‘A Clockwork Orange’ at 50: A Film That Maintains Its Shocking Power Because Of Its Nihilism

The only thing Stanley Kubrick ever really wanted to talk about was how men were primates driven by primate urges: the violent acquisition and subsequent hoarding of sex, food, and shelter. Exploration, construction, civilization is just a tributary from this seminal artery and the story of man is reducible entirely to this viscous, vicious, reduction. Kubrick is our most essential, immediately and unapologetically Freudian director. It’s the reason he’s as fine a choice as shepherd for a film noir about a down-on-his-luck welterweight (Killer’s Kiss), a manned mission to Jupiter (2001), a desperate author prone to drink and child abuse (The Shining) and a sexually confused doctor wandering an onanistic fever dream of New York at Christmas (Eyes Wide Shut). His first film, Fear and Desire, about a quartet of soldiers dropped into a dark wood on a mission of murder and survival, set the beat and he never strayed far from it. The reason A Clockwork Orange never ages is not because it is a work of prophecy but because, like all works of alleged prophecy, it is really only exceptionally keen evolutionary anthropology — or, frankly, primatology by any other name. What seems prescient is really just a careful chronicle of who we are, have always been, and always it seems will be and the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001 is all ye know and all ye need to know.

It’s why, about a third of the way into A Clockwork Orange, the soundtrack for 2001 (on vinyl, no less!) makes an appearance in the film. Our hero Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is shopping at a record kiosk and putting the make on two comely lovelies; we will later see him, to the tune of the “William Tell Overture,” bed in turn and in concert while spinning a few discs over another lost afternoon. Alex’s days and nights are all spent in the pursuit of sex and acquisition. He hangs out at Korova Milk Bar with his “droogs”; there, over draughts of drugged libations, they make up their “rassoodocks what to do with the evening.” In many constructs of the future, notably Joss Whedon’s Firefly universe, a Chinese patois transforms the language — here, it’s Russian, speaking obliquely to an authoritarian socialist state at odds with a certain progressive hopefulness about the preference for one kind of organizing principle over another. In Kubrick, the only things that really matter are 1) Who’s holding the bone and 2) How big is it?

The film opens over a series of title cards in bright, primary colors — its first shot is an extended one, pulling back down a corridor of Allen Jones-inspired tables and milk dispensers, all in the life-sized shape of nude women in various postures of subjugation or sexual arousal. Alex and his boys only see women as objects that are one thing or another thing: resources to be stolen and possessed. People like to obfuscate protein exchanges as the romantic rituals of dinner dates and perhaps the nightcap to follow. Kubrick does not.

Littered in throughout his pictures are images like this: none so immediately shocking perhaps, but mark the mannequin warehouse in Killer’s Kiss where the murder takes place — or more directly to the point, the way Peter Sellers’ Quilty reveals himself as a slumbering chair in the first moments of Lolita. It isn’t so much that objects are sexually dangerous in Kubrick’s films — it’s that objects, created by man, are functions of the libido. Consider all the slow docking sequences in 2001; the trembling, penile refueling sequence that opens Dr. Strangelove; of course the filling of a milk glass in A Clockwork Orange from one porcelain teat, fetchingly offered. The image of breasts as solely the function of male desire repeats during the rape sequence in the writer’s home shot at Skybreak, Radlett, Hertforshire during which Alex, while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain,” cuts the wife’s (Adrienne Corri) breasts free from her jumpsuit. All our exterior forms are expressions of our basest functions. There’s a suggestion in A Clockwork Orange that Alex’s beloved Beethoven — whose Ninth Symphony he spins with a sacral reverence on a beautiful Transcriptor’s Hydraulic Reference Turntable in his bedroom, one wall of which is lined with speakers — is evidence by itself of the possibility for man to transcend his bestial nature. But then it’s used as background music for the showreels of atrocity the government uses to try to “fix” Alex through aversion therapy and becomes the final provocation that drives Alex to his suicide attempt. All this not forgetting that Beethoven, in his time, was declared dangerous for the passions his music inflamed among the impressionable youth.

If anything, the shock of A Clockwork Orange has only metastasized in the fifty years since its troubled release, when it was widely condemned for its ultraviolence and graphic, non-consensual in-out/in-out. Time has confirmed its excess as only a reflection of who we are when we don’t pretend to be what we are not. It maintains its power because of its nihilism. There’s no hope for us as a species because we will not reckon with who we are: animals ruled by a monkey court. Why expect something of us we would not expect from a band of baboons? Alex, like Scorsese’s looming Travis Bickle, is the archetype of the hero: brutal, concupiscent, malignantly ignorant, and used by those in power as a tool to first frighten and then uphold as some standard in our Judeo-Christian mania for redemption stories. The message of the piece, as it was for so many films from the 1970s, is that there are no actual consequences for the bad guys. Even more disheartening, the villains will be made the hero by powerful men and the media they hold in their thrall. A Clockwork Orange, if anything, is a warning about the apparatus designed to make martyrs out of convenient deviants. The way it goes about it is frankly mesmerizing in its persistence of vision and purpose. It’s easy to forget what a film made by a genius looks like – and in matters of the lizard brains of low men, in the west, first there’s Hitchcock and Lang, and then only Kubrick.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream A Clockwork Orange