A Clockwork Orange The movie A Clockwork Orange opens with a close-up of a dark blue eye with false eye lashes. The camera moves back as we are presented with a young man in a white shirts and trousers sitting next to three other young men. A voice over narration begins with "There was me; that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, George, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar, trying to make up our rassodocks what to do with the evening." (Clockwork) We have been introduced to the story's main character, Alex, and his gang of social outcasts. Directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, A Clockwork Orange is a nightmare vision of the future. The film explores society and the teenage anti-hero Alex who lives in it. Still a controversial movie around the world, A Clockwork Orange has never failed to show us the impact society can have on the individual. After the opening scene at the Milkbar, we follow the four hoodlums on several violent journeys in what seems and is a futuristic world. After beating a "filthy old drunkie" senseless, we find the gang pitted against "Billyboy and his three droogs who were getting ready to perform a little of the old in-out-in-out." Alex and the boys put an end to all the fun with an old fashioned rumble equipped with switchblades and chains. "Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles." Not satisfied with just two beatings, Alex and his "droogs" take off into the country side to terrorize a writer and his wife to the lovely theme of "Singin' in the Rain." "What we were after now was the old surprise visit." After a night of beatings and rape, the four boys retreat back to the Korova Milkbar for a nightcap. Coming home that night, we find Alex has a fetish for the "old Ludwig Van." The next morning, we are introduced to Alex's plastic social elite mums and dad, as well as Alex's probation officer, Mr. Deltoid who informs Alex there was "a bit of extreme nastiness last night." After a day of having his way with two girls in a scene that is shown at 12 times the normal speed of film, Alex is back out with his "droogs" for another night of senseless violence. A slow-motion confrontation between Alex and Georgie leads to the rest of the crew to double cross Alex at the robbery of a health farm where Alex kills a women with a phallic sculpture. "Naughty, naughty, you filthy old sooker!" The police capture Alex and he is sent to prison for murder. Mr. Deltoid says of the situation "I hope to God they torture you to madness." Alex studies the bible and becomes friends with the prison chaplain. Working his way into a reformation program called the Ludovico technique, Alex says "I want the rest of my life to be good, one act of goodness." Seated before a screen, Alex is dosed and straight-jacketed. His head wired with electrodes and eyes held open with clamps, Alex is forced to watch acts of violence on the screen. The drug, according to the balding doctor, will "soon cause intellect paralysis, deep feeling of terror and helplessness, very like death, when the subject will most associate his catastrophic experience with the violence he sees." After Alex begins to feel sick, he cries for help and pleads for them to stop after realizing violence is a sin against society. After several weeks of social torture, Alex is allowed freedom only after a presentation of how the technique has made him socially acceptable. "He will be your true Christian, ready to be crucified rather than crucify! Reclamation!" After being freed, Alex finds no luck with his mums and dad and discovers his old friends only want to make him feel back at home again by kicking him in the "guttiwuts" and attempting to drown him. Left in freezing cold rain, Alex finds himself in the home of the man who was the writer he had terrorized years earlier. After a glorious rendition of "Singing in the Rain" by Alex in the bathtub, the old man realizes he has his arch enemy in his grasp. Drugging young Alex, the old man and his bodyguard lock him in a room and Alex jumps out the window when he has no other choice. "Suddenly I vidies what I had to, wanted to do, and that was to do myself in, to snuff it." Jumping out the window lands Alex in the hospital where he suddenly finds himself as a poster boy for political ends. "I've suffered the tortures of the damned." Suddenly we find that Alex is socially acceptable and he declares "I was cured all right." The film is a based on the novel "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, which was published in 1962. Kubrick first read the novel in 1969. Reading it in one sitting, Kubrick saw the potential filming possibilities. "The narrative invention was magical, the characters were bizarre and exciting , the ideas were brilliantly developed, and, equally important, the story was of a size and density that could be adapted to film without simplifying it or stripping to the bone." (Kagan 167) With such an interest for the novel, Kubrick worked directly with Burgess to adapt the novel into a screenplay. He found an actor, Malcolm McDowell, whom he had had in mind for the narrator-protagonist for his first reading. Even though the character of Alex was fifteen in the novel, Kubrick felt McDowell was the only actor who could play the part of the social outcast. To cut down on production costs, Kubrick decided to use real locations and only four scenes in the film were shot on sound stages. Kubrick says of his on location shooting that "you have got to use your resources in the most effective way possible, because they are limited and when they are seriously stretched it always shows on the