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“Liberals, They Hate ‘Clockwork'”
Even half a century on, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is still one of the darkest and most haunting of dystopian films about the near future. A bitter satire on the inability of judgment-free modern society to deal seriously with violent crime, it premiered in New York City fifty years ago this week, on December 19, 1971. As a student writer at NYU, I was able to see it a week early at a press and critics screening at the Cinema 1 Theater. Getting there that night was no joy; riding the graffiti’d-up Lexington Ave. subway, and watching your back on the dark, crime-ridden winter streets of Manhattan. It was a good prologue for seeing the film.
A month into its release, Malcolm McDowell gave an interview to The New York Times: “Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they’re dreamers and it shows them realities, shows ‘em not tomorrow but now. Cringe, don’t they, when faced with the bloody truth?”
The Times journalist asks about the effects of movie violence. McDowell drily noted that New York had 88 rapes a day. “I hate violence, but it is a fact, the human condition…Movies don’t alter the world, they pose questions and warnings. The Clockwork violence is stylized, surreal. Kubrick uses it only to warn us.”
That is the case for the defense: A Clockwork Orange, for all of its shocking imagery, is a sobering lesson about free will, humanity’s inability to overcome its worst impulses, and the evils of scientific attempts to control the mind. That was the stated intention of novelist Anthony Burgess.
In 1971, liberal discourse about juvenile delinquency still hadn’t (and still hasn’t) moved much past the platitudes that even staunch progressives Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim satirized in “Officer Krupke”—The kids were depraved because they were deprived. But Kubrick knew better. He quoted Robert Ardrey in “African Genesis”: “The idealistic American is an environmentalist who accepts the doctrine of man’s innate nobility and looks chiefly to economic causes for the source of human woe. And so now, at the peak of the American triumph over that ancient enemy, want, he finds himself harassed by racial conflict of increasing bitterness, harrowed by juvenile delinquency probing championship heights.”
Kubrick was the son of a neighborhood doctor, an amateur photographer who turned pro when he was seventeen, a kid who ventured into the wide, wilder world of Greenwich Village and other areas of Manhattan. After he’d become famous and successful, the unprecedented crime wave of the Sixties drove him and his family from New York; it was largely fear of urban violence that brought him to the quiet countryside of the north of London, then and now the world’s second-most important center for making films in English.
A Clockwork Orange was made and released in a strange era not unlike our own, with new forms of cultural extremism. Before there was a formal women’s movement, there was already a growing backlash to what was becoming non-stop hyper-sexualization of women in magazines, movies, and other media. It created a new term—sexism–that first came into use in this period.
This is where the film crossed a then-nearly-invisible tripwire that would affect its reputation over time. Was it a bitter critique of a sex-obsessed but loveless world, or a well-crafted example of it? Stanley Kubrick’s deliberately shocking opening shot of bar tables and drugged-milk dispensers molded into the images of naked women, not to mention the notoriety of what is probably the most famous home invasion scene in movie history, were unlikely to ever make it a female-friendly favorite, but in its time, audiences and readers of both sexes were receptive to what Kubrick said in its defense, that he didn’t depict that world because he approved of it, let alone gloried in it, but because if men’s appetites for sex and violence are totally unrestrained, this is where we’re going to end up someday soon.
Not everyone bought that, of course. To skeptics, A Clockwork Orange, despite its undeniable cleverness in visual design, integration of picture and pre-existing music, and other aspects of film craft, is essentially a futuristic porno rape comedy with gaudy costumes and science fiction overtones, its face, Alex’s smirking leer.
The 50th anniversary of a famous film is generally the occasion of its final major remembrance and lasting sum-up in the press. Whether it’s Gone With the Wind, 2001, How the West Was Won, or any other, the posts and articles at 50 signal a film’s public sendoff to critical Valhalla, or to critical Hades, or if simply forgotten and ignored, to obscurity by neglect. Each previous Clockwork milestone, its 10th and 25th anniversaries, were occasions to debate the value of this still-controversial movie. Novelist Anthony Burgess and film director Stanley Kubrick are long gone, so A Clockwork Orange’s sole surviving principal, Malcolm McDowell, will no doubt be questioned closely to, essentially, pressure him to denounce the film. It will be claimed that today’s Left puritan attitudes are clearer, sharper, truer than 1971’s.
A few weeks after the Malcolm McDowell quote that headlines this post, Stanley Kubrick chimed in with his own article, headlined “Now Kubrick Fights Back.” He began:
“An alert liberal,” says (Times writer) Fred M. Hechinger, writing about my film A Clockwork Orange, “Should recognize the voice of fascism.” “Is this an uncharitable reading of the film’s thesis?” Mr. Hechinger asks himself … I would reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism—the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other human beings—which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.
A prescient warning from—it’s hard to believe–a half-century ago. Not bad prophecy, Stanley.
This post is part of the Group Writing Project, a member-created regular feature of Ricochet, administered by Clifford A. Brown. The theme for December 2021 is “Winter Lights, and Dark Winter Nights”. Member participation is not only welcome, but encouraged.
Published in General
Paths of Glory sorta kinda qualified.
