A Clockwork Orange (1971) is disturbing, bizarre, and, like all of Stanley Kubrick’s major films, a directorial masterpiece rife for analysis. In this essay, I’ll explain how it satirizes modern society with panoramic scope, ultimately asserting that our various social structures are nothing more than hypocritical manifestations of the innate human desire to control one another, such that the tame condition of the modern man is an artificial result of the many forces of greed acting on him at all times.
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Kubrick opens with a sickening sequence introducing Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) as the leader of a gang of “droogs” wreaking havoc on future London. In addition to being the leader of the gang, Alex is especially sociopathic among them: whereas the other three complain that their thieving ambitions are too low, revealing that their motivations are mainly material, Alex dismisses such petty concerns, reminding them, “You have all you need!” Apparently, in contrast to his accomplices, Alex simply enjoys violence and rape for their own sake—a truly savage, dangerous individual.
And an episode after the gang’s vicious spree of “ultraviolence” spotlights another unsavory quality of Alex’s that will be important to the film’s thematic core. When his droogs stage a rebellion of sorts against him, Alex responds with ferocity, whacking Georgie in the codpiece and bloodying up his comrade, Dim. He plunges both into the marina and afterward gloats:
Now they knew who was master and leader. Sheep, thought I.
Thus, we see that Alex relishes commanding and ordering his peers, and he’s willing to use brutal means to retain his ability to do so.
This trait foreshadows the behavior of nearly every character he meets from that point forward in the film. For example, once the gang’s subsequent job ends in disaster and Alex is left at the mercy of the London penal system, he’s acquainted with Chief Guard Barnes (Michael Bates), the prison’s exaggeratedly despotic officer. Barnes is constantly barking purposeless orders (“Pick that up and put it down properly!”) just to lord it over the inmates, wielding his institutional authority with dimwitted pleasure. He has the implied power to beat the inmates into submission if he needs to, although he can’t seem to accomplish this with Alex, whose sly sneer stubbornly demonstrates that, predating One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest‘s (1975) R.P. MacMurphy, he hasn’t quite been dominated by routine and regimentation.
The next figure of authority Alex encounters is the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), who isn’t quite as effective an authoritarian as Barnes, but nevertheless promises dire consequences for the boys if they don’t change their ways. He preaches that in the next life, souls of unrepentant sinners “scream in anguish and unendurable agony…their skin rotting and peeling…a fireball spinning in their screaming guts!” After this wild speech, which doesn’t appear to move the inmates, the chaplain leads a hymn of warning to the boys:
I was a wandering sheep / I did not love the fold / I did not love my shepherd / I would not be controlled.
So while the chaplain’s methods are plenty different from Barnes’, both characters attempt to coerce Alex into submission via the threat of physical punishment. Ironically, then, after the stage demonstration of Alex’s “cure,” the chaplain protests, “Self interest, the fear of physical pain…drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement!” It seems the chaplain has forgotten that his own sermonizing was founded on those very principles, invoking “anguish and unendurable agony” as its sole impetus for reform.
Yet another agent of coercion is the medical team headed by Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering) and Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan). Serious scientists, they appear to despise the melodramatic, overly officious Barnes. This engenders hope that Alex’s new caretakers will be less tyrannical than the old ones. But when Alex later notes the unpleasantness of his new conditioning, Dr. Branom delivers a speech no less pious or condescending than what Barnes or the chaplain might have given:
Of course it was terrible. Violence is a very terrible thing. … You see, when we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You’re becoming healthy, that’s all.
Once again, the centerpiece of the philosophy is using physical pain or discomfort to force Alex to behave. And this time, it’s not only rhetoric, as the scientists’ Ludovico Technique endows Alex with a physiological aversion to sex and violence: a permanent, inescapable threat of pain.
Notably, when Alex begs that the treatment be stopped, offering a fairly convincing credo against violence (“It’s wrong because it’s like, against society!”), Brodsky dismisses his pleading, preferring the coercive means of correction to the authentic enlightenment of his patient. And when Alex rails against the use of Beethoven in the musical score, Brodsky remarks to Branom, “Here’s the punishment element, perhaps,” apparently oblivious, like the chaplain, to the reality that his entire system of reformation is based on physical punishment. Also similarly to the chaplain, Brodsky pays empty lip service to the value of free choice, telling Alex, “The choice has been all yours!”—while ignoring Alex’s pleas to desist the treatment.
We see Chief Guard Barnes for the last time in the post-treatment demonstration. He’s moody and skeptical at first, because Minister Frederick (Anthony Sharp) denounces his favored institutional methods as ineffective “hypocrisy.” But by the end of the demonstration, he’s clapping profusely, having derived great enjoyment from Alex’s humiliation on stage. It appears, then, that Barnes actually cares little about the institutional methods that he outwardly champions; what he truly values is seeing adversaries like Alex overpowered, their spirits crushed.
