It isn’t just in its portrayal of the supposed future that A Clockwork Orange fizzes with tensions. Alex, our humble narrator, is by far the most appealing character in the film, yet he is also a monster. His main victim, on the other hand, is seriously unpleasant, whilst his liberal friends are as prepared to use brutality as the regime they oppose. Then there’s the sheer joy of the music, and those scenes of violence which are so brilliantly transformed into slapstick ballet. Everywhere you look, you find clashes and contradictions.
It might seem that, with all these incongruities somehow swirled into coherence, A Clockwork Orange is as calculatingly put together as much of the hype which surrounds Kubrick’s painstaking approach would generally suggest. But for once I think the coolly distanced eye of his directorial vision, for all that it’s apparent, is misleading. For a start, there are many things obviously wrong with the film. There’s that odd ending, which looks as if Kubrick has simply slotted in a scrap from a scene he couldn’t find a use for elsewhere, and the gratingly over-the-top performance by Patrick Magee as the injured writer. And, above all, there’s Kubrick’s cockeyed (and I mean that in both ways) handling of women. The way the camera leeringly follows the naked girl as she runs from the stage in the old casino scene, for example, or the ridiculously out of place synthesiser motif which re-appears when another near-naked young women emerges before Alex when he’s presented as a reformed character. And then there’s that bit toward the end when Alex wakes up in hospital, and we discover that the groaning we’ve been hearing comes from a nurse and a doctor having sex behind a screen, which is followed by yet another glimpse of naked female flesh. I mean, is that last scene supposed to be funny? Have we somehow stumbled into a Benny Hill outtake? All in all, of course, the effect of these and other false notes is to add to that disconcerting sense of having our sympathies and moral boundaries stretched which is one of A Clockwork Orange’s great strengths, but it does raise some question of what exactly Kubrick was intending.
By all accounts, the shooting of this film went far more smoothly than most of Kubrick’s movies. Malcolm McDowell gives a performance of such brilliance that you can’t imagine that even a perfectionist like Kubrick exercising his usual obsession with re-takes, and McDowell has confirmed in subsequent interviews that this was a relaxed and easy shoot – which, it should be noted, also took place almost entirely at locations near to the notoriously travel-phobic Kubrick’s Oxfordshire home. The actual genesis of the film was also unusual for Kubrick. He’d been obsessing for years over various projects, including the famously never filmed movie about Napoleon, when a copy of Burgess’ novel was given to him. The screenplay is superb, of course, but like The Exorcist and No Country For Old Men, it’s one of those novels which seem to have been written specifically to be turned into a film, and from which you can lift whole scenes pretty much intact.
All in all, then, we have a film which slipped far more smoothly and quickly from idea to screen than most of Kubrick’s works, and in which his usual obsessive perfectionism needed and was given less room to play. Which, I think, explains a lot of what I’ve been describing. The off-the-wall brilliance. The sheer joie de vivre. Even those weird false notes, which leave us dazedly scratching our heads and wondering what effect Kubrick was actually intending to achieve. It even explains Kubrick’s puzzlingly weak reaction of withdrawing A Clockwork Orange in the face of the hysterical criticism it attracted, when one would have thought that Alex’s elevation to a mixture of celebrity and hate figure in the film had already demonstrated this was only to be expected.
Here is a film where all the wildly disparate elements somehow manage to fit into a brilliantly resonant whole. And this happened, I suspect, not because Kubrick knew and was in control of what he was doing, but because he wasn’t. It happened because he was drawn and attracted to the subject, got excited by the lucky combination of talents he was able to gather together, and then did what all artists must sometimes do, and ditched conscious intent and simply went for it, and probably ended up surprising himself as much as the public with what he achieved.
For once, Kubrick let his genius off the leash. A Clockwork Orange, with its dazzling combination of balletic violence, off-kilter comedy, acute social commentary, archly ironic ‘futurism’, disconcerting moral tone, pervasive sense of Britishness and brilliant central performance, is the result.
