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 its thematic meaning. As I’ll go on to prove, A Clockwork Orange is a panoramic satire of modern society that ultimately asserts 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 civilized 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. Later dialogue between these hoodlums confirms that Alex is especially sociopathic among them: whereas the other three complain that their thieving ambitions are too low, revealing that their motivations are primarily material in nature, Alex dismisses these petty concerns, telling them, “You have all you need!” In contrast to his accomplices, it seems, Alex simply enjoys violence and rape for their own sake—a truly savage, dangerous individual.
And an episode after the gang’s vicious “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—both for the aforementioned reason of their dissatisfaction with their earnings and because Alex isn’t exactly pulling his weight as the leader—Alex responds with ferocity, whacking Georgie in the codpiece and bloodying up his comrade, Dim. He plunges both into the marina and afterward gloats:
Alex: “Now they knew who was master and leader. Sheep, thought I.”
Thus, we see that Alex not only enjoys brutality and sexual violence, but he 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 total 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:
The Chaplain: “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, “The boy has no real choice, has he? 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, as it invoked “anguish and unendurable agony” for sinners 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). As scientists, they have little use for the melodramatic, overly officious Barnes, and their contempt for him is palpable as he drops off Alex. This provides hope that Alex’s new caretakers will be less tyrannical than the old ones. But when Alex later notes the unpleasantness he feels during the conditioning, Dr. Branom delivers a speech no less pious or condescending than what Barnes or the chaplain might have given:
Dr. Branom: “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 rhetoric is the prospect of physical pain or discomfort to force Alex into behaving. And this time, it’s not only rhetoric, as the Ludovico Technique leaves Alex with an actual 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 the threat of physical punishment. Brodsky claims to Alex, “The choice has been all yours!”—while ignoring the actual choices that Alex is making at that very moment. Thus, again like the chaplain, Brodsky pays lip service to the value of free choice, but his actions suggest that, in fact, he is uncomfortable with his subjects choosing freely.
These ironies demonstrate the hypocrisy and self-interest of their perpetrators. If Brodsky were truly concerned about helping his patient, why not stop the treatment after Alex professes his change of heart? If the chaplain were so concerned with Alex’s “self-abasement,” why encourage him to submit to “be controlled” by church dogma? Their professed morals, it seems, are only covers for the reality that they simply enjoy exerting control over others.
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 weight. Sharp’s quiet comments to his peers reveal that he cares only about retaining his political power. Like the other three aforementioned supporting characters, he wants to be in charge—that’s all.
Given the unwelcome influence of these meddlers, there’s a temptation to think, “poor Alex!” Indeed, believing that Kubrick wants us to sympathize with 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. These misguided moralizings would foreshadow the hand wringing that followed Joker (2019), a clear descendant of A Clockwork Orange, almost fifty years later.
But make no mistake: if we find ourselves too fond of Alex—a murderer and rapist—then that’s on us, not Kubrick. Because it’s our responsibility to remember 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 their own son back into their home after his reformation, they kick him out on to the street with no money or prospects, 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 isn’t exactly a source of unconditional 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 please.
In the last third of the movie, Georgie and Dim use their newfound authority as police to nearly drown Alex with impunity (using water for their torture—just as he knocked them into the marina), and writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) drives him to attempting 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. As I said early on, this satire is panoramic in scope.
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, as hoped, is able to contemplate sex and violence in relation to the pictures, his responses are odd and illogical, consisting largely of gibberish non-sequiturs. 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 alarmingly goofy answers, 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 that has reversed the Ludovico Technique.
When Minister Frederick pays him a visit, the symbolic meaning of Alex’s 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 his political cooperation. This imagery is clear: Alex has become infantilized at the hands of the state—no longer freethinking and enterprising, but 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 on the government. 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. The sum total of Alex’s adventures and interactions is his lying in bed physically incapacitated, babbling like a small child, with the government shoveling food into his willing mouth.
So Alex may estimate 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 adventures, it appears, have 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 leave 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 it’s neither: Kubrick, as always, is a dispassionate observer, with, as I indicated before, neither sympathy nor animus for Alex. His project, rather, is to show us through his magnifying glass 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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