And neither do Minister Sharp’s denunciations of prison ward “hypocrisy” carry any moral weight. Sharp’s quiet comments to his peers reveal that he cares only about retaining his political power.
Given the unwelcome influence of these meddlers, there’s a temptation to sympathize with Alex. Indeed, believing that Kubrick aims to lionize his vicious protagonist is the kernel from which the worst reviews of A Clockwork Orange have sprung. Take Roger Ebert’s uncharacteristically bad 2-star review for example, or Pauline Kael’s, well, characteristically bad takedown in the New Yorker.
But make no mistake: if we find ourselves too fond of Alex—a murderer and rapist—then that’s on us. Recall the earlier episode during which Alex violently retakes control over his droogs, afterward comparing them to “sheep.” Crucially, the egomania that he demonstrates in that section of the movie is merely reflected in the aforementioned characters that exert control over him in these later events: just as Alex endeavors to keep his mates in line while he’s top dog, his friends and antagonists in positions of power target him for coercion after his arrest. So there’s no particular reason to sympathize with Alex, other than that we know him well; this movie consists of variations on a theme, and Alex’s early behavior is merely one of the variations.
Another variation that comes into focus later in the film is Alex’s own family. Although his parents are portrayed as doddering buffoons, their actions after he’s released from prison are serious, even sinister. Rather than accept him back into their home after his reformation, they kick him out on to the street with no money or direction, claiming they’ve leased his bedroom to a lodger named Joe. But Joe himself implies that the real reason Alex is no longer welcome is the embarrassment he caused his parents with his crimes.
At the end of the film, Alex’s father expresses regret for denying him a home—but this is only after Alex’s reputation has been rehabilitated through positive press. Thus, Alex’s family is no source of love, but rather yet another entity attempting to force him into submission. When he defies them, they replace him with an obedient surrogate: someone who, unlike Alex, will do as they wish.
In the last third of the movie, Georgie and Dim use their newfound authority as police to nearly drown Alex with impunity (just as he plunged them into the marina), and writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) drives him to suicide with the dreaded Beethoven’s 9th. These characters act primarily for revenge, and, in Alexander’s case, political benefit. Regardless of their motivations, though, it appears that they, too, are guilty of what Barnes, the chaplain, Brodsky, Frederick, Alex’s parents, and Alex himself are also guilty of: attempting to control other people for their own enjoyment and their own selfish benefit.
So what is the end result of these many power grabs? Well, Alex wakes up in a hospital after attempting suicide, and something is…not quite right with him. A psychiatrist provides some picture prompts, and although Alex proves once again able to contemplate sex and violence, his responses are odd and illogical. For example, when shown a picture of a peacock with the easy prompt, “Isn’t the plumage beautiful?” he offers: “Cabbages…knickers…uh…it’s not got…uh, a beak.”
Huh? Alex, laughing childishly after these gibberish non-sequiturs, is a far cry from the wry, conniving young malchick we met at the beginning of the film, an apparent result of the brain surgery to reverse the Ludovico Technique.
When Minister Frederick pays him a visit, the symbolic meaning of this new condition becomes clear. Alex requests that Frederick literally spoon-feed him his meal as Frederick offers him a good salary and a job of his choice in exchange for political cooperation. The imagery is clear: Alex has become infantilized at the hands of the state. No longer freethinking and enterprising, he’s happily dependent on the government to meet his every need.
Kubrick, then, has offered us a vision of the modern man: a blissfully mindless leech. More importantly, he has provided an examination of how we came to be this way: through the effects of the incessant human need to control one another. Alex’s adventures combine to leave him physically incapacitated, babbling like a small child, with the government shoveling food into his willing mouth.
So Alex may pronounce himself “cured”—but is he really? In the final scene, he imagines himself having sex, at first glance a potential triumph of individual freedom. But if we look closer we can observe that this is a relatively tame, proper sex scene, with, importantly, a small crowd of well-dressed people watching in approval. Alex’s journey, it appears, has stamped out his brutality in favor of a tamer sexuality, a libido approved by the well-to-do. A libido, in other words, more familiar to us, the inhabitants of modern society, who are also subject to the many sources of control—religion, the nuclear family, politics, law enforcement—that act on Alex and render him a listless government prop.
Is it a good thing that Alex’s horrific imagination has been watered down to fantasizing about bourgeoisie-approved, happily consensual sex? Is it a bad thing? I think we owe it to ourselves as serious viewers to conclude that Kubrick, as always, is a dispassionate observer. I indicated before, he has neither sympathy nor animus for Alex. His project, rather, is to show us that, for better or worse, the forces that shape our minds from animal clay into civilized human moldings are characterized by hypocrisy, greed, and self-interest.
–Jim Andersen
For more movies explained, see my piece on Eyes Wide Shut.
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