A History of Ultra-violence

The Phoenix (one of our local non-multiplexes) ran a short season of Stanley Kubrick films last summer, comprising (if memory serves) 2001, Dr Strangelove, Spartacus, Barry Lyndon and The Shining – a quintet which, for the most part, should remind any sensible viewer of just why Kubrick is revered as one of the greatest directors ever to fake the moon landings – sorry, I meant to say ‘draw breath’. That said, missing from the run (which otherwise included nearly every film Kubrick made between 1960 and 1980) was A Clockwork Orange, originally released in 1971.

I suppose this is not really surprising when one considers that this is a film with a history of not appearing, having been withdrawn from UK cinemas in 1973 and not issued for home entertainment purposes at Kubrick’s own request, after he received threats because of it. When I was at university in the mid 1990s it still had that cachet of being an illegal, transgressive piece of art: bootleg copies were on sale next to those of Reservoir Dogs (likewise unavailable on legitimate VHS at the time). I distinctly recall that even a TV documentary about A Clockwork Orange was subject to a legal challenge and withdrawn by the makers.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this very remarkable film is that it still retains most of its power to shock and disturb. It is back in UK cinemas at the moment and the screening I attended did not feature the usual card from the BBFC, presaging the start of the film. Instead, the crimson field of the opening titles smashed into view unheralded, accompanied by the disquieting radiophonic howl of the opening music. What follows the opening credits is one of the most vivid sequences in all of modern cinema, as we accompany teenager Alex (Malcolm McDowell) on a typical night out. That sounds fairly mundane, but in fact we are plunged into what is essentially a kind of bacchanal of violence: verbal, physical, sexual, motorised and musical. The near-future stylings of the film and the Russian-influenced argot of Alex and his droog gang-members are just alienating enough to make the film compellingly strange rather than repulsive, but it is a close thing, and there is something deeply unsettling about the way that Kubrick’s direction and McDowell’s charisma conspire to make Alex a borderline-attractive antihero rather than the vicious monster we should probably perceive him as.

Of course, there is also his love of classical music, especially Beethoven, which is about as close as Alex gets to having a redeeming feature. Ironically, it is this, coupled to his own arrogance, which leads to Alex’s comeuppance – such as it is. Turned on by his droogs and finally nabbed by the police, Alex is sent to prison. It is here, a few years into a long prison term, that he first hears of the Ludovico technique – a method of rehabilitating prisoners and turning them into model citizens. Eagerly he volunteers, not quite realising what he is letting himself in for…

Sitting by my desk at work is a small but chunky volume listing the 101 greatest science fiction films (or something like that), and, sure enough, A Clockwork Orange features in it. It always seems to me this is one of those films which only just scrapes over the line – it is arguably set in one of those ten-minutes-into-the-future dystopias, the awful fashions and calculatedly tasteless art instantly evoking an exaggerated version of the 1970s. But the Ludovico technique is certainly the stuff of science fiction, allowing the film to address big questions of what it means to truly be a human being. The film’s thesis has been much articulated, almost to the point of overfamiliarity: by removing a person’s ability to make genuine moral choices and compelling them to exist in a state of petrified timidity, have you honestly made them ‘good’? The film’s energy and technique keeps the question interesting, although it departs significantly from Anthony Burgess’ novel by omitting the epilogue, in which an older Alex reflects on the excesses of his youth. The book’s conclusion appears to be that young men are naturally and inherently prone to violent misbehaviour, but they eventually grow out of it. (One should point out that Kubrick claimed only to have read the American edition of the novel, from which the final chapter was cut on the grounds it was unconvincing and unrealistic.)

Kubrick, naturally, is also interested in the Ludovico technique as a comment on the nature of cinema itself: the treatment room looks very like a cinema itself, with Alex strapped into his seat, literally a captive audience, unable to look away as scenes of violence play out before him. Some of these bear a striking resemblance to scenes from the film itself, which has to be a consciously self-reflexive touch. Thanks to the treatment, Alex is ultimately repelled and literally nauseated by what he sees – perhaps Kubrick is challenging the audience to compare their own responses to the violence that permeates his film.

