‘A Clockwork Orange’ in the Age of Cancellation

Is A Clockwork Orange Stanley Kubrick’s worst movie? The director’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s futureshock novel—which returned to Netflix this month after an absence from the streaming service of several years—is a work of undeniable visceral intensity and visual imagination. Like Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey before it—and The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut subsequently—it’s been parodied, pilloried, and fully subsumed into our collective DNA. Insert a scalpel at any random point in the past five decades of global pop culture and you’ll find a steady, pumping stream of red, red kroovy. Last year, Canadian author Lynn Crosbie used A Clockwork Orange as the inspiration for her sly, shattering novel Chicken, which is about a decadent movie star modeled on Clockwork’s leading man, Malcolm McDowell. Since the 1970s, icons ranging from David Bowie to Bart Simpson to Rihanna have either donned Alex DeLarge drag or adopted Nadsat slang.

The film’s aesthetics may be pop brutalist all the way, but as a subject for analysis, A Clockwork Orange is positively cubist. It can be viewed (and deconstructed) from a dozen angles at once, from its postmod, prepunk Britishness to its censor-baiting extremity and “video nasty” status—or as auteur worship for Kubrick, an actor’s showcase for McDowell, a collision of art-cinema rigor and counterculture brashness, prescient prophecy or dated posturing, or a critique of sadism, sensationalism, sexism, and exploitation in entertainment and an all-time case of the pot calling the kettle black. As with every one of Kubrick’s movies, other than his clumsy 1953 debut, Fear and Desire, and its low-budget (but much improved) follow-up, Killer’s Kiss (1955), A Clockwork Orange has endured as both a work of art and a conversation piece. You can’t just shrug it off. But if, as I’ve always thought, A Clockwork Orange is ultimately a contradiction—a classic that is also a failure, and a masterpiece that is somehow less than meets the wide, pried-open eye—its appearance on Netflix is a good opportunity to wrestle with its legacy.

The first critic to land anything resembling a body blow against A Clockwork Orange was Pauline Kael. She praised Kubrick’s early features The Killing and Paths of Glory for their structural ingenuity and craftsmanship but turned on him around the time of Dr. Strangelove, which she perceived as a virtuoso exercise in hip, flip cynicism, and less a cautionary satire about Cold War politics than a nihilistic embrace of an apocalypse-now mentality. Kael’s take on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which she called a “monumentally unimaginative movie,” was considerably less persuasive, but a theme was emerging: As the cult of personality around Kubrick grew—uncoincidentally synced with an apparent private and stylistic hermeticism—Kael felt increasingly obliged to take the great man down a few pegs. She reviewed A Clockwork Orange in The New Yorker a few weeks after it bowed to a mix of raves and scandalized pans, and she personalized her criticism by referring to the director as “Stanley Strangelove,” mocking his “saintly, bearded, intellectual” appearance, and casting him as the worst kind of hypocrite. “The directors used to say they were showing us [violence’s] real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors,” she wrote. “You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us … we become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it.”

Taking stock of “what’s in” A Clockwork Orange, in terms of violence, would be a daunting inventory. Kael’s implication that Kubrick was trying to shock a mainstream audience that had become more and more inured to gore as the ’60s went along—from the black-and-white slashing of Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho to the deep-red climaxes of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch—is not out of bounds. Even by today’s standards, it’s a ferocious film staged for maximum discomfort. Her argument breaks down in her unwillingness to reckon with the complex (if not necessarily subtle) relationship between Kubrick’s excesses and the substance of Burgess’s story. It concerns a teenage thug (McDowell’s Alex) whose natural, exuberant recourse to viciousness is systematically drained away by government-funded doctors using him as a guinea pig in an elaborate social-scientific experiment. “At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure,” Kael complained, without recognizing that Burgess and Kubrick’s argument was precisely the inverse: violence-as-sensual-pleasure is a hardwired human trait, and attempting to deny or remove it in any kind of systematized way is a sign of a potentially fascist society.

What’s most simplistic about A Clockwork Orange is the way it pits the teenage Alex against a power structure that hates and devalues him both as a lawless rabble-rouser and as an emasculated, defenseless, discarded test subject. Kubrick’s career-long fascination with the conformist trappings and dehumanizing machinations of authority (which he tended to view with skepticism and contempt and was captured best in those defiant, communal cries of “I am Spartacus”) sometimes bumped up against his own puppet-master aesthetics. At times A Clockwork Orange plays like a critique of control-freakery made by a control freak. It also doesn’t help that McDowell’s charisma, carried over from his career-making performance as a boarding-school revolutionary in Lindsay Anderson’s If…., is emphasized at the expense of nearly every other character on screen. Those other characters are either depicted as ciphers or, worse, embodiments of petty-bourgeois ugliness who seem to invite or even deserve their own defilement.

This is not necessarily an open-and-cut case of directorial sadism, however. The risk Kubrick takes in A Clockwork Orange by aligning us so closely with Alex’s headspace (both in terms of camera placement and the judicious use of voice-over, much of it transcribed directly from the novel) dares us to conflate his pent-up, adolescent rage with an objective point of view, or to condemn the way he actualizes his specific fantasies of rape and murder without factoring in our own fascination. For every dully obvious point Kubrick lands here—like visually paralleling Alex and his droogs with the bone-wielding ape men in 2001, or revealing that the nastiest of its antihero’s “brothers” go on to be hired as cops after they’re captured—there are maneuvers of the deftest complexity. Take, for instance, the hilariously insinuating montage in which McDowell returns home after an evening of debauchery and masturbates to the strains of Beethoven in full view of the Christ figurines on his mantelpiece. It’s a sacrilegious vision with a wonderfully banal punch line: Alex, curled up in bed next to his pet snake, begging his nagging mother for just five more minutes of sleep before school.

