Theology Today - Vol 31, No. 3 - October 1974 - CRITIC'S CORNER

248 - The New Nihilism

HOLLYWOOD knows more about the inner nature of Homo sapiens, viewed as a species, than any political, philosophical, or scientific school on earth." No Hollywood producer offered this self-inflating thought; rather, it comes from anthropologist Robert Ardrey, writing in African Genesis. Though overstated, Ardrey's insight is crucial; that is, many contemporary films (not only from Hollywood) are not merely mirroring society but are reflecting attitudes about human beings which incorporate scientific insights that challenge traditional Christian doctrines.

Specifically, Bertrand Blier's recently released "Going Places" picks up a theme strikingly presented in two of 1972's most important films: Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and Peter Barnes'/ Peter Medak's "The Ruling Class"-namely, a philosophical underpining for each film which says that nothing matters on a human level, whether God exists or not. Such a philosophy can be asserted on the basis of recent anthropological/behavioral psychological understandings of the nature of humanity. Christian theology has not even begun to deal with this phenomenon.

I call this cinematic philosophy a "new" nihilism, because it is based on the irrelevance of God rather than his absence. Nihilism was given form and substance primarily through Nietzsche's death of God and carried into the twentieth century principally in Camus' concept of the "absurd"-which posited that humanity still must struggle for meaning in the light of the possibility of God. In "Class," love and judgment as attributes of God are ridiculed, and God-existent or non-existent-is simply irrelevant, because human beings are violent and irredeemable by nature. In "Clockwork" the latter point is also true, although here God is not even dealt with for God would have no meaning in trying to deal with who Alex is and who he is becoming. In "Places," absurd connections are the sole prime movers for the two young protagonists, and their substitute god-sex-becomes in the final analysis as irrelevant to them as that road which goes nowhere. In each film the potentially substitute gods-behavioristic conditioning, freedom of choice, even sex and violence-are all eventually depicted as spurious, unworthy of even beginning to be deified. The

David W. Pomeroy is a minister in the United Church of Christ and serves as Associate Director of Broadcasting for the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches. His film criticism has appeared in several publications, including his essay, "1973--Year of the Religious Film," which was published in the April issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

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only god possible would be a god of absurdity, who obviously would be irrelevant to any sense of redemption.

These films find their philosophical locus in contemporary scientific insights, which purport to lead to a definition of the nature of humanity-concepts such as B.F. Skinner's behavioral modification, R. D. Laing's inverted sanity/insanity, and Ardrey/Lorenz's theory of human brutishness.

The key, for example, to the power of "A Clockwork Orange" is the thoroughness of its nihilistic foundation, rooted as it is in attempts at behavior modification. Because all of the characters (including Alex) are treated as unsympathetic caricatures, none of their philosophical positions are a serious alternative to a totally denigrating concept of humanity.

Consider the prison chaplain, who articulates the position most often associated with a Christian doctrine of humanity ("Man must be free to choose between good and evil or he is no longer Man") and appears a pompous, haranguing, self-important fool. There's no way we are going to believe his importunings to leave Alex free to choose. Or consider the "liberal" Minister of the Interior, initially a spokesman for behavioristic conditioning as a means of rooting out violent impulses, who becomes a fawning, political manipulator when some of Dr. Brodsky's "side effects" go awry. Who can believe even in a Skinnerian future when it is being perpetrated by such stylized political machinators as these?

Obviously, Kubrick intended to reveal each secondary character in the most ludicrously caricatured light possible to provide a contrast to Alex's psychic journey. Yet, this really doesn't work, for Alex becomes a kind of Billy Pilgrim to whom things just happen. He maintains the illusion of being in control of his environment in the beginning, but subsequent events reveal that in fact he has been thoroughly conditioned by his external environment-by permissive parents and the necessity to respond to his fawning "droogs."

Alex is certainly beyond freedom and dignity, and thus he appears to be a Skinnerian creature. But the caricature that is the Minister, the fact that Alex's one potentially redeeming feature (his love of Beethoven) is also conditioned against, the gleam in Alex's eye at film's end when he believes he has beaten the system (when in fact he has just capitulated to it), and the cynical use of "Singing In the Rain" under the closing titles referring back to one of the most brutal events in the film-all these belie behavoristic conditioning as holding out a realistic hope for the future. The thesis (Alex's violence keeps him in seeming control of his life-situation) and the antithesis (Alex can be conditioned into conforming with certain societal expectations) clash rather than join in the synthesis (since neither violence nor conditioning works, nothing matters, and Alex can live just on the level of morbid fantasy-sex in a grave-and irrelevant nostalgia-"Singing In the Rain").

