A Clockwork Orange (1971) Review

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.

Anthony Burgess wrote the novel in 1962, in part after his pregnant wife was assaulted by American deserters in London during the blackout. She lost the child. He wrote the book from inside that, which is worth knowing before deciding what it is 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 genuinely 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 has not weakened at all.

The Slang Does the Work

Nadsat is not decoration and it is 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 have been enjoying yourself for twenty minutes.

The vocabulary is mostly Russian, filtered through cockney, which 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, which 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 could not. Alex is polite to you. He calls you his brother, apologizes for digressions, and takes you into his confidence, and the courtesy is what keeps you on his side while he does unforgivable things.

The Question It Asks

The Ludovico technique cures Alex of violence by making him physically incapable of it. He is shown films while drugged until the association between violence and nausea is absolute. He is safe, harmless, and no longer a person in any sense that matters.

The prison chaplain gets the film’s thesis and gets it early, which is unusual for Kubrick. Goodness comes from within. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

That is a genuinely hard argument and the film does not soften it. The state is pleased with the result and demonstrates it to an audience. Alex is made to lick a boot and to be 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 was not violent, which is the film’s answer to whether you can excise a part of a person cleanly.

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 is 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 did not 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 cannot 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 is about maturation and the limits of state intervention. Without it, it is 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 was visibly worn down by it. He said he was ashamed of having written a book that became notorious for the wrong reasons, and that he would 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 is 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 did not survive scrutiny.

What is interesting is that the man who made an argument about free will and consequence chose to remove the object from circulation, which is itself a decision about consequence.

The other thing to know is that Kubrick was living in England and was reportedly frightened. That is not a small consideration and it is usually left out of the story.

What Has Aged and What Has Not

The design has not dated at all, which is remarkable 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 has not dated. Wendy Carlos’s synthesized Beethoven and Purcell is one of the earliest serious uses of electronic sound in a major film, and the mechanised 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 that a modern audience will find harder than a 1971 audience did. That is a real change in how the film lands and it is worth being honest about.

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 is not a futuristic notion.

Malcolm McDowell was twenty-seven and his performance is the reason the film functions. He is genuinely funny, which is 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 has 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 does not soften anything. If you read the novel, get the British edition with chapter twenty-one, then decide which ending you think is right. That argument is more interesting than the film’s notoriety.

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