Is the cure worse than the disease?

Rating: 9/10 (20 July 2001)

Stanley Kubrick was a director who always had the knack for raising troubling issues, and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE raises some doozies.
Based on Anthony Burgess' controversial 1962 book, the film details the adventures of Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a "droog" whose obsessions include rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven (specifically the Ninth Symphony). After he is caught by police for murder, he spends two years in a British prison before being selected to undergo the Ludovico treatment, designed to cure criminals of their baser impulses.
The problem, however, is that this treatment also saps McDowell of the ability to defend himself against former victims who come seeking revenge. After attempting suicide in the home of a writer he once terrorized, he recovers in a hospital and, in a political ploy of unheard-of proportions, he is restored to health--all his instincts for violence once more intact.
Not surprisingly, Kubrick was heavily criticized for his stylized scenes of sex and violence, which were so disturbing they briefly got the film an 'X' rating; slight trimming by Kubrick bought it down to an 'R'. But beyond those elements, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE retains its unsettling aura for tackling the issues of crime and punishment, and law and order, which are your basic political code words. He asks us to ponder the evils of brainwashing. Is the cure that Alex is being given worse than the disease he has spread? Do politicians have the right to dictate to people how to behave? Is the price of free will the predilection of a very small minority to act barbaric?
Accompanied by the music of Beethoven, Rossini, and others, principally in synthesized arrangements by Walter Carlos, those questions are bought forth in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE; and as is typical for Kubrick, he gives us no easy solutions. For a diatribe against rampant right-wing conservatism, grab-ass politics, and law-and-order jingoism, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE remains extremely effective, and still timely after thirty years.