Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [115]
Pauline believed she had a clear-eyed view of Kubrick’s intentions. At the end of the picture, when Alex’s former victims turn on him and he reverts to his old, corrupt self, she grasped that Kubrick intended it as “a victory in which we share . . . the movie becomes a vindication of Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being and only the good Alex was a robot.” She was deeply disturbed by Kubrick’s grotesque portrayal of the victims, which she found “symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, ‘Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.’ In the new mood . . . people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims—that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassination, post-Manson mood. I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.”
While she made it clear that she in no way advocated censorship, she felt that she and her colleagues had to speak out against the “corrupt” morality that so many directors were attempting to force-feed the gullible public:
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools.... There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship.... Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it’s eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it’s worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?
Her impassioned argument, however, fell mostly on deaf ears: A Clockwork Orange became an immense success, one of the year’s most widely discussed films.
Pauline’s concern about audiences’ being turned on by violence were nothing if not timely: In the weeks that followed the release of A Clockwork Orange, a number of extremely brutal films opened in theaters, including Dirty Harry, which marked Clint Eastwood’s first appearance as the San Francisco police inspector Harry Callahan. (Pauline would have a lifelong antipathy toward Eastwood, whom she considered minimally talented and absurdly macho.) Dirty Harry took as its theme the corruption and unfairness of a legal system that rewards criminals by getting them off on technicalities: Pauline found it a “right-wing fantasy” about the police being “helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals.”
But the film of the season that caused her the greatest apprehension was made by a director whose work she admired—Sam Peckinpah. She regretted that she had not been able to write about The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah’s 1969 drama about a gang of over-the-hill outlaws reuniting for a final spree, but the film had made an indelible impression on