On-Screen Debauchery Emerges

When talking pictures first began, many people didn’t believe that the medium would become such a big part of American culture. But, the technology progressed, cinema started to have narrative stories that played on people’s fantasies or their own realities, and Americans went to the movies by the hordes. The first color picture, The Wizard of Oz, told the story of the fantasyland that a young Midwestern girl dreamed of. It had elements of the unreal mixed with the actuality of the Dust Bowl and depression that Kansas’ residents were dealing with in 1939. Likewise, thirteen years later, Singing in the Rain let viewers into the more-relative fantasy of the movie production.

Then along came A Clockwork Orange, and Stanley Kubrick threw a reality all too real into the faces of his audiences. While he follows the fantasy-mixed-with-reality mold, the reality he shows is not the reality that your average moviegoer encounters on a regular basis, and it is most certainly not what he or she is used to seeing in cinema. Although a completely unplanned connection (watch McDowell explain the scene below), the infamous ‘Singing in the Rain’ scene calls upon the first musical film in such a way that would never have been imaginable even when the song was composed. As the Droogs invade the home of one English couple, they proceed to rip apart the home, although looking for nothing in particular. Alex and his goons proceed to rape the wife in front of her husband while both victims are bound, gagged, and beaten. Reality of this scene is that there are members of society that commit these crimes, but these occurrences are ones that are pushed to the backs of our minds, kept under wraps, and not openly displayed to the public. Controversy was maybe a part of Gone With the Wind, but even this controversy was written for film—it was published years before. Kubrick rode the success of his previous film, 2001: Space Odyssey, to break the boundaries of what moviegoers can handle visually. It is no exaggeration to say that he is the one who blazed the trail so that programs depicting gore and violence, such as CSI, can now be show to the American audience. He is the one who allowed for true reality to be shared with America.