Director: Stanley Kubrick (UK, USA). Year of Release: 1971
Extreme close-up on a pair of eyes, staring out from below the brim of a bowler hat. There is a sense of mascara, and the eyebrows are excessively long. As the camera pans out, we hear the man with the eyes speaking in a pigeon version of English about ultra-violence and Ludwig van Beethoven. Stood around him are 3 similarly clad men – dressed all in white with black headgear, a glass of milk in each of their hands. Welcome to Alex and his Droogs.
In case you don’t know the plot, here’s a brief summary. Alex and co go on the rampage in the dystopian New Town where they live. Catching a rival gang about to rape a young woman (cue gratuitous nudity), they stage a fight which looks more like a circus performance than an act of extreme violence. They then break into the remote house of a pretentious author and his wife. They beat up the author and rape the wife, balletically dancing and singing along to Singing In the Rain.
Following a similar break into the house of a woman who keeps large phallic sculptures (which obviously makes her culpable of huge crimes against humanity), the Droogs abandon Alex to the police. The police force Alex’s eyes open while forcing him to watch violent videos, including those of Hitler and the holocaust. Alex is weaned off violence for life – and, as a by-product, he can no longer listen to Beethoven’s Ninth. He is, so to speak, a Clockwork Orange, a man without any agency.
Let back out into society, he is the defenceless victim of the people he previously tormented, unable to resist the physical and mental violence that ensues when they realise who he is. Then a sinister government official offers to return Alex’s ability to relish violence, as long as he is able to perform a helping role to the government. In a more politically astute film, this would be a comment on the authorities’ contradictory relationship with Fascism. Here you’re not so sure.
Writing about A Clockwork Orange was always going to be a walk in the park, wasn’t it? The classic lost Stanley Kubrick film, which he withdrew almost on the moment of release until he died in 1999. Kubrick always delivered classic cinema, didn’t he? (we’ll leave aside Eyes Wide Shut at the moment as a late-life aberration made under the influence of too much Tom Cruise). I even remember getting a bootleg VHS in the 1990s while on holiday, and finding it all rather spectacular.
So, I was very excited about the chance to see it open air, and yes, it still looks magnificent. The appearance of Alex and the Droogs in white overalls, codpieces and long, false noses is iconic – a word which has been overused but fits perfectly here. Wendy Carlos’s soundtrack of classical music played on then-cutting edge Moog synthesisers is still truly subversive – a sign that music which was supposed to belong to our rulers is now in the hands of something much more primeval.
The politics of A Clockwork Orange are much more complicated. Director Stanley Kubrick has a largely unwarranted reputation of being a political radical – mainly based on 2 great anti-war films (Paths of Glory and Dr Strangelove) and a call to mass insurrection (Spartacus). But the politics of Spartacus were pushed by its communist writers – Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo – and liberal star/producer Kirk Douglas, with the libertarian Kubrick trying to tone down the radicalism.
A Clockwork Orange works more as a thought experiment than a manifesto. Who are we supposed to identify with? The violent rapist Alex, whose voice we hear throughout the film and on whom the camera is almost permanently fixed? Or the police and government ministers who try to use him for their own nefarious ends? The nihilist Kubrick might argue that none of them is to be trusted, but he clearly prefers Alex and besides, this is an artificial moral dilemma constructed by the director.
This dilemma – basically, how do “we” deal with the dissolute members of society who refuse to obey to “our” rules? – sometimes appears to be torn from the pages of the Daily Mail. All well-meaning liberals who suggest looking at the roots of violence are depicted as effete collectors of pretentious art and therefore worthy of ridicule. To be fair, the authorities don’t come out looking any better, but this just fits Kubrick’s cynical vision of everything being a bit shit.
A Clockwork Orange came out in 1971, following a decade of British kitchen sink dramas in which working class people and their concerns finally took centre stage. Only a couple of years before, in If…, A Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell had sat on the roof of a public school and randomly gunned down his privileged contemporaries. Meanwhile in the USA, New Hollywood was trying to articulate opposition to the Vietnam war in films like Bonnie and Clyde and Catch-22.
A Clockwork Orange shares the social realism of the kitchen sink dramas only inasmuch as Alex and his parents have wandering Northern accents. It also shares some anti-authoritarianism of the New Hollywood, but none of its political radicalism. It glorifies in Alex’s random violence, but because it makes no effort to understand the attacks, let along explain them, the thuggery, the female nudity, and especially the rapes appear to be mainly there to titillate the director and his complicit audience.
But never mind the politics, is it Any Good? Well, partly, but only in parts. The dialogue in the made-up language of Nadsat didn’t really work for me. Something that probably worked better in Anthony Burgess’s novel, just felt too much like the writers showing off for no reason. It reminded me too much of school trips to Shakespeare plays where your lack of knowledge of what the words could mean made the experience more of a translation exercise than any enhancement of the play/film.
Alex’s love of Beethoven also has the feel of élitism. The violence of someone who likes Beethoven is seen as much more tragic than if he had preferred Steppenwolf – or even Wendy Carlos. Book author Burgess was similarly priggish, saying: “I despise whatever is obviously ephemeral and yet is shown as possessing some kind of ultimate value. The Beatles, for instance. Most youth culture, especially music, is based on so little knowledge of tradition and it often elevates ignorance into a virtue.”
Nonetheless, the first third of the film is spectacular, and contains moments of brilliance. I can’t exactly explain why, but I found the chorus line of 4 dancing model crucified Christs hilarious. But even when the film is strong, it’s still fairly hit and miss. The remainder of the film, which charts Alex’s fall, is probably fascinating on first watch, but when you know what’s going to happen, there’s not much else there. It shows more of an intellectual exercise than with much inherent drama.
Malcolm McDowell is excellent as Alex, but this is far from his best film. At a 50+year distance, we are left to either revel in what he offers here or remember was capable of delivering much more. Nonetheless, A Clockwork Orange contains a number of spectacular scenes, which will linger in our collective consciousness for a long time. It also had its impact on popular culture, spawning band names like Moloko, Korova Milk Bar, and Heaven 17.
But as a whole the film is a bit of a mess which does not justify its 2+hour running time. It might be that the decades of self-imposed exile have imposed on it a mythical status which it doesn’t fully deserve. If Kubrick had not intervened, and it went on general release in the 1970s, maybe we’d have forgotten it by now. But it still justifies a single visit, maybe not more, to enjoy individual scenes and to revel in spectacular parts which do not quite add up to a coherent whole.
CinePhil 