Un paraíso en construcción

‘Nothing dates quite so rapidly as our ideas of what the future might be like,’ remarks film critic Philip French (French 1990: 87). The main problem for science fiction in the cinema has always been that visions of the future which might seem prescient for their time can quickly become dated, anachronistic and absurd. Given the perishability of the genre, therefore, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange (1971) is that it still seems so fresh some thirty years later. The film’s early-1970s apocalyptic vision of a near-future Britain where law and order have collapsed and an authoritarian right-wing government resorts to brainwashing as a method of social control remains a powerful and often disturbing picture of a society in a state of moral and political decay. Indeed, there are some voices on the left which might argue that the film’s prophecy was fulfilled by the events between 1979 and 1997: a Tory government in power for a whole generation, presiding over an increasingly divided society in which violent crime has become more and more commonplace. This is not to say that A Clockwork Orange should be interpreted as a prophetic allegory of Thatcherism, though clearly some of its themes and ideas did continue to have relevance during the Thatcher years. What can be said, however, is that A Clockwork Orange belongs to that particular brand of futurist science fiction which remains close enough to the present that it can legitimately be described as a realist text rather than a fantasy. There are no ray-guns or space-flights in A Clockwork Orange, nor even any elaborate special effects. The differences between this and its director’s previous film, 2001:

A Space Odyssey (1968), with its technological fantasy and elaborate sci-fi hardware, could not be more pronounced.

A Clockwork Orange was based on the novel by the English author, Anthony Burgess, first published in 1962. The film, which for the most part follows the novel quite closely, tells the story of Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). It is set in the near future (‘Just as soon as you could imagine it, but not too far ahead–it’s just not today, that’s all,’ explains Alex in the opening voice-over). At the beginning of the film the teenage Alex is the leader of a gang of ‘droogs’, Dim, Pete and Georgie, who spend their evenings hanging around the Korova Milkbar. Stimulated by

their intake of ‘milk-plus’ (drugs), they get their fun by indulging their appetite for ‘a bit of the old ultra-violence’. Alex’s gang kicks to death a tramp and then takes on and beats the rival gang of Billyboy in a gang-fight in a derelict opera house. Stealing a car, Alex and his gang drive around causing mayhem until they arrive at a remote house in the country. Alex tricks his way inside by pretending to have been involved in an accident. Once inside the house, Alex and his companions embark on an orgy of violence, severely beating the owner Mr Alexander (Patrick Magee) and forcing him to watch as they gang-rape his wife (Adrienne Corri). The next day, while his parents are out, Alex is visited by a social worker; later he enjoys sex with two girls he has picked up.

Meeting up with his droogs again, Alex slashes Dim (Warren Clarke) across the hand to assert his authority after Dim has made fun of Alex’s fondness for Beethoven (whom he refers to as ‘Ludwig Van’). The gang embark on another night of senseless violence, this time raiding a luxury health farm where Alex kills the owner, the Cat Lady (Miriam Karlin) by bludgeoning her to death with her collection of erotic objects d’art. However, the police arrive, and, although his droogs escape, Alex is captured and sentenced to prison for fourteen years for murder.

Two years into his prison term, Alex is approached by the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp), who persuades him to volunteer for the government’s new experimental programme of aversion therapy, known as the ‘Ludovico Technique’, to cure him of his violent tendencies. The treatment is no less than a form of brainwashing in which Alex is pumped full of drugs and forced to watch a succession of pornographic and violent images, to the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which he can no longer listen to without suffering nausea. After two weeks Alex is released back into society, but upon returning home he finds that his parents have taken in a lodger who has replaced him in their affections. Homeless, he encounters two of his former droogs, Dim and Georgie, who are now policemen and who beat him savagely and leave him for dead in the middle of nowhere. Alex struggles to the nearest house, which happens to be the home of Mr Alexander, now a cripple and a widower, his wife having died after her traumatic ordeal at the hands of Alex’s gang. Alex does not recognise his former victim, but Alexander remembers him and takes him in. Alex tells his apparent benefactor all that had happened, including the details of his treatment by the government. It transpires that Alexander, a writer and intellectual, is planning a coup against the government, and he sees in Alex the opportunity to discredit the government while exacting his own personal revenge. He imprisons Alex in the attic and tortures him by playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which Alex can only escape by throwing himself out of the window in a suicide bid. Alex survives the fall, however, and awakening in hospital he is visited by the Minister who tells him that Alexander’s conspiracy has been discovered and suppressed. The Minister believes that Alex is cured and wants to show the press and public that the policy of aversion-therapy has been a success. ‘I was cured all right,’ Alex remarks in voice-over, and the film ends with him lying on his hospital bed, listening contentedly to Beethoven (which no longer induces nausea) whilst fantasising about a life of more sex and violence.

