Subversion requires an embracing of a paradigm to subvert. Mere violation either of method or acceptable content is not sufficient to make a statement that will last. Rather, demonstration of a mastery of language and technique is required to establish any critique as serious. Which is to say—the most radical of statements are not made merely to tear things down; they are made to tear things down in order to preserve them. As Chesterton wrote somewhere—true revolution is by those conservatives who love something so much they are willing to tear it down in order to preserve it.
For those who have not seen Kubrick’s film, or read the Anthony Burgess novel upon which it is based (either its original British version, or the American one, which excluded an original final chapter of redemption of the main character, Alex—and which was ignored by Kubrick for his screenplay), this missive is not necessarily a recommendation of the film or the novel. Both are jarring in their depiction of an expression of hyper-violence and perversity in some future day that has given itself over to the evil twins of unbridled cultural libertinism and society fascism—which, in 1971 (the film’s release) fairly predict today’s culture writ large. And while Kubrick’s taking up Burgess’s material made them friends for a time, they apparently did not see eye to eye regarding the story’s ultimate message.
Rather, my own interest in the film (available currently on Netflix and which I re-watched for the first time in 30 years just this week) is in terms of Kubrick’s legendary command of the film (a film, any film) as form and the influence his work has continued to have in the art in which he proved himself a master from the very beginning of his career. Like the Coen Brothers, Kubrick seemed never to have attempted to make the same film twice. Like Welles or Hitchcock, his obvious command of the vocabulary of film is immediately apparent. The fact that the films he produced each comprised a kind of classic—and genre-less one at that—is a testament to his deep commitment to his idiosyncratic challenge to film-form each time he tried it (and, here, I mean “tried” in the Montaigne-esque sense of “essais”; “to try” not only to mean “to attempt” but to “challenge.”
Kubrick started making films in 1951 but did not begin to be noticed until perhaps the release of Dr. Strangelove in 1964. This film, which enjoys the kind of cult-status that almost every film that followed also enjoys, was followed rather quickly by classics that defy identification and which confound any biographer’s ability at categorization: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980). Given the finesse that characterizes the production values of the other three films in this list, A Clockwork Orange seems a deliberate regression of form—and, so, a deliberate one at that.
The outlines of the narrative are well known. Alex is the leader of a small group of thugs who spend their waking hours committing violence for the sake of violence. They live in a society that has obviously embraced the smashing of norms as its raison-detre, but one in which the “government” seems concerned that such excesses are bad for society. Alex is captured by the state and enlisted in (enlists in?) a program to rehabilitate him according to the latest theory of psychological development, which seems to hold a naturalistic philosophy regarding any one person’s individual actions: subversives are the result of environmental conditioning and can be cured by a new program of environmental conditioning to counter that which produced their anti-social behavior in the first place. It’s an odd world. On the one hand, the film celebrates a youth (in the beginning) that glories in the iconoclasm of perverting and ruining whatever society seems to hold as decent; on the other hand, the film seems to argue that such behavior is the fault of the society that tricks the next generation into an attitude of unruly revolution. By the end of the film, one is struck by the irony that the chief torturer of Alex would re-appear to feed him and appeal to his (Alex’s) sense of humanity to “right” the “wrong” that society has perpetuated against him. Kubrick’s film ends (unlike Burgess’s novel) with Alex declaring (perhaps quite ironically) that he’s has been “cured.”
We live in that world today—in which the next generation is rewarded and punished simultaneously for precisely the same behavior.
But Kubrick’s film struck a nerve in the film-making world. The influence of both 2001 and The Shining in cinematographic terms for future generations is undeniable. Barry Lyndon is a tour-de-force that no one has even tried to duplicate. But watching Orange now, one is put in mind of later films as various as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tanenbaums (2001) or Coon, Wyatt, and Covel’s Napoleon Dynamite (2004). While the former is in its color scheme darker, its consciously mannered composition of frame recalls Kubrick—offering us balanced composition that always betray a broken family portrait. And the latter’s color scheme and deliberately artificial framing and production design, like Tim Burton’s much earlier Edward Scissorhands (1990), seems deliberately to imitate Kubrick’s highly stylistic and deliberately artificial signature for A Clockwork Orange.
What Kubrick’s films ever attempt to mine and exploit is the relationship between content and form. Each of his films, then, seems an attempt to illustrate that this particular story must be told in this particular form—and that such a form is unique to just this particular story. That, in and of itself, is a powerful theoretical statement. No two films look or sound the same because no two worthy stories tell the same story—and, so, each demands an unique look, tone, texture, depth, feel, sound, color combination, and the like. At the same time, while particular stories are unique, they are universal enough to be submitted to a form capable of revealing universal themes of existence—and that form is film.
It is not the only form capable of such expression and that is telling in and of itself. But Kubrick was an artist of a particular vocabulary and the meaning he attempted to convey in A Clockwork Orange was fit uniquely (for him) to the language of film. It is interesting that he never adopted a first-person-point-of-view in the film (except in the narrative voice-over throughout, which stands in contrast to the camera’s journalistic P.O.V. of merely recording scenes even as the musical score itself offers a blending of objective (seeing) and subjective (hearing) the experiences being displayed as they are displayed). In a film that seems to document the experience of a particular character, Kubrick films only what a fly-on-the-wall (not a God) might see and so leaves the ultimate meaning of the sum-total meaning of the film in ambiguity. Is Alex cured? Are we implicated as voyeurs in his crimes? Do or can we identify with the main character or are we part of the machinery that manipulates individuals into a confusing understanding of the relationship between free will and some over-arching providence that either “gives a shape” to our ends or makes a mockery of our feeling that we independently direct our actions and determine our meanings?
Some great film makers confound by making definitive statements. Stanley Kubrick confounds by confounding—respecting a langue so much that he disrupts it every time with his parole, and recreating it thereby — offering future film makers a foundation for saying something new.
Thank you, Fred. I will have to ruminate more deeply and see what the soil of this particular take yields. More soon. And thanks for reading!
A splendid introduction. But I’d like to see more of you on Clockwork Orange, especially its implied analysis of the contemporary problems of the secular caring State (to which, faute de mieux, I owe my gratitude).