A Clockwork Orange (1971) by Stanley Kubrick

Warner Bros

CRITICISM – There are famous films whose critics do their best to erase their subversive aspect. This is the case with A Clockwork Orange. Adapted from Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), it is known for all the wrong reasons. This is not a film about violence, neither for nor against it. Conversely, 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 engine of social life, as has become customary for These days. Not only is it Alex's vision, but it is a theatrical, fantastical vision. Alex does not live in reality, but in the permanent theater of himself. His private life is as public, constantly wanting to be the center of attention, and in an obsessive way.

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

Alex, from the outset, talks about himself, placed in the center of the image and stares at us defiantly while his voice rings out. He narrates the action of the film in 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 story. “There was me…that's Alex, and my three droogs, namely Pete, Georgie and Dim”,he said. On several occasions, he addresses the spectators as his “brothers”, creating an intimate, close relationship with them. Alex's perversion, narcissism and theatrical vision are ingeniously placed in Kubrick's own cinematographic process, creating a mise en abyme between Alex's fictional life and that of the film which unmasks it.

The whole movie is based on this setup. This is what makes A Clockwork Orange the first film to indicate that perversion will no longer operate in the shadows, anonymously (like Jack the Ripper or Mr. Cursed by Fritz Lang), but needs recognition, of a public and media theatricalization, selfish of oneself. In 1972, Stanley Kubrick captured the process in progress: that a pervert wanted to become a media person 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, with an obese ego which 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's a prank in the vein of Doctor Strangelove. Everything is amplified and overloaded reflecting Alex's hallucinated vision. The settings are outrageous with kitsch, garish, exaggerated colors (the Korova Milkbar, the parents' apartment). And this from the credits where the colors appear like red, blue, red monochromes on par with contemporary art. The music itself, through Ludwig Van Beethoven, is partly recomposed with the synthesizers of Wendy Carlos.

All the characters are represented. 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 from the end (Pauline Taylor) with her purple wig. Alex and his droogs are dressed like they are in the theater. They have white jumpsuits, shells on their genitals, wear masks. Alex has false eyelashes that he removes in the evening. Other characters play in an insistent way, such as the judicial controller, Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), Franck Alexander (Patrick Magee), the writer, or even the head warden 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 Home Secretary (Anthony Sharp), but does a minister need to overact, given that he is already playing 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 which has replaced this one. 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 daily today 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 cinema, but in a demystifying inverted mirror. All its staging converges towards this focal point. Pornography as morality at all stages, emotional, affective and sexual pornography.

It must be remembered that the 1970s were dominated by intensive “sexual liberation”. All this is known. In reality, this “sexual revolution” is not that men and women are making love more in reality, but that their sexual relations are more exhibited and more crude in 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 through the order of 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, which points its head towards his crotch, phallic sculptures of the cat lady. The scene of threesomes and rapid coitus 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 point of the filmmaker, a man reduced and subject to his impulses, here a mechanical banana. The young women also put up no resistance to this sexual escapade and they will end their dreary lives like the cat lady, 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 for accumulation is limitless (the objects in his drawer). Likewise, this irrationality and this desire for omnipotence are illustrated by the sequence where Alex drives his car and does not want to be stopped by anything on the way, causing a series of accidents. Alex is so in his little atomized world that his room is locked like a safe. Besides, the family does not exist or very little. 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 in the center.

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

The error of many interpretations is to believe that Stanley Kubrick aestheticizes violence. However, everything in the film is spectacularized, put in the spotlight: the scene with the tramp is seen like a pocket theater, lit in the manner of detective films. The tramp sings and is applauded by Alex and his droogsbefore being severely beaten. Just before, the poor man complained about the world without order (a reactionary caricature of him). 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 very much resembles a theater. Kubrick plays with 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 as a musical with the song I'm singing in the rain, referring to the film of the same name. Alex thinks he's in a comedy film. When he is about to rape the woman, removing her suit and cutting it like an orange, before her husband's eyes, Alex approaches him and says: “Learn carefully, brother ! » with this sticky proximity of creating 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 is the writer's good left-wing conscience which, moreover, opens the door to Alex and his gang.