SILENT RUNNING
(Director: Douglas Trumbull; starring: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint - 1972)
Alastair Reynolds
In the future, some kind of catastrophe – planned or otherwise – has befallen Earth’s once great natural environments. All that’s left is a handful of domed preserves, drifting through the solar system attached like glistening seed pods to huge skeletal space freighters. After the order arrives to jettison the forests, blow them up with nuclear bombs, and return the ships to commercial use, most of the crew are jubilant about the prospects for returning home. But one ecologically-minded astronaut – the be-gowned, plant-loving hippy Freeman Lowell – decides he isn’t going to stand for this. Before very long he’s killed the other crew members, taken the ship off on a white-knuckle ride through Saturn’s rings, and begun bonding with the maintenance drones. Lowell is eventually forced to sacrifice himself to save the last forest, itself left in the care of the final fully-functioning drone. The film closes with touching images of the robot tending the garden, continuing the task that humans couldn’t be trusted not to screw up.
It’s safe to say that Silent Running is implausible on many levels. I can excuse the habitats in space – maybe the domes already existed before Earth’s ecosystem went wrong – but it’s not at all clear why they need to be shepherded around attached to enormous spaceships. It’s even less clear why they need to be blown up, rather than just left to orbit the sun on their own. The story wouldn’t kick in unless the domes were imperiled, though, and (minor understatement ahead) it’s not as if the decisions of governments and corporations always make absolute, binding sense in the real world. Setting aside the dubious combination of magical artificial gravity on a ship that in all other respects appears to be bolted together from late-twentieth century components (an aircraft carrier was used for the impressively spacious interior shots), what is perhaps more problematic is the time it takes the tree-hugging Lowell to realise that the reason his sole surviving forest might be ailing, on the wrong side of Saturn, is that the Sun is now a very long way away. Long before the penny drops he hefts a yellow cue ball, as if almost making the connection…
Despite these problems I love Silent Running unreservedly. Emerging at the tail-end of the Apollo era, it’s as much a part of the early seventies as After the Goldrush, and should be seen in that context. When I saw it for the first time, at the other end of the seventies, it slotted neatly into place as the missing jigsaw piece tying together the other big SF films of the last decade, of which it seemed to share a consensus view about the way the future was going to look. It had the plausible industrial design of 2001: A Space Odyssey: the huge, grey-clad spaceships sliding ponderously past the camera, the control rooms filled with complex navigational hardware and flickering readouts, the emphasis on artificial intelligence as an essential component of our space faring future. It had the shuffling, bipedal robots that I had glimpsed in background scenes in Star Wars. It had the downbeat, working stiffs in space aesthetic of Dark Star (prefiguring Alien, which I didn’t see until several years later). Above all else, and for all its moments of humour, it was terribly, terribly sad: things just didn’t go well for Freeman Lowell or anyone around him. Stars Wars changed matters, of course, but the one thing you didn’t go to seventies SF for was a happy ending.
The connection with 2001 ran deeper than I appreciated at the time. The director, Douglas Trumbull, had led the effects team on that film. One of the key differences between Clarke’s novel and the film is that in the book the Discovery travels to Saturn, not Jupiter. In fact the change
to Saturn was Kubrick’s idea – he was keen on the idea of showing the rings, and having the Discovery fly among them. Clarke rewrote the story accordingly. But Trumbull’s team, already under pressure with existing work, ‘went ape’ and vetoed the change, which is why it remains Jupiter in the film(1). It’s tempting to view the Saturn sequences in Silent Running as Trumbull returning to do justice to the ringed planet, but in truth the Saturn encounter, while dramatic, is not even the most impressive element in the film, and doesn’t really improve upon anything in Kubrick’s masterpiece. While some of the spaceship effects are good, by far the best things about Silent Running are the convincingly rendered interior shots – the domes and vast, mechanized cargo bays – and the marvelously realised drones, all of which were operated by amputee actors. Comparisons with 2001 rather miss the point, though. The earlier film was meticulously plotted and designed, with a logical basis for everything that occurs or is shown, whereas Silent Running functions better as a dreamily rationalised eco-parable. It’s all about conservation, ultimately, and the lengths one could or should go to in order to protect something utterly irreplaceable.
