The controversial film Steven Spielberg called the first “punk rock movie”
While director Steven Spielberg is responsible for some of cinema’s most revolutionary moments, from the appearance of the animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park to the ingenious subtlety of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List, he is also a filmmaker who works very much within the boundaries of Hollywood cinema. Inspiring the likes of J.J. Abrams, Edgar Wright, and David Fincher, among many others, Spielberg’s immense impact on the landscape of cinema would help it to transition the medium into the 21st century marked by vast technological innovations.
Often leaving the screenplays of his films to a bevvy of different budding writers, it is rare that Spielberg takes full creative control over his projects. Although each of his films may contain a certain emotional, whimsical tone, the director is far from an auteur, despite this being a fervent online debate, quietly drawing inspiration from cinema history to blend in with each of his stories.
This should not detract at all from Spielberg’s success, however, as while Spielberg may not display the experimental styles and techniques of the likes of David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, he has certainly helped to sculpt the landscape of modern cinema. Proving the value of tentpole Hollywood blockbusters, Spielberg used the success of his 1975 film Jaws to create a filmography that boasted innovation above all else.
Influenced by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney and the aforementioned Kubrick, Spielberg spent his youth enveloping himself in the world of cinema, finding inspiration in the latter’s 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Spielberg would take aspects of inspiration from the sprawling space epic and apply them to his own genre adventures, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but there was arguably one other Kubrick flick that had a far greater effect on him.
“A Clockwork Orange was, I think, the first punk rock movie ever made,” he told the American Film Institute, referencing the filmmaker’s 1971 film about a gang leader whose anatomy is removed from him by the powers of the state. Nominated for four Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ it was considered one of the most controversial movies of its time and is still contentious to this very day.
“It was a very bleak vision of a dangerous future,” Spielberg continued, “Where young people, teenagers, are free to roam the streets without any kind of parental exception. They break into homes and assault and rape people, the subject matter was dangerous, but Kubrick had a kind of twinkle in his eye”. Picking out the particular scene in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his gang of ‘droogs’ violently attack a man whilst listening to Gene Kelly’s Singing In The Rain, Spielberg described the moment as “the most horrifying things I think I’ve ever witnessed”.
Concluding, the director adds, “That was audacious and I think very dangerous at the time. When you look at the movie right now, unfortunately, history has caught up to the movie and the headlines we now live with every day in our lives are not dissimilar to the subject matter of the 1970s film A Clockwork Orange”.
Kubrick himself was no fool, however, with the filmmaker recognising the danger of releasing the movie at the time of its release. Hounded by the right-wing British press, who called it a dangerous motion picture that would inevitably cause copycat attacks like the one seen in the movie, Kubrick eventually pulled the film from distribution amid fears for his own safety.
“Stanley was very insulted by the reaction, and hurt,” Stanley Kubrick’s widow Christiane stated in the book The Complete Kubrick, with the director being desperate not to be artistically misunderstood. Yet, in the absence of mainstream approval, Kubrick had most certainly made a punk movie that stuck a middle finger up to the stiff rigidity of the establishment.