The Eye and the Genital

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2002)

Spoiler herein.
Kubrick's films are misunderstood. Reading the professional reviews and comments here, one would think the reason for this film to exist is for Kubrick to make a strong satire. What bunk. What a small view.
This movie is about the tyranny of movies (and similar performances). The fact that so few people see it as something else is a testament to the self-protective nature of films in our soul.
The Droogs engage in performances. Their speech is theatrical. Their rival gang is discovered on the stage. There is a focus on the eye. They wear costumes. The sex with the teeniboppers is cast as a performance (and photographed that way). The accosted writer is (selfreferentially) the writer of the film, who incidentally drives the character to suicide by exposing him to a performance. During that attack, the Droogs act out another film.
The therapy is forcing `us' to watch movies precisely like the one we are watching. Kubrick follows the Film-within-the-film rule of having the distance of abstraction from the film with to the film be the same as from `real' life to the film. The entire film can be seen as (pick one): one of the punishment films; a subsequent vision in the hospital; a musical drama played out in some kid's head; a simple hallucination in the milk bar; a simple invention of the gay writer (who pretends he had a wife).
All of Kubrick's work starting with Lolita is an exploration into the plasticity of narrative, in the context of obsession (`Lolita'), war (Metal'), power , space (meaning the environment as in `Lyndon'), and invented reality (`2001') and adulterous fantasies (`Eyes'). Here we work with violent adolescent sex: cockworks. It is what Phil Dick had in mind.
Ted's Evaluation: 3 of 4: Worth watching.