The two poles of western civilization - constrained vs unconstrained:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kubrick's Psychopaths
Society and Human Naturein the Films of Stanley Kubrick
EXCERPT:
Manipulation is another tool of the psychopath often used by Alex. He lies to his parents and to his truant officer in order to manipulate them. When Alex is caught and charged with murder, he typically tries to shift blame to his droogs and to deny responsibility. Once he is imprisoned, he adopts the role of model prisoner, "sucking up" to the chaplain by pretending to study the Bible (secretly finding more material for his sadist and sexual fantasies therein). During his conditioning he attempts to manipulate the scientists. Once in a position of dominance, his manipulation takes on a bullying tone, as exemplified by his behavior following the suicide attempt when, despite having lost the use of all four limbs, simply by opening his mouth, and demanding food as if he were a baby bird, he asserts his dominance over the government minister as the minister feeds Alex.
As might be expected, the choice of such a protagonist for an important film by such a well known director as Kubrick resulted in a storm of critical controversy. Kubrick was accused of pandering to violent behavior if not outrightly promoting it. In an interview in the New York Times, Kubrick explained that although he is fascinated by violence, he is not advocating it (or anything else) in the film, but merely portraying it: "Part of the artistic challenge of the character is to present the violence as he sees it, not with the disapproving eye of the moralist, but subjectively, as Alex experiences it."[15] From this standpoint, in my view, Kubrick has succeeded masterfully in letting us see into the mind of a psychopathic personality. But Kubrick goes further in the interview in explaining his reasons for his fascination with Alex: "I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.... The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man."
Kubrick is expressing an idea here that accords with Sowell's[16] description of the "constrained" view of human nature which posits that it is flawed and largely fixed, and that efforts to build utopias will invariably founder on the rocks of human failings and will reflect the imperfections of their builders. Variations on this view have been held by such historical figures as Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The opposing view, that man is (at least somewhat) perfectible, or that the evil in the world is mainly the result of bad social institutions has been the view of Godwin, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Voltaire, Ronald Dworkin, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The constrained vision has been characterized as cynical, conservative, pessimistic, as opposed to the romantic, liberal, optimistic, idealistic unconstrained vision of man. Sowell points out that the person's view of human nature often serves as a litmus test that can predict which side of a given controversy the person will come down on, with holders of the constrained vision opposing holders of the unconstrained view across a spectrum of religious, social, and political issues. Often, people at opposite poles have great difficulty communicating with and understanding each other, since their basic premises are so different.
Kubrick expands on his view of the man's futile hope of salvation through social institutions in Clockwork by showing the natural man (psychopath Alex) in his encounters with characters representing other archetypes.
The liberal is represented by the writer Frank Alexander. Alex and his droogs gull him into opening the door to them by playing on his compassion with a sob story about an accident on the road, whereupon they brutally rape the wife and beat Frank so severely he is left a paraplegic invalid. Significantly, Alex vandalizes Frank's study, sweeping his writings and his typewriter onto the floor, and pulling down the shelves scattering asunder the books representing man's accumulated wisdom and knowledge. When Alex has come full-circle, and once again encounters Frank, he now is in Frank's power. How does the liberal deal with him? He drugs him and submits him to torture, gleefully enjoying his screams, thus demonstrating that at the heart of the liberal lurks the same primitive brutality that motivates Alex.
The moralist is represented by the prison chaplain. Alex fools the chaplain into thinking he has a true love for the Bible in order to gain privileges. The chaplain, significantly, recognizes the hypocrisy of the conditioning, and that it has made no moral change in Alex. But he is told by the minister of the interior (another type of psychopath):
<i>Padre, these are subtleties. We're not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics, we're concerned only with cutting down crime and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian...</i>
Cynical characters in the film who appear to share Kubrick's gestalt are the prison guard and warden who see through Alex's manipulation, but have not sufficient power to prevent the minister and the scientists from using Alex for his own ends.
