A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

By Steve Biodrowski     June 07, 2001

Stanley Kubrick's take on the Anthony Burgess novel is a strangely overwhelming experience--at time contemptible, and yet always valid in its sardonic outlook. We're forced to identify with a young, violent droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) as he rapes, brutalizes, and murders; after an experimental treatment conditions him to become violently ill at the mere thought of sex or violence, his kharma is leveled as, one by one, those he wronged have their chance at revenge. The sick joke of the movie is that everyone else, indeed the very state itself, is as morally corrupt as our 'friend and humble narrator.' The image of Alex, strapped to a chair during his treatment, eyeballs forced open to watch violent films while drugs create a sickening reaction within him, remains a powerful indictment of institutionalized facism supposedly done for the public good; when Alex realizes that, inadvertently, he's being conditioned against the background music, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, his agonized cry ('It's a sin!') carries a surprisingly powerful force, considering the amoral character who's uttering it. If anything, Alex seems somehow pure in his exuberant enjoyment of 'a bit of the old ultra-violence.' (Other filmmakers have attempted this tack, to much less successful results, such as Oliver Stone in NATURAL BORN KILLERS). Burgess's point was that destroying someone's free will, his ability to make moral choices, was as immoral as anything Alex did; in the novel (at least in England, where its last chapter was not shorn off), Alex eventually outgrows his youthful penchant for violence and finds himself aware of a desire to settle down. For Kubrick, life moves in cycles, endlessly repeating; thus the film ends with Alex returned to his previous state, presumably ready to embark on another spree as soon as he's released from hospital ('I was cured all right'). A cynical film, without redeeming characters, and yet it makes its point.