Stanley Kubrick Week: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

1 year ago

Stanley Kubrick Week: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

ANGEL TRUMPETS AND DEVIL TROMBONES

by Karina Wolf

You’ll remember the gist of A Clockwork Orange from your compulsory high school reading: Alex (Malcolm McDowell), an aggressively mischievous youth, leads his gang of droogs (that’s Nasdat for mates) as they enact a series of violent crimes. Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork takes place in a garishly mod dystopia. The film begins as Alex and co. walk along an abandoned quay, approaching the camera in white clothes, black boots, pink codpieces and bowler hats. Sticks in hand, these clownish “brothers” kick a beggar senseless while belting out their cover of “Singing In the Rain”. This cheery violence is the first in a cycle of horrifying juxtapositions. If cinema creates meaning through the succession of images, Stanley Kubrick is master of the anarchic mashup.

Perhaps its hapless sadism and futuristic misanthropy ensure Clockwork’s cult status. The film was banned for its contagious violence (a series of copycat crimes supposedly swayed Kubrick to remove the film from circulation in Britain). And you can still find Alex’s snearing face on countless t-shirts; a gesture, perhaps, to say that like Che, Clockwork is perceived by the masses as defiantly counterculture. By refusing to allow the viewer to sympathize too long with any of its characters, the film does assert a kind of Brechtian rebellion. After the gleeful beating, the gang interrupts an intended rape in an abandoned theater. In a pantomime of violation, the rivals play tug of war with the naked woman on the unused stage. This mise en abyme abuse isn’t less disturbing for its comic inefficiency. A self-reflexive work calls attention to behaviors through self-conscious repetition. A Clockwork Orange asserts that violent behaviors are ritualized. Violence is not only inherent; it’s enjoyable and stimulating.

After the rescue and tussle, the gang relaxes at a local milk bar – a provocative boite at which the elite mingle with the criminals. Kubrick stages a club where naked mannequins form splayed-leg tables; their genitals are festooned with brightly colored feathers and beads. Alex draws a glass of milk from the erect nipple of one of the dummy women. His friends threaten a wealthy bourgeoise for singing opera, but for once, Alex stops them – here, we witness his intense passion for Beethoven, a source of pleasure that overrides his other impulses.

In Clockwork, Kubrick’s two superpowers are evident: the nearly static, precisely composed wideshot and the insolent closeup. In the film’s first minutes, Alex’s droogs clash with their rivals in a blanket of darkness, like characters on a chessboard. Later, as they drive through the night in search of further mischief, we see Kubrick’s other trope: the camera pushes in on Alex’s punk snarl, half concealed in shadow. One side of his Janus face is decorated with eyeliner and theatrical lashes – it is exaggeration and beautification, but it is also repellent. Alex displays a deviant irreverence, like a Batman villain or a would-be rockstar. On this occasion, the gang invades a home on the pretext that they’ve had a car accident. Singing their signature Gene Kelly number, Alex and friends swarm the would-be rescuers and rape a woman in front of her husband. But with their bright clothes and charitable sentiments, even the victims are deplorable.

Film is an insistent game of make-believe. The director-author attempts to rally a crew and to deliver a story the way he envisions it, to discomfit or surprise or move an audience through his choices. Clockwork is striking in that there is almost no moment in which Kubrick allows a character to become sympathetic; indeed, comfort of any kind is consistently undermined.

Violence, for example, is a pleasure but also a compulsion. When Alex is caught and imprisoned for his crimes, Kubrick introduces Clockwork’s totemic scene: the image of the anti-hero in the midst of aversion therapy. To obtain an early release, Alex agrees to an experimental treatment that will eliminate his violent impulses. This “Ludivico Technique” requires that he is restrained by straightjacket, injected with a pernicious cocktail of drugs, and submitted to a succession of violent and pornographic images while listening to the music of his favorite composer. The desired result: when provoked to anger or sadism, the subject will instead become sick.

The torture is the most notable sequence in the film. It’s what you know if you haven’t seen the movie, and it has been replicated endlessly. Its appropriation – in a Guns N Roses video, on Lost, on The Simpsons – reflects the problem posed by the film and its principal character. Is Alex a rebel or a criminal? Are we meant to champion him for his wild behavior? Identify with the way he is programmed by the state? Feel saddened when his one aesthetic love is used against him? Take pleasure in the grim innovation of his punishment?

Malice is pleasurable, a life force, a weapon. There is something divine in anger and irreverence; it is godlike and self-affirming. Surfing a sea of images is also intoxicating – titillating, disturbing, provocative — until you drown in them. Clockwork operates with a shifting set of symbols; as a parody or social commentary, I’m not sure it can sustain itself.

When Alex is attacked by his former droogs, he finds accidental shelter with the handicapped writer who had been his victim. “They will sell liberty for a quieter life,” the paralyzed writer sympathizes with the brainwashed youth. But when the man recognizes Alex as the perpetrator of his wife’s rape, he becomes positively aroused by plans for retribution. Alex leaps from a window to escape the writer, and injures himself so grievously that the Ludovico therapy is reversed. The movie concludes with sour self-congratulation: the would-be liberal is incensed to violence. A new, fascistic government rewards Alex in a kind of public relations intervention, and Beethoven is restored to him as well. Instead of feeling ill, Alex sees pornographic images when he listens to the music.

Kubrick’s film relations are legion: Alex DeLarge is the sociopathic cousin of the David Bailey character in Blow-Up and a chromosome away from his more comedic offspring, Austin Powers (they even wear the same psychedelic coat when chasing women). In Truth or Dare, Madonna appropriates Alex’s slang and clothes during her tour. She wears a bowler and refers often to ‘the old in-out, in-out’. In Batman Begins, the wide views of Mr. Fox’s underground lair, with its glowing luminescent floor, and the slow ballet of dreamers tied together toward the end of Inception, are also indebted to Kubrick.

His inspirations were various. Kubrick worked frequently from adapted works, but though you’re undoubtedly aware of the writer (in this case, Anthony Burgess) these texts are very thoroughly rebranded. Certainly, there is a peculiar poetry in Burgess’s Nasdat pigeon language that is well-matched to Stanley Kubrick’s style as director. At times, syllables are nearly separated from meaning. The film A Clockwork Orange is very little about emotional authenticity or stable reality. Kubrick offers us a kaleidoscopic but indifferent world; in it, meaning, morals, and identity are diced up, collaged and repurposed to multiple ends.