Kubrick Contra Nihilism: Auteur Criticism

KUBRICK CONTRA NIHILISM: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Much critical ink has been spilled over the question of whether the world-view of archetypal auteur Stanley Kubrick is nihilistic or not, and appropriately so. To my mind, this is one of the most important questions we can ask about genuine artists and their oeuvres. If auteur criticism is to have any validity, from a philosophical perspective, it must address such issues. True cinematic geniuses (e.g., Bergman, Antonioni, Wertmuller, Hitchcock and Cronenberg, to name only a few) have something to teach us about the meaning of life, and in uncommon instances, their explorations can be genuinely philosophical. This is the case in several of Kubrick’s films, but most especially in his treatment
His attempt to “snuff it” had caused him sufficient trauma to free him from this nightmarish conditioning process (as his hilarious responses to cartoon images shown him by the woman psychologist in a previous scene had foreshadowed). No longer nauseated at the prospect of sex or violence, Alex was free to resume his sadistic ways. In my view, Kubrick celebrates Alex’s recovered freedom of choice here. No matter how monstrous Alex was, more monstrous still is a State apparatus that can rob the individual of his free will. With that free will, as Christianity has preached since Paul, must come the capacity for doing evil. It is the price even God had to pay for granting humans the dignity of moral
The opening sequences of the film, where Alex and his droogs beat up a drunk, thrash a rival gang, and break into a writer’s house, do precisely this. Burgess himself admitted that “It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers.”(x) But the proposed Freudian reading fails to account both for the moral profundity of this work and for our palpable sense that something in the nature of an authentic intellectual inquiry is going on