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

In Anthony Burgess's 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 didn't want a happy ending. In fact, Alex's voiceover is that of his autobiographical and lying story that he ultimately writes.

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

Stanley Kubrick here mocks contemporary art in the exhibition of the banality of sex as a guarantor of talent, sex which has invaded all of sociality and reached the category of art in decay of its signs, these being made obscene, theatrical and trivial. Self-exposure and destruction of all boundaries go hand in hand. It stated: “Surely there is a significant portion of modern art that is uninteresting, where the obsession with originality has produced a type of work that is perhaps original, but by no means interesting. I think it is in Orphée that Cocteau has the poet say: “What must I do ?” and the response is: “Amaze me. » Much modern art certainly does not meet this condition. It's art, but it's not amazing and it doesn't fill you with admiration and surprise. I think that in certain 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 informed, they arrest Alex who then finds himself in prison.

In the second part, Kubrick ironizes the roles that make up the prison universe, notably the head warden Barnes, a deliberately caricatured character, rigid in his principles like an automaton, the incarnation of traditional morality with the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), the other character ineffective with his preaching. Alex is still in the center, on the platform, spinning the words of a song. He tries to pass himself off as an “angel” whose passages from the Bible inspire him with scenes where he can indulge in his perverse dreams: he sees himself whipping Christ, participating in bloody fights or lounging with young people. naked women. He plays a role. He learns that a new treatment is in preparation, the Ludovico treatment which makes men “virtuous”. Alex continues to lie pathologically to protect his interests and escape prison. There 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 Doctor Brodsky's Institute. The Ludovico treatment takes place in a movie theater! Another form of spectacle of which Alex is at the center, even if this time he undergoes an ordeal to format his criminal conscience and make him like a dishcloth. He is immobilized, tied to a seat, his eyes held open while a man injects him with drops. He watches violent movies and says, “It’s funny, the colors of the real world only look real when they’re glossed over on a screen. » Little by little, he feels a deep unease when he witnesses Nazi news images against a backdrop of Beethoven. The stupidity of the treatment Ludovico believes that by giving 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 whereas previously he took pleasure in them.

The music or the figure of the German composer gradually invaded the entire film. Ludovico treatment (an allusion to the first name Ludwig), the cat lady using a bust of Beethoven to knock out Alex, portrait of the composer in Alex's room and in his cell when the Minister of the Interior visits her, the Beethovenian face of the the writer Alexander, to the carillon of his home (the first notes of the fifth symphony), and later, when the same writer plays the Ninth symphony in order to drive young Alex crazy. Beethoven is used over footage of a Nazi parade and images of destruction (like in Alex's dreams with this music). The filmmaker resumes his reflection on Western rationality through its technological development which was unable to slow down two world wars. He indicates that Culture can do absolutely nothing in the face of barbarism as he shows through Alex in his ecstatic listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven is emblematic throughout the film, like Alex's substrate. Not only does he listen to the composer's work, but not just any work: the ninth symphony, the Ode to Joy, a piece used ironically by a being who enters into violent ecstasy while 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 brotherhood. It symbolizes a big, hollow concept. Art does not make you more human. Kubrick alludes to the fact that the Nazi leaders could love Beethoven, Schubert or Wagner and at the same time had millions of men and women exterminated. This indicates that civilization is not separated from barbarism as is naively believed, but that both develop in the same momentum. Kubrick is also “fascinated” by this German culture among others, precisely because it was unable to 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, masked 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 don't see science as evil. It simply must be intelligently controlled by Society [2],” said Kubrick. Science, like civilization (and the 18th century, the filmmaker's favorite Enlightenment), has its dark side, when the latter no longer appears in the dazzle of luminous rationality.

This second part is the 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. She became 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 the 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 show. New theater scene where he is at the center. He is introduced to a young man who provokes him and deeply humiliates him. Alex can't react and wants to vomit. Then it's the turn of a beautiful young woman, topless. Alex can't make love to her. At the end, the Minister of the Interior congratulates himself on the success of the treatment. Ironically, it is the prison chaplain who is outraged 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, in the media.

