A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Watching a Stanley Kubrick movie is always an experience, an often intense, gripping, even hypnotic experience, and A Clockwork Orange is no exception. The director Frank Capra once wrote that Kubrick was a director of extreme talent, but who couldn’t figure out what it was he wanted to say. I would have to disagree here with Capra, I think Kubrick had tons to say, and this movie is loaded with enough social commentary and insight to warrant volumes of analysis. It is an ultra violent, extremely sexual film, boardering on porn, but also profound. Malcolm McDowell gives what can only be called an amazing performance as Alex DeLarge, a teenage miscreant living in a decaying and crime plagued near future London (1).

Following two days of explicitly depicted debauchery Alex is picked up and arrested for murder, having been betrayed by the gang mates he excessively lorded over. Two years he spends in prison, pretending to be reformed while inside nursing the violent and sexual fantasies that have always been central to his being. Upon hearing of a new experimental technic that is said to cure violent impulses and allow even the worse offenders to be safely released back into society, Alex determines to participate in this program as a way to get early release from his sentence, thinking he’ll be able to con his way through what must be a naive liberal psychobabble of a program. However a new government has come to power, and there efforts to curb individuality and control people are more extreme then anything Alex has ever experienced.

The treatment Alex is put through consists of exposing him to images of extreme violence and sexuality while gradually altering his brain chemistry so that such things make him physically sick. They literally make it impossible for Alex to act upon his baser impulses, any effort to do so is greeted by extreme and debilitating physical pain. Alex is in fact not changed, but robbed of the full extent of his agency, forced to be good for simple self preservation, a prospect that the prison Chaplin finds extremely odious to his higher Christian sensibilities. Upon his release Alex finds that not all is forgiven, and despite all that he has suffered through his former friends and victims, even to an extent his parents, desire him to suffer yet more. Unable to defend himself he is beaten by the homeless people he used to beat, by his former friends now gestapo like cops in the new government, and tortured by others in the films climax and twist, which I will not reveal to the reader.

There is much much here worthy of analyses, and both the left and right are critiqued as unable to deal with a psychotic like Alex, as both a threat and as a human being. It may be that Kubrick intended to tell us that such a person as his protagonist is simply beyond the ability of any society to properly deal with, and that unfortunately he may be the ultimate product of societal excess on either side of the spectrum. This is a touch stone film that shattered barriers and broke new ground, one of the most important films of Kubrick’s career and of the 1970's as a whole. This is as shocking today as it was upon its original release. The best summation of my feelings regarding this film could be summed up in one word: Wow. 5 out of 5.

(1) One of my favorite lines in the film is when a homeless man that Alex and his cronies are beating up, complains that with people living in space and on the moon the decay on the earth has been largely ignored. In this way the movie can almost be viewed as a counterpoint to the directors previous film 2001: A Space Odyssey, while man is exploring the mysteries of transcendence in space, the earth is reverting to a baser more primal state.