by David Mikics
Finding the right Alex was crucial to Clockwork’s success. Kubrick selected Malcolm McDowell, the twenty-eight-year-old hero of Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . (1968). There was really no other choice, Kubrick later said. McDowell had a curled-lip insolence and a ready way of mimicking the British aristocratic accent (as Kubrick biographer John Baxter describes it, “always too quick and too loud”).13 He could put underlings in their place, and with superiors he could lay on the smarmy obsequiousness.
“If you need a motor car, you pluck it from the trees,” says Alex to his droogs. “If you need pretty polly [money], you take it.” Alex is an overgrown child who delights in his easy life. Whatever he wants, he just grabs it. Living with his parents, sleeping late, he awakens yawning, scratching his buttocks, ready for a nice breakfast and a day of record shopping, drug taking, and a bit of the old ultraviolence.14
A Clockwork Orange is a movie about juvenile delinquency, a key Hollywood genre whose most famous instances are The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean, and West Side Story (1961). Brando and Dean were trained in the Method, and both had the soft inwardness that Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler nurtured in their pupils. Brando used delicate, distracted gestures to convey his vulnerability. Dean sometimes seemed, for obscure reasons, on the verge of tears. These rebels were tender, confused teenagers, not roughnecks. Like French existentialists, they carried the weight of the world. Though it was never very clear why the world was so intolerable, their beautiful souls were clearly suffering from it. Rebel Without a Cause depicts suburban existence as a quiet hell.15 “You’re tearing me apart!” Dean yells at his befuddled parents, as Nicholas Ray’s canted camera angles pinion him like a Christ figure. West Side Story, like Rebel, deals in teenage tragedy, adding an amused contempt for the headshrinkers and sociologists who try to diagnose adolescent rebellion. But West Side Story has a split consciousness. With its freewheeling dance routines it says, “We’re only in it for kicks: Take that, Officer Krupke.” But it also sells poignance in typical Hollywood fashion, shedding tears over young lives wasted by violence.
Kubrick declares an epochal break from these earlier movie classics of juvenile delinquency. There is nothing tender or tearful about Malcolm McDowell’s Alex. He is the natural man as hoodlum, a character that the sixties couldn’t imagine. That decade was hung up on revolution and expanding consciousness, neither of which would ever occur to Alex. McDowell’s superb performance is full of force but also simply matter of fact. He has killer style: jaunty and sharp in his Chaplinesque bowler, a buoyant boychik who will never realize how dumb he is. When MAD magazine depicted Alfred E. Neuman as Alex (in “A Crockwork Lemon”), it had Alex’s number: “What, me worry?” is his credo. McDowell turns on the charm, and doesn’t sweat it. We sense that, somehow or other, he will thrive in the end. Alex is not an abandoned soul like Humbert in Lolita, though they both have verbal talent to burn. (“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Nabokov’s Humbert.) Instead, Alex plays our louche pal: “O my brothers,” he says to us.
For Alex, like 2001’s Moonwatcher, bloodletting has the freshness of discovery. In one of Clockwork’s set pieces, the flatblock marina scene, Alex, struck by “inspiration, like,” rises up in the air, mouth contorted like Moonwatcher, about to teach his droogs a lesson by slashing open the hand of Dim, the most cloddish of the gang.
In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick argues against the hugely popular behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. Kubrick told Rolling Stone that he thought Skinner was wrong, and his movie clearly denounces Skinner’s behaviorist plans for social control.16 His two doctors, Dr. Brodsky and Br. Branom, are satirical portraits of Skinner-like behaviorists.
Kubrick’s point wasn’t just about Skinner. Behaviorism could be the movie industry ratcheted up a few notches: both of them manage our responses by doling out exciting stimuli. Significantly, Alex is rehabilitated by being forced to watch films as palpably violent as Clockwork itself.
Kubrick, when he read A Clockwork Orange, must have been drawn to Brodsky’s words to Alex during his Ludovico Treatment. Brodsky has been showing Alex films of Nazi atrocities to the tune of Beethoven. “The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence,” Brodsky tells Alex: “the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.”17 He is echoing Alex’s own insight throughout the novel, where sublime music conjures up the joys of ultraviolence. Kubrick in many of his movies shows rapture and destruction blending together. Brodsky aims to control this dangerous combination, quashing Alex’s fervor with his sterile mastery.