Kubrick's view of societal institutions is shown by his general portrayal of the drab conditions of the future England as well as through the psychopathic characters of the representatives of state authority shown in the film. The truant officer, Mr. Deltoid, is hardly concerned for Alex's well being. He barely can conceal his joy that finally Alex has killed someone and now can be punished severely. The psychopathic police interrogator enjoys torturing Alex. The government minister is also a psychopath, having no true concern for the welfare of either the prisoners or the society. The minister sees the Ludovico technique[17] as a tool for accomplishing his political ends, and Alex as a perfect candidate: "He's enterprising, aggressive, outgoing, young, bold, vicious--he'll do". And besides, "Soon we may need all our prison space for political offenders." He and Alex understand each other well and the last scene shows them scheming to place the blame for Alex's "misfortune" on the scientists and the minister's political opponents:
<i>
We tried to help you. We followed recommendations which were made to us that turned out to be wrong. An inquiry will place the responsibility where it belongs.... We never wished you harm, but there are some who did and do.... There is also a certain man...a writer of subversive literature, who has been howling for your blood...but you're safe from him now...we've put him away. He was a menace--we put him away for his own protection and also for yours.</i>
At the end, Alex is "cured" of his conditioning under government auspices and begins a new career in government service ("we always help our friends, don't we"). It is clear from his power and sex fantasies which close the film that he is not cured of his psychopathy, and that he will now continue his exploits from a position of even greater power than before. The final fantasy of him reveling in a sexual orgy while being applauded by many figures in Victorian garb may be symbolic of the forthcoming social sanctioning of his libertine behavior.
In Clockwork, government, technology, and other social institutions are seen as only worsening the problem of man's barbaric nature rather than helping. It is small wonder that liberal critics decried Kubrick's vision, as this also runs counter to their notions. Malcolm McDowell said in an interview, "Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers, and if someone shows them realities--cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth."[18]
Kubrick's view that the psychopath is an apt model for the natural man is one of the more bleak and cynical castings of the constrained vision. His casting of society as basically sharing the psychopathic bestiality of the natural man makes it no surprise that he has been vehemently attacked by some critics. It is interesting that many of those critics generally failed to perceive Kubrick's fundamental antagonism to their own views until the release of Clockwork. We will now examine the earlier Kubrick films to see how his use of psychopathic individuals and societies developed.
In Kubrick's earliest work we encounter psychopaths only as villains or peripheral characters, in the persons of <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kubrick's Psychopaths
Society and Human Naturein the Films of Stanley Kubrick
EXCERPT:
Manipulation is another tool of the psychopath often used by Alex. He lies to his parents and to his truant officer in order to manipulate them. When Alex is caught and charged with murder, he typically tries to shift blame to his droogs and to deny responsibility. Once he is imprisoned, he adopts the role of model prisoner, "sucking up" to the chaplain by pretending to study the Bible (secretly finding more material for his sadist and sexual fantasies therein). During his conditioning he attempts to manipulate the scientists. Once in a position of dominance, his manipulation takes on a bullying tone, as exemplified by his behavior following the suicide attempt when, despite having lost the use of all four limbs, simply by opening his mouth, and demanding food as if he were a baby bird, he asserts his dominance over the government minister as the minister feeds Alex.
As might be expected, the choice of such a protagonist for an important film by such a well known director as Kubrick resulted in a storm of critical controversy. Kubrick was accused of pandering to violent behavior if not outrightly promoting it. In an interview in the New York Times, Kubrick explained that although he is fascinated by violence, he is not advocating it (or anything else) in the film, but merely portraying it: "Part of the artistic challenge of the character is to present the violence as he sees it, not with the disapproving eye of the moralist, but subjectively, as Alex experiences it."[15] From this standpoint, in my view, Kubrick has succeeded masterfully in letting us see into the mind of a psychopathic personality. But Kubrick goes further in the interview in explaining his reasons for his fascination with Alex: "I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.... The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man."
Kubrick is expressing an idea here that accords with Sowell's[16] description of the "constrained" view of human nature which posits that it is flawed and largely fixed, and that efforts to build utopias will invariably founder on the rocks of human failings and will reflect the imperfections of their builders. Variations on this view have been held by such historical figures as Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The opposing view, that man is (at least somewhat) perfectible, or that the evil in the world is mainly the result of bad social institutions has been the view of Godwin, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Voltaire, Ronald Dworkin, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The constrained vision has been characterized as cynical, conservative, pessimistic, as opposed to the romantic, liberal, optimistic, idealistic unconstrained vision of man. Sowell points out that the person's view of human nature often serves as a litmus test that can predict which side of a given controversy the person will come down on, with holders of the constrained vision opposing holders of the unconstrained view across a spectrum of religious, social, and political issues. Often, people at opposite poles have great difficulty communicating with and understanding each other, since their basic premises are so different.
