A Clockwork Orange (1971) by Stanley Kubrick

Warner Bros

REVIEW – There are famous films whose critics strive to erase their subversive aspect. This is the case of A Clockwork Orange. Adapted from Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), it is known for the wrong reasons. It is not a film about violence, neither for nor against it. On the contrary, it is a work where, for the first time in the history of cinema, Kubrick stages the perverse theatricalization of the self through the public sphere as the driving force of social life, as has become customary these days. Not only is this Alex's vision, but it is a theatrical, fantastical vision. Alex does not live in reality, but in the permanent theater of the self. His private life is as public, wanting to be constantly at the center of attention, and this in an obsessive way.

A Clockwork Orange is divided into three parts of about forty-five minutes. In the first, everything is said from the sequence shot that opens the film. Alex DeLarge, (Malcom Mc Dowell) stares us straight in the eye, dressed extravagantly, with at her side her three sidekicks, her droogs, Pete (Michael Tarn), Georgie (James Marcus) and Dim (Warren Clarke). He is in the Korova Milkbar with its equally extravagant and theatrical decor with mannequins serving as tables.

Alex, from the outset, speaks about himself, placed in the center of the image and staring at us defiantly while his voice resounds. He narrates the action of the film in the Nadsat language, an adolescent slang comprising Slavic languages, English and Cockney Rhyming Slang. He is the homodiegetic narrator of the film, that is to say, he is present as a character in the story he tells and is the hero of his tale. “There was me… that is to say Alex, and my three droogs, namely Pete, Georgie and Dim”, he says. On several occasions, he addresses the spectators as his “brothers”, creating an intimate relationship of proximity with them. Alex's perversion, narcissism and theatrical vision are ingeniously placed in Kubrick's own cinematic process, creating a mise en abyme between Alex's fictional life and that of the film that unmasks it.

The whole film is based on this configuration. This is what makes A Clockwork Orange the first film that indicates that perversion will no longer operate in the shadows, anonymously (like Jack the Ripper or Mr. Cursed by Fritz Lang), but needs recognition, a public and media dramatization, selfish of itself. In 1972, Stanley Kubrick grasped the process in progress: that a pervert wanted to become media-friendly and no longer act in the shadows.

Alex is a violent being, and he believes himself to be all-powerful, like God. He is a true pervert in the clinical sense of the term, a being invested with a characteristic infantilism, an obese ego that has replaced his brain. This infantilism is characterized by the drink, Korova, milk (child food) enriched with vellocet, synthemesc or drencrom whose properties are to overexcite and promote ultra-violence.

A Clockwork Orange is a baroque film. It is a farce in the vein of Doctor Strangelove. Everything is amplified and overloaded, translating Alex's hallucinated vision. The sets are outrageous with kitsch, garish, exaggerated colors (the Korova Milkbar, the parents' apartment). And this from the credits where the colors appear as red, blue, red monochromes on a par with contemporary art. The music itself, through Ludwig Van Beethoven, is partly recomposed with Wendy Carlos' synthesizers.

All the characters are on stage. A good number of them are wigged and dressed in an eccentric way: the outfit of Alex's mother (Sheila Raynor) with her purple (then yellow) wig, the cat lady (Miriam Karlin), the psychologist at the end (Pauline Taylor) with her purple wig. Alex and his droogs are dressed like they are at the theatre. They have white overalls, genitalia, and wear masks. Alex has false eyelashes that he removes in the evening. Other characters play in an insistent way, like the judicial controller, Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), the writer, or even the head guard Barnes (Michael Bates). They are like actors who overdo it, histrions. A Clockwork Orange is a deliberately hysterical or histrionic film. The only one who plays normally is the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp), but does a minister need to overplay, given that he already plays a role ?

In short, A Clockwork Orange is a deliberately theatrical and outrageous film. Alex does not officiate in reality, but in a permanent theater that has replaced it. The work plays on this confusion where it is impossible to make the distinction. This is the heart of Stanley Kubrick's film, the spectacularization of oneself, of one's image through the screens made everyday these days where everyone virtualizes themselves, wants to put themselves at the center of attention. The genius of the filmmaker is to do it through another screen, that of the cinema, but in a demystifying inverted mirror. All his staging converges towards this focal point. Pornography as morality at all stages, emotional, affective and sexual pornography.