James Chapman

Most commentators agree that, while the film follows the novel quite closely, nevertheless the dominant authorial voice is that of Stanley Kubrick rather than Anthony Burgess. It is placed in the context of Kubrick’s oeuvre, comparable in both thematic and stylistic terms to his other films. To quote, for example, Philip Strick: ‘That it is his [Kubrick’s] tale...is obvious from the parallels in structure, emphasis and technique with all Kubrick’s other dramas, from Day of the Fight in which arenas and split personalities find an uncanny preface, to Full Metal Jacket in which, once again, conditioned killers pursue the excesses of a fiercely private war’ (Strick 1997:

218). The precision of Kubrick’s mise-en-scène, the almost clinical formalism that is a characteristic of his work, is evident here, for example in the long tracking shots which open so many scenes and in the set dressings which add so much background detail (paintings, sculptures) that is not always present in the novel. Kubrick’s obsession with aspects of film form is exemplified in the early sequence where Alex and his gang set upon a drunken tramp. The location is an urban underpass and the formal composition of the scene is a textbook example of expressionism: the set is lit by one strong light from the back (the entrance to the tunnel) while the foreground and edges of the frame are in almost total darkness. The gang members are silhouetted against the backlight, casting long shadows, their faces in blackness. The hoodlums therefore merge into the darkness of the tunnel, becoming, as in the classic cinema of German Expressionism, part of the environment which they inhabit. The fight between Alex and Billyboy’s rival gangs is another sequence where action is staged for aesthetic effect. The location is a derelict opera house and the fight takes place on the stage, filmed in frontal tableau. The stage is lit by shafts of light across its rubbish-strewn floor, where even the debris is arranged in carefully abstract patterns. Many critics have remarked upon the balletic qualities of the gang-fight, and the movement is choreographed with all the precision of a dance routine in a musical. The most kinetic and violent sequences, moreover, are set to music, ranging from Rossini’s ‘Thieving Magpie’ during the joy-ride in the stolen car, to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, which Alex sings mockingly during the assault on Mr and Mrs Alexander (see figure 19).

Thematically, as well as stylistically, A Clockwork Orange bears relation to Kubrick’s other work. In particular, it has been seen as the third in a loose trilogy of futurist films which each, albeit in their very different ways, expose the dark underside of technology and progress and reveal a deep disquiet about the future of humanity. Philip French considers that A Clockwork Orange joins Dr Strangelove (1964) and 2001 ‘to complete a trilogy of admonitory fables set in a bleak, dehumanised future’ (French 1990: 86). In certain respects, A Clockwork Orange is a counterpoint to 2001. If 2001 can be interpreted as a text of the late 1960s embodying the spirit of the flourishing counter-cultures in breaking away from oppressive social and political forces–

most famously and spectacularly illustrated in the climactic ‘stargate’ sequence which is often

Figure 19 ‘Viddy well, little brother, viddy well’: sex and ultraviolence in A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Source: Courtesy of the British Cinema and Television Research Group archive

interpreted as a hallucinogenic ‘trip’–then A Clockwork Orange is a text of the early 1970s in which social control and authority is re-imposed by the ruling elite. Although the films are very different in that 2001 is a technological fantasy whereas A Clockwork Orange is much more a down-to-earth Orwellian nightmare of political repression and social control, there are nevertheless some thematic similarities in so far as both films posit a problematic relationship between humanity and science in the future. And both films also, of course, make extensive use of classical music.

In placing the film in the context of the Kubrick oeuvre, however, it is important not to lose sight of the contribution made by Anthony Burgess. Although Burgess was not involved in the production of the film–the screenplay was written by Kubrick himself–the finished film does show his influence as well as its director’s. A Clockwork Orange was one of five novels which Burgess wrote in the course of 1961–2, his prolific output at this time due to the fact that he had been diagnosed (incorrectly as it turned out) as suffering from an inoperable brain tumour and given only a short time to live. It is perhaps his most personal novel in that it was shaped by events which Burgess had experienced at first hand. He wrote it shortly after returning from six years working abroad as an officer in the Colonial Service in Malaya. Upon his return to Britain,

James Chapman

Burgess was struck by the development of teenage gangs such as the Mods and Rockers, and the sub-cultures of coffee-bars, dress codes and slang vocabularies which they created for themselves.

Living in Hove on the south coast, Burgess was able to observe the Bank Holiday gang-fights in seaside resorts such as Brighton. The novel, set roughly ten years in the future, describes a society where gang violence has escalated out of control and the government has resorted to Pavlovian techniques of brainwashing and conditioned response to control the offenders. One of the specific incidents in the novel had an even more personal basis. During the Second World War, when Burgess was stationed in Gibraltar, his first wife was savagely attacked and raped by a gang of four American GI deserters in London. She suffered a miscarriage, and Burgess always attributed her early death to the trauma. It is hard not to read the novel without seeing the character of Mr Alexander (a writer) as Burgess himself and Mrs Alexander as Burgess’s wife, Lynne.

