PAULINE KAEL

A Clockwork Orange: Stanley

Strangelove
Review in The New Yorker, January 1, 1972

Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, Stanley

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and ex-
acting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi
comedy. Is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repellent –
than a clean minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beat-
ings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they’re frigidly, pedantically
calculated, and because there is no motivating emotion, the viewer
may experience them as an indignity and wish to leave. The movie
follows the Anthony Burgess novel so closely that the book might
have served as the script, yet that thick-skulled German professor
may be Dr. Strangelove himself, because the meanings are turned
around.
Burgess’s 1962 novel is set in a vaguely Socialist future (roughly,
the late seventies or early eighties) – in a dreary, routinized England
that roving gangs of teen-age thugs terrorize at night. In perceiving
the amoral destructive potential of youth gangs, Burgess’s ironic fable
differs from Orwell’s 1984 in a way that already seems prophetically
accurate. The novel is narrated by the leader of one of these gangs –
Alex, a conscienceless schoolboy sadist – and, in a witty, extraordi-
narily sustained literary conceit, narrated in his own slang (Nadsat,
the teen-agers’ special dialect). The book is a fast read; Burgess, a
composer turned novelist, has an ebullient, musical sense of lan-
guage, and you pick up the meanings of the strange words as the
prose rhythms speed you along. Alex enjoys stealing, stomping, rap-
ing, and destroying until he kills a woman and is sent to prison for

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 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: STANLEY STRANGELOVE 135

fourteen years. After serving two, he arranges to get out by submit-

ting to an experiment on conditioning, and he is turned into a moral
robot who becomes nauseated at thoughts of sex and violence. Re-
leased when he is harmless, he falls prey to his former victims, who
beat him and torment him until he attempts suicide. This leads to
criticism of the government that robotized him – turned him into a
clockwork orange – and he is deconditioned, becoming once again a
thug, and now at loose and triumphant. The ironies are protean, but
Burgess is clearly a humanist; his point of view is that of a Christian
horrified by the possibilities of a society turned clockwork orange, in
which life is so mechanized that men lose their capacity for moral
choice. There seems to be no way in this boring, dehumanizing so-
ciety for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and
crime; they do what they do as a matter of course. Alex the sadist is
as mechanized a creature as Alex the good.
Stanley Kubrick’s Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is not so much an ex-
pression of how this society has lost its soul as he is a force pitted
against the society, and by making the victims of the thugs more
repulsive and contemptible than the thugs, Kubrick has learned to
love the punk sadist. The end is no longer the ironic triumph of a
mechanized punk but a real triumph. Alex is the only likable person
we see – his cynical bravado suggests a broad-nosed, working-class
Olivier – and the movie puts us on his side. Alex, who gets kicks
out of violence, is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and
younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly,
with the power and slyness of a young Cagney. Despite what Alex
does at the beginning, McDowell makes you root for his foxiness,
for his crookedness. For most of the movie, we see him tortured and
beaten and humiliated, so when his bold, aggressive punk’s nature is
restored to him it seems not a joke on all of us but, rather, a victory
in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. The look in
Alex’s eyes at the end tells us that he isn’t just a mechanized, choice-
less sadist but prefers sadism and knows he can get by with it. Far
from being a little parable about the dangers of soullessness and the
horrors of force, whether employed by individuals against each other
or by society in “conditioning,” the movie becomes a vindication of
Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being and only the good
Alex was a robot.
136 PAULINE KAEL

The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers,
so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new
attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference.
Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspec-
tive of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why
shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In the new
mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly respon-
sible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to
believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and
phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflect-
ing this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering
to it. I think he wants to dig it.
This picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way.
And though it has no depth, it’s done in such a slow, heavy style that
those prepared to like it can treat its puzzling aspects as oracular. It
can easily be construed as an ambiguous mystery play, a visionary
warning against “the Establishment.” There are a million ways to
justify identifying with Alex: Alex is fighting repression; he’s alone
against the system. What he does isn’t nearly as bad as what the
government does (both in the movie and in the United States now).
Why shouldn’t he be violent? That’s all the Establishment has ever
taught him (and us) to be. The point of the book was that we must
be as men, that we must be able to take responsibility for what we
are. The point of the movie is much more au courant. Kubrick has
removed many of the obstacles to our identifying with Alex; the
Alex of the book has had his personal habits cleaned up a bit – his
fondness for squishing small animals under his tires, his taste for
ten-year-old girls, his beating up of other prisoners, and so on. And
Kubrick aids the identification with Alex by small directorial choices
throughout. The writer whom Alex cripples (Patrick Magee) and the
woman he kills are cartoon nasties with upper-class accents a mile
wide. (Magee has been encouraged to act like a bathetic madman;
he seems to be preparing for a career in horror movies.) Burgess gave
us society through Alex’s eyes, and so the vision was deformed, and
Kubrick, carrying over from Dr. Strangelove his joky adolescent view
of hypocritical, sexually dirty authority figures and extending it to all
adults, has added an extra layer of deformity. The “straight” people
are far more twisted than Alex; they seem inhuman and incapable
 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: STANLEY STRANGELOVE 137

