In 1971, Warner Brothers films
released Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy A Clockwork Orange, based
on a novel by Anthony Burgess, to both critical and popular acclaim
as well as to political controversy. A futuristic film about a violent
young hoodlum, it scored Kubrick his biggest box office hit at that
point in his career. A Clockwork Orange was nominated
for four Academy Awards, won the New York Film Critics Circle Award
for best picture, and found favor with international audiences.
It has since gained a cultlike following.
The film’s brutality disgusted many viewers, even though
most of the violent images in A Clockwork Orange are
not of the blood-and-gore variety. In this film, Kubrick choreographed
gang fights and assaults as graceful dances, and he presented scenes
of rape, theft, physical brutality, and murder with a surreal, stylized,
and even comic detachment. Even so, the Motion Picture Association
of America slapped an X rating on the film’s initial American release. After
Kubrick deleted thirty seconds of footage, the MPAA revised its
rating to R.
Although Kubrick grew up in the United States, he lived
much of his adult life in England, and there the film proved even
more controversial than in the United States. The British public
saw A Clockwork Orange as a particularly English
film, satirizing English values and manners. For example, the run-down
housing complex where Alex, the main character, lives closely resembles
London’s poorly maintained public housing projects. While many disaffected
British teens of the day saw their lives reflected in the film,
some adults viewed the film as a celebration of youth violence,
one more sign that society had grown too permissive with children.
Groups of concerned citizens called for the film to be censored.
A Clockwork Orange had been in theaters
for over a year when a bizarre and brutal crime put the movie back
in the headlines. In 1974,
a gang of British youths attacked a teenage girl. As they raped her,
they performed the same song-and-dance number—“Singin’ in the Rain,”
made famous by Gene Kelly in the musical of the same name—that Alex
sings as he prepares to rape a woman in the film. Several more copycat
crimes followed. The newspapers had a field day with the story,
and a British judge declared the film an “evil in itself” and called
for it to be censored. Though he defended his film, Kubrick was
appalled at the copycat crimes and feared being sued. He pulled
the film from British theaters, and it was not officially screened
in full in England again until 2000, after
his death.
Kubrick was born in New York City in 1928 and
attended public school. His father, a physician, filled the family’s
home with books of European fairy tales, folk tales, and Greek and
Roman mythology. Kubrick read these books extensively when he was
a child, and many of his films have the stylized and surreal quality
of a myth or a fairy tale. Despite his interest in reading, Kubrick
proved a mediocre student. He was an avid chess player and photographer,
however, and after high school, he landed a job as a photographer
for Look magazine. He worked there for four years
before turning to filmmaking. He made his first feature-length film
in 1953, using money he borrowed from his
friends, his father, and his uncle, who was credited as associate
producer. Kubrick eventually became a popular success, but for most
of his career he avoided the Hollywood spotlight. On the set, he
sometimes demanded that a scene be shot as many as seventy or eighty
times, which earned him a reputation as a perfectionist. Kubrick
died on March 7, 1999,
only months before the July release of his thirteenth film, Eyes
Wide Shut.
A Clockwork Orange was not Kubrick’s
only shocking film. For years, French authorities banned Paths
of Glory (1957), one of his early
war films, which tells the story of cynical French generals and the
soldiers they victimize. The Catholic Church in the United States raised
objections to Kubrick’s 1962 film, Lolita,
which is based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel of the same name and
details an older man’s sexual obsession with a young girl. Kubrick
had a keen sense of humor and aesthetic vision, but at the core
of his films is a dark vision of humanity. Primitive psychological
urges drive his characters, often manifested as impulsive sexual
or violent behavior. As his friend Alexander Walker, a film critic,
wrote of him, “Kubrick’s view of man [is] as a risen ape, rather
than Rousseau’s sentimental characterization of him as a fallen
angel.” Kubrick spun out this image of man as the biological and
spiritual heir of the apes in his futuristic film 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968).
