Violence is a recurrent theme in Kubrick’s filmography. It’s the visible core in Paths of Glory, Dr. Stragnelove, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket and yet we can encounter violence in all his movies if we look deeper. The approach chosen in this essay to dissect how violence appears in Kubrick’s films is through Slavoj Žižek work. Even though he has done research in film analysis, but hasn’t done much research about Kubrick. In this essay we’ll define the main types of violence and then pick scenes in Kubrick’s movies and identify all the different kinds of violence in them, primarily A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).

Žižek defines three main types of violence: subjective, objective and symbolic. He argues they are interrelated and we cannot explain one without the other, especially subjective violence, the one referring to easily visible and identifiable violence such as murder. Subjective violence often appears suddenly, without apparent explanation. Žižek argues that subjective violence often answers to objective violence, the 0 level of violence, the one we normally tolerate without questioning. This relationship we’ll seek. Symbolic violence is special, because it does not imply any physical action, instead relies on language, following Heidegger’s work on language. Symbolic violence will be appropriate in this essay by analysing how characters talk and what they say.

The first scenes I want to get into are those with violence inside the first half of A Clockwork Orange, where Alex and his Droogs randomly attack people for fun under the influence of a beverage composed of milk and some drugs. It’s a perfect exemplification of subjective violence, as we can clearly identify that is Alex and his friends who are doing that, but we cannot say why. The world they live in is a near-future dystopia, where economy has clearly gone down and society is unhappy, as his mother must work long hours and take drugs to fall asleep. I would suggest that violence arises from this world in which robbing is easier than working, in which violence is a way to subconsciously express discomfort with current conditions. I’ll draw a parallelism with Žižek’s analysis on the 2005 Paris riots. He argues that rioting was a way to claim true citizenship, as rioters were already legally considered citizens of France. He defends this position in the face of those who try attribute any visible cause. They did not have banners and they did not riot against a particular group of society and being the cars and business destroyed that of their own people. We see the same kind of violence in A Clockwork Orange: they do not discriminate between social groups when raping, vandalizing or stealing. There’s no moralizing view of violence, as further in the film violence is perpetrated by police, doctors, old men and those who suffered violence at first. It’s especially interesting the point made by turning Alex’s Droogs into policeman, who had betrayed him, leading to the incarceration of the protagonist and narrator. I claim that this is a clear statement against all kind of violence, specially by uniting subjective and systemic violence. That’s showing to the viewer that what’s needed in order to keep an horrendous political and economic system alive is not much worse (or it’s the same as) than vicious crime itself.

A Clockwork Orange turn itself over after Alex is imprisoned and enters the Ludovico recovery program. What I see here is a new kind of violence described by Žižek called “violence of religious inspiration”. Based on Lacan’s jouissance it’s a kind of violence surrounding envy and preventing others from achieving this jouissance or joy. When Alex is obliged watching several hours of violence every day without the possibility to look away we do not find violence of religious inspiration. It’s only when he’s forced to connect Beethovens ninth with violence scenes that we find it. Let’s develop the argument. Alex is fond of Beethoven, during the first half of the movie it’s associated with his vicious and sexual drives, especially the ninth, heard while he masturbates to a poster of the compositor. Beethoven is above violence, and he’s willing to give violence away in order to get back to society but Beethoven is his objet petit a, the object cause of desire in Lacan words, is what can make Alex care about this world. But when forced to listen it while watching violence he cannot bear the situation. He begs to the doctors, but they, playing it down or not caring about Alex mental health, deny the petition thus exerting violence of religious inspiration. This kind of violence will appear in the same way when Alex end up at the writer’s house and plays the music to make Alex suffer, to take advantage of the religious violence perpetrated by the doctors. Beethoven’s ninth in A Clockwork Orange and various political systems is a topic that Žižek has already spoken about in his movie A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology[1] although not through what I’ve exposed here, but while an interesting topic we might continue further with Kubrick’s filmography.