“In less than a fortnight now you’ll be a free man,” Brodsky tells Alex reassuringly, patting him on the pletcho (shoulder).18 For Brodsky freedom is subjection to behavioral law, the trained response grilled into the body by chemical injection. As in Orwell’s 1984, freedom is slavery.
Shot in winter 1970–71, A Clockwork Orange cost a mere two million dollars. Except for some key scenes, it required fewer takes than usual in a Kubrick film. This was partly because “Malcolm knew his lines,” as another brilliant boyish star of the day, Tom Courtenay, said, but partly also because Clockwork has an improvisational feel unusual in Kubrick.19 It uses slow motion and fast forward in the rough-and-ready way of early-seventies cinema.
The film required design genius: as with 2001, Kubrick imagined the world of the future in unforgettable fashion. He commissioned the sculptor Liz Jones, who had crafted the Starchild, to design nude female mannequin tabletops for the Korova milkbar. Drug-laced milk plus spurts from a mannequin’s nipple (“ ’Allo Lucy, ’Ad a busy night?” asks Dim as she squirts out the liquid drug). Kubrick dressed his droogs in white pants and shirts, bloodshot eyeball wristbands, paratrooper boots, bowlers, and codpieces. A Clockwork Orange heavily influenced the punk movement, then still years in the future. The movie eschews the glam gender-tweaking of Bowie or Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (1970) in favor of a tougher, quasi-military style.
A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick’s most zestful movie, a joyride from the moment it opens with a steady backward zoom from Alex’s false-eyelashed stare and hearty smirk. Many of its vignettes are pure oxygen, like the comic opera turn when Alex’s boys tussle with a rival crew of hoodlums.
The dazzling, dangerous brio of A Clockwork Orange is nowhere better shown than in its West Side Story–style rumble between the two bands of young goons. Alex interrupts Billy Boy and his gang, who are about to rape a squirming, half-naked girl on an abandoned theater stage: “Just getting ready to perform something on a weepy young devotchka,” as Burgess puts it. When Alex appears, the girl, grabbing her clothes, runs away unheeded. Rape takes a second place to the male-on-male showdown. Here Kubrick follows one of Ardrey’s key ideas, that men want power and territory more than sex.20
“How art thou?” Alex sneers to Billy Boy like Prince Hal addressing Falstaff, as the soundtrack strikes up Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture. What follows is a balletic showdown, with the two bands of droogs rhythmically flipping and socking each other.
We next see the droogs on a hell-for-leather car ride, with their hair whipping in the wind and the road in cheap-looking back projection: shades of Bonnie and Clyde. Suddenly they glimpse a sign reading HOME, and, Alex reports, he gets that “vibrating feeling all through my guttywuts.” (Alex’s Nadsat is ear-catching: a painter I know works while listening to the Clockwork Orange soundtrack, including the dialogue.)
The notorious home invasion–rape scene that follows took three days of sitting around the set to figure out, with the cameras not yet rolling. After much cogitation, Kubrick asked McDowell, “Can you sing?” McDowell answered that he knew only one song, “Singin’ in the Rain.” So Alex does his famous routine while preparing to rape the helpless wife of the writer Mr. Alexander, played by Adrienne Corri in a red pantsuit. Alex’s chipper singing, the throwaway air of the scene, the distorting fish-eye lens that targets Mr. Alexander as he is forc
ed to watch the assault on his wife, all this throws us off balance. As Kolker says, “the whole sequence is slightly ridiculous, as well as horrifying.” We feel “disgust and astonishment,” rather than the thrill that violence in movies usually provides.21 Much later in the movie, Alexander, played with vindictive glee by Patrick Magee, gets his revenge, and we are again disconcerted. We don’t know how to take this simpering, twitching, red-faced nutball blasting Beethoven’s Ninth at Alex, who after the Ludovico Treatment reacts with suicidal desperation. Our laughter is uneasy; we can’t relax into enjoyment.
