Two thoughts on Adam Nayman on A Clockwork Orange
You should be reading the film criticism of Adam Nayman. Last week he wrote at The Ringer about Stanley Kubrick's adaption of A Clockwork Orange "in the age of cancellation," i.e., in a time when works of art deemed "problematic" are censored, edited, or banned. Or at least when such a fate is wished upon them by screaming hordes online.
I have two thoughts in response to his piece on ACO, which as usual is an excellent, thoughtful engagement with a difficult and culturally influential film.
First, toward the end of the essay he writes the following:
"It’s hard to say what’s more boring: The idea that a good movie is one made by a good person and/or contains content that could be considered progressive for its time and place, or the shouting-down of that position from those whose investment in rejecting it can seem condescending or creepy."
This is a genuinely strange dichotomy to pose, and there is only one plausible source for it: Twitter, or social media more generally. Surely Nayman knows there are—no joke—real-life, actual arguments, in print, in reputable journals and magazines, going back decades (and more), about the reception of art whose content or creator is morally questionable? Whereas the first item in his dichotomy is a culturally powerful, and growing, one, the second item he opposes to it is limited to a minuscule chorus of internet trolls who represent nothing and no one. Framing it in the way that he does, however, presents a faux false choice between two apparently equally bad options. Yet the falseness of the false choice is in the set-up, not in the actual positions available on the issue.
So either Nayman really thinks these are the options before us, or he is taking the easy way out and presenting a fake dilemma he knows is built on straw. Or, I suppose—what's best for him and worst for us—he, like so many who write about film and the arts today, spends too much online. Twitter distorts the mind, y'all. Get off it.
Second, he concludes the essay with the following paragraph:
"A Clockwork Orange is worth defending and decrying, although it’s not like coming down one way or the other is going to have much effect on a movie that’s already been elevated into the canon, and whose influence—from countless dorm rooms and laptop desktops adorned with posters and screenshots—is already massive. In truth, we don’t need another essay on A Clockwork Orange. But I do think we need the movie itself, not just because its problematic aspects are so bound up in its power, but because of what it says about the psychology of cancellation itself, and the unnaturalness of censorship and the comforting lie of 'bad apples,' which reassures us that it is other people who are rotten to the core. To paraphrase Kael, we become clockwork oranges if we reject difficult art without asking what’s inside us first. And it’s better to watch A Clockwork Orange than to be one."
This is a brilliant ending, and a point I largely endorse, since it's implicitly Augustinian: original sin means that, under fallen conditions, every artist and every work of art is implicated in evil—there's no way out. Which need not lead to either license or excuse or flattening of complicity in evil; but at a minimum it makes the correct diagnosis and eliminates the vacuous hope of "pure" art.
A minor addendum, however, from this unrecovered moralist: in point of fact, we don't "need" A Clockwork Orange, and for most of us, it would be better not to watch it at all. ACO and films like it—that is, works of visual art that depict or engage in gratuitous sex, violence, or vulgarity in such a way as to indict the viewer's own imlication or pleasure in them—fall prey to Truffaut's critique of anti-war films: the medium undermines the message. All anti-war films ultimately end up glorifying war; mutatis mutandis, the same goes for films that attempt to critique decadence by enacting it. Martin Scorsese is postmodernism's guilty auteur de jour here: Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street fail at exactly this point.
Which isn't to render a quick and easy No against these movies, or to argue that no one should see them, or to suggest that they don't have subtle things to say worth attending to in critical essays like the one Nayman's just written. Only to say that, all things being equal, A Clockwork Orange might do more harm than good, either in one's own life or in the broader culture; and that can be true at the same time that everything approbative Nayman says about the film is true, too.
Art's complicated. Cliché though it is, nevertheless it's one more reason, among many others, to resist cancellation culture, however "problematic" the work in question.
I have two thoughts in response to his piece on ACO, which as usual is an excellent, thoughtful engagement with a difficult and culturally influential film.
First, toward the end of the essay he writes the following:
"It’s hard to say what’s more boring: The idea that a good movie is one made by a good person and/or contains content that could be considered progressive for its time and place, or the shouting-down of that position from those whose investment in rejecting it can seem condescending or creepy."
This is a genuinely strange dichotomy to pose, and there is only one plausible source for it: Twitter, or social media more generally. Surely Nayman knows there are—no joke—real-life, actual arguments, in print, in reputable journals and magazines, going back decades (and more), about the reception of art whose content or creator is morally questionable? Whereas the first item in his dichotomy is a culturally powerful, and growing, one, the second item he opposes to it is limited to a minuscule chorus of internet trolls who represent nothing and no one. Framing it in the way that he does, however, presents a faux false choice between two apparently equally bad options. Yet the falseness of the false choice is in the set-up, not in the actual positions available on the issue.
So either Nayman really thinks these are the options before us, or he is taking the easy way out and presenting a fake dilemma he knows is built on straw. Or, I suppose—what's best for him and worst for us—he, like so many who write about film and the arts today, spends too much online. Twitter distorts the mind, y'all. Get off it.
Second, he concludes the essay with the following paragraph:
"A Clockwork Orange is worth defending and decrying, although it’s not like coming down one way or the other is going to have much effect on a movie that’s already been elevated into the canon, and whose influence—from countless dorm rooms and laptop desktops adorned with posters and screenshots—is already massive. In truth, we don’t need another essay on A Clockwork Orange. But I do think we need the movie itself, not just because its problematic aspects are so bound up in its power, but because of what it says about the psychology of cancellation itself, and the unnaturalness of censorship and the comforting lie of 'bad apples,' which reassures us that it is other people who are rotten to the core. To paraphrase Kael, we become clockwork oranges if we reject difficult art without asking what’s inside us first. And it’s better to watch A Clockwork Orange than to be one."
This is a brilliant ending, and a point I largely endorse, since it's implicitly Augustinian: original sin means that, under fallen conditions, every artist and every work of art is implicated in evil—there's no way out. Which need not lead to either license or excuse or flattening of complicity in evil; but at a minimum it makes the correct diagnosis and eliminates the vacuous hope of "pure" art.
A minor addendum, however, from this unrecovered moralist: in point of fact, we don't "need" A Clockwork Orange, and for most of us, it would be better not to watch it at all. ACO and films like it—that is, works of visual art that depict or engage in gratuitous sex, violence, or vulgarity in such a way as to indict the viewer's own imlication or pleasure in them—fall prey to Truffaut's critique of anti-war films: the medium undermines the message. All anti-war films ultimately end up glorifying war; mutatis mutandis, the same goes for films that attempt to critique decadence by enacting it. Martin Scorsese is postmodernism's guilty auteur de jour here: Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street fail at exactly this point.
Which isn't to render a quick and easy No against these movies, or to argue that no one should see them, or to suggest that they don't have subtle things to say worth attending to in critical essays like the one Nayman's just written. Only to say that, all things being equal, A Clockwork Orange might do more harm than good, either in one's own life or in the broader culture; and that can be true at the same time that everything approbative Nayman says about the film is true, too.
Art's complicated. Cliché though it is, nevertheless it's one more reason, among many others, to resist cancellation culture, however "problematic" the work in question.
