insanity

Rating: 10/10 (22 June 2005)

The plot is course, that future England is ruled by gangs. Alex deLarge(Malcolm McDowell) and his "droogs" go around committing "ultra-violence" and raping women. One night, after murdering a woman with a giant phallic statue, Alex's droogs knock him out and leave him for the police. The police use him in the "Ludovico treatment", in which they lid-lock him and make him watch documentaries of concentration camps while he is drugged to get sick, so that he will associate violence with becoming ill. But when he gets out of jail, it has disastrous consequences for him.
First of all, we need to remember that a common motif in Stanley Kubrick's movies is insanity. We might jump to say that Alex is insane. But we need to realize that he is a product of this society that created him, and he grew up in the slums, so we shouldn't expect him to be a "model citizen". Moreover, after the police arrested him, they don't look at why he was committing ultra-violence; their solution is to mentally castrate him. So really, the government is insane in this case.
And what does the title mean? Well, a clock is man-made, and an orange is natural. Humans, including Alex, are also natural. But after they put him through the Ludovico treatment, he can only obey them. In effect, he becomes like a machine...a sort of clock. What about Alex's name? I read somewhere that it could be a combination. The word "a" in Greek means "without", and "lex" in Latin means "law", so his name could suggest "lawless".
What about some of the movie's other aspects? Alex's false eyelash makes him look asymmetrical, as if to say that something about him isn't right. Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), whose wife Alex rapes, is confined to a wheelchair (like Dr. Strangelove?), and after Alex is cured of being ultra-violent, Mr. Alexander becomes as sadistic as Alex used to be. Alex is one of Beethoven's biggest fans. We view Beethoven as a great composer (and he certainly was), but in a drawing of him, he looks almost insane. Alex at one point thinks about Jesus, and during the Ludovico treatment, he has several wires all over his head, and they suggest a crown of thorns.
There are so many messages that one can read into "A Clockwork Orange". As one of Kubrick's many masterpieces, it shows him to be one of the greatest directors of all time.