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I just recently re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Any exposer I had had to this film was long before I had tapped the surface of my film studies education. Naturally, that means my opinion of this film has substantially changed. I have always been intrigued by this piece of work that plays between a masterpiece of photography and mise-en-scène and a strongly imposed bit of social commentary. There aren’t many directors out there these days who dare to say it like Kubrick did, especially not in the american film world.

Kubrick had the vision to create films that an audience can understand like a natal language thanks to the way his conception appeals to the senses. Even more importantly, he has the necessary ego that makes the difference between a good artist and a great artist. If he had something to say he was going to say it the most scandalous and truthful way possible, no beating around the bush for Kubrick. Nothing was too real or too inconsiderate for his camera. Many contemporary artists, especially in the film world, stray away from telling their stories in the imposing and more then explicit way that Kubrick did.
There are plenty of artists out there who turn the mirror on society just as he did. The dilemma is that we are living in a desensitized western culture, desensitized to images. It is all too well know to a western audience that the images in the cinema are not real. We have watched too much five o’clock news, spent too much time hiding under our head phones, and stumbled upon too many internet porn sites for films like Syriana or Traffic (which both turn the looking glass on western society) to make us walk out of the theatre with memorable images burned into our heads.

This is both a positive thing and a negative thing for a western audience and for a contemporary filmmaker. This desensitization to shocking imagery could force an audience to pull itself away from the escapist option when watching a film and make them focus their attentions on a deeper understanding of a film, or risk getting board. The audience is becoming a more attentive audience. The way we watch film is changing. But what happens when the viewer forgets what he saw when he wakes up the next morning. How often do we see films these days that we have trouble remembering a week later?

So how does a filmmaker attack this dilemma? Is turning back to Kubrick’s techniques the answer? Or has the contemporary audience moved too far past that to still feel something when they see a character like Alex create suffering and be dealt his own share of injustice parading across our screens? I have no answer right now, but it’s something that will be milling around in my head.