It should be remembered that the 1970s were dominated by an intensive “sexual liberation”. All this is known. In reality, this “sexual revolution” is not that men and women make more love in reality, but that their sexual relations are more exhibited and more raw in the pictorial representations. Everything is outrageous here and in particular the exaggerated sexualization as a sign. Stanley Kubrick understood that sexual exhibition is a vampirization of sex by the order of the spectacle. Like Alex, all sexual signs are exhibited in metaphorical form or not. Phallus-shaped noses from the droogs, sexual inscriptions and graffiti in Alex's building, mannequins in the bar, naked painted woman, legs open in front of Basil, Alex's snake, who points his head towards her crotch, phallic sculptures of the cat woman. The scene of threesome and rapid intercourse edited in fast motion like a burlesque film with the two young women with phallic mirrors met in a record store clearly indicates that sex has become mechanical and functional, cold and pragmatic as we see it today. This is the very purpose of the filmmaker, a man reduced and subjected to his impulses, here a mechanical banana. The young women do not oppose any resistance to this sexual escapade and they will end their dull life like the cat woman, without having built anything.

Alex's listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony coupled with violent images of hanging and destruction is shown and likened to an orgasm. His desire to accumulate is limitless (the objects in his drawer). Similarly, this irrationality and desire for omnipotence are illustrated by the sequence where Alex drives his car and does not want to be stopped by anything along the way, causing a series of accidents. Alex is so much in his own little atomized world that his room is locked like a safe. Moreover, the family does not exist or hardly at all. Later, Alex's father and mother, a caricature of parents, will not hesitate to replace him with another young man. There, Alex is no longer at the center.

Pornographic society was only in its infancy, not only in its sexual sense, but in the one where everything would be publicly exhibited in limitless visibility (photos of Abu Ghraib or revenge porn). Pornography has given us a caricatured example of it where sexual intercourse is filmed relentlessly, viscerally and voraciously stripped of its secret flesh to be displayed for all to see. Nothing is obscene anymore, because everything is on stage, shown, dismembered, tracking down the slightest secret and the slightest seduction to appraise them and transform them into liquidity in the commercial circuit. An entire era is coming where all limits explode: tears, sorrow, murder, blood and sex will be subjected to this implacable law and symbolic formatting of the whole society.

The mistake of many interpretations is to believe that Stanley Kubrick aestheticizes violence. However, everything in the film is spectacularized, put under the spotlight: the scene with the tramp is seen as a pocket theater, lit in the manner of detective films. The tramp sings and is applauded by Alex and his droogs before being severely beaten up. Just before, the poor man complained about the world without order (a reactionary caricature of it). The sequence of the rape and then the fight between Alex's gang and his rival, the Billie boys, takes place in an old disused hangar, which looks very much like a theater. Kubrick plays on the contrast between the drama of the scene and the light music The Thieving Magpie by Rossini, all filmed like a ballet.

The famous scene with the writer Frank Alexander where Alex and his companions rape his wife is staged like a musical comedy with the song I'm singing in the rain, referring to the eponymous film. Alex thinks he's in a comedy film. When he's about to rape the woman, taking off her jumpsuit by cutting her up like an orange, in front of her husband, Alex approaches him and says: “Louque, listen carefully, bro!” with that sticky closeness of creating an intimacy with his victim, as if he were asking her to attend a show in which he is the star. Alex constantly needs to be the center of attention to carry out his murders and rapes. It's the writer's left-wing good conscience that, moreover, opens the door to Alex and his gang.

If Alex looks at the writer, he also fixes the viewer in a camera-like gaze. Kubrick goes against the nihilism of a cinema like that of Tarantino and of the counter-cultures that justify any form of visual pornography in terms of sex and violence to make it a pleasurable spectacle and believe themselves to be rebels. Consumer society obliges in this perverse legitimization of the desires of individuals. The image is never innocent and the stakes do not enlighten minds.