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If "Clockwork" uses Skinner as a taking-off place for its ultimate nihilism, "The Ruling Class's" inspiration is the inverted political psychology of R. D. Laing. Laing sees society as insane and suggests that the psychotics may be ostracized largely because of their unacceptable sanity. Dramatist Luigi Pirandello anticipated Laing by depicting the thought that many who appear mad are really sane in an insane world. Laing pushes such convoluted paradoxes into aphorisms of political persuasion (how to live sanely/insanely and still affect the crazy, mixed-up polis). The point for our purpose is that Laing's followers believe that this insight into the convoluted nature of humanity can lead to purposeful existence, while "Class" ends by affirming nothing except that human beings will continue to be insane. It doesn't matter whether society is sane or insane.

"Class's" nihilism is more subtly persuasive than "Clockwork's" because initially it is cloaked in biting satirical humor. Jack, the 14th Earl of Gurney, is, according to his psychiatrist, a paranoid-schizophrenic, and, according to himself, God. Dr. Herder summarizes: "Reality is for him what he perceives it to be"-a fine Pirandellian point. When, in the second segment of the film, Jack's God of love is confronted with the Electric God of wrath and judgment, his sense of reality and self is turned upside-down and he is, ostensibly, "cured."

But screenwriter Peter Barnes maintains a consistency of viewpoint, even while changing the mood from black humor to bleak tragi-comedy. Sane as far as the world is concerned, Jack now perceives himself as Jack the Ripper. And this incarnation becomes, in the film's terms, a paradigm for humanity. Reality is still in the eye of the perceiver.

This viewpoint is maintained to the end. In what could have been the holding out of a soupcon of redemptive hope, his wife, who has come to love him out of initial self-interest, approaches with the offer of love. He fulfills his role as Jack the Ripper, though, as his last, unhuman scream reverberates across London. Humanity's future is to come out on the other side of the clash between the God of Love (thesis) and the God of Judgment (antithesis) into the paradigmatic synthesis of Jack the Ripper.

III

In the anthropological theory of Ardrey/Lorenz, we are all ultimately brutish-resorting to violence-reactive rather than reflective animals (incidently, a thesis nicely demonstrated by the ending of "The Exorcist"). Human beings may be conditioned ("Clockwork") or considered sane when they are insane ("Class"), but neither of these psychological impulses have ultimate meaning. "Going Places" also depicts this conceptualization of human beings consistently again, with no offer of redemption. Jean-Claude and Pierrot are two

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amoral Parisian punks who wander aimlessly through terrorizing activities such as purse-snatching, molesting a young mother, deflowering a 16-year-old. As with Alex in "Clockwork," such events are merely thrust upon them; they have gone far beyond freedom and dignity in having any control over their own destiny.

And the one time such control is attempted leads to the most absurd moment in the film. In search of "meaningful sex," they travel to a woman's prison, confront an older woman as she leaves after a 10 year-term, and begin a symbiotic relationship-yet with some real warmth. After touching something in the two not there before, she kills herself-a wholly unmotivated act which, moreover, is accomplished by an act of vaginal mutilation that outdoes "Cries and Whispers."

"Going Places" is not as good a movie as the other two discussed here because of its lack of reality (for example, no cops are ever seen in pursuit) despite a basically realistic mode, and its obsession with sex as replacement for love (which is boring after the initial point is made). However, it is important as a purveyor of the new nihilism because of the consistency of Blier's view. He even gives himself the opportunity for a cop-out ending (the car they finally steal is just like one they had earlier fixed to crash while on a sharp curve)--which would had been ironic divine retribution. But Blier does not take this easy way out, and instead we have only an image of that interminable road-leading nowhere-and of two men and their woman companion who are irrelevant to each other or to any universal order-divine or otherwise. The thesis (random terrorism as life-style) and the antithesis (sex can replace meaningful relationships) here simply fade into a synthesis of endless repetition.

What these films in their depiction of a new nihilism offer to us is a prod in the direction of the primary theological task of our day: work on a doctrine of humanity that takes into account the insights of contemporary psychology and anthropology. The explicit nihilism of "Clockwork," "Class," and "Places" is the result of extrapolating current science and philosophy along one possible line of thought-a line which leads to despair about the on-going work of discovering the nature of humanity, as well as despair about the work of science itself.

If hope and redemption and purpose are to have any contemporary meaning within a new Christian doctrine of humanity, this will be so only as other extrapolations are taken from such scientific and philosophical thought. By grappling with what scientists/artists such as Skinner-Laing-Ardrey-Lorenz-Kubrick-Barnes-Blier are saying about us, we can place such extrapolations into the context of the incarnational work of God in our life, thereby incorporating these new insights into the work of redemption and not just into the despair of nihilism.