Written by Théo Stöcklin

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) [Clockwork] follows the morally controversial lifestyle of Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), a somewhat deranged juvenile who leads a small gang of hooligans in a near-future Britain.

From the relentless wrongdoings of Alex throughout the first act, the film’s intention rambles between a celebration of the unwatchable and a critical commentary of the unconditional nature of violence: ‘A bit of the old ultra-violence’ as Alex narrates. After the unintentional, yet predictable murder of an archetype cat lady, Alex is further betrayed by his gang and finds himself sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment.

And so, the second act begins as he serves time. There, he can no longer exercise any sort of violent acts, and quickly seeks refuge in religious texts. Whether he truly finds inner peace through religion or merely uses this as a masquerade to get parole remains ambiguous. Two years into his sentence, he becomes the laboratory mouse of a fictive and somewhat ethically questionable scientific experiment supervised by the new minister of internal affairs. Unable to close his eyes, Alex is faced with an infinite number of crude and graphical videos to the point where his mind and body reject all sorts of ultra-violence as well as his beloved Beethoven’s ninth symphony.

As the scientific experiment turns out to be successful, Alex reintegrates into society. Rather than being the conventional resolution of Alex’s arc, the third act turns out to be his peripetia. He reencounters various parties from the first act, except now the tables have turned and he is the victim who cannot escape any violent acts upon him. After naively revealing his weak spot, Beethoven, Alex faces a near-death experience, and the film takes a political turn in which he becomes the muppet to influence the next elections. As the film ends, Kubrick gave the audience reasons to feel both empathy and sympathy for Alex, a complex character who was at first violent and despicable but was further depicted as innocent and somewhat funny; like a little child who knows not how to behave.

In terms of contextualisation, by the late 1960s, the self-regulated Production Code, which significantly censored the depiction of drug use, violence, and sex, fell apart and was replaced by the more lenient Motion Pictures Association film rating system. Revolving on an age basis, this system loosened the depiction of adult themes on the silver screen. Compared to the sexual innuendos of Kubrick’s 1962 audio-visual adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita (1955), Clockwork seems not to hold back on its depiction of questionable themes. From unmotivated violence to sexual assault, the film continuously disgusts the spectator, and one could easily see it as nothing else than a horror film. However, could it be that this disgust we reprimand from watching Clockwork is nothing else than Kubrick’s ingenious attempt to cure the spectator from violence in a similar, yet less extreme way than Alex’s scientific experiment?