Much has been written about A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s dark tale of sex, drugs and ultraviolence. Much hot air has been expelled on the subject of its supposedly incendiary nature and its shocking scenes of cruelty. Released in 1972 and set somewhere in the not so distant future, the film immediately received critical acclaim but caused controversy for its explicit and decidedly amoral scenes of rape and violence. The film depicted a group of teenage male ‘droogs’ living it up in a dystopian society not that dissimilar to a bland, dilapidated England – where the picture was filmed – and indulging in their favourite pastimes, being raping, beating people up and listening to Beethoven. Unleashed at the same time as Sam Peckinpah’s ugly Straw Dogs, Kubrick’s film came under much scrutiny for its onscreen brutality and mistreatment of the female characters. In fact, A Clockwork Orange was one of the first films to inspire a slew of alleged ‘copycat’ crimes, as ill-informed conservatives claimed that the film inspired various beatings and muggings across the country. 

Naturally, the fact that the criminals in question hadn’t actually seen the film was irrelevant, but the resulting brouhaha infuriated the late director, and infuriated the also late author Anthony Burgess even more; Kubrick’s film had been adapted from his original novel, which was a deeply spiritual morality tale. While this source text contained its own scenes of nastiness, these were balanced with passages of moral exposition on the subject of violence, why people commit it and why others find it so beguiling. Kubrick, however, was accused of merely revelling in the perverse thrill that violence brings. 

Things came to a head when death threats arrived at the director’s family home, and in a bizarre and unequalled case of selective self-censorship, Kubrick pulled A Clockwork Orange from British cinemas alone, forbidding that the picture should ever be distributed on celluloid or video in this country again. Since this strange act of partial erasing, the cult popularity of A Clockwork Orange has grown and grown; somehow the film has become a byword for violence and the darker side of humanity. It is also a template against which all subsequent ‘violent’ films must be judged; critics unjustly compared David Fincher’s The Fight Club with it, while the damp squib of American Psycho did not come close to rivalling the resentment that A Clockwork Orange caused. 

It was the sad death of the elusive and enigmatic Stanley Kubrick that effectively lifted the ban and allowed A Clockwork Orange to be shown in this country (Northern Ireland) again, despite the fact that pirate videos have been readily available here since it was removed in the first place. In the interim, I have read the original text countless times for my English Literature course; I have poured over articles in magazines and film journals about the film’s legacy; I have even been intrigued by the near mythic appeal of this dark, seedy film. So, after all the hype and controversy, after all that wrangling of my conscience, I finally went to see it at our local arts cinema. I expected the worst, that my nerves and morals would receive a sound thrashing, that I would leave the cinema feeling outraged by the picture and strangely dirty. 

But, to be honest, I must admit that this recent re-release left me feeling a little underwhelmed. A Clockwork Orange opens with a foreboding clarion call–a red screen the colour of fake blood, followed by some gratuitous nudity and a spot of gangs duffing each other up. For its first half, the picture falls into this pattern of nakedness and violence, which may sound pretty unsavoury, yet somehow fails to be as offensive as it would like to be. Part of this stems from the fact that the film was produced in the early nineteen- seventies, as illustrated by the generous sideburns and mullets that are on offer here, sadly something that not even computer generated effects could fix. We perhaps cannot grasp the comparatively tame nature of cinema at that time and therefore the offence that a picture of such calibre would have caused. Since then, we have become accustomed to onscreen dismemberment, cruelty and jazzed-up pornography all in the name of art, of pushing back barriers and challenging taboos. At least Anthony Burgess’s novel of A Clockwork Orange warns that if you are going to break down barriers, you better have a good moral of your own to put in their place. 

Secondly, the fight and rape scenes of the picture are arranged so carefully and meticulously that they are strangely devoid of emotion; as they are structured for aesthetic reasons, they neither seem titillating nor provocative. The frequent displays of female skin may well be misogynistic, yet one suspects that the film would be more unsettling if Kubrick had cared about the women more. We are not invited to feel any empathy for the female victims, as they are merely placed like props, yet we are not invited to feel any other emotion either; Kubrick was a very visual director and was able to create striking images, yet sometimes he let the visuals run away from the empathetic side of his films. Neither a thing of beauty nor of being victimised, the female bodies in A Clockwork Orange left me feeling rather numb, especially when compared to the gentle and sensual filming of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, which said a lot more while showing a lot less. Though the viewer is spared from seeing actual rapes or murder onscreen, the preceding moments are filmed in such a clinical and unfeeling manner that it is difficult to be stimulated to any response, for good or for bad. This argument makes more sense when one reads that Anthony Burgess’s own wife was attacked, an event that largely inspired the writing of his book; in this novel, the scenes of cruelty to women are truly disturbing but therefore do not seem out of place or misjudged. 

In contrast, the second half of the picture is much more restrained–Kubrick’s films were often split into two ‘acts’ –as our protagonist and laconic narrator Alex is incarcerated for a burglary gone wrong, straying into more philosophical ground. To cure him of his evil ways, Alex–played with admirable vigour by Malcolm McDowell – is forced to undergo a nasty bout of aversion therapy; he is strapped into an uncomfortable looking chair with his eyelids jimmied open and made to watch a series of violent films. These pictures are intended to remove his leanings towards physical cruelty, yet the prison chaplain laments that they are removing Alex’s free will, his ability to choose between right and wrong. It is here that A Clockwork Orange tries to tackle the big issues, yet backs away from them when the picture becomes too subjective; Alex may imagine himself as a soldier mocking Christ at the crucifixion, yet this issue is not properly resolved; Kubrick may toy with the tricky issue of free will, yet decides to bring Alex back to his old ways of gleeful violence and naked women; if the film is an attack on the explicit nature of cinema, then why does it also celebrate it? 

As Alex himself says: 

It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the big screen. 

Overall, I will have to side with Anthony Burgess on this one–while Kubrick was painting with a wider, more colourful palate, the British author’s original novel brims with insight into the state of humanity at the time of its writing (1961) and is more relevant now than ever. Burgess hints at a deep need for something more meaningful within society, yet Kubrick seems to dismiss this as idealistic and sentimental. While it is difficult to strike the balance between being wise and being cynical, I would argue that Burgess did so with more precision. The furore that surrounds the film adaptation like a protective bubble raises many interesting questions about how we perceive violence in our society and on our screens, about how the consequences of having free will. Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange is diverting and, after all that grief, was not the fully blown fest of nastiness that I was expecting. If it was, then more of my questions would have been answered, but perhaps that is the way Kubrick wanted it. 

Ross Thompson  05/28/2000