Quote 5

Alex:   “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”

Alex speaks this line while watching a scene in a bloody film the doctors show him as part of Ludovico’s Technique. Viddy is a slang word that comes from the Russian word meaning “to see.” In this quotation, Alex says that art seems more real than life. Throughout the film, Alex seems not to experience the reality of his own violence. His responses to it are at once sinister and childlike, and he sees violence as just a game. When he watches a film, however, images and colors of the real world actually reach him. The color he refers to here is red, the color of blood, which he sees flowing on-screen. “It’s funny,” he says, and, indeed, irony lies in the fact that life must be turned into art before Alex can truly experience it. This statement expresses Kubrick’s own complex attitude toward the arts. In A Clockwork Orange, the arts are a way for characters to more clearly understand their world, but they are also a way for them to distance and detach from life.

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