Kubrick and the death penalty
by Paolo Valassi
www.orizzontikubrickiani.it
In September 2011, the American state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, accused of the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer who intervened to protect a homeless man who was being violently pranked by a group of thugs. Davis, who was 19 at the time of the crime, had always maintained his innocence. Those who had started the campaign to save him argued that, due to the lack of evidence against him and the fact that the eyewitnesses who had initially accused him had later recanted, at least another trial was necessary.
Appeals and international mobilization were in vain: there were 630,000 requests for clemency, including those of the then Pope Benedict XVI, former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and many American and international political figures and public figures. The New York Times had warned that his execution would be "a terrible mistake". A spokesperson for the French Foreign Ministry had called the execution "an irreparable sin" and in the last hours the Vatican had expressed the hope that the condemned man's life could "be spared". Barack Obama, a new Pontius Pilate, had declared through a spokesperson that he did not want to interfere in a matter "that concerns the procedures of a federal state".
As can be seen, apart from Obama, a massive deployment of forces that however did not lead to the desired result.
Coincidentally, in the same hours there was another execution, passed over in silence and to avoid which no one lifted a finger. Lawrence Brewer, 44, white, member of the Ku Klux Klan, was executed in Texas because he was guilty of a brutal crime. In 1998, Brewer, together with two accomplices, had tortured a 49-year-old handicapped black man for an entire night and then, after tying him with a chain to his car, had dragged him for three kilometers along the street until he killed him. Brewer has never shown any remorse for his actions. "To tell you the truth," he said in an interview, "I would do the same thing again."
There seems to me to be something jarring in the public opinion’s attitude towards these two episodes.
Kubrick had faced the same contradiction in his conversations with Michel Ciment, in particular when talking about A Clockwork Orange:
"The central idea of the film concerns the problem of freedom of choice. If we are deprived of the possibility of choosing between good and evil, do we lose our humanity? Do we become, as the title suggests, a clockwork orange? [...] Alex represents the unconscious, man in his natural state. With the Ludovico treatment he has been civilized, and the illness that follows can be seen as the neurosis imposed by society. [...] If we had not previously seen Alex act as a brutal and ruthless criminal, it would have been all too easy to agree that the State commits a greater fault in depriving him of his freedom to choose between good and evil. It must be clear that it is wrong to turn even the worst criminals into vegetables, otherwise we would fall into the same logical trap as the old Hollywood westerns against lynching. who always undermined their own assumption by showing the lynching of an innocent person. Of course, no one will dispute the fact that one should not lynch an innocent person, but will they agree that it is equally wrong to lynch a guilty person, even if he or she is guilty of a horrible crime?”
Exactly…