A Clockwork Orange (1971) Review
8/10
Official trailer
Alex narrates in an invented slang, addresses you directly as his brother, and is charming throughout. That charm is the film’s method and its problem, and both were entirely deliberate.
I admire this film more than I enjoy it, and I think that’s what Kubrick wanted. McDowell’s Alex is great company for the first stretch, and I resent how easily he gets me laughing along. The movie sets that trap on purpose, and I fall into it.
Anthony Burgess wrote the novel in 1962, in part after American deserters assaulted his pregnant wife in London during the blackout. She lost the child. He wrote the book from inside that. That’s worth knowing before deciding what it’s arguing. Kubrick read it, made the film almost line by line from the American edition, and produced something Burgess spent the rest of his life being asked about and disliking.
The 8 is for a film whose argument is airtight and whose execution is deliberately unpleasant in ways that have aged unevenly. The first act is hard to sit through now, harder than in 1971, and Kubrick’s staging of the assaults reads differently than it did. The philosophical question underneath hasn’t weakened at all.
The Slang Makes It Work
Nadsat isn’t decoration and it’s not worldbuilding. Burgess invented it so that violence would be described in words the reader has no automatic reaction to, and Kubrick keeps it for the same reason.
A beating described in ordinary English produces revulsion. The same beating described as a bit of the old ultra-violence produces something closer to interest, and by the time you notice, you’ve been enjoying yourself for twenty minutes.
The vocabulary is mostly Russian, filtered through cockney. That was Burgess’s joke about a future in which Soviet influence had reached English youth culture. Droog is friend, horrorshow is good, viddy is see, rassoodocks is mind, moloko is milk. None of it is glossed.
That refusal to gloss is the trap. You learn the language by absorption over the first fifteen minutes. That means you have to participate to follow the film, and participation is complicity. Burgess was explicit about the design. He wanted the reader brainwashed into a lexicon, and said the book was a linguistic exercise as much as a moral one. The narration also does something the images couldn’t. Alex is polite to you. He calls you his brother, apologizes for digressions, and takes you into his confidence, and the courtesy keeps you on his side while he does unforgivable things.
Vocabulary controls distance, and the choice is always available to a writer. The same event described in clinical, colloquial or invented language produces three different reactions in the same reader, and the writer picks which.
The technique to steal is that if you want the reader complicit, give them a word for the act that doesn’t yet carry a verdict. A new word has no accumulated disgust attached to it, so the reader processes the event before they judge it. That gap is where complicity lives.
The corollary matters more for most writing. If you want a reader to recoil, use the plainest word available, because plainness is what carries the accumulated weight. Writers reaching for elaborate description of something horrible usually achieve the opposite of what they intended, because elaboration is a kind of distance and distance is comfort.
The Question It Asks
The Ludovico technique cures Alex of violence by making him physically incapable of it. He’s shown films while drugged until the association between violence and nausea is absolute. He’s safe, harmless, and no longer a person in any sense that matters. The prison chaplain gets the film’s thesis and gets it early. That’s unusual for Kubrick. Goodness comes from within. When a man can’t choose, he ceases to be a man.
That’s a hard argument and the film doesn’t soften it. The state is pleased with the result and shows it to an audience. The state makes Alex lick a boot and shows him unable to respond to a naked woman, and the officials applaud.
The film’s cruellest move is that the treatment also destroys his love of Beethoven, because the Ninth was playing during one of the films. So the conditioning takes the one thing in him that wasn’t violent. That’s the film’s answer to whether you can excise a part of a person cleanly.
That Beethoven detail is the cruelest thing in the picture, and it’s where I stop enjoying Alex and start feeling sorry for him. I think it’s the smartest choice Kubrick makes, because it shows the cure costing something the state never bothered to count.
Then it gives him back. The government reverses the treatment for political reasons, entirely cynically, and the last shot is Alex imagining exactly what he was imagining at the start.
That ending is where the film and the book diverge, and it’s the whole controversy.
The Missing Final Chapter
The British edition of the novel has twenty-one chapters. The American publisher cut the last one, and Kubrick worked from the American edition and has said he didn’t know a different ending existed until he was well into production.