The film has been accused of being morally dubious(2), but I don’t go along with that. We’re not invited to sympathise with Lowell’s actions – even he seems rightfully appalled by what he has done – but merely to accept that, given the tremendous stakes, a good man might act in this way. After he has killed his colleagues, Lowell touches his conservation pledge, as if desperately trying to reassure himself that he has done the right thing. This is not a man with a clear conscience. And while he does end up saving one of the forests, he doesn’t save himself. In fact Bruce Dern succeeds in portraying Lowell as at least mildly unhinged from the very outset. Still, each time I watch the film I can’t help but put myself in Lowell’s position and wonder if what he does is in any way justifiable. One could argue that the stakes are artificially high – that in the real world it would never come down to a simple choice between murder and losing the last forest in existence. But setting up that kind of duality is one of the things that science fiction does rather well, and Silent Running does it as effectively as any SF film I know.
One final point: early in the film we’re told that the domed preserves were created around the turn of the century. Later, we learn that Lowell has been involved with the project for nine years, and was there from the beginning – thus neatly placing the action around 2009 or 2010. Thankfully, of course, in the enlightened world of the real 2010, we don’t have to worry about anyone cutting down forests any more, or the Earth’s climate going bananas.
Those early seventies eco-worriers: what were they thinking about?
Notes:
1: Odyssey: the Authorised biography of Arthur C Clarke by Neil McAleer (Gollancz, 1992) – p204
2: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (Orbit, 1993) – p1105.
SOLARIS
(Director: Andrei Tarkovsky, starring: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Juri Jarvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky - 1972)
Trevor Hoyle
Be warned, Solaris puts a spell on you. I fell under its influence thirty-eight years ago when it came out in 1972, and I still believe it to be one of the most imaginative, atmospheric and thought-provoking films ever made, science fiction or not. If you’ve ever ruminated in your idle moments what an alien intelligence might conceivably be like – really alien, I mean, not the man-in-a-rubber-suit with fangs and a tail, or Speilberg’s whimsy – then Solaris is the closest you’ll come to seeing it on screen.
The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was a visionary artist who treats his audience with respect, as adults with minds. While the film is based on the 1961 novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006), Tarkovsky didn’t slavishly follow Lem’s book as a journeyman director might (in fact they fell out during filming and Lem disowned the project). But all to the good: with Friedrich Gorenstein collaborating with Tarkovsky on the screenplay, Solaris stands alone as a work of art,
We open on Kris Kelvin, a cosmonaut-psychologist, standing by a lake at his parents’ dacha in the Russian countryside, on the eve of being sent to a space-station orbiting Solaris, an ocean-planet (‘protoplasmic ocean-brain’ in the novel). Tarkovsky allows the camera to roam leisurely over the lake and the rippling underwater fronds, setting the pace and mood. (Water – flowing, dripping, raining – is a motif throughout.) We’re in no frenzied hurry here. And yet there’s an air of foreboding and unease; Tarkovsky somehow coveys an underlying anxiousness which permeates the entire film.
Kelvin is played by Donatas Banionis, handsome in a chunky, world-weary sort of way, with melancholy eyes gazing into the middle distance, which he does a lot of.
Henri Berton, a recon pilot from the space-station, arrives with the backstory in the form of a visual record of his grilling before a committee in which he claimed he saw a 3-metre-tall human baby formed by the ocean. Apparently the ocean-brain is so fiendishly clever it can mimic or replicate objects and people (structures known as ‘mimoids’ in the novel). Now prematurely aged and bald, Berton is a ravaged shell from his youthful appearance on the tape: something traumatic happened to him over that ocean, but what?
There follows a long sequence of Berton travelling by driverless car through neon-lit underpasses and over concrete flyovers, the speeded-up images changing from colour to black-and-white. This was shot in Tokyo, and what the hell it means, I have no idea. I wonder if Tarkovsky did either, but it adds to the chillness, the creepy unsettling anticipation of what Kelvin is about to face. You don’t always have to know why a scene is there in Hollywood plot terms, you just have to intuitively let it create the mood.
