(ACO) A Clockwork Orange | Don Daniels | Sight & Sound | Winter 1973

Sight & Sound - Winter 1973
A Clockwork Orange

By Don Daniels

Stanley Kubrick's films seem to provoke the kind of mindless praise and attack
that is called 'controversy' these days. In the case of A Clockwork Orange, the
responses have ranged from 'brilliant' to 'boring', with special attention to
the film's depictions of violence. If the viewer responds to nothing else, he is
sure to notice the sensational subject matter. Of course, violence is a
difficult subject for visual treatment. The question must be, does the work
provide a context that can safely hold such distracting materials? Kubrick has
been careful to offer such a container. But if the viewer refuses it, he is left
holding the inevitables - violence, sex, death - at least as far as chatter and
film criticism are concerned.
A Clockwork Orange has a number of things to say about violence. It shows the
victim's pain. Only the naturalistic details of suffering in Bonnie and Clyde
are comparable in this respect to Kubrick's work, and Kubrick's is the more
daring stylistically. The film also shows the joy of the attack, especially in
the balletic gang-fight. But the parody there of bar-room brawls alerts us to
the very special point of view even as we enjoy the feral grace. The beating of
the tramp is nastiness seen darkly, peripherally. We all know it happens, but
what to do? The attack on the HOME is the scene everyone will remember. Like
Bonnie and Clyde's set-pieces of extempore chaos, part of the power of the scene
is the anything-can-happen surprise of the visit. But Kubrick combines the
gang's brutal improvisations with Alex's calculated song and dance: realistic
detail and stylised action that reinforce one another and indicate the state of
mind that is the subject of the film. Some have found only a technique of
estrangement in the stylised violence. I find myself distanced and touched.
Somehow the artificiality makes the violence more painful, Alex's coolly
committed acts more evil.
Then there are those reviewers who have found Alex the only 'attractive' figure
in the film. But surely evil is alluring; and ungenerous, too - an important
point when the immediate vision we get is Alex's. Would the death of the rather
attractively tart Catlady be the more appalling if it were not the obscene
obliteration from Alex's ecstatic consciousness that the film records? Alexander
De Large must not only conquer his world. He must unify it, no matter how
distorted the final vision. His habit coincides with Kubrick's attempts to give
a motion picture a complexity of visual coherence, to create a system of visual
correspondences that will illuminate its theme. To complain of Alex's singular
attractiveness is to indicate a naivete about the role and to compliment Malcolm
McDowell's rendering of evil's various charms. Kubrick's future society is
'Alexed' into a child's refuse-strewn playground.
The child keeps meeting fragments of himself in his career of crime; even his
costume - white overalls, boots, bowler hat - looks borrowed from the
technicians, guards and politicians he encounters. Alex is characterised not
only by his actions against society, but in the actions of the State against
Alex. The two are equated in the film, his charm reproduced in its durance, the
principal difference - a perhaps considerable one - in the State's coarsely
institutional and indiscriminately committed immoralities that Alex can only
practise on a restricted scale. Those critics who find special pleading for Alex
in the State's depredations against him ignore the equation, a real
accomplishment in so carefully structured a work. Not only do each of the
initial scenes of gang violence return in the retribution sequences at the end;
they also set up the chief spheres of conflict throughout. The tramp is Alex's
representative of an indifferent society; Billyboy's rival gang a prefiguration
of Alex's mutinous droogs; and Mr. Alexander, in his very name, an indication of
Alex's self-directed destructiveness. Just as Alex forces Mr. Alexander to watch
the unspeakable, so Alex will be forced by the State. Both Alexanders are
enemies of the State and share a name that means 'defender of men'. When Alex is
interrogated by the quartet at the police station, he ironically invokes the
law, just like the tramp at the mercy of his four tormentors. The martinet Chief
Guard at the prison is Alex the gang-leader, and he inflicts inhumanities on
Alex as Alex does on his victims. When Alex comically mimics him at the Medical
Institute reception centre, he only punctuates the careful parallels of
individual and State which we have seen all along.