Probably another Malcom McDowell film, “Caligula.”
A reasonable quibble, though not a dispositive one. (Hey, doesn’t that sound like a classy way to disagree?) They created two sets in an ordinary warehouse, the Korova Milk Bar and the anonymous-looking prison intake room, where newly imprisoned inmates are strip-searched. But a warehouse isn’t a studio sound stage.
Rear projection equipment is portable, unlike the front projection setups that Kubrick used in 2001. So I don’t know where the car scene was filmed. Incidentally, it was also the last scene shot, in March 1971, only nine months before the film opened.
Some trivia about the car scene: AFAIK, it’s the only closeup of Pete, “the unknown droog”, who has one line in the whole picture during the Korova scene, “Right right”. The actor was the only actual teenager in the group and the least experienced, which is why I suspect Kubrick didn’t use him for much.
One small detail that is confusing to American (and maybe other) audiences: as the Durango 95 sports car zooms along and Alex runs other cars off the road, the other cars all seem to be the ones at fault–they’re all in the wrong lane. But of course, in Britain it’s the car on what to us is the normal side of the road that is the aggressor. If it had been a daytime scene this would have been obvious, but with no context the first impression is wrong.
True–but it doesn’t necessarily count, because nearly everybody liked Paths of Glory. The relative few who saw it anyway; it was a Kirk Douglas movie with a decent ad campaign, but not a major hit in first run.
I read the book first and loved it, but it was a struggle for a senior in HS. I watched the movie and thought it was brilliant. My freshman roommate and I, bowler hat, white dish-room garb, fake eyelashes, long noses, canes and all, dressed as droogs for Halloween. Not everyone got it. To this day, many of my college friends call me Droog. I recently found an unopened Blueray of the movie and started watching it. Alas, I couldn’t get through it. I’ll try again sometime when no one is around. I also purchased the soundtrack back in the day. It was also amazing then, but less so, now, but still worth a listen.
LOL. Our first date was “Cabaret”…..
FYI still married.
Oh yeah…What woman wouldn’t want to see a movie produced by Bob Guccione?
With you on Pulp Fiction. Totally hated it.
Starring Isabella Rosselini, what could possibly go wrong?
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Oh, my…
well, I spent a month during grad school where I watched A Clockwork Orange every morning. I can recite it better than Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I tease my 12-year-old son with snippets on YouTube- but told him we won’t watch the whole thing until he’s a lad of just 15 AND he’s read the book, the 21-chapter volume (that’s my rule with these kinds of movies and their associated filmed versions).
So, what’s it going to be then? Er, he asked me, “hey, Dad, what’s it about?”
Well, son, it’s a science fiction story, told through the eyes of a young criminal, about how a liberal society attempts to cure criminality through chemistry and movies, essentially giving a treatment to violent criminals such that, after completing it, they get so sick even at the thought of doing something violent. And it works! In fact, it works too well…”
The novel displays Anthony Burgess’s genius – which I’ll say is displayed in all his works, including interviews (years ago, he did a great one with Larry King while promoting his book about Mozart). Likewise, the film is brilliant and deserves study. It showcases great British character actors (watch Michael Bates in this, then Patton, then Frenzy – the man defines what is to be an artist).
Oh, and if you don’t like the music, you’re trans-phobic.
Now there’s some enthusiasm! The film has so many great, usually over-the-top line readings.
“Food all right?? Tryyy the wiiine!”
The Cat Lady sucks in her breath with distaste. “Don’t touch that. It’s a Very Important Work of Art!”
The government Minister: “We always help our friends, don’t we, Alex?”
I thought he was Spartacus.
No, I think it’s one of these guys.
Me too! Watched it with Caryn.
Those who are part of Left-y Group Think know their attitudes are so clear and pure, they do not even need to contemplate them.
Every few weeks, a new meme surfaces from their Leaders. They need only to remember the words and parrot them when it seems like they might get some brownie points by doing that.
Stanley Kubrick was lent a copy of the novel by Terry Southern, who’d done a crucial rewrite of the Dr. Strangelove screenplay. There’s a hint that Southern felt let down that although he had some talks with Kubrick about the book, he wasn’t hired to be the official writer of the script. Kubrick himself tackled the first draft.
And therein lies a tale. Kubrick was fanatical about project secrecy, controlling (restricting, really) all publicity, right down to refusing to let documents out of his possession. In itself. there’s nothing crazy about that; in fact, for films and even non-film tech companies it’s become something close to standard business procedure.
So he wouldn’t have been pleased if he’d known that in the back stacks of the American Film Institute library, right in the center of Hollywood, someone–it was easy to figure out it was Southern–had deposited unauthorized photocopies of his own unpublished draft screenplays of Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. Depositing them at AFI seems to have been a mischievous unpublicized gesture towards the end of Terry Southern’s life, and although they were officially cataloged, nobody knew about them.
In the case of Strangelove, Southern’s motives are clear: he’s saying, look at the gaping flaws among the gems in Stanley’s first take, and see how much I personally saved this film from fatal stretches of mediocrity.
In the case of Clockwork, his motives are less clear because there’s no wrestling over a script that Southern didn’t write.