One question raised by such virtuoso filmmaking and by a style that keeps calling attention to itself, whether in the form of sped-up footage or slowed-down pacing, is whether Kubrick is jerking off as well, or at least getting off on being the auteur equivalent of a bad boy. The release of 2001 rewrote the director’s narrative in the shape of isolated, elusive genius, but the sly controversy-monger who went out of his way to adapt Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita wasn’t abandoned in the process. It’s accurate to say that self-conscious aestheticism and shock value are tools in A Clockwork Orange’s arsenal and both are used strategically. If Kubrick takes the opportunity to show off, it’s in line with Alex’s own predilection for performance (signaled first during a gang rumble that unfolds beneath a proscenium and contains Shakespearean dialogue). If he’s trying to shock his audience, it’s at least as much out of concern for complacency as naughtiness, which is why, in the film’s best moments, it is high culture itself that becomes weaponized in every possible direction.

Alex’s seemingly paradoxical love for “Ludwig Van” is carried over from Burgess’s novel, and Kubrick’s use of music is the one aspect of the film that shows him at his very best—at the level of genius. Starting with Dr. Strangelove’s diabolical deployment of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” to soundtrack a mushroom cloud, Kubrick gradually made himself a master of contrapuntal music cues, and in A Clockwork Orange, he found material that didn’t just lend itself to such juxtapositions, but was built around them.

Burgess’s idea of a teenager living in the near future who finds rapture in centuries-old melodies was a joke with deeper implications about the durability of culture, as well as the way that even music which seems to belong to the world becomes personalized with each individual listener. When McDowell improvised a version of “Singin’ in the Rain” on set during the scene in which Alex paralyzes the reclusive writer Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), he unlocked a contemporary, Hollywood-aimed variation on Burgess’s point, which Kubrick then wove brilliantly into the overall design of the film. Alex uses “Singin’ in the Rain” to express his joy at inflicting pain. In the process, Kubrick “taints” the music in a manner that foreshadows the methodology of the evil scientists’ brainwashing Ludovico Technique (not to mention the pale imitation of Quentin Tarantino, whose use of “Stuck in the Middle With You” in Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Blonde’s own private ode to joy is a tribute).

It’s telling that most of what we see on Alex’s “mindscreen” (i.e., his mind’s eye) before he’s hypnotized into passivity and then again after a head-first suicide attempt is modeled on popular entertainment: He emulates not just Gene Kelly, but the characters of Roman movie epics and vampire thrillers, as well as hardcore pornography. These images suggest that Alex is acting out the things he sees in film and movies, but—and here is where I think Kael is wrong—Kubrick isn’t saying that those images caused his fantasies so much as they acted as containers for them. The controversy concerning A Clockwork Orange and the “copycat” behavior of some viewers led to the banning of the film in the U.K., as if its aesthetics—the thuggish chic of the costumes and the druggy synth tones of the score—were to blame for the viewer’s behavior. What’s troubling about Kubrick’s film is that for all the big, abstract ideas it deals with, blame is not really one of them; instead, it sees our capacity for cruelty and carnage as innate and unchangeable, short of the most advanced, externally imposed mechanisms of denial imaginable.

Kubrick loved these kind of big, archetypal ideas, sometimes to a fault, and a good deal of A Clockwork Orange represents the least appealing parts of Kubrick: the heaviness of his irony; the lugubriousness of his humor; the way he literally turns women into objects (the porcelain statuary at the Korova Milkbar); and the suffocating formalism of his style. With the exception of McDowell, whose brilliance goes a long way toward keeping things watchable in the draggy, repetitive second half, the actors are all over the top (the director’s fault, not theirs). And, by omitting Burgess’s final chapter, in which Alex is “cured” not by a reversion to his base nature but a natural process of maturity, Kubrick arguably cheapened the material. (The story goes that he’d never read the edition with the original ending; Burgess, for his part, was not a fan of the film.)

So is A Clockwork Orange Kubrick’s “worst”? The only thing that stops me from saying yes is the experience of re-viewing—and reviewing—a movie that tries to deal seriously with dark and twisted impulses in a moment when discussions about the virtues of art (specifically the possible “cancellation” of work that either contains unsavory content or has been produced by unsavory characters) have become a kind of moral pissing contest. It’s hard to say what’s more boring: The idea that a good movie is one made by a good person and/or contains content that could be considered progressive for its time and place, or the shouting-down of that position from those whose investment in rejecting it can seem condescending or creepy.

A Clockwork Orange is worth defending and decrying, although it’s not like coming down one way or the other is going to have much effect on a movie that’s already been elevated into the canon, and whose influence—from countless dorm rooms and laptop desktops adorned with posters and screenshots—is already massive. In truth, we don’t need another essay on A Clockwork Orange. But I do think we need the movie itself, not just because its problematic aspects are so bound up in its power, but because of what it says about the psychology of cancellation itself, and the unnaturalness of censorship and the comforting lie of “bad apples,” which reassures us that it is other people who are rotten to the core. To paraphrase Kael, we become clockwork oranges if we reject difficult art without asking what’s inside us first. And it’s better to watch A Clockwork Orange than to be one.