The psychological mechanism behind Alex's unifying vision is that of
'projection'. All Alex' s victims are outside society - the tramp, the gang, the
radical - and when he punishes them, he unknowingly punishes himself. The
'mirror defence' of projection works to throw outward, to spit out, the
consciously disowned aspects of the personality by ascribing them to others. The
mechanism is itself unconscious. When Alex commits evil, he enjoys the pleasure
of the act itself, the knowledge that it is considered wrong by society, and the
unconscious justification of the act through projection. Thus, Alex rapes,
ensures there is a witness to the rape, and punishes the 'complacency' of the
victim. Evil is honoured, sharpened and justified. Alex levels the social ranks
of his victims. A ballet of hoods implies a foregone conclusion: masculine power
is questioned only to be affirmed. The drunk's rhetorical complaints are Alex's
own: he hears just what he wants to hear. Throughout the film, figures of
authority (Deltoid, the police, the Chief Guard, the doctors and the Minister of
the Interior) are all versions of the gang leader. As the equation is perfect
but in one respect, Alex is conscious of his evil - horribly so - except in his
need for self-justification. How reviewers could have missed the comedy of
childish egotism is a kind of perfection in itself. The infantile fantasies show
Alex's blindness to his own psychology through a masochistic dream in which he
always triumphs despite indignity, torture and 'suicide'. Men court him,
newspapers celebrate him, Hitler apes him. The lovely bird motif throughout the
film -the Beethoven frissons in Bar and lair; the malchick screams at the
Medical Institute's sinny; the gull over the Thames; and the growing boy eating
from the Minister's hands - not only indicates the variety and integration
Kubrick achieves through motivic relationships, but Alex's pathetic desire for
freedom in the midst of blind dependence. Just an ordinary boy, with a stash, a
pet and a love of Beethoven.
Kubrick has appropriated theme, character, narrative and dialogue from Anthony
Burgess' novel, but the film is more than a literal translation of a construct
of language into dramatic-visual form. Kubrick's film refashions the materials
of the novel, and the rigour of the reworking gives the film a poetic
compression and resonance that the novel lacks, despite its disturbing narrator,
intricate structure and brilliant language. 'Nadsat' figures primarily in only
the first third of the movie, but Kubrick has included much of Burgess'
narrative invention, and as a result the Alexanders of film and novel conquer
similar empires. The unifying parallels between citizen and State and the
mechanism of projection are taken from the novel, although Kubrick finds new
ways of communicating them visually.
There is a psychological name for the kind of ferocious insanity directed at the
fabric of society that Burgess and Kubrick portray. It is 'Alexanderism',
agriothymia ambitiosa, and it designates the desire to destroy nations. Alex is
murderer, rapist, thief, hood - a Bad Bad boy. The film assumes the evil of his
acts to be evident. What is condemned specifically is not the act but the mental
dynamics that led to it. The shouts of the gang in their frolickings are
mechanical, self-advertising, a bit joyless; obviously another kind of pleasure
is being had in addition to simple sadism. When Alex moves to Rossini against
the rival gang, or his own gang, or the Catlady, he mirrors his State's
political conflicts. For the corrupt citizen and State, violent conflict is a
necessary instrument of self-creation.
Burgess' novel is a fictional expression of this idea from the psychological
writings of Franz Alexander, the neo-Freudian noted for his studies of
psychosomatic diseases. Towards the end of his life, Alexander studied the use
of motion pictures to create stress in victims of hyperthyroidism (Psychosomatic
Medicine, XXIII, No. 2, 1961, 104-114). But the generative materials of the
novel can be found in the psychologist's earlier work, The Psychoanalysis of the
Total Personality. The orange is clockwork because of what Franz Alexander would
term the 'mechanism of neurosis'. For him, social expressions of violence mirror
the conflict within the individual of ego, id and super-ego.
