Eyes Wide Shut

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2012)

So much has already been written about this viddy, dissected & commemorated & pilloried like maybe no other member of the Pantheon Of Kubrick that any more hoopla is redundant. There's really not much else left to say when it comes to some things, especially controversial classics like this- you're just adding to the growing pile of he said/she said yay or nay. That's why I focus so much on no-name trash.
As a teenager watching this, I was probably the kind of spectacle addicted junkie Kubrick was thumbing his nose at, waiting eagerly for the infamous scenes of sex & violence while not really paying attention to the rest. My grandparents unknowingly strolled into a showing during its original 70's run and walked out mid way through, disgusted. I didn't really get it back then in all but the most obvious of ways; all that stuck with me about this gorgeous shot of ice water was the colourful clutter, the day-glow X rated minutiae stuffing the sidelines while gleefully insane cartoon characters strut back n forth in paroxysms of sound & fury, totally oblivious to their outlandish surroundings.
Its been said that there's really no other opening like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE's, that slooooow pull back on statue over statue of luridly posed pretty polly with a trademark Kubrickian glower at the dead centre courtesy of Mcdowell- its very memorable. Than there's the chorus line of Christs, back slapping plastic Jesus' shot like song and dance men in Alex's room that recalls a scene from Jodo's HOLY MOUNTAIN where the Thief screams in despair as the camera zooms out on a warehouse of copyright Christs piled together in towering mountain-caps of commodification. Later on still we get the cat lady, surrounded by pornographic paintings & pussies, ordering our lead droog to be CAREFUL with her gigantic sculpted penis: 'Its a very important work of art!'.
Again and again acts of ultra-violence and in & out enacted unblinkingly before a panoply of warped popular culture, neon frescoes of trash art kitsch littering the frames like the rubble of some unseen psychic meltdown. This viddy nailed with frightening accuracy the gleaming post modern sheen of our full blown covert dystopia, the apocalyptic landscape of modern life where pod people move through an over mediated social arena, oppressed at every turn by over sexed infotainment and various other subliminal mind f%&ks while all the time insisting it has absolutely nooo baring on their own behavior. Clockwork orange indeed. What if the world ended and no one noticed?
Its like the characters in the film exist in some hellish time warp, all sorts of incongruous fashions and designs crammed into an unwieldy hodgepodge of cultural schizophrenia. It looks at once painfully retro and smoothly futuristic. Even the nadsat dialogue is a melting pot of alien patois, slang and contemporary words jumbled together into a kind of demonic poetry. Truly I've seen no other movie prophesize the multicultural, Orwellian sh*thole England was to become like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
No wonder this flick figures into several mind control conspiracy theories, that it even provoked copycat crimes. I wonder how Kubrick felt about hitting the nail on the head so completely that his work about brainwashing and hyper-reality seemingly turned out its own earnest droogies, unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality. The biggest irony though is that even before the Ludvico treatment, Alex Delarge was a nothing but a clockwork orange.