In Anthony Burgess' novel, Alex attacks the novelist for a particular reason that Stanley Kubrick removed. The latter writes a novel called A Clockwork Orange when the thug enters his home. He reads a few lines and it is at this precise moment that he gets angry and tears up the manuscript before hitting and raping the novelist's wife. Alex becomes a writer at the end of the novel. And above all, he becomes a good citizen again. The filmmaker did not want a happy ending. In fact, Alex's voiceover is that of his autobiographical and mendacious story that he writes in the end.

As the leader of the gang, Alex rules the roost. He is the alpha male, not hesitating to beat Pim with a vicious cane when he mocks a singer who has just sung Beethoven's Ode to Joy in the Korova Milkbar. He represses his gang members on the banks of the Thames when he feels his power is threatened. “Now they knew who was Master and Chief. Sheep, I thought. But a true leader always knows when to be generous with his subordinates.” His “friends” set a trap for him when they all go to Miss Weathers's house at Woodmere Beauty Farm. Alex breaks into her home and discovers a room full of sexual “artworks” and cats for only companions. He provokes this woman who did gymnastics and mocks her sexual obsession through aesthetics. The cat woman will die murdered by Alex who will smash her skull with a phallic sculpture in return when she tries to reach him with a bust of Beethoven. Act joining real murder and symbolic sexual act in a deadly orgasm.

Stanley Kubrick mocks here contemporary art in the exhibition of the banality of sex as a guarantor of talent, sex that has invaded all sociality and has reached the category of art in the rotting of its signs, these being made obscene, theatrical and trivial. Exhibition of self and destruction of all limits go hand in hand. He declared: “Certainly there is a great deal of modern art that is not interesting, where the obsession with originality has produced a type of work that is perhaps original but not interesting at all. I think it is in Orpheus that Cocteau has the poet say, 'What should I do?' and the answer is, 'Astonish me.' A great deal of modern art certainly does not meet that condition. It is art, but it is not astonishing and it does not fill you with admiration and surprise. I think that in some areas, music in particular, a return to classicism is necessary in order to stop this sterile search for originality.[1] »It is after killing the cat lady that Alex is attacked by Pim with a bottle of milk. “Logical” resentment towards the dominant. The police having been warned, they arrest Alex who then finds himself in prison.

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In the second part, Kubrick ironizes on the roles that make up the prison universe, in particular the head guard Barnes, a deliberately caricatured character, rigid in his principles like an automaton, the incarnation of traditional morality with the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), the other ineffective character with his sermons. Alex is still in the center, on the platform, turning the words of a song. He tries to pass himself off as an “angel” whose passages from the Bible inspire scenes where he can indulge in his perverse dreams: he sees himself whipping Christ, participating in bloody fights or lounging with naked young women. He plays a role. He learns that a new treatment is in preparation, the Ludovico treatment which makes men “virtuous”. Alex keeps lying pathologically to safeguard his interests and escape prison. Here too, he wants to be the chosen one. The unexpected visit of the Minister of the Interior will give him the opportunity to distinguish himself.

Alex is transferred to the Institute of Doctor Brodsky. The Ludovico treatment takes place in a movie theater! Another form of spectacle in which Alex is at the center, even if this time he undergoes an ordeal to format his criminal conscience and make him like a wimp. He is immobilized, tied to a seat, his eyes held open while a man injects him with drops. He watches violent films and says: “It's funny, the colors of the real world only seem real when squinted on a screen.” Little by little, he feels a deep unease when he watches Nazi news footage with Beethoven in the background. The stupidity of the treatment Ludovico believes that by printing a chemical treatment Alex's soul will change. He pretends to be horrified by the violence, but in reality he is horrified by the fact that he feels disgust at the sight of the images when he used to enjoy them.