In the healthy personality, the super-ego aids the economy of the psyche with
automatic, unconscious repression of the instincts. But in the neurotic, the
super-ego is rigid and schematic in its automatic censorship, like an unbending
totalitarian state. This unconscious part of the ego is formed by social laws
and parental restraints. When the id threatens to invade the conscious mind with
its anti-social desires, the super-ego represses without the ego's awareness of
the repression. And in the neurotic, suffering becomes a method of obtaining
instinctual release. The super-ego aids the id through over-severity. According
to Alexander, 'Clinical experience taught me that the ego makes use of the
satisfaction of the need for punishment in order to free itself from the
super-ego and surrender itself to the repressed forces.' The corrupt State is 'a
macrocosmic repetition of the ego-structure,' for as radical parties war for the
sake of conflict, so do id and super-ego. Energy is expended internally rather
than expressed. Violence becomes an end in itself. The neurotic drama of id, ego
and super-ego is not just a metaphorical one for Alexander; he calls them
'part-personalities' and charactenses the super-ego as a 'corrupt official',
outwardly severe but privately bribeable. The super-ego conspires with the id
and punishes the ego. The neurotic suffers in order to 'pay' for subsequent
instinctual release. Punishment rids the ego of the prickings of conscience and
adds zest to subsequent expression of instinctual desires.
In novel and film, Alex's career is an allegory of the disguise of instinctual
impulse in neurotic symptom, of punishment endured to facilitate crime. By
suffering, the ego absolves itself of sin and justifies its commission. Alex has
learned the formula well that sees pain as part of pleasurable fulfilment; in
fact, a licence to it. With Deltoid and the Minister the arrangement is as clear
'as an azure sky of deepest summer'. Each of Alex's triumphs is preceded or
followed by defeat. The 'perfect evening' and the orgy must be paid for by
Deltoid's visit and the mutiny of the gang in a series of pleasure-pain,
manic-depressive rewards and punishments. Justice demands an eye for an eye.
When Alex kills, he goes to prison. The Minister complains that the prisoners
'enjoy their so-called punishment' and counsels Alex on his way to the Medical
Facility, 'Let's hope you make the most of it, my boy.'
The self-punishment is signalled in the film by the 'Adagio' from the William
Tell 'Overture'. The home-coming scene is almost straight from the novel and
beautifully played: Alex punishes himself, is punished by his parents (and Joe
the Boarder, the Good Good Boy), and punishes Pee and Em in a family circle of
guilt. Absolution comes in the near-drowning, nature's purifying rain, and Mr.
Alexander's bath. When Alex's groans in the hospital are mixed with those of
fornication, we hear Alex's pleasure-in-pain; the exorcism of restraint through
punishment allows for masochistic delights as well.
Franz Alexander quotes Schiller's ballad 'The Ring of Polycrates': 'Therefore if
thou desirest to ward off suffering, pray to the Invisible Powers that they add
pain to happiness.' The universal sense of foreboding in the midst of joy is
visualised in the film in the Last Supper that Kubrick has arranged for Alex -
an ancient symbolic intimation of the pleasure-pain principle . Alex is the
scapegoat (like the three condemned men in Paths of Glory), the sacrificial
lamb, and his story is mythic - that of Osiris, Dionysus, and Christ. Death and
suffering lead to absolution and resurrection. In the hospital, 'Eat me' on the
fruit basket from Alex's parents is both obscene and sacramental. The film is
Alex's masturbatory fantasy. When he listens to Beethoven, four suffering
Christs dance. And he commits 'suicide' for his own ends. Alexander quotes Freud
(The Economic Problem in Masochism): even self-destruction cannot take place
without libidinal satisfaction.'
For Alexander, the Oedipus complex is 'the nuclear or root complex of all
psychoneuroses.' The child must learn to sublimate the love and hate for his
parents in tenderness, but there is always some destructive energy left over to
be turned against society or against the self. The introversion of the death
instinct Alexander sees as 'the primary process in the formation of the
neurosis.' Alex provokes hatred in order to justify his anti-social acts and to
punish himself. In the compulsion neurosis, Alexander suggests, that the father
is often identified with the strictness of the super-ego. Alex's parents have
not only lost all authority; they have been raped and crippled at HOME. Alex
commits symbolic incest (Kubrick carefully does not allow his crime to become
matricide in the film) and, indirectly, patricide. With sets and lighting
Kubrick has emphasised the rational realm of HOME. The conscious ego is unaware
of the secret plans of the instincts. In fact, Kubrick allows Mr. Alexander to
prompt his wife to let the forces in. When the 'father' is forced to watch the
rape, it is the 'son's' revenge, the sinner watching his sin in all pride, and
the id defining its power through the agency of the super-ego.
