can make a good movie (or good
>art) about serial killers who eat people or about
>amoral rapists.
>
Which only goes to confirm my original objections. The use of the
term 'decadent' with reference to art (and Kubrick's films are art)
almost invariably articulates and conceals a moral or political
agenda while appearing to make an aesthetic judgement. The best
analysis of this I know is Wilde's preface to later editions of
'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.
As for 'I don't think you can make a good movie (or good
>art) about serial killers who eat people or about
>amoral rapists', my simple answer is of course you can. Art of all
kinds would be immeasurably poorer without various depictions and
analyses of appalling behaviour from Sophocles to Hitchcock.
Your Chicago critic is simply wrong. Burgess' book is most
emphatically anti-Nietzschean, as a Catholic conservative he was
trying to demonstrate the crucial importance of morality and ethics
- exemplified by religion - as the very essence of social bonds, the
message of the book is that it cannot be replaced by either
repressive control or by technical fixes aimed at
'curing' the offender ('re-education' as they used to call it in
China). It may be that the film fails to carry this theme across
effectively (which may account for Burgess' dislike of it) but I
found it there. And I must agree to differ with your critic's
assessment of the film's technical merits too. And I never saw the
slightest hint of Kubrick's justifying the actions of the droogs.
As for the comparison with 'Silence of the Lambs' this simply does
not work. This is a standard Hollywood pot-boiler (enriched by a
thick slice of overripe Welsh ham), perhaps you ought to see 'Red
Dragon' an earlier film about the first Hannibal Lecter novel with
Brian Cox as the good doctor which is rather better. The use of
music is good in that too. But neither can compare with the
slightest of Kubrick's work.
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Iain Noble
Hound Dog Research, Survey and Social Research Consultancy,
28A Collegiate Crescent Sheffield S10 2BA UK
Phone/fax: (+44) (0)114 267 1394 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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