Kubrick expands on his view of the man's futile hope of salvation through social institutions in Clockwork by showing the natural man (psychopath Alex) in his encounters with characters representing other archetypes.
The liberal is represented by the writer Frank Alexander. Alex and his droogs gull him into opening the door to them by playing on his compassion with a sob story about an accident on the road, whereupon they brutally rape the wife and beat Frank so severely he is left a paraplegic invalid. Significantly, Alex vandalizes Frank's study, sweeping his writings and his typewriter onto the floor, and pulling down the shelves scattering asunder the books representing man's accumulated wisdom and knowledge. When Alex has come full-circle, and once again encounters Frank, he now is in Frank's power. How does the liberal deal with him? He drugs him and submits him to torture, gleefully enjoying his screams, thus demonstrating that at the heart of the liberal lurks the same primitive brutality that motivates Alex.
The moralist is represented by the prison chaplain. Alex fools the chaplain into thinking he has a true love for the Bible in order to gain privileges. The chaplain, significantly, recognizes the hypocrisy of the conditioning, and that it has made no moral change in Alex. But he is told by the minister of the interior (another type of psychopath):
<i>Padre, these are subtleties. We're not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics, we're concerned only with cutting down crime and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian...</i>
Cynical characters in the film who appear to share Kubrick's gestalt are the prison guard and warden who see through Alex's manipulation, but have not sufficient power to prevent the minister and the scientists from using Alex for his own ends.
Kubrick's view of societal institutions is shown by his general portrayal of the drab conditions of the future England as well as through the psychopathic characters of the representatives of state authority shown in the film. The truant officer, Mr. Deltoid, is hardly concerned for Alex's well being. He barely can conceal his joy that finally Alex has killed someone and now can be punished severely. The psychopathic police interrogator enjoys torturing Alex. The government minister is also a psychopath, having no true concern for the welfare of either the prisoners or the society. The minister sees the Ludovico technique[17] as a tool for accomplishing his political ends, and Alex as a perfect candidate: "He's enterprising, aggressive, outgoing, young, bold, vicious--he'll do". And besides, "Soon we may need all our prison space for political offenders." He and Alex understand each other well and the last scene shows them scheming to place the blame for Alex's "misfortune" on the scientists and the minister's political opponents:
<i>
We tried to help you. We followed recommendations which were made to us that turned out to be wrong. An inquiry will place the responsibility where it belongs.... We never wished you harm, but there are some who did and do.... There is also a certain man...a writer of subversive literature, who has been howling for your blood...but you're safe from him now...we've put him away. He was a menace--we put him away for his own protection and also for yours.</i>
At the end, Alex is "cured" of his conditioning under government auspices and begins a new career in government service ("we always help our friends, don't we"). It is clear from his power and sex fantasies which close the film that he is not cured of his psychopathy, and that he will now continue his exploits from a position of even greater power than before. The final fantasy of him reveling in a sexual orgy while being applauded by many figures in Victorian garb may be symbolic of the forthcoming social sanctioning of his libertine behavior.
In Clockwork, government, technology, and other social institutions are seen as only worsening the problem of man's barbaric nature rather than helping. It is small wonder that liberal critics decried Kubrick's vision, as this also runs counter to their notions. Malcolm McDowell said in an interview, "Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers, and if someone shows them realities--cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth."[18]
Kubrick's view that the psychopath is an apt model for the natural man is one of the more bleak and cynical castings of the constrained vision. His casting of society as basically sharing the psychopathic bestiality of the natural man makes it no surprise that he has been vehemently attacked by some critics. It is interesting that many of those critics generally failed to perceive Kubrick's fundamental antagonism to their own views until the release of Clockwork. We will now examine the earlier Kubrick films to see how his use of psychopathic individuals and societies developed.
In Kubrick's earliest work we encounter psychopaths only as villains or peripheral characters, in the persons of <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->