The Catlady is not so trusting. Her Health Farm is the very locus of the
super-ego, all instincts honoured in domestication, like her cats and erotic
art. Franz Alexander outlines the relationship of the super-ego with the id,
both beyond the ken of the ego, but each aware of the other. The super-ego is
not fooled by the disguises of desire. In the film, Kubrick has the Catlady call
the police, unlike Mr. Alexander, thus allying her with the State and clarifying
that the gang merely takes advantage of the call, having offered the attack on
the Farm as a bribe to their tyrannical leader. Alex and the Catlady recognise
each other immediately. Kubrick turns their fight into a dance in which the
unconscious forces of the id (the phallus) battle the conscious personality (the
bust of Beethoven). The bust is a symbol of instinct sublimated into the
socially useful energy of artistic expression. When the Catlady strikes Alex,
the ego is punished because of the id's threat of instinctual release. Having
suffered, Alex can then overwhelm the personality and triumph.
Alex's roles are three. In attack he is the id's ever-renewing energies; in
command he is the super-ego's ancient despotism; and in pain he is the neurotic
ego. In the prison and final HOME sequences, Alex meets the leaders of the
State's warring gangs - a new Mr. Alexander and Frederick, the Minister of the
Inferior (his name, Kubrick's contribution, means 'peaceful ruler'). The ego is
to the super-ego as a citizen of a totalitarian state is to his government. He
is unaware of the government's machinations. And the State is indifferent to
him. When Alexander De Large meets Frederick De Large in the prison, still
another version of the crime-punishment contract is signed, to be honoured in
Alex's conditioning and final rehabilitation. The coda between them in the
hospital is another of Kubrick's scenes of duplicity and degraded language.
Speech becomes a conspiratorial purr, a litany to console and corrupt, like Dr.
Branom's promise, between injections, 'By this time tomorrow, you'll be
healthier still,' delivered with that obsessional faith it is Kubrick's gift to
record exactly.
Alex and Mr. Alexander, two 'victims', return again at the end of the film.
Kubrick has Alex cripple Mr. Alexander, who becomes an enemy of the State and
the very personification of the uninhibited instincts. By removing information
about Mr. Alexander before the attack, Kubrick makes his politics and his
madness seem even more its result. Having suffered, he derives his radical
opinions from personal impotence and a liberated desire for revenge. Thus, Mr.
Alexander's insanity reveals the same dynamic that is at the root of Alex's
hatred of the world and himself. As Franz Alexander suggests, the outwardly
directed destructive energies of the unconscious, when turned upon the self,
become the super-ego's sadism. Like General Mireau's retaliations for military
defeat in Paths of Glory, Alex and Mr. Alexander revenge themselves on each
other. Kubrick has combined in Mr. Alexander the various roles Alex alternates
throughout the film. His Mr. Alexander is the crippled neurotic ego, the
government of the super-ego, punishing Alex, and the power of the id, revolting
against all order. Like Dr. Strangelove, he beautifully and boldly summarises
the madness of the subject. I am thinking of his orgasm of pain and hatred upon
recalling his crippler, and the final shot of him madly torturing with the
'Ninth' while surrounded by his co-conspirators.
Kubrick has compared Alex's craft and guile to that of Richard III. But the
comparison cannot go very far, for Alex is unconscious of his clockwork. Free
will necessitates self-knowledge. Alex is lost in the funhouse mirrors of the
narcissist, in the doubles of his victims, in the mirrors of HOME, and in the
water imagery throughout the film. There is that magnificent shot of Billyboy
the pirate that leads to Alex's marine discipline of his droogs; and later the
suicide thoughts by the Thames, the watery bit of corporal, the cleansing rain
and bath. The socialist state is a little boy's playpen (Kubrick has made
certain the prison doesn't look all that uncomfortable).