Apart from this one plot device and a few scenes at the beginning, A Clockwork Orange feels strikingly non-futuristic when one watches it now. This is not to say it is a realistic or naturalistic film, of course: it most closely resembles a kind of parable or twisted allegory. There is something undeniably grotesque and over-the-top about every major character and the way they are performed – apart from Alex himself, there is the probation officer Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), the chief guard (Michael Bates), the minister (Anthony Sharp) and the writer whom Alex brutalises (Patrick Magee). These latter two serve another aspect of the film, which is its commentary, and indeed satire, of social and political attitudes. This is not light or even particularly funny satire: it is as savage and scathing as anything else in the film. On the other hand, Kubrick is scrupulously even-handed, treating both the authoritarian government and the supposedly progressive liberals with equal contempt, one side being happy to dehumanise their own citizens in the pursuit of good publicity, the other showing no concern for human life, as long as they can gain political advantage. (No wonder senior politicians have always seemed to be a bit wary of A Clockwork Orange: when the shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe was asked to contribute to a documentary about it, around the time of the film’s re-release in 2000, she agreed on the proviso that she didn’t actually have to watch it.)

Its depiction of useless, self-interested politicians and violent, knife-wielding youth gangs are only two of the ways in which A Clockwork Orange feels as relevant today as it doubtless did nearly fifty years ago. But then this is a film about the biggest and most important of ideas: how we want to live as a society, and treat one another; just what is involved in being a good citizen; what is the essential nature of a human being? And it manages to do so with unforgettable visual style and a memorable musical score. At this point in his career, Kubrick made making masterpieces look very easy indeed.

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All the Wrong Moves

‘Classic Star Trek was that slightly rough girl who is a touch unrefined, dripping with sex appeal… and you end up wanting more. TNG was that more subdued, shy, refined girl… but innate passion and chemistry just isn’t there, and the entire experience feels a tad unrewarding.’ – Glen C Oliver, quoted in The Fifty Year Mission

‘My favourite bit was when Malcolm McDowell nutted Captain Slaphead.’ – Tony Parsons, Newsnight Review

Watching Star Trek: Generations in the UK was a slightly odd experience, simply due to the different ways in which film and TV operated back in those distant days of 1995. Nowadays, popular American TV shows arrive in the UK either simultaneously with their US transmission, or at most a couple of months later, but twenty years ago being a Star Trek watcher without a satellite subscription was a gruelling ordeal (I suppose you could say it was an exercise in character-building, but then that seemed to be other people’s rationale for every lousy experience I had in the 90s). There was, for instance, a two year gap between the transmission of the first and second episodes of series four, a period demanding strict spoiler management if you also read SF magazines. The cinema release of Generations in the US followed the conclusion of Next Gen‘s final season (after a decent interval, anyway). When it arrived in the UK shortly afterwards, we still had over a year of first-run TNG still to go, so it all felt a bit odd and a little premature.

(Still, it could have been worse: the first X-Files movie likewise appeared shortly after its US release, thus completely screwing up the intricate meta-plot for those of us who were a year behind due to only having access to the BBC broadcasts.)

Oh well. At least the movie itself seemed to pass the time fairly agreeably – at the time, anyway. Things get underway with the inaugural cruise of the Enterprise-B in 2293, overseen by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and a couple of his old buddies, who are clearly not as retired as it was implied they were about to become at the end of Star Trek VI. Things go a bit amiss when the Enterprise encounters refugee ships caught in a mysterious energy ribbon, and Kirk apparently sacrifices himself to save the day and allow some of the refugees to be saved.

Before you can say ‘hang on, if the Federation was rescuing refugees from a Borg assimilation back in Kirk’s day, how come no-one had ever heard of them when the Enterprise met their first cube in second-season Next Gen?’, we find ourselves 78 years later aboard the Enterprise commanded by Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). The ship receives a distress signal from a research outpost which has been attacked by the Romulans, and one of the survivors turns out to be Dr Tolian Soran (Malcolm McDowell), whom we have previously met as one of refugees (he’s one of those conveniently long-lived kinds of alien). Investigations are hampered by Picard being distracted by bad news from home, and Data (Brent Spiner) deciding to instal a chip which gives him emotions, and by Soran turning out to be a bad ‘un.

Yes, Soran teams up with some renegade Klingons, kidnaps the ship’s regular whipping boy LaForge (LeVar Burton), and zooms off to execute his nefarious plan of blowing up various stars. But why? Well, it turns out the mysterious energy-ribbon is either a gateway to heaven, or basically intergalactic crack, or simply one of those metaphorical Trek plot devices, and Soran is keen to get back into it, and blowing up stars will help with this (it’s complicated). In order to put a stop to all this, Picard finds himself obliged to team up with Kirk, who has been stuck in the timeless world of the ribbon since the start of the movie. But can victory come without great sacrifices?

