The movie that convinced Jeremy Renner not to do drugs: “I really appreciated it for that”
The effect of movies on public behaviour has long been a topic of debate, echoing through the halls of power and over dinner tables around the world. Does watching a violent film make someone more likely to commit violence? If impressionable minds see movies filled with sex and alcohol, are they more inclined to seek those things out? In truth, these conversations are usually reductive. They’re often pushed by people with agendas, looking for something to blame rather than holding society accountable for its own actions.
However, one thing about this tendency to link behaviours off-screen with those on-screen that has always fascinated me is that no one ever seems to think movies can positively affect people’s behaviour. Avengers star Jeremy Renner would beg to differ, though. You see, he’s a staunch proponent of films having the power to make you straighten up and fly right, because he saw a movie in his teens that put him off the idea of taking drugs for life.
“A Clockwork Orange, I’ve seen about 35 times,” Renner told Rotten Tomatoes in 2014. “I remember first seeing that, and I certainly didn’t get half the movie”. Indeed, young Jeremy mostly thought the surreal, frightening movie was “weird and strange”. As he grew up and matured, though, he began to appreciate its filmmaking style, anarchic sense of humour, and socio-political themes more and more.
Fascinatingly, the most significant impression Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian masterpiece made on Renner was that it made him feel like he was on acid. To the Hurt Locker star, who had never taken hard drugs, watching the movie was so mind-bending and consciousness-expanding that he realised, “I watched Clockwork Orange enough so I didn’t have to do drugs.”
To him, it was simple: why mess with illegal narcotics when you can just watch Kubrick’s demented opus? “It’s the visual storytelling and the language that I thought was so tremendous,” he noted. “It’s an absolute acid-trip fantasy weird thing.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the world didn’t share Renner’s reaction to A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Instead, it was accused of encouraging juvenile delinquency. Then, when a 14-year-old was in court in 1972 for the manslaughter of a classmate, the prosecutor alleged the film gave the boy ideas. This was followed the murder of an elderly homeless man by a 16 year old, and a rape in which the attackers sang ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, like Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge does in the film.
In ’73, Kubrick requested that the film be taken out of circulation in Britain, but he quickly pointed out that he didn’t believe art could make people do anything that wasn’t already in their nature. “To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around,” Kubrick mused. “Art consists of reshaping life, but it does not create life, nor cause life.”
As for Renner, he acknowledged that the movie features a lot of “shock value,” but he liked that it took no prisoners and was confrontational. “I really appreciated it for that,” he nodded.
Ultimately, Renner may have always been someone who had no interest in drugs, because – as Kubrick believes – that is his nature. In this scenario, watching A Clockwork Orange simply gave him an idea of what going on an acid trip might be like. However, the idea that the movie inadvertently stopped him from endangering his well-being with narcotics purely because it was so weird is undeniably compelling.