screen." (Walker 44) Going through ten years of back issues of three European architectural journals, Kubrick was able to locate futuristic scenery that was already built. Kubrick also found the latest developments in cinema technology to be useful. Implementing mikes as small as paper clips , he was able to cut out background noises and have synched dialogue. His lighting was cheap and efficient and he also shot many scenes with wide angle lenses. "Mr. Kubrick constantly uses what I assume to be a wide-angle lens to distort space relationships within scenes, so that the disconnection between lives, and between people and the environment, becomes an actual literal fact." (Walker 46) The film took six months to shoot. Kubrick worked seven days a week to edit the footage, starting out at ten hours a day. He worked his way up to 14 to 16 hours a day as his deadline approached. "Opening on December 20, 1971 in New York City, the film opened to mixed reviews." (Ciment 165) The violence and adult themes contained in the film intrigued while at the same time shocked audiences. A box office hit, A Clockwork Orange received worldwide acclaim as an important work of art. "It was chosen by the New York Film Critics as the Best Film of the Year, and Kubrick received a Best Director Award. It won the Italian David Donatello award, the Belgian film critics gave it their award and it won the German Spotlight award. It received four Oscar nominations in the United States and seven British Academy Award nominations. It won the Hugo award for the Best Science Fiction movie." (Ciment 162) Pauline Kael sees Kubrick as having "assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says 'Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want?' The look in Alex's eyes at the end tells us that he prefers sadism and knows he can get by with it." (Kagen 184) Art critic Robert Hughes pointed out that the film is a "cultural satire as well as a social satire, a chilling prediction of the roles of cultural artifacts: paintings, buildings, sculpture, music." (Kagen 184). To prove this, Hughes points out the scene right before Alex kills the woman with the sculpture of the penis where the woman has the nerve to say "Don't touch it, it's a very important work of art!" (Clockwork) Kubrick himself interprets A Clockwork Orange in a three fold manner. "First as a social satire on the use of psychological conditioning; second as a fairy tale retribution; and third as a 'psychological myth,' a story constructed around a fundamental truth of human nature." (Kagen 181) Music plays a very big role in the film, and at points the violence centers around the melody of the music. Alex centers his violence to a theme of Beethoven, but that is what drives him out a second story window as well. Many themes are explored in the film such as religion, art and free will. The confrontation between Alex and society seems to be Kubrick's focus. "The film explores the difficulties of reconciling the conflict between individual freedom and social order. Alex exercises his freedom to be a vicious thug until the State turns him into a harmless zombie no longer able to choose between good and evil." (Ciment 163) A Christian theme comes out in the film as we see Alex undergoing redemption. "The premise implied by the title is that it is far better for an individual to possess free will, even if it is exclusively the will to sin, than for him to be mad over into clockwork paradigm of virtue."(Kagan 172) Alex gives into the system and becomes a model yet mindless citizen. Soldiers coming home from the Vietnam war at the time were seen as the same. They were heroes in some people's minds, but also seen as killers in others. The film could not have come out at a better time in the 1970s. The situation that not only the United States was in, but also the rest of the world helped show that we do not live in a utopian society and we are far from it. A Clockwork Orange is a vision of a future that hasn't came about yet, but could have seemed possible at the time of the film's release. Alex is rebelling against the state, but the state gets its payback. Does anyone actually win? Alex has a free will, and that scares society. Anthony Burgess made up an argot called Nadsat for his novel. The vocabulary was implemented into the film, which is basically English with a "polyglot of slang terms and jargon thrown in. The main sources for the addition terms is Russian, with contributions from Gypsy, French, Cockney/English slang and other miscellaneous sources such as Malay and Dutch." (Ciment 188) For example, the word "Cheena" means "woman" and "Lubbilubbing" means "Making Love." Both words derive from Russian vocabulary. Other examples are "Rozz" which means "Policeman," "Pooshka" which means "Gun" and "Viddy" which means "To see." The Nadsat is used throughout the novel and the film to a point where a viewer at times becomes confused while being amazed at the slang. Burgess, as well as Kubrick, are trying to present a new world to us but at the same time relate the society that Alex lives in to our own. It is scary to watch the film, but at the same time it is intriguing to realize its implications and the futuristic foreshadowing it presents. Works Cited Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1972. Ciment, Michel. Kubrick. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick Directs. NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. A Clockwork Orange. Director: Stanley Kubrick. Warner Brothers, 1971. Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: WW Norton and Company, 1962.
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