The music or the figure of the German composer gradually invaded the entire film. Ludovico treatment (allusion to the first name Ludwig), the cat woman using a bust of Beethoven to knock Alex out, portrait of the composer in Alex's room and in his cell when the Minister of the Interior visits him, the Beethovenian face of the writer Alexander, on the carillon of his home (the first notes of the fifth symphony), and later, when the same writer makes him listen to the Ninth Symphony in order to drive the young Alex crazy. Beethoven is used on images of a Nazi parade and images of destruction (as in Alex's dreams with this music). The filmmaker resumes his reflection on Western rationality through its technological development which could not slow down two world wars. He indicates that Culture can do absolutely nothing against barbarism as he shows through Alex in his ecstatic listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven is emblematized throughout the film, as Alex's substratum. Not only does he listen to the composer's work, but not just any work: the ninth symphony, Ode to Joy, a piece used ironically by a being who enters into violent ecstasy when listening to it in the fact that it does not participate in any real joy. As beautiful as it is, it does not bring human fraternity. It symbolizes a great hollow concept. Art does not make one more human. Kubrick alludes to the fact that the Nazi leaders could love Beethoven, Schubert or Wagner and at the same time exterminate millions of men and women. This indicates that civilization is not separate from barbarism as is naively believed, but that the two develop in the same momentum. Kubrick is also “fascinated” by this German culture among others, precisely because it could not prevent anything despite its tradition and its eminent cultured representatives. In such a short time, it collapsed like a house of cards.

This part is the opposite of the first in the sense that Alex, a notorious pervert, is subject to an even more formidable law, hidden behind science to remove his savagery. ” Science is potentially much more dangerous than the State because it has a much more lasting effect. Certainly I do not see science as an evil. It simply has to be intelligently controlled by Society [2] », says Kubrick. Science, like civilization (and the 18th century, the filmmaker's favorite Age of Enlightenment), has its share of darkness, when the latter no longer appears in the dazzle of luminous rationality.

This second part is an illustration of this. Alex, the violent man who tortured his victims, becomes the guinea pig of science, which wants to eradicate Alex's violence by chemical and rational methods. By justifying this process, it then becomes the new dark side, even more dangerous because more unsuspected than the old one due to the very fact that it justifies its barbarity by rationality or so-called “enlightened” science. It has become Alex's reverse double. It is in this sense that Kubrick's film is a profound and lucid work. Barbarism can return through the light. Or Good as we see it today.

Once “cured”, Alex is subjected to a public examination in front of the prison warden, the Home Secretary, the chaplain, Chief Warden Barnes and the scientists. New spectacle. New theatre scene in which he is at the centre. He is introduced to a young man who provokes and deeply humiliates him. Alex cannot react and wants to vomit. Then it is the turn of a beautiful young woman, topless. Alex cannot make love to her. At the end, the Home Secretary congratulates himself on the success of the treatment. Ironically, it is the prison chaplain who is indignant that Alex's free will is being taken away. But Kubrick's staging is ingenious: Alex looks alternately at the Minister and the chaplain, then at the audience during the applause. And he smiles, delighted, to be the center of attention, mediatically.

The third part takes up the first according to the inverted symmetry like a mirror. Everything that Alex did to his victims is returned to him. The tramp takes revenge, his droog friends have become police officers (using the same methods as before, but in uniform) and they also take advantage of the situation to beat him up, leaving him almost dead. Alex ends up at the writer's house, Alexander, his double as their first name suggests. Kubrick takes up the same lateral tracking shot when Alex, half unconscious, comes to ring the bell again at the writer's house who was typing on the typewriter. It is Alexander's bodyguard who opens the door, the latter's wife having died because of Alex. The writer does not immediately recognize the young man who was disguised when he first came. It is when he hears him sing I'm singing in the rain in his bath he realizes that Alex is indeed the thug who attacked him. The shock is so intense that he goes into convulsions.

Alexander represents the left-wing opposition, intellectual and cultured. He wants to use Alex to attack the Minister of the Interior, a cynical project behind his humanist side as an enlightened intellectual in the front. His legitimate, but unjustifiable resentment pushes him to drug Alex, lock him in a room and play him Beethoven until he drives him crazy. His jubilation in the face of the torture he inflicts on Alex, inspired by the Ludovico process, is just as barbaric as the treatment Alex subjected his victims to. Kubrick sends conservatives and opponents back to back to the same cynical policy. Here again, he does not give any favors to these left-wing intellectuals, full of compassion for criminals when they can serve their interests, but become as barbaric as the system (similarity to the Ludovico system) that they criticized when they find themselves affected in their flesh.