We’re fifty minutes into this 2-hour 45-minute movie before Kelvin leaves Earth for the space-station. Tarkovsky doesn’t bother with hyper-drives or quantum gravity hokum to get him there. All it takes is thirty seconds of starscape and two lines of dialogue:
Kelvin (in the shuttle cockpit): ‘When is lift-off?’
Controller’s Voice: ‘You’re already off, Kris.’
There’s a brief view of the station orbiting the seething, restless ocean of Solaris, and next thing our hero is stepping out of the shuttle pod. The station is a wreck, vandalised equipment lying around, circuits flashing and sparking. No welcoming party. There are only three scientists left on board: Dr Snaut (called Snow in the translation, which I prefer), Dr Sartorius, and Dr Gibarian. Correction. Scratch Gibarian: he committed suicide by lethal injection and is lying under a plastic sheet in the freezer.
Snow and Sartorius are shifty-eyed and uncommunicative, and Kelvin is spooked when he visits Snow in his cabin and glimpses what looks like a child. Sartorius will only talk to Kelvin in the corridor, his back shielding the cabin door, and in a rare moment of surreal comedy he has to stop a dwarf from escaping and thrust him back inside.
Exhausted from his trip, Kris barricades the door of his cabin and falls into a deep sleep. He awakens to find a young woman watching him: his wife, dead these past ten years. Hari is real and alive, perfect in every detail; she even has the puncture mark on her shoulder from the suicide jab after they quarreled and he left her. Not everything fits, however. Hari sees a photograph of herself and asks, ‘Who’s this?’, then catches sight of her own reflection: ‘Kris, it’s me.’ And Kelvin has to cut her out of her dress because it has no seams or openings.
Hari is played by the very beautiful, dark-haired 22-year old Natalya Bondarchuk, who for much of the time is simply the passive object of Kelvin’s gaze, a tough role which she carries off superbly.
Unable to handle this disturbing occurrence, Kris locks his ‘wife’ inside a shuttle pod and blasts her off into space, in the process setting his coverall on fire and scorching his face. Snow dresses his wounds while he explains that these ‘materialisations’ started to appear after they fired a burst of radiation at the ocean. The ocean reacted by probing their sleeping minds and projecting back the s
ecret fears and phobias buried there – real or imagined. Kelvin is lucky it was an actual person from his past, Snow tells him, and not someone or something from his subconscious. Will she come back? ‘She will and she won’t – there are an infinite number of replicas,’ says Snow.
And of course she does, or rather another faultless copy. Hari number 2 has learnt something from her predecessor: to cut herself out of her seamless dress. She is also indestructible. After clawing with her bare hands through the cabin door to be with him (it opens inwards and she’s pushing outwards), her arms gashed and bleeding from the jagged metal, the wounds heal up before Kelvin can tend to them.
‘Kris, what’s the matter with me?’ Hari asks, terrified. ‘Is it epilepsy?’
When Sartorius explains his theory that the ‘visitors’ are composed of neutrinos not atoms, which have been stabilised by the Solaris force-field, Kelvin gets angry that he’s discussing it openly in Hari’s presence. This is the woman he loved and thought he’d lost, and now she’s back. He’s even prepared to remain on the station to preserve the illusion, because Hari cannot exist beyond the sphere of Solaris. Sartorius dryly suggests that a blood test will soon cure him of thinking of her as human. Kelvin does the test and admits to the others that when he seared the blood with acid it just kept renewing itself. It makes no difference. She is his wife.
Hari overhears the plan hatched by Sartorius to beam an encephalogram of waking, rational thought-waves at the ocean (rather than the stuff of nightmares) with the aim of making contact. Kelvin is the chosen candidate. Plan B is to build a neutrino annihilator which will disperse the visitors and leave the humans unharmed. Even though she loves Kris desperately, Hari realises she is some kind of projected facsimile, and finally confronts him: ‘You don’t love me. You don’t know where I came from. I’m not Hari!’
Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 9