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.
