Stan took a wrong turn here - and just kept going

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2003)

"Dr. Strangelove" and "2001:A Space Odyssey" are in my Top 5 movies of all time, so in my book Stanley Kubrick forever has an asterisk next to his name denoting "genius" (his "Lolita" was none too shabby, either). But right here, with this movie, is where ol' Stan began - in my mind - to vanish into his own hermetically sealed vault of cinematic pretension and designer, knee-jerk nihilism. The movies he made for the remainder of his life are cold, opaque works that don't engage on any level, save for an appreciation of the technical artistry they demonstrate: meticulously constructed sarcophagi, where lie entombed the spirit of a once-puckish, daring, and wonderfully *alive* filmmaker.
At least with `Clockwork' Stan still retained the power to provoke (he lost even that right after this release) - but he goes about it all wrong, and to extremely dubious ends. I should say upfront that I read the book (by Anthony Burgess) first, and it had a profound effect on me. (SPOILERS AHEAD) The first part - which chronicled Alex and the violent, pillaging activities of he and his `droogs' - filled me with such revulsion and hatred, that I took sadistic glee in seeing the `reformed' post-Ludovico Alex get his nasty comeuppance in the second half of the book. However, when the story took its final twist at the end by giving Alex his `freedom' back, I was furious. Here's a guy who (the narrative makes clear) has learned no lessons or morals from his predicament - who feels no remorse, and will doubtless return to a life of `ultraviolence' as soon as he gets the chance; I was rooting for him to remain a robotic pawn of the state. The book's fundamental challenge lies just in this: convincing (or at least presenting powerfully to) the reader that even brutes and reprobates such as Alex deserve the dignity of free will, and that there can be no justification for revoking that. (The challenge is, indeed, open-ended - inasmuch as I'm not entirely convinced; after all, isn't prison a revocation of someone's `free will', too? Isn't *any* form of punishment? But at least the book's presentation makes it an idea worth wrestling with.)
Kubrick's mistake, as I see it, is in making Alex such a charming and charismatic figure. In the book he's a single-minded brute; he still is in the movie, but by filtering his thoughts through the purring, dulcet tones of Malcom McDowell, and filming even his most violent and heinous acts with pop-art style brio, Kubrick leaves little doubt about his affection for this monster. Further, he does so within the context of making EVERY OTHER SINGLE CHARACTER in the movie such a caricatured and annoying drone (so much so, in fact, that it is actually *they* who become the monsters - quite a flip).

As such, Kubrick upsets the entire balance of the piece (at least as Burgess envisioned it). We get no sense of Alex's crimes against humanity - because, in fact, there's no `humanity' here: only the kind of ciphers and waxwork grotesqueries that would become Kubrick's definition of `character' for the remainder of his career. Perhaps that's his point, after all (no doubt it is): that, in fact, under a bogus sense of decorum, society consists of nothing but droning, annoying hypocrites, and there's no use in spilling a tear for any single one of them. But when you are watching a woman being violently raped and you are made to feel nothing for her - not to mention her brutalized husband (who gets absolutely savaged by the director later in the film) - then something rather sick and insidious is going on.

Burgess' book was written as a warning against the dangers of social engineering, no matter how well-intentioned. Kubrick's movie plays more as a blatant indictment of humanity as a whole. Its underlying, none-too-subtle message is that in a society so plastic and corroded only violently murderous free spirits like Alex are truly worth anything: he may not be nice, but at least he's not dead inside like every other single person on the planet.
Personally, I think the only humanity Kubrick ends up indicting by such an approach is his own. But then that's just me, isn't it.