Kubrick was fascinated by the dark side of human nature
as well as by the dangers of the political systems that humans create
to control their own shadowy desires. In 1964,
Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying
and Learned to Love the Bomb, a political comedy about
the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
This film satirized the logic of the day, which maintained that
the best way to keep the world safe was through an ever-increasing
buildup of nuclear weapons. Dr. Strangelove is
a terrifying and hilarious comedy in which the combination of human
irrationality and the overwhelming power of the state manage to
destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust. A Clockwork Orange offers
another look at the dangers of state power, where the power-hungry
individual, Alex, and the power-hungry state seem almost equally
threatening.
The theme of state power had particular significance in
the early 1970s, when A Clockwork
Orange appeared in theaters. World War II and the rise
of the Soviet Union had already shown the world the dangers of fascism,
Nazism, and totalitarianism. Before writing the novel A
Clockwork Orange, Burgess spent some time in Soviet Russia
where he saw gangs of violent youths running wild while the police
rounded up the government’s political opponents. His novel and Kubrick’s
film, in turn, reflect those experiences.
The 1960s and 1970s
also brought about worldwide political upheaval and rebellion against
political and social institutions. During those decades, sex and
drugs had unprecedented influence on teenagers’ lives. This time
period yielded drastic ideological alienation between generations,
as the young rebelled, politically and socially, and allied against
what they saw as the hypocrisy and repression of their elders. Although
Alex in A Clockwork Orange has no particular political
or social motivation for his violence and performs violence simply
for its own sake, viewers still took a keen interest in the question
of how much power the state should have to control its members,
in particular its young.
Many viewers also responded to the film’s cynical presentation
of science as a tool of state control. In the film, the government
chooses Alex to be the subject of an experimental procedure, conducted
by government-employed doctors, that attempts to control his violent tendencies
by altering his mind. Although the film presents this procedure
as a futuristic nightmare, the first half of the twentieth century
had seen the rise of psychological and scientific methods of changing
human behavior, as well as instances where governments used those
methods to control criminals and other members of society they deemed
threatening.
In 1971, Zhores and Roy Medvedev,
famous Soviet dissidents, published a memoir, A Question
of Madness, in which they described Zhores’s imprisonment
in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, where techniques of mind control
were practiced on him. In the United States, lobotomies and electroshock
therapy had already been used to treat the mentally ill in the 1930s.
Although doctors believed these procedures would truly relieve the
suffering of their patients, the government also hoped the procedures
would reduce overcrowding in state-run psychiatric hospitals. According
to Elliot S. Valenstein, author of Great and Desperate Cures:
The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments
for Mental Illness, doctors at the time “were rarely questioned
about anything they tried, and institutionalized patients were completely
at the disposal of the staff in terms of treatment.” In some instances,
doctors performed similar procedures in prisons, on inmates judged
criminally insane, in the hopes of making them less violent.
In Clockwork, a theme of the governmental
abuse of power is coupled with the concept of modernity’s dehumanization
of society, which has filmic roots dating at least as far back as
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
This film, marking a widespread distrust of the industrial age,
portrays an urban society segregated into “thinkers” and “workers,”
neither group possessing a complete set of human qualities. A similar
theme appears early on in Clockwork, when Alex’s
mother wants to see him off to school but is thwarted in her maternal
desires by her obligation to her factory job. In this scene, Alex’s
cheery “Have a nice day at the factory!” offers a comic relief that
was more inspired by such films as Charlie Chaplin’s landmark Modern
Times (1936), a slapstick classic
set in a factory and featuring Chaplin thrashing about in an effort
to keep up with his conveyor belt duties.
Just as Metropolis influenced Clockwork’s
criticism of society, so does Lang’s 1931 classic M foreshadow Clockwork’stheme
of irrepressible violence. The murderer in M, though
guilty of heinous crimes, seems childlike and helpless, his actions
only a response to a profound psychosis. Though Clockwork’s
Alex is a more unforgivable villain, the root of his perverted thrills
seems equally innate. The film’s more politically oriented satire,
apparent, for example, in Alex’s run-down community and his state-mandated
psychological “cure,” preceded that in Milos Forman’s mental-hospital
drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975),
Terry Gilliam’s futuristic, bureaucracy-rotten Brazil (1985),
and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000),
about the horrors of the state welfare system. Like Clockwork, these
films were all critically acclaimed, praised for their often-shocking
explorations of humanity’s darkest impulses.
