A Clockwork Orange (1971)

I’m going to be a little pre-emptive here and defend a movie that the gatekeepers never loved and in eleven or so months will be maligned big time: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Its 50th anniversary comes up in December. As with 2001 and other major films, the 50th is usually the final “big” remembrance in the press. When still-remembered films reach their 100th, that’ll change. Every previous milestone of Clockwork, like its 25th, were occasions to trot out the two leading theories concerning this still-controversial movie. I don’t fully believe either of them, but here they are, in their partial goodness:

One, A Clockwork Orange, for all of its shocking imagery, is a sobering, essentially Christian lesson about free will, humanity’s inability to overcome its worst impulses, and the evils of scientific attempts to control the mind.

Two, A Clockwork Orange, despite its cleverness in design, music, and filmcraft, is essentially just a pretentious porno rape comedy with gaudy costumes and science fiction overtones, a heartless smirking leer directed at men who think women deserve what they get.

The first option is what Anthony Burgess has been saying since long before the film opened. Okay, there’s truth in it, but…there’s also at least a little bit of truth in the second, and I say that as a Clockwork defender. The movie was made and released in a strange cultural era where unlimited sexy was arousing female sensitivity to sexism.

That’s what’s going to kill Kubrick’s meticulously earned reputation come this December. Malcolm McDowell will be under pressure to denounce the film, and it will be claimed that today’s Left puritan attitudes are clearer, sharper, truer than 1971’s.

I have another theory: the movie wasn’t made out of high-minded concern about governments and mind control drugs. Nor was it blind to the cruelty, the literal violation of the body and self that we sum up as violence. On the contrary, look at Kubrick, a diminutive, proud son of a neighborhood doctor who ventured into the wide, wilder world of Greenwich Village and other areas of Manhattan. 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 England, then and now the third leading center of making films, at least in English. Less than a month into the release of the film, Malcolm McDowell gave a quote to The New York Times: “The liberals, they hate Clockwork“. He was right. A few weeks later (Jan 27, 1972?) Stanley Kubrick chimed in with his own article, headlined (not by him) “Now Kubrick Fights Back”. In its day, the film was understood to be a bitter satire on the inability of civil authorities to take violent crime seriously.