Dissecting a Clockwork Orange
“You men need to tuck away your penises and surrogate penises (guns), because you will never get anywhere with them. Masculinity is a myth and a dead end.”
- Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange is an interesting beast. The film has been vilified, banned, condemned on artistic grounds and yet it survives. The film’s hallucinatory visuals depicting a strange, narcissistic modernistic society, steeped in seventies art deco and harsh, contrasting lighting, paint a bleak, uncompromising picture. Kubrick’s use of implied violence, death and cultural destruction throw the viewer into a hellish, emotional marsh of pessimism and hate.
Reviewed by Tim Dirks the title of the film is explained: “The controversial film's title and other names in the film have meaning. The title alludes to: a clockwork (mechanical, artificial, robotic) human being. Orange - similar to orangutan, a hairy ape-like creature, and the Cockney phrase from East London, "as queer as a clockwork orange" - indicating something bizarre internally, but appearing natural, human, and normal on the surface”
This film plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way. It's done in such a slow, heavy style that those prepared to like it, can treat its puzzling aspects as insightful. Yet we’re complicit in the violence as Alex (Malcolm McDowell) narrates the story to us as if we are his friends, the only ones he can open up to. Alex enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying until he kills a woman and is sent to prison for fourteen years. It is in this that the violence becomes sanitized (after two years of imprisonment), that we don’t necessarily feel guilty, or pity the victims of Alex’s senseless crimes. Kubrick isn’t telling us that violence is “okay”. He’s telling the viewer that masculinity is a broken concept. The violence is an indication of pent-up sexual frustration, delivered callously and cowardly to anyone that gets in the way.
Alex Jack, in his
- Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange is an interesting beast. The film has been vilified, banned, condemned on artistic grounds and yet it survives. The film’s hallucinatory visuals depicting a strange, narcissistic modernistic society, steeped in seventies art deco and harsh, contrasting lighting, paint a bleak, uncompromising picture. Kubrick’s use of implied violence, death and cultural destruction throw the viewer into a hellish, emotional marsh of pessimism and hate.
Reviewed by Tim Dirks the title of the film is explained: “The controversial film's title and other names in the film have meaning. The title alludes to: a clockwork (mechanical, artificial, robotic) human being. Orange - similar to orangutan, a hairy ape-like creature, and the Cockney phrase from East London, "as queer as a clockwork orange" - indicating something bizarre internally, but appearing natural, human, and normal on the surface”
This film plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way. It's done in such a slow, heavy style that those prepared to like it, can treat its puzzling aspects as insightful. Yet we’re complicit in the violence as Alex (Malcolm McDowell) narrates the story to us as if we are his friends, the only ones he can open up to. Alex enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying until he kills a woman and is sent to prison for fourteen years. It is in this that the violence becomes sanitized (after two years of imprisonment), that we don’t necessarily feel guilty, or pity the victims of Alex’s senseless crimes. Kubrick isn’t telling us that violence is “okay”. He’s telling the viewer that masculinity is a broken concept. The violence is an indication of pent-up sexual frustration, delivered callously and cowardly to anyone that gets in the way.
Alex Jack, in his
References: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Cinema_Beyond/C_B.lectures/ClockworkOrange/Benj_CultIndustr_Clckwrk.html http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/clockworkorange/ http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9145/aco.htm http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/resultsadvanced?vid==representation+of+violence+a+clockwork+orange