For all his personal and tragic experience of violence, however, the target of Burgess’s book was not so much the gang culture itself as the notion that violent behaviour could be controlled by brainwashing. Burgess had been disturbed by accounts of new behaviourist methods of reforming criminals, particularly the work of American psychologist B.F. Skinner, who believed that the experiments conducted by Pavlov in the behaviour modification of animals could be applied to human beings. Burgess believed that this would erode the freedom of people to make moral choices. The freedom of choice, even if it was the choice to commit rape and murder, was, in Burgess’s view, essential for humanity. As the literary critic Blake Morrison writes: ‘His book, even before Kubrick’s film, caught the anti-mechanistic spirit of the culture, or counter-culture, of the sixties, and took its place, somewhat awkwardly, alongside Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the works of R.D. Laing, and other books attacking the erosion of individual rights by penal and medical institutions’ (Morrison 1996: xxiii).

The novel of A Clockwork Orange was published in Britain in May 1962 to generally negative reviews. Many critics complained that it was difficult to read. This was due to the style which Burgess had adopted whereby he used a first-person narration (by Alex) in an invented language which was meant to approximate the language of teenage gangs. ‘Nadsat’ was a mixture of American-English, colloquial Russian, Slavic gypsy dialect and Cockney rhyming slang. It is the language which Alex and his droogs speak, and the language in which Alex narrates the story. As a result the novel is quite difficult to read, and, indeed, when it was published in an American edition a glossary of ‘Nadsat’ words was added by the publishers, much to Burgess’s disapproval.

Furthermore, the American edition omitted the last chapter of the book, which had a profound effect on the story in terms of both structure and content. The British edition had twenty-one chapters structured in three sections of seven chapters each (each of the seven sections beginning with the rhetorical question ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’). In the final chapter Alex has been released from hospital and is hanging around the Korova Milkbar again with a new gang of droogs.

However, he now renounces violence, and instead has visions of settling down in domestic bliss with a wife and baby. It is symbolic that this occurs in the twenty-first chapter in so far as twenty-one is the age at which children traditionally reach adulthood. And, as the last chapter also begins with the question ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’, it is clear that Alex has made the conscious choice between right and wrong. But by dropping the last chapter, the American edition not only lacked the structural and numerical unity of the British edition, but it also ended on a much more downbeat and pessimistic note with Alex still in hospital and his future uncertain.

‘My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress,’ Burgess later remarked.

‘What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of moral optimism in it’ (quoted in Morrison 1996: xvii).

The novel aroused interest from Paramount Pictures in the late 1960s, and a script was prepared by Michael Cooper and Terry Southern, but in the event it was Kubrick who was to make the film, in Britain, backed by Warner Bros. However, it was the American edition of the book which Kubrick adapted for the film. Whether this was deliberate on Kubrick’s part, or whether he was unaware of the difference between the two editions, is unclear. The result, however, was that the film omitted the more affirmative ending which Burgess himself preferred. While the original novel suggested that Alex had mended his ways, the film ends with the implicit suggestion that he is still looking forward to a life of sex and violence. In most other respects, however, the film is a faithful adaptation of Burgess’s novel, and shows his original intent. The narrative of the film follows that of the novel in all but the smallest details, and the key sequences are transcribed from page to screen with much fidelity. Crucially, the film maintains Alex’s first-person narration through the technique of a voice-over by McDowell and the extensive use of subjective camerawork, brilliantly exemplified in the point-of-view shot of Alex’s attempted suicide where the camera was dropped down the side of a building to simulate his view as he falls.

The association of the spectator with Alex’s point-of-view in the film is nevertheless uncomfortable and at times disturbing. This is particularly so in the scenes of violence, the most unsettling of which is the rape of Mrs Alexander. While the novel also describes the rape from Alex’s perspective, a certain barrier is created by the use of the ‘Nadsat’ language which distances the reader from the full horror of the actions which are being described (‘So he did the strong-man on the devotchka, who was still creech creech creeching away in very horrorshow four-in-a-bar, locking her rookers from the back, while I ripped away at this and that and the other, the others going haw haw haw still, and real good horrorshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge’ (Burgess 1996:

22).) However, what in a novel is left to the mind’s-eye of the reader can be shown graphically through the medium of film. The rape is presented on screen with a degree of explicit and graphic detail that was unprecedented in mainstream cinema. Not only is the terrorised victim shown in

James Chapman

full-frontal nudity, but a hand-held camera is used to film the action in close-up. The resulting scene is extremely uncomfortable, implicating the spectator in the rape as a voyeur. Burgess, who had admired 2001 and had hoped that the film of A Clockwork Orange would aspire to a similar level of ‘visual futurism’, felt that the representation of sexual violence was too stark. A Catholic, he privately felt that the film was pornographic, although in public he praised Kubrick for his

‘technically brilliant, thoughtful, relevant, poetic, mind-opening’ film (quoted in Morrison 1996:

xviii). Perhaps surprisingly, given its content, the film was passed uncut by the British censors, a decision which provoked much controversy (Robertson 1993: 143–50).

Kubrick himself argued that the violence perpetrated by Alex in the first part of the film was necessary in dramatic terms as a counterweight to the brainwashing which he then received. In a rare interview he told Sight and Sound:

It was absolutely necessary to give weight to Alex’s brutality, otherwise I think there would be a moral confusion with respect to what the government does to him. If he were a lesser

It was absolutely necessary to give weight to Alex’s brutality, otherwise I think there would be a moral confusion with respect to what the government does to him. If he were a lesser