In the missing chapter Alex is older, bored with violence, and begins to want a child. He grows out of it. Burgess considered this essential, because a book about moral choice in which the protagonist can’t change is, he argued, not about moral choice at all.
Which ending you prefer largely determines what you think the story is. With chapter twenty-one it’s about maturation and the limits of state intervention. Without it, it’s about a state that briefly succeeded in removing a person’s will and then handed it back when convenient.
I think Kubrick’s version is the stronger film and Burgess’s version is the stronger argument. The film’s ending is bleaker and more coherent as cinema. The book’s ending is more interesting as philosophy, because growing out of it undermines the state’s justification entirely. Burgess wrote about this for decades, and it visibly wore him down. He said he was ashamed of having written a book that became notorious for the wrong reasons, and that he’d rather be remembered for almost anything else.
Kubrick Withdrew It
After the film opened in Britain there were copycat reports, court cases in which the film was cited, and eventually threats against Kubrick’s family. He pulled the film from British distribution himself. Not the censors, not the government, the director. It remained unavailable in the United Kingdom until after his death in 1999. That’s close to unique in film history. A director suppressing his own work for nearly thirty years, not on artistic grounds but because of what was happening around it.
Whether the film caused those incidents is unanswerable and probably unlikely. The press coverage at the time was frenzied and several of the cited connections didn’t survive scrutiny.
What’s interesting is that the man who made an argument about free will and consequence chose to remove the object from circulation. That’s itself a decision about consequence. The other thing to know is that Kubrick was living in England and was reportedly frightened. That’s not a small consideration and it’s usually left out of the story. I respect Kubrick for pulling it. A frightened man made a decision about his family that kept his own film out of British cinemas, in the country he’d made his home, for nearly thirty years, and I don’t see how anyone could fault him for it.
The relevant craft point is about complicity and its cost, and it applies to anybody writing a charismatic antagonist. If you make the reader enjoy somebody’s company, you’ve created an obligation, and the obligation is to make them pay for it. Kubrick discharges it. The first act is enjoyable, the second act is punishment, and the film is careful that the punishment isn’t what the audience wanted either. That structure separates the film from the material it inspired, most of which offers the pleasure and never presents the bill.
The practical test on your own work is to ask what the book is asking the reader to pay for the fun they’ve had. If a charming murderer stays charming and is simply caught or killed, the book has entertained the reader and taught them nothing about their own appetite. If the book makes the reader want something for the character and then makes them examine that wanting, it has done something.
What Has Aged and What Has Not
The design hasn’t dated at all. That’s rare for a film about the near future made in 1970. The Korova milk bar, the white costumes, the bowler and the single false eyelash: all of it still looks deliberate. The music hasn’t dated. Wendy Carlos’s synthesized Beethoven and Purcell is one of the earliest serious uses of electronic sound in a major film, and the mechanized version of the Ninth is doing thematic work about the conversion of feeling into process.
What has aged is the treatment of the assaults. Kubrick shoots them as choreography, sometimes to music, and the staging reads as aestheticized in a way a modern audience will find harder than a 1971 audience did. Those scenes cost the film points with me. I understand the choice, and I still find them ugly in a way that feels more like indulgence than argument, and they’re the reason this is an 8.
The satire of the state has aged well and become less exaggerated. A government adopting a cheap technological fix for a social problem, announcing success, and abandoning it when the politics turn isn’t a futuristic notion.
Malcolm McDowell was twenty-seven and his performance is the reason the film functions. He’s funny. That’s the hardest part of the assignment. He also suffered a scratched cornea during the Ludovico scenes, filmed with his eyes clamped open, and has talked about it enough over the years that it’s become the film’s standard anecdote.
Should you watch A Clockwork Orange?
Yes, with a warning. The first thirty minutes are harder than the reputation prepares you for, and the film doesn’t soften anything. I give it an 8 because the argument about free will is as sharp as anything Kubrick put on screen and McDowell makes Alex funny when he has no business being funny, and I knock off the rest for staging those assaults like dance numbers. Then read the British edition with chapter twenty-one and decide which ending you think is right.
