A Clockwork Orange | VIOLENCE MAKES VIOLENCE

In 1972, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece A Clockwork Orange was unleashed onto the 

unsuspecting British public, in theatres all over the United Kingdom. The film ratings board of Great Britain had been especially harsh on this viciously violent movie, and the board’s harshness was soon justified: a multitude of replicated crimes, allegedly inspired by the movie, broke out across the country. The most horrific of these involved a 17-year-old Dutch tourist, who was raped by a gang of youths chanting—just as in the film—the lyrics to the song “Singing in the Rain.” Kubrick subsequently succumbed to public pressure and forbade the showing of the film in Great Britain; a self-imposed ban that lasted until his death in 1999. The public reaction to the movie was motivated by an unspoken theory of art and ethics; namely, that the aesthetic good is inextricably bound to the moral good, that good art makes good people. The great irony is that the work of art in question is itself an attack upon this commonly held (but rarely challenged) assumption.

Alex, the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, has the most refined aesthetic taste of all the characters in the movie—he loves Beethoven and appreciates beauty for its own sake, even if that beauty is almost solely restricted to the female form. And yet, Alex has the blackest heart in a cast of villains. This dichotomy induces in the audience an unpleasant cognitive dissonance, conflicting with our assumptions. Despite this conflicting influence, Kubrick’s mastery of cinematography draws us into rapport with the young man. Throughout the first act of the movie, we see Alex savagely beat a homeless old man, steal a car only to run other drivers off the road, rape one woman and murder another. Even then, it all seems somehow playful. An early scene in which Alex’s gang fights with another group of thugs epitomises Kubrick’s approach to violence in the first act; the young men fight with stage furniture that shatters upon impact, making the brawl seem lighthearted. Yes, we in the audience think, this violence is morally reprehensible—but it certainly is fun to watch!

This tone is sustained until Alex is detained and sentenced for the murder of a middle-aged woman. In prison he volunteers for an experimental process that claims to ‘cure’ criminals of their sociopathy. The so-called Ludovico technique conditions Alex against violence by forcing him to watch footage of crimes and immoral acts while under the influence of a drug that makes him wretch and gag, giving him a feeling of impending death. And it works. Alex is made a better person not by appreciating beautiful things, but by being forced to see the true monstrosity inherent in violence. The transformation central to the plot of A Clockwork Orange enacts a theory that contradicts the public reaction to the film: crime is reduced by showing more violent films, not fewer.

Upon release, Alex finds himself without a home and on the street, where he meets the same characters that he persecuted in the first act. This time they take revenge upon him, assisted by Alex’s inability to remain conscious during the violence, a side effect of the Ludovico technique. I  believe Kubrick attacked our complicity in the depravity of the first act: he guided us to enjoy the savagery of the first act, and we gladly allowed it. Now, he turns the violence upon our surrogate and turns his directorial expertise to reveal the horror of that violence. And this is the director’s ultimate attack on the common conception of beauty: he uses his control over the audience’s experience to replace the drugs and straitjackets of the Ludovico technique with the pain we feel upon seeing the rehabilitated Alex so brutally punished.

When the critics of A Clockwork Orange said that the movie promoted violence through the sympathetic but evil character of Alex, they got the story only partially correct. The first act of the film certainly does, but only for the purpose of revealing our guilt in the third act. Thus we should see A Clockwork Orange, a movie banned in Britain for twenty-seven years on the grounds of excessive violence, for the anti-violent, but philosophically radical, piece of art that it actually is.