Alex throws himself out of the window and ends up in hospital, plastered up to his neck and totally immobilized. The Minister of the Interior, in search of a voice and image (he is on the same level as Alex in this respect), comes to visit him. He talks with him and, deliciously ironic, he feeds Alex, because the latter cannot use his fork. An obvious metaphor for the political system to “educate” such individuals by “feeding” them or reinforcing their elementary perversity. The Minister does not hide his intentions in a cynical speech of high flying: he had the writer imprisoned whose episode where his wife was killed by Alex he questions while accusing him of having plotted against the government by using Alex in this story! Which he himself does not hesitate to do. This whole story has harmed public opinion in the government's re-election and he asks Alex's collaboration to get things back on track by offering him a job that is paid to match the damage he has suffered. No more, no less, he uses Alex's perversion. Especially since to comfort the thug, the minister brings in two giant speakers that “spit out” Beethoven's Ode to Joy from Symphony No. 9 at full volume. The minister hugs him, the journalists arrive and take pictures of them in an ecstatic crackle of flashes. Alex is still the center of attention, congratulated by the highest authorities.

Alex looks up into the air, satisfied. The last sentence that closes the film is ironic as usual with Kubrick. Alex imagines a scene where he makes love to a woman in front of an applauding audience: “No mistake, I was cured.” Indeed, he is “cured”, not that he has become a model citizen, but a being who has rediscovered his perversity and will be able to use it by disguising it behind a civility, legitimized by the Ministry of the Interior. Kubrick is a disturbing filmmaker. He indicates what “civilization” is based on and what its intimate and complex process is. The mechanical man subjected to his impulses behind a civilized mask. A mechanism grafted onto the living. Which explains the title of the film. A carnal automaton.

Kubrick shows well how power legitimizes criminals or uses them in its service (as in terrorism). The filmmaker has not only implicated young Alex, but autopsies all the cogs of society and the State that find their account there. In addition to the Minister of the Interior, let us recall the judicial controller in charge of the reintegration of young offenders, a civil servant of the State, who is aware of all the misdeeds committed by Alex, whom he is in charge of. He makes him understand that in the future, he will defend him and turn a blind eye to the carnage he commits in exchange for sexual favors…

 The implications of Kubrick's film are famously exemplified by Montreal skinner Luka Rocco Magnotta (Éric Newman), an Alex multiplied tenfold. After undergoing several plastic surgeries, working as a stripper and model, and attempting a career in pornographic films, he rose to fame on the reality TV show Cover Guy. Magnotta is the author of videos posted on the Internet from 2010 in which he tortures kittens. Then on May 25, 2012, in an 11-minute video, we see his lover, Jun Lin, dead, mutilated, dismembered and raped. Arrested on June 4, 2012 by the police, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Since then, he has supporters! Hybristophilic women fantasize about him. Hybristophilia (from the Greek hybrizein, “to commit an outrage against someone” and phile, “who loves”) indicates an individual sexually attracted to criminals. No one will be surprised that millions of Internet users rushed to contemplate such a spectacle, which was impossible before. Magnotta possesses all the attributes of selfishness, narcissism and the perversion of the individual immersed in his fantasy of omnipotence that is impossible to fulfill. Like Alex in the film. Such a case, increased tenfold by the Internet, could only happen in our time on such a scale.

The problem is that this kind of spectacle can spread easily and attract people as if they were at a show. Even transforming the world into a show, transforming the habits and customs of everyone into the same symbolic formatting by image and screen, much more terrible ontologically speaking than a massacre on the other side of the Earth. It has already started with sexual and emotional pornography and it is just waiting to spread across the entire planet by pulverizing the private sphere with the public sphere of self-image. Stanley Kubrick understood, as early as 1972, what was going to happen in our exhibitionist and pornographic societies in the broad sense. And it is not good news.

Notes:

[1] Michel Ciment, Kubrick , Calmann-Lévy, 1981, p. 151.

[2] Ibid., p. 151.

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