“Is it some devil that crawls inside of you?”
That question is posed early on in A Clockwork Orange to Alex (Malcom McDowell), leader of a gang of robbers and rapists. It’s a question the movie will continue to ask—of both Alex and humanity—throughout its bleak, harrowing, darkly comic running time. In adapting a novel by Anthony Burgess, director Stanley Kubrick offers yet another evisceration of the human species. People are inexplicably merciless, Kubrick seems to assume, so why should his movies be anything but a mirror of that?
A Clockwork Orange directly followed 2001: A Space Odyssey, and although we’re still in the future, it’s an uglier, more dystopian one. Violent youth, like Alex and his “droogs,” go on theatrical, criminal sprees during the night, while sophisticated adults stay sequestered in their poshly designed, space-pod homes (almost all uniformly decorated with graphic paintings of naked women and statues of penises). The film’s first section dryly documents the abhorrent lengths to which Alex and his gang will go, especially in a home invasion in which they beat a writer nearly to death and rape his wife—all while Alex prances about singing the title number from Singin’ in the Rain.
Such showmanship, if you want to call it that, is what makes Alex such a sickly mesmerizing figure (and A Clockwork Orange a squeamishly iconic film). From the first moment we meet Alex’s malevolently mischievous stare—the film’s opening shot pulls back from a close-up on his face to the overtly sexualized “milk bar” where he sits with his droogs—it’s clear McDowell is perfectly in sync with the character and camera in a frightening (given the material) way. You can’t take your eyes off Alex, and not only because you don’t feel safe turning your back on him. He gives every action, even the horrible ones, a performative flair (even flopping backwards on his bed as if he were in a ballet).
The further we get into Alex’s head—and there’s a montage of images of death and destruction that he imagines while masturbating to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9,” interspersed with shots of Alex sporting bloody vampire teeth—the more that early question bedevils us. Is he an outlier psychopath? A symptom of the desensitized society that seems to surround him? Possessed?
Once the law catches up with Alex, another question arises: Can he be saved? Prison itself doesn’t do much in the way of reform. Even though the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley)—a fire-and-brimstone preacher with errant impulses of his own—takes Alex under his wing, Alex reminds unconverted, expressing his preference for the sex and violence of the Old Testament over the sermonizing of the New. Reading the story of the crucifixion, he even envisions himself as a whipping centurion, driving Christ to the cross. Still, the chaplain encourages him, “Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen.”
The state believes Alex could use a little nudging toward that choice. And so a government minister selects him to be a guinea pig for the “Ludovico Technique,” in which he is forced to watch images of violence—sexual and otherwise—as nausea-inducing drugs are pumped into him. Here—with clamps peeling back his eyelids, in one of Kubrick’s most indelible images—is where McDowell’s mischievous stare finally transforms, turning into something ghoulish. From there A Clockwork Orange becomes a cheeky consideration not only of original sin—the idea that we are born as broken people into a broken world—but free will. If transformation is forced upon us, have we really transformed?
There are some—Christians, actually—who would say that transformation only comes about through love. A Clockwork Orange goes on to show that science and paperwork (Kubrick indulges in long, immaculately composed scenes of Alex being admitted to one facility or another) won’t redeem Alex. But love? Ah, but here is the movie’s darkest joke, a reminder that this is a filmmaker who sent a giant space baby not to save the Earth, but gobble it up. There are moments when you wonder if Alex’s love of Beethoven might be his saving grace, a sign that somewhere—beneath the ways he’s soiled the music with his masturbatory associations—is an appreciation for the beautiful and good. But then the doctors employing the Ludovico Technique happen to play “Symphony No. 9” during Alex’s viewing sessions, causing him to feel excruciating nausea whenever he hears it going forward. Notice the term Alex uses when he begs his torturers to at least turn off the music: “It’s a sin!”
A Clockwork Orange ultimately asks: how deep is sin’s hold—on Alex, and on us? This being a Kubrick film—and considering that it leaves us with Beethoven’s Ninth triumphantly, transgressively ringing once more in Alex’s ears, after a fall from a window knocks the Ludovico out of him—the movie doesn’t seem to think humanity is worthy of an answer. To A Clockwork Orange, we’re all droogs at heart.
