A Clockwork Orange… Ticking

Abstract

In June 1995, Bob Dole – would-be president and a politician who has been insulated from the world for many years – attacked Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers as a violent assault on Republican fantasies of home and family. The film, Dole said, is one of “the nightmares of depravity” created by Hollywood and popular culture that threaten “to undermine our character as a nation.” In 1996, shortly before the political convention that nominated him, he praised Roland Emerich's Independence Day – a film that proposes, with all the manipulative advantages of the Hollywood style, now tricked up to digital perfection, pasteboard heroic figures fighting against evil alien invaders – as a film that upholds those values that Republicans hold dear. When A Clockwork Orange appeared in 1971, it was attacked as an unmediated celebration of the violent young self, as a provocation to youthful viewers to imitate what they saw on the screen. There were – on the streets of England – acts of violence that seemed to be based on the film (just as there was at least one such act in the United States after the release of Natural Born Killers ). A British judge – prophesying Bob Dole some twenty-five years earlier – said the film was “an evil in itself.” Its creator, Stanley Kubrick, a man noted for his willful repression of a public persona, was moved to write a letter to the New York Times defending himself.

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