Image © Warner Bros / Stanley Kubrick
In Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, the ultra-violence-loving young hero Alex is ‘cured’ of his anti-social tendencies by way of an experimental medical intervention. The procedure, vividly depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, involved plying Alex with powerful nausea-inducing drugs while compelling him to watch films depicting random, wanton violence.
As a result, whenever Alex feels an impulse to violent behaviour, he is overcome with a debilitating sickness that renders him physically incapacitated, mentally submissive, and incapable of violence. He is proclaimed ‘cured’. Thus rehabilitated and no longer a threat to society, he is released from prison.
(As fans will know, there are two problems with the cure. First, not everyone has taken it, so there are many resentful, unreconstructed folk who are all too willing and able to inflict harm upon the now defenceless Alex. Second: the cure inadvertently conditioned him to have the same reaction to the music of Beethoven (which he passionately loves), an unforeseen outcome which creates an easy and powerful trigger for Alex’s most suicidal responses.)
Personally, I never needed such conditioning; I developed it naturally, while still very young.
I was small child, often the puniest in class, and was frequently picked upon by bigger kids. I grew up physically fearful of assaults on my person, my anxieties stoked by frightful tales of playground atrocities. (A full half century later, the tale of The Boy Who Had His Eye Gouged Out With a Stick still haunts me.) I learned early to fear physical violence, because I had no defence against it.
Fortunately, I was also one of the brighter kids in class, and realized early that when faced with a fight or flight scenario, my best hope for survival was to use brains over brawn. So I developed what some would call the gift of the gab – an ability to cajole, entertain and persuade through words. This skill got me through school relatively unscathed and became, not coincidentally, my meal ticket for most of my adult life.
As I cleared adolecsence and entered adulthood, the fear of bullying receded, but my attitude toward physical violence underwent a subtle change. Fear morphed into outright revulsion.
As a teen I had loved ‘horror films’, the bloodier the better. In later years, however, as onscreen carnage became both more quotidian and more graphic, I began to shun any film that might contain scenes of extreme violence. The thought of watching people saw off their own limbs / put bullets through their heads / dismember their housemates / etc made me feel simply physically ill. So I gave them a miss.
(At the time, the real boundaries of onscreen horror were being pushed by the videogame industry, but having never been a player, it was easy to avoid that particular arena of gore.)
Literature provided something of a safe haven. Books didn’t tend to be as graphically violent as the movies and when they were, I could usually self-censor. But lately, even that has become a challenge.
At my son’s recommendation, I began reading the Game of Thrones saga. While I’m not generally a fan of fantasy fiction per se, I’ve become addicted to this series, but the level of violence and sadism described frequently revolts me. (I understand the television series is graphically faithful.) I rationalise that it’s a work of fiction: ‘not real, never happened’, though I am pretty sure many of the stomach-churning acts described are based on historical sources.
That defence is less successful for a book like Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda. The novel describes in toe curling, historically accurate detail the tortures inflicted by Huron warriors on their captives, and it affected me profoundly. At points I literally had to put the book down and stop reading, such was the intensity of Boyden’s description. This wasn’t fantasy; it has the undeniable weight of historical fact, and as such, carries a keener edge of horror. It really happened, here, in Canada.
The only distance, the only remaining defence, that I could put between this reality and my own was that of time. This kind of thing doesn’t happen any more, not in our enlightened age.
But it does. For violence, for horror, for sheer mind-bending sadism, little can compare to our daily newsfeed. Radical Islamists are routinely beheading people by the score, incinerating captives in cages, and threatening myriad horrors on the west. And all of it online, available for viewing 24/7, at a click.
I don’t watch them. But others do. There is, apparently, a cinema in Aleppo (a Syrian city occupied by IS) which shows the videotaped atrocities playing in endless loops to audiences that include children as young as 8. They sit, transfixed by the spectacles they witness.
We may be entering a new era, one that revives medieval darkness and savagery in a time of social media narcissism and interconnectedness. If we are, it is most surely a step backwards for us all.
The devolution is being televised. I for one will not be watching.