A Clockwork Orange Review in the New Yorker
Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological mess, a paranoid correct-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced listen control, just all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex.
I don't know quite how to explain my disgust at Alex (whom Kubrick likes very much, as his visual style reveals and as nosotros shall see in a moment). Alex is the sort of fearsomely strange person we've all run across a few times in our lives -- usually when he and we were children, and he was less inclined to conceal his hobbies. He must have been the kind of kid who tore off the wings of flies and ate ants just because that was so disgusting. He was the kid who e'er seemed to know more about sex than anyone else, too -- and especially about how dirty information technology was.
Alex has grown up in "A Clockwork Orange," and at present he's a sadistic rapist. I realize that calling him a sadistic rapist -- simply similar that -- is to stereotype poor Alex a little. Simply Kubrick doesn't requite u.s.a. much more than to go on, except that Alex likes Beethoven a lot. Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the aforementioned way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music -- to add a cute, cheap, dead-terminate dimension.
Now Alex isn't the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero nosotros got in the aroused British movies of the early 1960s. No endeavor is made to explain his inner workings or accept apart his gild. Indeed, there'south non much to take apart; both Alex and his order are smart-nose pop-art abstractions. Kubrick hasn't created a future earth in his imagination -- he'southward created a trendy decor. If nosotros fall for the Kubrick line and say Alex is vehement because "society offers him no culling," weep, sob, we're just making excuses.
Alex is fierce because it is necessary for him to be tearing in order for this movie to entertain in the way Kubrick intends. Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by order, non by his parents, non by the police state, not past centralization and not past creeping fascism -- just past the producer, managing director and writer of this movie, Stanley Kubrick. Directors sometimes become sanctimonious and talk almost their creations in the third person, as if society had actually created Alex. Only this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being besides minor: Alex is all his.
I say that in total awareness that "A Clockwork Orange" is based, somewhat faithfully, on a novel past Anthony Burgess. All the same I don't pivot the rap on Burgess. Kubrick has used visuals to change the book's point of view and to nudge united states toward a kind of grudging pal-send with Alex.
Kubrick'due south well-nigh obvious photographic device this time is the wide-bending lens. Used on objects that are fairly shut to the camera, this lens tends to distort the sides of the image. The objects in the center of the screen look normal, merely those on the edges tend to camber up and outward, condign bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the broad-bending lens well-nigh all the time when he is showing events from Alex's betoken of view; this encourages us to see the world equally Alex does, equally a crazy-house of weird people out to get him.
When Kubrick shows usa Alex, however, he either places him in the center of a wide-angle shot (so Alex alone has normal human dimensions,) or uses a standard lens that does not distort. And so a visual impression is built upward during the movie that Alex, and only Alex, is normal.
Kubrick has another couple of groovy gimmicks to build Alex into a hero instead of a wretch. He likes to shoot Alex from to a higher place, letting Alex look up at u.s.a. from under a lowered brow. This was too a favorite Kubrick angle in the close-ups in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and in both pictures, Kubrick puts the lighting accent on the eyes. This gives his characters a slightly scary, messianic expect.
And then Kubrick makes all sorts of references at the end of "A Clockwork Orange" to the famous sleeping room (and bathroom) scenes at the cease of "2001." The echoing water-drips while Alex takes his bathroom remind us indirectly of the sound furnishings in the "2001" bedroom, and then Alex sits downward to a tabular array and a glass of wine. He is photographed from the same angle Kubrick used in "2001" to show us Keir Dullea at dinner. And then in that location's even a shot from behind, showing Alex turning around as he swallows a mouthful of wine.
This isn't simply unproblematic visual quotation, I think. Kubrick used the final shots of "2001" to ease his space voyager into the Space Kid who ends the movie. The child, yous'll remember, turns large and fearsomely wise eyes upon us, and is our savior. In somewhat the aforementioned way, Alex turns into a wide eyed child at the end of "A Clockwork Orange," and smiles mischievously as he has a fantasy of rape. We're now supposed to cheer because he's been cured of the anti-rape, anti-violence programming forced upon him past society during a prison house "rehabilitation" procedure.
What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he actually want us to identify with the hating tilt of Alex's psychopathic little life? In a earth where guild is criminal, of course, a adept human must alive outside the law. Only that isn't what Kubrick is saying, He actually seems to be implying something simpler and more than frightening: that in a earth where order is criminal, the citizen might every bit well exist a criminal, too.
Well, enough philosophy. Nosotros'll probably be debating "A Clockwork Orangish" for a long time -- a long, weary and pointless fourth dimension. The New York disquisitional establishment has guaranteed that for united states. They missed the boat on "2001," and so maybe they were trying to grab up with Kubrick on this one. Or perhaps the news weeklies merely needed a good movie cover story for Christmas.
I don't know. Just they've really hyped "A Clockwork Orange" for more than information technology'south worth, and a lot of people will go if merely out of curiosity. As well bad. In addition to the things I've mentioned higher up -- things I actually got mad about -- "A Clockwork Orangish" commits another, perhaps even more unforgivable, artistic sin. It is just evidently talky and boring. You know there'southward something wrong with a movie when the final 3rd feels like the last half.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his decease in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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A Clockwork Orange (1972)
136 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-clockwork-orange-1972
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