Can violence be good? That’s what Jocker (Matthew Modine) asks himself in Full Metal Jacket. He’s a young man that enters the military academy to become a war reporter for the army. If A Clockwork Orange was about subjective violence this one is about symbolic and objective violence, war is just a background, maybe that’s why it was shot in the UK, because it’s message is global, not particular. In this film words are way more dangerous than guns. The pressure slowly built by Sargent Hartman (R. Lee Emery) shouting on Leonard (Vincent D’Onofrio) without any capacity to react drive to a violent and destructive explosion that kills both the oppressor and the oppressed. Objective violence exerted with symbolic violence is destroyed by the most evident explosion of subjective violence that leads to auto-destruction, as sometimes is only an expression of despair. This event is the division between the first and second half of the film. From this point onwards, action takes place in Vietnam where Kubrick shows two sides of the same coin that is war: extreme violence that becomes mundane. Our protagonist is intrigued by this dichotomy and while he first resists all violent implications, he finally becomes one of those who enjoy the violence. We find strong parallelism between the two halves, where the roles of Sargent Hartman and Leonard (now both dead) are taken by Animal Mother and Joker himself. The difference is that while the first half was training and violent, now it’s war and violent at its purest. This similarity is clearly exemplified by the penultimate scene, when Joker shots the agonizing Vietnamese snipes while the same tune is playing as that of Leonards suicide. Both are taken to their limits in withstanding violence and cease to be, although Leonard doesn’t do it through suicide but the resignation of his uniqueness, of his moral grounds. After the execution scene the movie ends with a dozen soldiers marching in the night through the flames caused by them while they all sing a Mikey Mouse song, giving the sense that Joker has finally given up to the war machine. Dissonance between eyes and ears is comparable of that dissonance between normal life and violence underneath it. It would be the same message is we herd punk while seeing a happy white family having dinner in the USA. It’s the same message when we hear Surfing Bird by The Trashmen while a cameraman records war footage, as if he was recording at the beach.

Music plays a central role in setting the tune and telling us the underlying meaning of what we see. It’s not casual that Alex favourite tunes are ironically those of harmony and love between mankind, but also of joy and excess, both tightly related to jouissance and human drive. Even the presentation of this movie with an electrified version of Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary could be interpreted as a parallelism of UK’s historical moment, one of glory (The Bill of Rights was introduced with the conjoint reign of King William and Queen Mary) and the decadence in which the movie is set. In Full Metal Jacket, music clearly follows the character’s mood. In this movie I shall remark that during the entire training camp we only hear a song at the begging of the movie and those sung by the actors themselves. We won’t hear more songs (excluding incidental music) until Vietnam, when commercial music is what will set the tone, mostly through top hits of the previous two decades. By contrast, in some other films he did not use a lot of music as the two examples shown until now. For example, in Dr. Strangelove: How I learned to stop caring and love the bomb (1964) we only find three songs, although this highly ironic tone that Full Metal Jacket has is also here. The last song of this movie is We’ll meet again by Vera Lynn, used very accordingly to the satirical portrayal of war, because certainly (almost) nobody will meet again after the nuclear war that happens at the end.

We’ll recapitulate again to the main subject of analysis, violence. We’ve seen how Kubrick does constantly use violence as a topic of his films, especially those analyzed like A clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, but also Paths of Glory or The Shining. Power relations are also present in many of his films, especially in Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange and mixed with humans more inner drives in Eyes Wide Shut. If we separate by type of violence, Symbolic violence is the easiest to find, mostly because his movies have a well thought script. The clearest examples are the lines of Sargent Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, followed by the use of nasdat (a pseudo-russian vocabulary) in A Clockwork Orange as a way to subvert normal linguistic violence. In the other hand, the clearest example of subjective violence are those acts perpetrated by Alex in the first half of A Clockwork Orange and the “Get some” at the chopper scene in the 1987 movie, comparable to other forms of subjective violence as terrorism. In the other hand, if objective violence is what we are looking for the clearest example is the divide between the ultra-rich and the rest of society in Eyes Wide Shut. Although we haven’t done a proper analysis here because the central point of the movie deviates towards human drive and impulses. There’s also space to talk about social stratification and consumerism which are the main results of liberal capitalism, sustained by brute amounts of objective violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

Kubrick, S. (1964). Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [DVD].

Kubrick, S. (1971). A Clockwork Orange [DVD].

Kubrick, S. (1987). Full Metal Jacket [DVD].

Kubrick, S. (1999). Eyes Wide Shut [DVD].

Zizek, S. (1992). El sublime objeto de la ideología. Siglo xxi.

Zizek, S. (2009). Sobre la violencia: seis reflexiones marginales (Vol. 1). Grupo Planeta (GBS).

[1] See the full transcription here: https://zizek.uk/the-perverts-guide-to-ideology-transcriptsubtitles/