The third part repeats the first according to reversed symmetry like a mirror. Everything Alex did to his victims came back to him. The tramp takes revenge, his droog friends have become police officers (using the same methods as before, but with uniform) and they also take the opportunity to beat him up, leaving him almost dead. Alex ends up with the writer, Alexander, his double as their first name says. Kubrick repeats the same lateral tracking shot when a half-unconscious Alex comes to ring again at the writer who was typing on the typewriter. It's 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's when he hears her singing I'm singing in the rain in his bath that 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, intellectual and cultured opposition. He wants to use Alex to attack the Minister of the Interior, a cynical project behind his humanist side as an enlightened intellectual on the front. His legitimate, but not justifiable, resentment pushes him to drug Alex, lock him in a room and play him Beethoven until he drives him crazy. His glee at the torture he inflicts on Alex, inspired by the Ludovico process, is just as barbaric as the treatment Alex subjected his victims to. Kubrick brings conservatives and opponents back to back with the same cynical policy. Here again, he does no favors for these left-wing intellectuals, full of compassion for criminals when they can serve their interests, but become as barbaric as the system (similar to the Ludovico system) that they criticized when they find themselves affected in their flesh.

Alex throws himself out of the window and finds himself in the hospital, plastered up to the neck and completely immobilized. The Minister of the Interior in search of voice and image (he is on the same level as Alex in this respect) comes to visit him. He chats with him and, in a delightful irony, he gives Alex something to eat, because the latter cannot use his fork. An obvious metaphor for the political system to “educate” such individuals by “feeding” them or reinforcing their elemental perversity. The minister does not hide his intentions in a high-level cynical speech: he had the writer imprisoned, whose episode he questions in which his wife was killed by Alex while accusing him of having plotted against the government using Alex in this story! Which he himself does not hesitate to do. This whole story has done a disservice to public opinion in the re-election of the government and he asks for Alex's collaboration to put things right by offering him a job 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 which “spit” the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at full blast. The minister hugs him, the journalists arrive and take photos of them in an ecstatic crackle of flashes. Alex is still the center of attention, congratulated by the highest authorities.

Alex looks up, satisfied. The last sentence which 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 civility, legitimized by the Ministry of the Interior. Kubrick is a disturbing filmmaker. It indicates what “civilization” is based on and is its intimate and complex process. The mechanical man subject to his impulses behind a civilized mask. Mechanics grafted onto living things. Which explains the title of the film. A carnal automaton.

Kubrick clearly shows 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 workings of society and the State which benefit from it. In addition to the Minister of the Interior, let us recall the judicial controller responsible for the reintegration of young delinquents, a state official, who is aware of all the misdeeds committed by Alex in his charge. 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 in Montreal skinner Luka Rocco Magnotta (Eric Newman), an Alex to the power of ten. After undergoing several cosmetic surgeries, working as a stripper and model, and attempting a career in pornographic cinema, he became known on the reality TV show Cover Guy. Magnotta is the author of videos distributed on the Internet from 2010 in which he tortures kittens. Then on May 25, 2012, in an 11-minute video, we see her lover, Jun Lin, dead, mutilated, dismembered and raped. Arrested on June 4, 2012 by the police, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He’s had supporters ever since! Hybristophile women fantasize about him. Hybristophilia (from the Greek hybrizein, “to commit an outrage against someone” and from phile, “who loves”) indicates an individual who is sexually attracted to criminals. No one will be surprised that millions of Internet users rushed to watch such a spectacle, which was impossible before. Magnotta has all the attributes of selfishness, narcissism and perversion of the individual immersed in his fantasy of impossible to fulfill omnipotence. 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 show can spread easily and attract people like the show. Even transforming the world into a spectacle, transforming everyone's habits and customs into the same symbolic formatting through the image and the 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 that's not good news.

Notes:

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

[2] Ibid., p. 151.

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