As I suggested, while David Carson’s movie seemed fairly satisfying on its first release, these days it just feels slightly off in all kinds of ways. It’s not that it’s totally without good things – the chief of these being Malcolm MacDowell, who is clearly having a whale of a time chewing up the scenery (I seem to recall him volunteering to come back and kill off the rest of regular cast in subsequent movies), but the vibrant cinematography also does a great job of making the film look very different from the TV series which was such a recent memory when it came out.

The problem, I think, is that the film plays it safe when it should be doing something new and surprising, and innovates when what we really want is something familiar. Doing a movie where the original crew and the Next Gen mob meet up was arguably too much of a no-brainer to be advisable, and yet here it is, albeit in a rather limited form. It doesn’t really help that the TNG writers don’t seem to have much feel for the original crew, or that the script was clearly written for different characters to perform – Scotty finds himself spouting all kinds of scientific bafflegab and Chekov ends up in charge of sickbay, and it’s hard to think of a way they could have made it more obvious that it was supposed to be Spock and McCoy in these scenes.

I suppose I should also mention that Kirk doesn’t really feel like Kirk in this film, despite Shatner’s best attempts to give him some of the old swagger and fire. The theme of the film requires Kirk to be a somewhat regretful, diminished figure, looking back on an unfulfilled life, and this doesn’t quite ring true somehow – yet the Generations take on the character seems to have acquired some traction, having a lot in common with the Kirk who appears in the ‘autobiography’ which came out a couple of years ago. It’s Kirk, but not as we know him, and perhaps this is why his death at the end of the film doesn’t have anything like the impact it should – it’s also the case that it feels like the writers are dotting an i, rather than concluding this character’s story. (Maybe they should have kept Shatner’s ‘bridge on the captain’ ad lib.)

Writing about the very first Star Trek movie, I mentioned its similarities with early TNG, and the crucial mistake it made by not presenting the characters in a way that was recognisable from the TV show. Certainly the movie assumes the audience will have a certain degree of familiarity with the TV show – recurring villains the Duras sisters show up, for instance – and the whole thing is to some extent plotted and structured like a big-budget episode of the series. But they also come up with a story where Picard starts crying like a baby and Data can’t stop laughing like an idiot, and neither of these are things which I really want to see in a TNG movie (or indeed in any form of TNG). That said, at least they get interesting things to do, which isn’t the case for everyone in the cast – some of the junior members of the crew just seem to be there to meet contractual obligations, and even in these minor roles their performances radiate that comforting MDF quality we have come to expect.

I suppose I also have a problem with a couple of faults which recur throughout the TNG movies: whether or not they actually have a planned economy in the 24th century is the subject of fierce debate, but it seems certain beyond doubt that they have totally run out of subtlety. Like many of the TV episodes, they take a theme or a piece of subtext and then belabour you with it at quite extraordinary length, in the form of characters making long speeches or engaging in lengthy discussions about it. Yes, the film is about mortality and growing older. This is clear by about ten minutes in. And yet they keep on and on and on about it, without ever actually managing to say anything surprising or especially subtle about it, until the plot crashes into the assumption that, because Star Trek is ostensibly SF, a Star Trek movie should resolve like most modern SF blockbusters (i.e., with an action sequence). Hence the concluding scenes of three men in late middle age clambering around on some rocks.

I’ve never really been anything like as fond of the TNG movies as I was the original series movies from the 80s. Maybe it’s because I saw those early films when I was younger, or maybe it’s because I’m generally much fonder of the 60s TV series than I am of TNG. But I also think it’s the case that the TNG films feel constrained, somehow, obliged both to stay true to the ethos of the TNG TV series and respect the integrity of the rest of the Trek brand. They just don’t feel especially cinematic, and if a film doesn’t feel cinematic, what’s the point of it? This film includes lavish bigger-than-TV moments (the bit on the sailing ship) and supposedly significant developments (the business with Data’s chip, the destruction of the Enterprise-D), but ultimately it doesn’t really feel like anything other than a carefully-assembled brand extension.

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Escape from East Kilbride New Town

One of the more interesting phenomena in cinema is when power and success goes to a young director’s head somewhat, with the results generally being interesting, if possibly not that person’s best work: the ensuing films are ambitious, startlingly off-the-wall, but also frequently overblown and audience-unfriendly. It happened to Spielberg with 1941, it happened to Edgar Wright with Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and – I recently discovered – it happened to Neil Marshall with the 2008 film Doomsday.

This was the (relatively) big-budget follow-up to Dog Soldiers and The Descent, a couple of pared-down but effective and well-received horror movies about people going off to the woods and being jumped on by monsters. The events of Doomsday take place on a wider canvas. When a lethal and highly-contagious viral outbreak takes place in present-day Glasgow (the exact cause is not delved into, but I expect someone tried deep-frying something they shouldn’t have), panic and violence rapidly spread. The British government quickly order the construction of an armoured wall separating Scotland from the rest of the UK, and leave the country to its own dark fate (all this, by the way, without any bickering over referendum dates or wrangling about a possible ‘third option’ – food for thought there for Alex Salmond, methinks).

