The PR Blog

What We Are Willing to Look At

When I was sixteen, I sneaked into a theatre to watch a film that would stay with me for the rest of my life.

I was not old enough to be there.

I had pretended to be eighteen.

My older brother took me. He was good like that - aware I would probably find a way to see it anyway, and deciding it was better I did so with him beside me.

The film was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

What struck me was not simply the violence. It was the contrast.

The beauty of Beethoven playing over acts of brutality. The elegance of the imagery sitting beside cruelty so casual it almost felt playful. It was not just disturbing - it was disorienting. My world of innocence was splintered. 

When we left the theatre, I was shaken.

My brother said to me, “Don’t watch things because they sound exciting unless you’re ready.”

At sixteen, I thought he was talking about the film.

I have come to believe he was talking about something much larger.

Because once you have seen certain things clearly, you do not fully unsee them.

They become part of how you understand the world.

That memory returned to me recently as I considered uncomfortable truths about the world we are living in now - and how differently people seem to respond to them.

It made me think again about two moments in my own life.

One was in a cinema.

The other was outside a courthouse.

Decades ago, a young girl - someone connected to my daughter’s circle of friends - was raped and murdered.

I will not soften that sentence. There is no soft way to say it.

When the offenders were brought before the court, hundreds of people gathered outside. Mothers, fathers, families, ordinary citizens whose grief and anger were almost impossible to contain.

I remember standing there among them.

The air was thick with it... rage, devastation, disbelief.

All it would have taken was one voice to ignite the crowd. One step forward. One moment where grief became action.

But it did not happen. 

We stood in silence. Not because we did not feel anger. We did.

Not because we did not feel hatred. We did.

I still do.

I despise what was done to that child.

But none of us moved. None of us became what we hated.

That distinction matters more to me now than anything else about that day.

It was not the absence of anger that defined us.

It was the restraint of it.

And that restraint was not automatic. It depended on something fragile but essential: trust that justice would be done.

That the system would take what we were feeling and give it a lawful form.

That grief and outrage would not be wasted.

That memory has stayed with me for decades because I no longer take that trust for granted in the way I once did.

For those unfamiliar, A Clockwork Orange tells the story of a young man, Alex, who delights in violence and domination. After being imprisoned, he is subjected to an experimental behavioural treatment known as the Ludovico Technique, designed to eliminate his capacity for violence by making him physically ill at the thought of it.

I have never believed that evil is something I can understand in any comforting way. I do not understand what would drive a person to harm a child or anyone for that matter. I do not find explanations that make it easier.

There are things that remain outside comprehension. And perhaps they should.

What I do understand is something else: the fragile balance that prevents anger from turning into collapse.

Civilisation depends not on the absence of rage, but on its containment.

On the belief that justice exists outside the crowd.

That belief is what I felt outside that courthouse.

It is also what I fear is weakening.

In recent years, I find myself thinking more often about cases like that of Henry Nowak or the horrific incident in Belfast - names that become symbols of something larger than themselves. Not because they define society, but because they reveal how deeply people feel when they believe justice has failed or been delayed or diminished.

When that belief takes hold, something shifts.

People stop trusting the distance between wrongdoing and consequence. Perhaps the lambs are awakening and their silence is not a given? 

And when that trust erodes, anger begins to look for other forms of expression.

Not always lawful ones. Not always controlled ones.

This is where I think the connection between my two early experiences becomes clearer.

The Clockwork Orange showed me what it looks like when a state tries to eliminate moral failure by removing choice itself.

The courthouse showed me what it looks like when ordinary people, left with choice, still refuse to become instruments of vengeance.

One is control imposed from above. The other is restraint chosen from within.

Both depend, in different ways, on what people are willing to see.

Because seeing is not neutral.

We choose what we look at, what we ignore, what we explain away, and what we allow ourselves to feel.

There is a temptation in every era to avoid looking too directly at what disturbs us.

To soften it. To reinterpret it. To turn away.

But a society that stops looking at uncomfortable truths does not become kinder. It becomes more fragile.

Because truth does not disappear simply because it is ignored.

It accumulates pressure.

And eventually it returns in ways that are harder to control.