Reel Look: 'A Clockwork Orange'

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2015)

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening." Stanley Kubrick was at the height of his creative prowess when he directed his triumphant 1971 film 'A Clockwork Orange', based off of the dystopian novella by Anthony Burgess in 1962. The story takes place in a futuristic Britain, where crimes are rampant and there is very little that can actually be done about it. Our main protagonist/villain is a young delinquent named Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) who is the leader of his gang of Droogs. The main interests of Alex is rape, committing "ultraviolent" acts after consuming drug-infused milk and listening to Beethoven. It is only when he accidentally kills a cat lady off with a phallic sculpture when attempting to burglarize her home that he is imprisoned and brainwashed into a descent citizen, via the Ludovico Technique, so that the mere thoughts of violence and sex nauseate him. In the end, he resorts to his former self after he attempts suicide and the government try to "fix" him again.
What is intended is to not only look at the context of this film as a contemporary, albeit bizarre unit, but to try and delve into the psyche of a fictional youth whose inner workings are never explained and what has slowly created his vile motivations over time. The film asks many questions but is given no solid answers to the viewer at hand. Are we still human beings when forcibly stripped from our willingness to choose good from bad, or just mere mechanisms that should gladly mold into the cogs of society? Are we supposed to sympathize with the mind-alteration of our main character or be repulsed by his past crimes? Let's take a look.
Burgess himself insisted that humans, by definition, have free will. The fact of the matter being, a culture will ultimately take drastic action to confine anyone into the gears of its clockwork rhythm when feeling threatened from a foreign disruption of normality. This particular film takes an interesting stance on how it wants to tell a story, slathered especially with a colorful Anglo-Russian rhyming slang called Nasdat which is used by the anti-hero Alex in first-person perspective here and there narrating throughout the film, also adapted from the book. The story takes place in near-future Britain of which we are not given any specific date or time. Alex is the devilish hooligan and leader of a gang of Droogs, whose hideout is a place called the Korova Milk Bar where he and his pals get hyped up for a night of mayhem and mischief of horrendous proportions after drinking milk laced with mescaline. From there, they beat up a rival gang, drive recklessly through the night in a stolen car and finally break into a futuristic-styled home of a couple of whom the Droogs beat up the husband, rape his wife and trash the place as Alex bounces a ball and taps his boots while belting out 'Singin' in the Rain'. After this he returns home to his dilapidated loft where he plays a cassette tape of Beethoven's 9th Symphony to put the final touch on the perfect evening, all the while fantasizing of orgies and acts of "ultraviolence". Since Alex has committed despicable acts with his gang, he is then imprisoned and becomes a guinea pig for a group of doctors who use his own classical music against him when they perform the Ludovico Technique upon our protagonist. They strap him in a straightjacket and stretch his eyes open with small rods as they force him to watch graphic films all to the music of Beethoven, as he is eventually brainwashed and conformed to a descent citizen and stripped of the love of his favorite composer so that any ideas of sex and violence ultimately sicken him. Upon his release, he encounters the tramp, of whom recognizes him whereas Alex does not. He and his chums beat up the now-defenseless post-Droog as the fight is broken up by two policeman, ironically former Droogs also, take Alex and dunk his head repeatedly in a trough of dirty water. Now that Alex is a decent citizen, society has reversed the effect of his former actions upon himself. So go the distorted mechanisms of the said title.
The resolution is left unsatisfying for the society in which Alex lives but satisfying for us in a sense because the mechanisms of this young rebel are far beyond fixing, as it was the culture that truly created him over time. We now have mixed emotions as we abhor the deplorable actions of Alex and yet feel sympathy for him when he is stripped of his free will and becomes like a dog in one of Pavlov's experiments. It is in the second half where we just have to wait and see how Alex will have to unwillingly accept his alteration to society and acknowledging the fact that he is now a decent civilian before descending back into his old sadistic habits. Alex, besides the other characters inhabiting the world of the film, seems to be the only one suffering from who he really is and when it is taken from him, he eventually has a mental breakdown and the gears are switched back to the terrible mechanisms of his past from an all-too-demanding culture telling him what he should say, do or think or who he should be. For Alex, a brainwashing may have lasted for a time, but not long enough to conform back to his old mechanisms into how the culture has truly geared him to be. Chock full of vibrant language and classical music while also mixing truth from lies, irony from satire and oxymoron from paradox, Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' is indeed a frenzied fun house of macabre and mayhem.