One of the director's crucial decisions was his very faithfulness to Burgess'
narrative structure. The compression inevitably makes the psychological
entrapment all the more obvious. In the novel the neurotic formula might
possibly be overlooked. On screen, the hyperbolic structure undercuts and
exposes the mechanism. The rhetoric is even more heightened than in the novel,
but not coarsened. And Alex's litany, 'Clear as an azure sky', never seemed more
desperate or ironic.
How ironic too that while Alex's masturbatory dreams are clips from Grade-B
horrorshows, the Institute's sinnies look like parodies of 'realistic', Grade-A
Hollywood (Straw Dogs, for example). While Alex comments on the realism of
glorious Technicolor, Dr. Brodsky monitors the death of consciousness. When
Walter Carlos' beautiful electronic transcription of the 'Joy' theme's 'Turkish'
march variation that accompanies Alex through the Bootick re-enters beneath the
'unstaged' scenes of World War II devastation, the frame of the film widens
startlingly. The mirror images multiply from the neurotic, to the gang, to the
State, to the paths of glory. Consciousness and freedom lie in ruins.
Alex toasts us, fellow patrons of the Korova Milkbar, at the start of the film.
The Vice needs his audience. Kubrick has visualised the ego's self-dramatising
habit with actor-audience scenes throughout. Billyboy's near-rape is enacted
on-stage. Alex then arranges a rape for an audience and later becomes an
audience for rape. The State dramatises Alex's redemption at the Passing-Out
ceremony (the Min of the Int: 'At this stage we introduce the subject himself').
An Ascot audience applauds Alex's fantasy-rape at the end. And the film has as
many eyes as 2001, from eyelashes to cuff-links, to Alex's surgically clamped
gaze.
Alex is seen as blind to the interdependence of the individual and society. The
imagery of theatre and vision reveals that Alex insists on breaking down that
unity to step aside for the voyeur's sense of power. The State punishes him for
this separation, initiates him, but - if his vision can be trusted - into a
corrupt society. In its punishment of the neurotic personality, the super-ego
disrupts the unity of the psyche but preserves the integrity of the suffering
ego. 'The world is one, life is one,' muses Dr. Brodsky in the novel. In the
film, the newspapers champion 'Alex Burgess'. The citizen of a British borough
is his own enemy.
The comparison to Richard III may be another Kubrick red herring (although Alex
is recognisable in Richard's 'Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a
glass/That I may see my shadow as I pass'). The closer Shakespearian comparison
that Burgess and Kubrick surely have in mind is Iago (the brainwashing technique
is Ludovico's). Like Iago, Alex is guide, teacher, and 'play-wright', even to
conditioning. As in Othello, his chief victim goes mad for revenge. Alex acts
out the violence of Iago's language. Both take pride in their evil. And the HOME
rape may well be intended as a version of the Act IV, scene I playlet that Iago
stages with Cassio and Bianca for a gullible Othello. Othello, after all,
projects his fantasies on to Desdemona and luxuriates in self-torture. There is
Stephen's description of the 'hornmad Iago' in Ulysses, 'ceaselessly willing
that the moor in him shall suffer.' Both Alex and Iago are like Genet's Saints
of Evil, creating self through crime - and utterly unpunishable. The Anti-Christ
is vampire, lost in the bonds of theft.
The ending of novel and film leaves Alex free to choose new or old 'freedoms'.
If we get a 'cleaner' Alex in the movie - no pedophilia, no 'matricide', no
prison murder - it is because his first sin is against himself. The cause of
much confusion among his critics has been Kubrick's ability to make us privy to
Alex's vision, to show us its seductive beauty while carefully keeping all hands
clean. More than a visual investiture of a novelist's or a psychologist's
conceits, A Clockwork Orange is not a simple film. We watch with no little
admiration as Alex demonstrates the coherence he can achieve with a hoodlum
artist's exploitation of everything at hand to shape the self. We watch the
Alexandrians attempt the formality of dance without ever truly achieving the
Dionysian ecstasy that liberates, the 'fantasy' that frees. But the director -
who has always been alive to the rhythms of structure - contrasts the locksteps
of self-enslavement with the organic beauty of the movements of his film, to
suggest something like true freedom from the very heart of fantasy and
mechanism.
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