Sound & Wonkavision: Annivyrsary 1971

ISSUE #137

At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges. The FCC finally pushed an advertising ban through Congress; tobacco companies had been using television in hopes of hooking kids—more than 80% of adults who had ever smoked daily tried their first cigarette by 18—and establishing a life’s revenue through nicotine’s neural conditioning.

The legislation was a sign—society was looking twice at the power of images and asking if they could still be trusted. It was this year that Pauline Kael—whose biting film reviews at The New Yorker had proven she was no prudish censor—spoke out against brutality on the big screen:

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools.”

This came in her review of '71’s most famous film, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a vicious story set in a dystopian British future where high society is terrorized by teenagers like the sadistic schoolboy Alex. It was a clear response to Charles Manson, whose death sentence was handed down this year as well—Alex opens the film by beating, robbing, and forcing himself on his victims in full-blown Technicolor, “the pornography of brutality,” as Kael described it. Later, in exchange for a shorter prison sentence, Alex agrees to a new Pavlovian conditioning treatment where he's forced to watch films of the most savage imagery until he can't think of sex and violence without feeling sick.

Though frequently lionized, the film is little more than a gratuitous take on the "smoke the whole pack" approach; its tone is both portentous and puerile. Yet he did have his finger on a certain psychological pulse—this was the year of both the Stanford Prison Experiment and the publication of Beyond Freedom & Dignity by B.F. Skinner, a book which argues that conditioning could make a happier society if science could only get over pesky ethical hang ups like freedom and dignity. "Almost all major problems involve human behavior, and they cannot be solved by physical and biological technology alone,” Skinner said. “What is needed is a technology of human behavior.”

You don't have to look much further than children smoking to see evidence of imagery as behavioral technology. People had seen things in 1971, and it was affecting them. Their screens were broadcasting cautionary tales. They saw the drug-induced deaths of Jim, Jimi, and Joplin. They saw Ralph Steadman’s hallucinatory illustrations to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. They saw coffins draped in flags flying back from Vietnam; saw classified accounts from the Pentagon Papers; saw assassinations, massacres, the protests, the beatings.

Music responded in kind. Marvin Gaye, appalled by what he witnessed, wrote his humanist masterpiece What’s Going On, which was recently named Rolling Stone's greatest album of all time. Sly and the Family Stone—a previously joyous funk band now whittled down to the paranoid, embittered Sly alone—wrote Marvin his own answer: There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Facing down the windmill guitars of Who's Next and Led Zeppelin IV, Motown found girl groups going out of style—though “Want Ads" turned out to be a brilliant final gasp (you'll recognize it from The Avalanche's "Because I'm Me"). The vulnerability Joni Mitchell wrote with on Blue was so rattling to the public that Kris Kristofferson once begged her, “Oh, Joni. Save something for yourself." Even Rod Stewart dipped into darkness with “Maggie May," born from the personal experience of sneaking through a drainpipe into a jazz festival and losing his virginity at sixteen—to an older woman he later recalled as "something of a sexual predator."

All these works stand in such stark contrast to A Clockwork Orange that it's worth interrogating whether Kubrick actually hated music; his is a cinema so unmelodious that it's practically tone-deaf. In editing, he actively eschews rhythm, holding shots until they're brimming with dissonance. A Clockwork Orange particularly delights in defiling songs by using them as instruments of torture. He underscores assaults and mutilations with "Singin' in the Rain," and plays diegetic Beethoven for Alex's conditioning scenes, leaving the character sick whenever he hears his once-favorite composer. "In addition to your being conditioned against acts of sex and violence, " one psychologist notes, "you’ve inadvertently been conditioned against music.”

Its use of music in moments of trauma is oddly similar to another British dystopian film that came out earlier in '71—Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The two ended up sharing a lot of attributes: both were American directors adapting landmarks of British literature; both were masterpieces of set design, hiding cavernous, colorful interiors inside brutalist architecture; both dealt with the question of how we punish our youth. Oompa-Loompas sing over each child's certain death, punished for their addictions at the hands of this magic factory. Wilder's Wonka is wizard of mischief—it was his idea to introduce the character with a limp, until his cane lodges in a paving stone and he reveals his ruse with a somersault. Wilder wanted the audience, from that moment forward, to never know whether Wonka might be lying—a question of trust still relevant to our idols and art.

If identity is so firmly shaped by music and imagery, I should point to at least one positive role model from 1971, an antidote to the sexless Kubrick—perhaps his very opposite, full of camp and glittered chic—in the form of David Bowie. While adults were hand-wringing in movie theaters, the youth were dressing in the image of a glamorous spaceman kissed by interstellar lightning. His fourth album, Hunky Dory, brought us many of his most beloved hits, from “Changes” to “Queen Bitch” to the soaring “Life on Mars?”

Bowie's galactic image was a Utopian speculation. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex is rehabilitated due to involuntary response to memory—songs pull emotion from that sinkhole like a hook dropped through a crack in the ice—but Bowie brings reform in a different way. His songs are a better type of cultural engineering, a positive reinforcement, a hand which takes the chin and gently lifts until we're gazing at the stars. He paints a picture of heaven akin to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

For him, the only place to go was up—and indeed, on December 2nd, 1971, a Soviet lander dubbed Mars 3 became the first spacecraft to reach the surface of our sister planet. It beamed a few seconds of signal back to Earth before it went quiet for good. I like to think its silence was a moral choice—when I'm forced to picture Alex, eyes pried to an endless screen, I imagine the celestial healing of that red Martian peace.