of suffering. He alone suffers. And how he suffers! He’s a male Little

Nell – screaming in a straitjacket during the brainwashing; sweet and
helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge;
beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor
and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what
is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself
can be felt to justify Alex’s hoodlumism.
The movie’s confusing – and, finally, corrupt – morality is not,
however, what makes it such an abhorrent viewing experience. It is
offensive long before one perceives where it is heading, because it has
no shadings. Kubrick, a director with an arctic spirit, is determined to
be pornographic, and he has no talent for it. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel
showed teen-agers committing horrible brutalities, and even though
you had no illusions about their victims – one, in particular, was a foul
old lecher – you were appalled. Buñuel makes you understand the
pornography of brutality: the pornography is in what human beings
are capable of doing to other human beings. Kubrick has always been
one of the least sensual and least erotic of directors, and his attempts
here at phallic humor are like a professor’s lead balloons. He tries
to work up kicky violent scenes, carefully estranging you from the
victims so that you can enjoy the rapes and beatings. But I think one
is more likely to feel cold antipathy toward the movie than horror at
the violence – or enjoyment of it, either.
Kubrick’s martinet control is obvious in the terrible performances
he gets from everybody but McDowell, and in the inexorable pacing.
The film has a distinctive style of estrangement: gloating closeups,
bright, hard-edge, third-degree lighting, and abnormally loud voices.
It’s a style, all right – the movie doesn’t look like other movies, or
sound like them – but it’s a leering, portentous style. After the balletic
brawling of the teen-age gangs, with bodies flying as in a Western sa-
loon fight, and after the gang-bang of the writer’s wife and an orgy
in speeded-up motion, you’re primed for more action, but you’re left
stranded in the prison sections, trying to find some humor in tired
schoolboy jokes about a Hitlerian guard. The movie retains a little of
the slangy Nadsat but none of the fast rhythms of Burgess’s prose,
and so the dialect seems much more arch than it does in the book.
Many of the dialogue sequences go on and on, into a stupor of in-
activity. Kubrick seems infatuated with the hypnotic possibilities of
138 PAULINE KAEL

static setups; at times you feel as if you were trapped in front of the
frames of a comic strip for a numbing ten minutes per frame. When
Alex’s correctional officer visits his home and he and Alex sit on a
bed, the camera sits on the two of them. When Alex comes home
from prison, his parents and the lodger who has displaced him are
in the living room; Alex appeals to his seated, unloving parents for
an inert eternity. Long after we’ve got the point, the composition is
still telling us to appreciate its cleverness. This ponderous technique
is hardly leavened by the structural use of classical music to charac-
terize the sequences; each sequence is scored to Purcell (synthesized
on a Moog), Rossini, or Beethoven, while Elgar and others are used
for brief satiric effects. In the book, the doctor who has devised the
conditioning treatment explains why the horror images used in it
are set to music: “It’s a useful emotional heightener.” But the whole
damned movie is heightened this way; yes, the music is effective, but
the effect is self-important.
When I pass a newsstand and see the saintly, bearded, intellectual
Kubrick on the cover of Saturday Review, I wonder: Do people notice
things like the way Kubrick cuts to the rival teen-age gang before Alex
and his hoods arrive to fight them, just so we can have the pleasure of
watching that gang strip the struggling girl they mean to rape? Alex’s
voice is on the track announcing his arrival, but Kubrick can’t wait
for Alex to arrive, because then he couldn’t show us as much. That
girl is stripped for our benefit; it’s the purest exploitation. Yet this
film lusts for greatness, and I’m not sure that Kubrick knows how to
make simple movies anymore, or that he cares to, either. I don’t know
how consciously he has thrown this film to youth. Maybe he’s more
of a showman than he lets on – a lucky showman with opportunism
built into the cells of his body. The film can work at a pop-fantasy
level for a young audience already prepared to accept Alex’s view of
the society, ready to believe that that’s how it is.
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept vio-
lence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were show-
ing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its
horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in
fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the
heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There
seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality,
 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: STANLEY STRANGELOVE 139

you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want cen-
sorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in cen-
sorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press
to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films –
the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this crit-
ical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much
for us – that only squares and people who believe in censorship are
concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship
are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about vi-
olence only when it’s eroticized. This means that practically no one
raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality.
Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as en-
tertainment, it’s worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges
if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it. How can
people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not
notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?