A Clockwork Orange review – Kubrick's sensationally scabrous thesis on violence

The souring of the swinging 60s got properly under way with this radioactively outrageous film, now rereleased as part of the Stanley Kubrick season at London’s BFI Southbank; this was Kubrick’s sensationally scabrous, declamatory, epically indulgent and mad adaptation of the 1962 Anthony Burgess novella about ultra-violent youth gangs in a dystopian future Britain speaking cod-Russian mixed with a weird version of Cockney rhyming slang. (Burgess cheekily trolled the public by claiming his title was taken from a certain Cockney phrase – “queer as a clockwork orange” – apparently known only to him.)

In place of peace and love and prosperity, A Clockwork Orange offered a new zeitgeist-decade of violence, anger, misogyny, the degradation of the public space in dreary suburban locales and modernist designs for living that had been vandalised. John Barry’s production design showed us “ruin porn” before the phrase had been invented.

All of the film’s provocation and jaded sexual politics are flavoured with histrionic cynicism and disillusion. It was self-banned by Kubrick: withdrawn by Warner Bros from UK distribution at the director’s insistence, an extraordinary example of director power over a studio. Kubrick had been badly shaken by press reports of real-life crimes supposedly inspired by the film. The ban remained theoretically in force until Kubrick’s death in 1999, although in the 90s it was easy enough to get hold of imported DVDs from the US, which is how I first saw it.

It is strange to watch A Clockwork Orange again, in my case for the first time in 20 years. It is still brilliant, still audacious, still nasty, but definitely dated, and longer than I remembered. Kubrick’s use of pop-classical scores can seem unvarying and strident, and less interesting than in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But his signature is there all the way through, especially in the establishing shots of cavernous interiors, with their vertiginous lines disappearing into the distance. What is also there is Kubrick’s definite weakness for softcore nudity, a definite liking for showing unclothed young women in decoratively pretty ways, which makes his depiction of rapes uncomfortable, although the offence is intentionally contrived. The nasty cutting of breast-shaped holes in the woman’s top in the first rape scene is bizarrely duplicated in the second: the woman has a painting on her wall of a woman with a similarly scissored outfit.

The fundamental premise is still potent: a young “droog” called Alex, brilliantly played by Malcolm McDowell, leads a gang of delinquents in acts of grotesque violence – which is turned on him when he is captured and forced to endure a clinical remedial torture. The swaggering assailant is made to watch upsetting films as aversion therapy with his eyelids clipped wide open and lubricated with an eyedropper – a genuinely horrifying scene, something to match the eye-slitting in Un Chien Andalou. But the use of Beethoven on the soundtrack causes Alex to hate not just rape and violence but also Beethoven’s music, which had been the love of his life and his one redeeming feature.

This turning of the tables, this challenge to our liberal sensibilities, is what makes A Clockwork Orange powerful: a sudden widening of the perspective on violence. Should we feel sympathy for Alex, or scorn for his richly deserved agony? If we are invited to feel nothing at all, then our very blankness, our neutrality, is our ordeal. I have watched many violent films by directors who have clearly been influenced by A Clockwork Orange, but it is as if they have only seen the first half. They have violent scenes, violent people, violent acts … and it leads nowhere. The shock just reverberates up to the next shock. Kubrick created irony and satire from his ultra-violence, and insolently made the audience’s own discomfort in watching these earlier scenes into part of the story.

It is also a very English film: the native New Yorker Kubrick had thoroughly mastered an English idiom, though this is perhaps partly due to excellent performances from Warren Clarke and Michael Bates, actors who were to be familiar on British TV. Flawed or not, it is a compelling thought experiment.