A Clockwork Orange - What its time did for it

A Clockwork Orange (1971), both the film and Anthony Burgess’ source novel, is primarily a film of ideas. Ideas, theories, explorations and reflections that, arguably, occasionally get the better of the films narrative, but none the less it is rife with material of meaning and value. It is this meaning that brought the film such acclaim as well as its mass damnation in the UK, being banned for upwards of twenty-five years, for primarily the sexual violence that was said to invite copycat crimes, until its re-release in 2000. The film was, in an undeniably sensationalist way, said to be bringing about the end of society in its depiction of “highbrow teen violence”. The film was even banned in the UK by Stanley Kubrick himself after he and his family received death threats. A deal was struck between Kubrick and Warner Bros. and A Clockwork Orange was not to be shown in the United Kingdom until after the director’s untimely death.

The film’s central dilemma was the question of free will. Is it better for an individual to have God-given free will no matter how they abuse it and use it for what is generally considered evil, or is it better to have society conform to law and order through force and obligation rather than choice? This question had particular significance to Burgess as his wife was assaulted by America soldiers during World War Two which clearly led to the segment of the narrative in which Alex and his three droogs break into the home of a liberal writer and proceed to sexually assault his wife. It is insights such as this that confirm the irony of the film and the point both Kubrick and Burgess were clear about, that A Clockwork Orange was an exploration of violence rather than a celebration as many were quick to accuse it of being.  

Politically, the film can be looked at as an expression and a reflection on post-war libertarianism in the United Kingdome. Furthermore, as a reflection and a statement that can be interpreted to be applied to capitalism and communism alike in a far more subversive way than the already progressive American science-fiction films of the fifties, most notably The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). A Clockwork Orange has since become one of the most praised and assured cult films of all time due in large part to how significant and provocative it was at its time.

Martyrs - Why do I need to see horrendous torture?

What would Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) be without meaning, without its transcendental narrative outcome? On a base level it would not be called Martyrs, more likely something as nondescript as Hostel or even The Tortured. The theme of martyrdom gives the horrendous violence and cruelty the film confronts its audience with a reason to happen and more importantly, and pivotal to anything even closely resembling a horror film, it gives the audience a reason to care. James Wan’s Saw (2004) had the illusion of context and reason for its elaborate and torturous death traps but the problem was that the gore, if it needs to be present at all, should serve the meaning, as with Martyrs and more recently Lucky McGee’s The Woman (2011), and not the other way around.   

Pascal Laugie has stated that his film “subscribes industrially to a return to torture films (of the 70’s)” he follows this by saying that the likes of Eli Roth’s Hostel or, again, Saw do not share the same aims or style of his film and in this “Martyrs was like an anti-Hostel or vice versa”. What differentiates the two is their approach to why such acts of violence are being shown to the audience. With Hostel it is clear that, in the mould of the 70’s and 80’s most unequivocally exploitative films, the revelling in the violence and gore was enough justification for all that is presented. The torture is there to be sickening and shocking and not to, say, explore the depravity and corruption of the wealthy in central European countries. Whereas how Laugier went about the undeniably brutal and full-on violence of Martyrs was for the exploration of the narrative and Anna’s martyrdom and the mystery that surrounds it. However, this throws up the further question of what is, if needed at all, sufficient justification for perverse amounts of hyper-realistic ultra-violence? A Serbian Film (2010), for instance, one of the most controversial films of the past decade, was laboured with more socio-political metaphoric meaning than any film in recent memory but to what goal? Does the oppression of the Serbian people need to be visualised through infant and incestuous rape? Director Srdjan Spasojevic feels so as he says that “there was no plan or intension to shock” and that the intensions of the film were “just to make a statement, just to say something”. Maybe A Serbian Film is the ultimate product of an artist’s frustration about the rape and exploitation of his people. Perhaps rather, and the film is the greatest advocate of any meaning, it is an unprecedentedly pretentious piece of work which, particularly after the first third of the film, reads like a show reel of some of the most vile acts of human nature ever allowed to have been shown in cinema in all the detail that the censors would allow to pass.   

This leads on to the question why is the violence in the likes of Martyrs justified by its meaning and not so with A Serbian Film? Ultimately, it comes down to the question does the violence serve that narrative or subtext of the film? If the central character of A Serbian Film impaling someone through the eye with his penis is valid and weighty enough a metaphor to put across the injustices of contemporary Serbian authoritarian rule then all debate is retracted. But in Martyrs the violence is there directly present to unravel the supposed mystery behind martyrdom throughout human existence whereas at no point does any violent act in A Serbian Film shed light or bring up questions on the narrative. As with film from Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) to moments in the otherwise intelligent and impressive Man Bites Dog (1992), violence and unpleasantries in general need a balance between exposition and reasoning. It is this balance that makes films such as Martyrs, A History of Violence (2005), Crash (1996), I Saw the Devil (2010) or The Girl Next Door (2007) so impactful and, in their own way, emotionally revealing and horrifying.        

The Dark Knight - Far too much a product of its time

The Dark Knight (2008), in its visual construction, is an immaculate piece of work. The choreography of the action is meticulous and impactful and the film is beautifully shot by Wally Pfister and scored with epic conviction by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. However, its greatest downfall is in how much the film is a product of modern commercial cinema in the worst possible way. It, along with Christopher Nolan’s follow-up, Inception (2010), is one of the greatest advocates for the notion that more is not always more. The Dark Knight, as with the sub-plot involving Cobb’s wife in Inception, has segments that are do not merit the plot in any manner and this often makes the entire effect of the film feel garbled and convoluted. Furthermore, the most devaluing facet of the film is how much it is clearly a product of post-Saw cinema and of a modern paranoid America. This is optimised in one of the latter scenes involving the two ships and one moral dilemma too many. The predicament that the participants of the “social experiment” that has been thrust upon them by The Joker boils down to a more elaborate and a more glorified envisioning of the question of ‘would one kill x to save oneself?’.  This philosophy all too closely resembles those found in the modern sub-genre of ‘torture porn’ with the likes of Saw and more crucially Tom Shankland’s W Delta Z A.K.A The Killing Gene (2007).               
    The problem with the film is how many ideas, characters, politics and ethics it tries to cram into its far outstayed running time, being just shy of two and a half hours. Intrinsically, the problem The Dark Knight faces is in its desire to be so much. The amount of ‘bang for your buck’ and intelligent ambition is no justification for chronic overwriting and far too many characters removing all focus from the title character, the dark knight himself. On the terms of being a Batman film it is very much a regression brought about by its time and the ambition that its time promotes. Unlike Nolan’s previous Batman outing, Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight, in its focus on Batman’s villains primarily, harks back more to Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997) than the undeniably far more appropriate and admirable in its interpretation of its subject matter, Batman Begins. The Dark Knight’s place is far better suited beside the likes of crime epics such as Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) than where it should of sat surpassing one of the finest pieces of big-budget movie-making of the last decade, Batman Begins.