McDowell’s sloppy brilliance in the “Singin’ in the Rain” rape scene is to give Alex not the glossy brutality of a film noir thug but the self-satisfaction of an eleven-year-old boy. Predictably, the scene was hard to film. Corri said, “For four days I was bashed about by Malcolm and he really hit me. One scene was shot 39 times until Malcolm said ‘I can’t hit her anymore!’ ”22
Alex lands in jail after murdering the “cat lady,” a skinny middle-aged woman in a leotard who commands him to put down a penis-and-buttocks sculpture: “That’s a very important work of art!” she screeches. We can’t help but root for dildo-nosed, codpieced Alex over the snobbish cat lady. Here Alex’s native wit contends with a snooty bourgeois whose taste is far more vulgar than Alex’s own. Alex is a primitive and, like all primitives, has integrity. But the cat lady leans toward kitsch: paintings of women in bold pornographic poses hang on her walls. When Alex brutally smashes the sculpture into the cat lady’s face, Kubrick cuts to Roy Lichtenstein–like cartoons of a mouth, echoing the jump-cut extreme close-ups of Janet Leigh in Psycho’s shower.
Clockwork draws from Chaplin and Keaton in its artful routines of physical violence. (“I wanted to slow it to a lovely floating movement,” Kubrick told Gelmis about the marina scene where Alex fights his droogs.)23 The movie is also, like nearly every Hollywood musical, an ode to feeling good. The Ludovico treatment lowers Alex to the depths of nausea, as the crown of thorns–like apparatus that encircles his head and pries open his eyes turns him into a version of Frankenstein’s monster. But at the end he is riding high once more. In Clockwork’s finale, joy reappears.
Naremore notes that A Clockwork Orange ends like Dr. Strangelove, “with the maimed body of a villain brought back to virile life.”24 Worldwide nuclear annihilation was Strangelove’s fantasy, but this is Alex’s: lying naked on snowy ground, he is having sex with a lovely, nearly naked woman who, rocking on top of him, is clearly enjoying herself greatly. Meanwhile a crowd of gentlemen and ladies in Edwardian getup applauds the couple enthusiastically, all to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth heaving toward its conclusion. Once again Alex adores the pummeling of Beethoven’s rapacious sublime, the overflow of spirit, healthy and violent. Alex, in voice-over, speaks the famous last line, “I was cured, all right,” and we cut to credits accompanied by Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”
McDowell reported that when he ran into Gene Kelly at a party some time after Clockwork opened, Kelly walked away without shaking his hand.25 Fair enough, but McDowell and Kubrick were repurposing the tune in the way great art does. What a glorious feeling, and a disturbing one too.
“But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick,” Alex says in Burgess’s novel. “What I do I do because I like to do.” He gives us his sermon: “Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God. . . . They of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.”26
“Old Bog or God” (Bog is Russian for God) keeps coming up in Clockwork. The behaviorist doctors recite a parody of Pauline Christianity, where knowing your miserable sinfulness puts you on the road to Jesus. Dr. Branom tells Alex, “You are getting well,” and explains that this is why he feels sick. The doctors only manipulate Alex’s physical reactions, instead of making him see that his crimes are wrong. The minister in Alex’s jail similarly misses the point. Alex need only respond properly to his cues for piety and obedience to be thought well on the road to redemption. But really Alex relishes the Bible for the sex and violence done by “those old Yehudis,” not for its moral fiber. The prison minister naïvely thinks Alex’s good manners signify sincere repentance, while the Ludovico treatment instills knee-jerk responses so that we no longer have to worry about anyone’s sincerity. Rehabilitation becomes a matter of outward behavior only. “Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all,” as Burgess’s novel puts it.27
Kubrick shows how the Ludovico treatment fails when Alex’s unruly libido bursts out again at the end of the film. But he doesn’t celebrate this liberation so much as ask us why we find it so exhilarating. The choice between behaviorist repression and raging desire is, Kubrick knows, too neat a dichotomy. Though he imagines himself a free man, Alex’s banquet of pleasures is just as predictable as the behaviorists’ nausea-inducing program. Libido too can be a form of bondage. And some regimes, like the Nazis, combined behavioral manipulation of the masses with the unleashing of violent desires.
In Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Alex watches wartime atrocities, including Nazis murdering Jews, during his rehabilitation. Kubrick merely shows a snippet from Triumph of the Will, along with German newsreel footage of tanks and planes, all set to a Moog synthesizer version of the Ode to Joy. Kubrick mentioned to one interviewer “the enigma of Nazis who listened to Beethoven and sent millions off to the gas chambers.”28 But he decided not to juxtapose death camps and Beethoven. Instead he cuts from Riefenstahl’s banal propaganda to a few Nazis kicking in a door. We are reminded, though, of the central place of Beethoven’s Ninth in Hitler’s Germany: though the words of the Ode celebrate peace and brotherhood, the victorious surge of chords suggests triumphant aggression.
Kubrick’s anti-Rousseauian animus, richly apparent in A Clockwork Orange and already forecast in 2001’s Dawn of Man, put him at odds with sixties dreams of peace and love. In a February 27, 1972, letter to the New York Times he condemned “Rousseau’s romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society,” adding that this was a “self-inflating illusion leading to despair.”29
In Clockwork, the party of Rousseau loses. When Alex stumbles back to HOME late in film, Mr. Alexander, Rousseau-like, welcomes him as “a victim of the modern age.”30 Alexander, Alex’s namesake, hates government repression, and with Rousseau he is convinced that human impulses are benign. The joke is on him: when he realizes that Alex is the man who raped his wife and crippled him, he tortures him with vindictive glee by playing Beethoven. Alexander is no longer a good-hearted believer in humanity.
A Clockwork Orange was released a few years before Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees enjoy murdering and torturing their fellow chimps. No movie has ever been a better illustration of Freud’s declaration that in our unconscious we are all rapists and murderers. It still has the force of scandal, after all these years. Along with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), it is one of the most controversial films ever made. The film originally got an X rating in the United States, where the Motion Picture Association of America had recently instituted ratings (censors were much concerned about the speeded-up scene where Alex has a threesome with two teen girls). Kubrick trimmed less than a minute to secure an R rating.
In Britain the press crowed that Kubrick’s film had led to a wave of copycat crimes. Young British hoodlums, the reporters said, were being inspired by Alex, and even dressing like him, with his bowler hat, long underwear, false eyelash, and codpiece. Kubrick had given them a taste of ultraviolence, and they wanted more. The movie, so the charge went, made raping and killing look like fun. Though in fact there is slight evidence for copycat crimes inspired by Clockwork, the furor that the newspapers aimed at Kubrick had its effect. Because of threats to him and his family over the movie, Kubrick in 1973 withdrew Clockwork from circulation in the United Ki
ngdom.
Not only British tabloids but the New York film critics felt their bile rising in response to A Clockwork Orange. Pauline Kael, who had hated 2001, lashed out in disgust at the movie. It was “an abhorrent viewing experience,” she wrote in the New Yorker, with a “leering, portentous style.” Kubrick, she said, was “sucking up to the thugs in the audience,” and she worried about “the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality.”31
Kael’s unspoken complaint in her review of A Clockwork Orange is that if only the movie were not so arch and forced, “literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor,” we might enjoy some of this bad behavior.32 The same month she panned Clockwork, January 1972, Kael thrilled to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, a movie that exults in ultraviolence far more straightforwardly than does Kubrick’s. The two films were released the same week, causing a minor panic among moralists.
Andrew Sarris was just as negative as Kael. “See A Clockwork Orange . . . and suffer the damnation of boredom,” he wrote in the Village Voice: “What we have here is simply a pretentious fake.”33 Audiences disagreed, in Europe as well as America: they rushed to see Kubrick’s scandalous bombshell of a movie.
Before Kubrick came along, Burgess had unluckily sold the screen rights for Clockwork for a few hundred dollars, so he never profited directly from the film’s success. But sales of his novel skyrocketed, and Burgess defended Kubrick’s version of his work in a series of newspaper and television interviews. Burgess made the case that the film was a serious statement about human freedom, not a thrill ride for wannabe teen gangsters.
