I’m reading The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark by Robert K. Elder. I’m enjoying it and I'll write a post about the whole book here soon. But I came across a passage I wanted to share. Here Elder and the fine director John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction, Rounders, You Kill Me) discuss one aspect of the film that changed Dahl’s life, A Clockwork Orange.
Elder: … There was a bunch of fiery rhetoric around the violence [of A Clockwork Orange]. Was it responsible to release this? Kubrick himself pulled the movie from distribution in London, fearful of copycat crimes and whatnot. Is there any kind of violence in films that you might regard as socially dangerous?
Dahl: Well, my point of view about it is this: I hardly ever blame the artist for making the artwork or the desire to make the film. I have a bigger issue with the companies that put it out there to make a profit. I think they have to take more responsibility for the public’s reaction to artwork, because they’re the filter. An artist is going to do what an artist is going to do. Before, a painter made a painting and stuck it into a gallery, or somebody wrote a book. Now, when you’re talking about mass media as a conduit to millions of people, I think the people running the companies have to be the final filter on what people see and what they don’t see.
Elder: That is what this film is addressing: Do you want heads of corporations or politicians deciding what we see or don’t see?
Dahl: Well they do anyway, don’t they? Of course they do. Whatever the company, corporation, or government—they are final arbitrator of what people see. I suppose you can point to the artist and say, “Why did you make that?” But I think with artists, I don’t even know if they really know what they’re making sometimes. Ultimately, I think the responsibility to society is from the companies that pay for the film, put it out there, and profit from it.
Elder: You’re echoing something that Kubrick said about artists and what the different causes of violence are. He says, “To try to fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.” Of course, life is, in his view in the film, violent and morally complex.
What do you think? Where does the responsibility lie?