Anyway, in the year 2035 Scotland is a barren, desolate, uninviting wasteland (insert your own joke here), while the aftereffects of the catastrophe have transformed England into a decaying, repressive autocracy, ruled over by grasping crypto-fascists like the prime minister (Siddig el Fadil) and his advisor (David O’Hara), and policed by security chief Nelson (Bob ‘Oskins) and his top agent, Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra). When there is another outbreak of the virus, this time in central London, disaster looms. But there is one slim hope: there are signs that human life has survived north of the border, in which case they must have discovered a cure. Sinclair and a crack team of squaddies are loaded into a couple of APCs forthwith and packed off to the ruins of Glasgow in search of a top virologist (Malcolm McDowell), left behind there during the quarantine. Sinclair’s orders are clear: come back with the antidote or not at all!

Doomsday is one of those movies where you can spend a lot of time thinking ‘I’ve seen this bit before… and this bit… and this bit…’ While the opening scenes clearly owe a debt to the 28 … Later movies, as the film progresses the influence of John Carpenter (particularly, Escape from New York) and George Miller (Mad Max, rather than Babe) becomes rather more dominant – though to be fair the film openly acknowledges its sources by naming a couple of minor characters after the directors in question. To begin with, at least, the film manages to take all these elements and mash them together to make something with a semblance of originality to it, and the first act of the film is rather engaging. It reminded me most of all of the original Cursed Earth comic strip from the British comic 2000AD, and it strikes me that the producers of the new Judge Dredd movie have really missed a trick in not getting Marshall involved in the production: on the strength of this film, he has exactly the right kind of sensibility for it.

Possibly best not to let him write the script, though: the first-act set-up is perfectly serviceable here, but as the film goes on it increasingly falls to bits, with elements included seemingly on a whim or because Marshall thought they would look cool, and key elements of the plot not properly articulated. Most fundamentally, the driver for the narrative here is the search for the cure – and when Sinclair finally catches up with Macdowell’s character, he rather vaguely waffles on about how ‘natural selection’ has given him and his followers ‘immunity’ to the virus. That, I think you’ll agree, is a stroke of good luck, given he’s an expert on viruses and all (even if it makes sense, which I strongly doubt). We’re talking about a Maguffin, obviously, but does it have to be such a blatant one?

One gets a sense that narrative cohesion was less of a priority for the film-makers than the startling excesses which run through this film from beginning to end – right at the start, the tone is set when someone gets shot, but they’re not just shot: their hand is messily blown off. Dismemberments and decapitations are frequent, rabbits get blown to pieces, well-known British actors are barbecued alive and eaten, and so on. (To say nothing of the scene with the naked blonde packing a pump-action shotgun.) I don’t have a problem with any of this stuff per se, but it does make Doomsday very difficult to take seriously as an actual SF action movie rather than a lurid piece of exploitation junk.

Matters are not helped by the fact that the senior members of the cast (and here I’m thinking of Hoskins and Macdowell) don’t get a great deal of screen time. (Adrian Lester is lumbered with a curiously underwritten role as the main character’s sidekick.) The bulk of carrying this movie falls on the shoulders of Rhona Mitra, who is agreeable enough to look upon, but not conspicuously equipped (on the strength of this performance) with either acting ability or screen presence. She is basically playing an undistinguished exponent of that tedious mainstay of the dimbo SF/horror action genre, the Ass-Kicking Babe – much like Kate Beckinsale in Underworld and its sequels, Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil and its spawn, or Sanaa Lathan in Alien vs Predator.

Those last two examples should be setting alarm bells ringing in the heads of right-minded folk, as they are both part of the oeuvre of the king of the trashy mid-budget genre movie, Paul W.S. Anderson. Even though I wasn’t much impressed with the way Doomsday unravelled throughout its length, eventually becoming not much more than a lumpy pastiche of its sources, I am still hesitant to describe it as basically resembling a Paul W.S. Anderson film, for fear of sounding too harsh. The fact remains that it does – an unusually imaginative and well-mounted Paul W.S. Anderson movie, to be sure, but still part of the canon. I suppose that if Anderson himself was responsible I’d be praising it as a great step forward – but he wasn’t, Neil Marshall was, and as a result Doomsday, though fairly entertaining, is inevitably a bit of a disappointment.

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