On A Clockwork OrangeHarold BentonDecember 1971It is difficult to recall a recent film that has provoked so immediate and divided a reaction as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Reports of audience members leaving theaters mid-screening are not exaggerated, nor are accounts of others remaining seated long after the final frame, as though unsure what, precisely, they have witnessed.
Kubrick, adapting Anthony Burgess’s novel, has constructed a work that is at once stylized and unsettlingly direct. The film follows Alex, played with unnerving composure by Malcolm McDowell, a young man whose capacity for violence is matched only by his appreciation for music—Beethoven in particular. This juxtaposition, which might have seemed contrived in lesser hands, is handled here with a kind of cold precision. The result is not contradiction, but amplification.
The early sequences, depicting acts of assault and degradation, are staged with a visual elegance that will trouble many viewers more than the acts themselves. Kubrick does not avert the camera. Nor does he invite easy condemnation. Instead, he presents violence as both spectacle and routine, leaving the audience to reckon with its own position as observer.
It is in the latter half of the film, however, that A Clockwork Orange reveals its more disquieting concerns. Alex, apprehended and subjected to an experimental form of behavioral conditioning, becomes the object of a state apparatus that is no less unsettling for its apparent civility. The treatment, designed to eliminate his capacity for violence, does so by rendering him incapable of choice altogether.
Here the film departs from mere provocation and enters a more ambiguous territory. If a man is prevented from doing harm only because he has been stripped of the ability to choose otherwise, has anything of value been preserved? Kubrick does not answer this question. He stages it, repeatedly, and with increasing discomfort.
There will be those who argue that the film indulges in the very excess it purports to examine. There is some justification for this view. Certain sequences linger longer than necessary, and the stylization, particularly in the use of music and set design, risks aestheticizing what might otherwise have been left stark. Yet to dismiss the film on these grounds alone would be to overlook the coherence of its vision.
Kubrick has, in effect, made a film about control—its exercise, its limits, and its unintended consequences. The society depicted here is less interested in justice than in order, and it is willing to achieve that order through methods that are, in their own way, as dehumanizing as the behavior they seek to prevent.
Whether A Clockwork Orange will endure is difficult to say. It is not a comfortable film, nor does it seem designed to be one. But it is, undeniably, a deliberate one, and it confronts its audience with questions that are unlikely to recede quickly.
One leaves the theater not with a clear judgment, but with a lingering unease—about the individual, about the state, and about the uneasy space between them.← Back to River City Review