–continued, next comment–
Kubrick seems to have done something direct and uncomplicated. Never one to kid himself about his writing abilities, he simply re-read Burgess’s book until he could pick out the dozen or so scenes that were key. Then, in that dozen, he took Burgess’s dialog and descriptions and cut them back to the minimum of what a film required. The result is fascinating, because the main events of story he edited directly out of the novel would be recognizable to anyone who’s seen the film, but the tone is very different.
What might be called Burgess/Kubrick hybrid script 1.0 is more earnest. Its victims are ordinary people that Alex’s crimes will stay with for a lifetime. By contrast, the movie goes out of its way to distance its moments of sadism by stylizing it, like a lethal ballet between two chain-wielding gangs, set (like most of the films other “battles”) to the jaunty airs of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie.
The novel’s use of Russian speech made more obvious sense when it was published in 1962, when the USSR had won the race for space and seemed to be in a period of ascendancy. At the same time, Anthony Burgess’s dear old England was starting to have a problem with violent young criminals, many affecting American styles and slang from films like The Wild One with Marlon Brando. Burgess’s insight, the trick of a language professor, was to imagine Britain’s future young Teddy Boys imitating Russians instead of Americans.
The future Britain of the book is drearily tired socialist, with details of collectivist speech and examples of slum life and civic decay. This is something Kubrick did change. He figured, correctly as it turned out, that the near future would be richer, not poorer, but that even modern housing projects would be remorselessly trashed by their tenants.
And who wrote the novel on which Kubrick thought he might base his Boney flick? Burgess. Alas, Stanley thought it unfilmable, or at least unsuited to his needs. Burgess published the novel anyway. It was about three inches thick, so it’s not as if it took him more than a few months to write.
I think I’ve mentioned this before when the subject arose: Burgess wrote a novel in which his alter ego, Enderby, get a brief moment of fame when he writes the script for a violent, sensationalist movie. He didn’t intend it to be controversial or graphic – it was an adaptation of a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, for heaven’s sake – but he’s suddenly regarded as a pornographic rape-enabler.
In case anyone had any doubts about what Burgess was getting off his chest, the book was titled “A Clockwork Testament.”
I thought he was T-Bone?
Films about the near future have a different set of problems to solve than ones set in the distant future. As any viewer of The Time Tunnel or Star Trek TOS knows, it can be easy to fake superficial stuff that has no connection to present day life. Just put green makeup on the women, blue makeup on the men, dress them in aluminum foil, and paint the sky backdrop purple. About the only halfway intelligent look at the truly distant future on screen is in Spielberg’s AI, a Kubrick story that Spielberg produced and directed as a tribute after SK’s death.
Films set in the near future have the problem of familiarity. It’s almost our world, but not quite. Here, I’ll give another nod to Spielberg: Minority Report was set in the year 2054, roughly fifty years from its release date, and looks great, although like any other future film, it’s a little bit unfair to ding the filmmakers for not being fortune tellers. In Minority Report, subway riders read newspapers with moving print. Pretty close to present day reality, except people have smartphones instead of newspapers. In the 1982 Blade Runner, the flying cars and lifelike androids wouldn’t arrive by 2019, but giant video billboards did, and so did bicycles with neon lights imbedded in them. In Back to the Future part II, the flying cars wouldn’t arrive for 2015 either, but news cameras on drone helicopters did, and so did 500 channel cable systems with The Scenery Channel.
It’s not hard to pack the set with video telephones and jazzy-looking concept cars. It’s harder to guess at the shape of things like sidewalk “furniture”–lamp posts, street signs, trash baskets. Will there be parking meters 10, 20, 30 years from now? How about mailboxes?
Clockwork’s future world looks credible, yet Kubrick didn’t design most of it. He used the most futuristic gadgets available in 1970–wireline phones, not wireless ones, vinyl LP records, and IBM Selectrics rather than computers. The police Land Rover has an electric sign. The one (literally) tiny concession to future tech was showing Deutsche Grammophon’s Beethoven symphony on a microcassette, the kind we used for dictation, not music. You see a TV camera at the end, and it’s unrealistically big by later standards. AFAIK, you never see a TV set, let alone a TV program from Alex’s world. Nor do you see advertising, street scenes, or outdoor crowds.
Um…I saw it with Becky, back home in Juneau. Before we met. I only saw it once. It is sweet that your memory is of it being me… I also don’t remember ever doing anything with any other man but you.
I’m from Juneau! As a kid anyway. Left in 1979. Lived in Douglas for the last part.
When I was little, some of my cousins lived in Alaska and I thought they lived in an igloo.
That is a-dor-able.
I think Caryn lived in one!
If you live somewhere where you get sufficient hard, wind-packed snow you definitely should build an igloo and camp out overnight. Even in north-central Minnesota, such opportunities didn’t come every year.
Of course, camping out overnight is not the same as living in one. But igloos were generally not used for extended stays, even up in the Arctic.
I haven’t read or seen A Clockwork Orange, so I can’t talk about that, but Gary’s post and the discussion here have convinced me I shouldn’t turn down an opportunity for that, either.
Read it. Or at least read it before watching the movie. They are very different.