Just Like Clockwork

[This is the second article on a trilogy about Stanley Kubrick films. The first installment was 'Unshut Those Eyes'.]

I'm usually not one for dystopian tales. I think the world has got that part covered, all right. No need to look in fiction for this kind of vibes. Even in the case of movies that I find to be excellent, like Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' or Terry Gillian's 'Brazil', I usually never revisit these kinds of stories.

But the misadventures of Alex and his droogs [friends] always have a place in my life, and more than having re-watched the film way over a dozen times, I find 'Clockwork Orange' (1971) to be a very portable morsel of storytelling, in the sense that I carry the film around in my mind, and think about the implications and symbolisms that it carries.

Taking place in a near-future - that is now actually the near-past, for us 21st century folks - the film begins following a night in the life of Alex and his gang of friends from the modernist youth.

More than juvenile delinquents, a group of violent sociopaths that wear a uniform and roam the streets searching for mayhem.

Alex is intelligent, quick-witted, understands and enjoys classical music, being particularly fond of Beethoven, whom he calls 'Lovely Ludwig Van'.

They drink Moloko [milk] Plus, that 'sharpens them up' and readies them 'for a bit of the old ultra-violence.' The Moloko is laced with illicit additives, such as vellocet (an opiate), sythemesc (a mescaline), and - check that out! - drencrom (or adrenochrome).

This is only the first clue that both the original Anthony Burguess novel and the Kubrick movie are filled with predictive programming, that is - information that powers that be want normalized in the long run, hence the need to have it appear in art and culture.

So, off they go - in an increasingly disturbing rampage of violence, rape and murder.

The image of societal decay is painted clear: they beat up a homeless old man, but they do so after cheerfully clapping his drunken singing. Next, they disrupt a 'gang bang' rape of a young devotchka (woman) by a rival gang - and for a minute there, we wondered if they are not good guys, after all. No such luck.

They steal a 'futuristic' sports car - a Durango 95 - but more than a joyride, they engage in a 'Russian roulette' of sorts in the countryside, driving on the wrong side of the road making the passing vehicles head off in desperation.

Finally, they get to 'a place called Home', where they wear Venetian masks - that foreshadow the Cult Orgy in his last film Eyes Wide Shut' - to rape and murder a woman and leave her writer husband wheelchair bound.

It's a very famous and controversial scene. Kubrick is actually doing to us what will be later in the movie done to Alex - he is exposing us to the horror, and creating an aversion to that content.

During the shooting of that scene, Kubrick was very unhappy with the result, saying that it felt too 'stiff'. That's when actor Michael McDowell had the brilliant idea of playing it while doing a crazy 'Singing in the Rain' performance. It makes the scene become very funny, and - what's more - makes the scene all the more terrifying due to this humor involved.

As they say in their lingo - 'very horror show' (good)!

Anthony Burguess complained that the movie delved to much in sexual titillation and gave his novel a bad rep - but that is somewhat unfair, since Kubrick softened one scene, in which, in the novel, Alex drugs and rapes two 10-year old girls. That was turned into much less objectionable ménage a trois with two young women over the age of consent.

Like the society in general, Alex's gang is also falling apart. He despises his droogs' inability to connect to music, and has to attack them to reestablish his status as leader.

The next outing of the gang is an even much more disturbing 'aversion therapy' storytelling by Kubrick. The attack on a highly confrontational Cat-Lady is stripped of any sensual appeal, and all the sexual imagery is in fact custom made to disgust rather than entice. Behind the Venetian mask, we see that Alex is a consummate monster.

As he leaves the scene of the crime, Alex is betrayed by his droogs, with a bottle of milk smashed to the face, and is arrested by the police.

We immediately see how the state brutality is in an order of magnitude greater than what any devious man can produce. In prison, the protagonist makes a fake conversion to Christianity, while he tries to dodge the homosexual solicitations by older and more dangerous inmates.

Finally, Alex is enrolled in the 'Ludovico Protocol', that aims to purge the evil from the test subjects' life. It's a take on the 'Aversion Therapy', and Behavior Modification in general, but it has been suggested that there is also a 'predictive programming' aspect that is meant to turn our attention to the illegal MK Ultra program implemented by the CIA from the 50s to the early 70's.

In the process of showing him the material that is going to 'cure' him, the doctors also make him victim of an aversion for Beethoven's music, previously his preferred. In doing that, they are killing the one redeeming aspect of his personality, his one really human facet.

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Stanley Kubrick described the film as a 'social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioral psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots.'

Once young Alex is deemed to be cured and released into society again, the story takes on a 'think mirror' aspect, and he fumbles through the same cast of characters he had met before, only now he is in a position of victim, suggesting that the cycle of violence will be there with or without his participation.

Other mirrored, inverted aspect that the story takes is that Alex is unable to go back to his family home - his parents exchange him for a new lodger in what for me is the most shocking scene of the movie - and he ends up beaten and almost dead at 'a place called Home', the house he defiled earlier in the picture, where he is taken in.

Once the communist writer realizes he is harboring the man who killed his wife and put him in a wheelchair, he decides to take revenge upon him, by locking him up in a room and playing Beethoven in loud volumes - leading Alex to try to commit suicide. His only trace of humanity was his greater vulnerability.

In the end, we have the un-reformed delinquent posing to cameras with a much larger sociopath: the prime minister. The totalitarian ideas of behavioral modification, of medical experimentation, of saving those places in prison for the political prisoners - all that paints a terrible dystopian picture, not of what we may come to be, but of what we are.

image montages and post-production made with Ribbet.com