The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

66 John Dahl
For example, I would say, even with the movies that I’ve done, like Rounders,
it never bothered me that everybody spoke in poker terms and that I had
no idea what they were. I watch it now and it makes complete sense to me, but
when I made the film I had never heard half these terms; at least I recognize
that that’s the way people speak and that the audience will figure it out.
When this came out it was a contemporary of Straw Dogs, the Sam
Peckinpah film with Dustin Hoffman. Critics were up in arms about
the violence of Straw Dogs. How were you affected by the violence in A
Clockwork Orange?
Dahl: I just thought it was awesome. It was violence for the sake of violence.
I’ve never been in a fight in my life. It’s completely foreign to me, but it
just seemed like stuff of literature; something of another world and exotic in
that respect. It seemed like good material for stories. There’s a scene where
they leave the milk bar and they run into those guys who are dressed in
another gang costume. They’re about to rape this girl, and there’s this gang
fight with Beethoven blaring away in the background. It’s just one shot of
random violence: guys getting their heads bashed with windows, landing on
tables. It’s not even in a sequence. It’s just jumped-together shots of people
being bashed over the head with Beethoven going.
There’s another scene I remember really getting my attention: while
walking in slow motion, Alex beats two guys and throws them in the water.
I had never seen slow motion like that before.
One of the reasons it was controversial was that it really divided critics.
Vincent Canby championed the film. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker at
the time accused it as “sucking up to the thugs in the audience.” Roger
Ebert was particularly disgusted by it, calling it “an ideological mess, a
paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning.”
Is any of that stuff fair, or are they just missing something?
Dahl: I don’t know. I saw it when I was seventeen, so I had a completely
different reaction to it than watching it this week almost thirty years later. I
guess what struck me, and I would hope that I would have seen it even back
then, is the desire for society to find some quick solution to violence and
crime, to find treatment that would curb or stop that. If we could just sit