Re:Visiting – A Clockwork Orange (1971)

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

Stanley Kubrick’s controversial movie based on Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel of the same name, depicts an alternate dystopia in which gang violence is rife across a near future Britain. The film became infamous due to its graphic content, which is said to have inspired real life acts of violence. It was subsequently removed from circulation at the request of Kubrick, and remained banned in several countries for many years.

A Clockwork Orange follows the story of our narrator Alex Delarge (Malcolm McDowell) – a particularly vicious thug who heads a gang of four Droogs, juvenile delinquents who relish on embarking on evenings of ultra-violence. Which on any given night will include robberies, home invasions and rapes, as well as vicious knife fights with other equally as vile gangs. But staying faithful to the tone of the novel Kubrick delivers his movie with an element of conflicting humour, as the audience is presented with a narrator who has an endearing and charming wit.

A narrator who contrasts his love of violence with a love of the finer things in life, such as fashion and the music of Beethoven. While Kubrick’s quirky choice of classical music again often contrasts with the brutality we are observing. He also merges the violence with a sexual undertone. Often portrayed with a dark humour, such as when Alex jousts with one female victim using a giant ornamental penis.

Kubrick imagines his future in a unique style that blends a subtle Sci-Fi vision, with the distinctive 70s tone of its day. The auteur director does not hold back in the slightest with his depiction of violence, while strong nudity is also present throughout. Kubrick also displays a number of artistic montage dream sequences. One depicting Alex as a Vampire, and another with him imagining himself as a Roman soldier, whipping Jesus as he carries the cross to his crucifixion.

Alex falls out with his Droogs when he hits one of his friends – Dim (Warren Clarke) – to teach him a lesson for disrespecting a sophisticated woman, while she is singing in the Moloko bar they frequent. This creates a mutiny within his sadistic gang, causing Alex to forcefully exert his dominance. But he is turned on by his compadres and left to be captured by the Police, after a particularly nasty home invasion ends up in murder.

Subjected to a long prison sentence, the movie pick up two years into Alex’s incarceration where he is seemingly a model prisoner who has formed a friendship with the prison Chaplain. Although we are shown that Alex day dreams about indulging in various debaucheries throughout history.

He manipulates the Chaplain into putting him forward for a new experimental treatment that supposedly cures a prisoner of their violent tendencies, allowing them to leave prison early and become a conforming member of society. And here the film asks the audience to reflect on whether a free man who loses his freedom of choice, is truly a free man at all?

Alex undergoes the two week therapy and is injected daily with a strange serum, while being subjected to watching hours of violent film footage. While he does so he begins to feel uncontrollably sick, and thus the experiment comes to fruition. The association of violence in his mind always now brings on an extreme sense of nausea, which supposedly will stop him from making the wrong choices in life.

To Alex’s biggest horror, the music used to accompany the images he is forced to watch is the music of his beloved Beethoven, proving to be a true punishment for the criminal. Appearing to be rehabilitated, Alex is released and heads back to his parents home who are more than surprised to see him. His room has been let out to a lodger who is less than pleased with Alex’s return, telling him so to his face.

Alex raises his fist to the lodger, but recoils when his body reverts to the repulsion of the impending violence. He subsequently leaves his parents home with his tail between his legs after discovering that all of his worldly possessions have been sold. The rejection by his parents causes him to contemplate suicide, and as he wanders the streets he continuously bumps in to those he wronged before he was convicted.

Alex is assaulted by a group of vagrants, before in the ultimate twist of fate, he is saved by Dim and another of his former Droogs, who are both now officers of the law. They take him out into the woods and deliver a vicious beating, while also drowning him to within an inch of his life and leaving him for dead. Alex then wanders from the woodland and arrives at the home of a wheelchair bound writer. A man Alex had previously assaulted, and who’s wife he had raped earlier in the film.

Alex initially finds solace from the man who only recognises him from a newspaper article as being the subject of the states controversial experiment. However while recovering in a warm bath Alex sings Singing In The Rain, the song he had also sung during the violent home invasion two years prior. This sparks the recollection of just who Alex is, and the writer drugs him before forcing him to suffer his own personal torture at the hands of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

A Clockwork Orange offers an intriguing commentary on the loss of a corrupted youth, living in a society on the brink of collapse. The film also provides a commentary on law and order as well as exploring the theme of rehabilitation within the corrective system. Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay faithfully recreates many of the key scenes from the book, while also creating many of his own to compliment the narrative for the visual medium. Pushing the boundaries of cinema into exciting new places for the time! KZ

Words by Mark Bates