Revisited...

Rating: 10/10 (14 July 2008)

You know, maybe it's high time I reevaluated A Clockwork Orange. I had been disgusted by it the first time, but I'll admit it left an imprint, one which I have been unable to shake in the years since I first saw it.
It's a disturbed piece of schlock cinema -- or it seemed that way. As I learn to understand Kubrick's artistic excesses and egoistic, exploitative enterprises, I begin to see the wild-eyed genius of his vision.
And I appreciate the disengagement of himself from his camera: in a way similar to Scorsese, Kubrick lets the camera record without ever questioning the validity of what is happening; their difference lies in that Scorsese's films are literate and rootsy, while Kubrick transcends those qualities and adds a hyper-surrealistic sublimity and a heightened tone of heavy ideology.
Kubrick attempts to deconstruct your world and rebuild it, much like Alex Proyas did in his 1998 masterpiece Dark City. He blends the old and conventional with restless ideas that long to jump from the screen but remain staid at his dictatorial hand. His ideas are Orwellian, his vision dystopian, his method scatological -- but his employment of each of these things is exact, controlled with a sense of schizophrenic indifference.
If my reassessment of the man is correct, perhaps my judgment of his films -- and A Clockwork Orange in particular -- will change. I was much younger, not very well-read, and certainly an amateur in film when I saw it the first time. It was so far beyond any concept that I'd previously encountered that it was at once engrossing and alienating.
But I've come to understand that may have been Kubrick's point. Like Alex DeLarge -- strapped to a chair while undergoing aversion treatment (brainwashing) -- we are meant to be the subjects of the experiment. Kubrick forces us to identify with DeLarge in both his redeemable and his irredeemable qualities, and in so doing he holds a pitch-black satirical and scabrous mirror up to us and, like a distorted reflection in the Fun House Hall of Mirrors, the initial reaction is one of disgust. But Kubrick says that it is not the mirror that is distorted; it is our self-perception.
I suppose I should've understood this sooner. The iconic cover art/poster of the movie is of DeLarge, wearing strange make-up, holding a bow and arrow aimed directly at anyone looking at him. At the tip of the arrow is an eyeball, and this simultaneously seems to be both an accusation and a warning: Kubrick is telling us we are being watched and convicted by proxy of Alex DeLarge.
Whatever else it might be, it is a neat trick, deftly executed, and nausea-inducing.