Never Seen It, #36 of 200: A Clockwork Orange

Slowly and methodically, we move through a list of 200 movies I'd never seen, watching one at a time, and writing about them. Here is the next movie on that list.

A Clockwork Orange

1971

Your Favorite Movie, Redux

During our Casablanca conversation a couple weeks ago, Fisher mentioned to me that his favorite movie of all time was only a few alphabetical spots down the list, so I reached out to him to get his take on why he liked A Clockwork Orange. Here's what he had to say:

I first saw Clockwork Orange when I was eighteen and at the twilight of my "I just bought another eight DVDs at this Borders bookstore after school" days. Going into the viewing, I knew that it was on the AFI Top 100 list and had a fair sense of what would come with it being from Kubrick.

For no good reason, this will be my first deep introspection into why this is my #1 all-time. Perhaps I come out the other side with this movie having been supplanted by either of its rivals, Kill Bill or Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps I'm not prepared to deal with that magnitude of change. This pandemic is hard enough.

Trying to recall my first viewing as best I can, a few things come to mind. The cinematography, music... and basically every frame at all times. It was such a WILD departure from anything I'd seen. The EXTREMELY mature situations I watched unfold really felt like I was getting away with something. My dad must have overhead from the hallway as he knocked on my door and poked his head in to see what I was watching. He purposefully confirmed it was a good movie, and accidentally confirmed that okay this is weird Dad cool goodbye.

I love long takes and I love wide shots. Kubrick was the king of both. They help you flesh out this fairly bizarre world you're forced to witness. Colors can be quite drab and stark but they can be extremely vivid. The intelligence of their application begged even a simpler me, "Why these colors, here and now?" The music only speaks for itself. I couldn't fake an understanding of the big picture: Beethoven, mixing/recording/assembling all audio pieces. All I know is the whole sound fits in the movie like the snuggest of puzzle pieces.

And the content. No shame in my game, I'm fascinated by the extremes of humanity and I have a strong morbid curiosity. For a talent like Kubrick to exhibit things right up a bunch of my alleys turned out to be a guaranteed success. The humor is perfect. Chief Officer Barnes is an all-time movie character for me. Malcolm McDowell swims in his role. Mum and Dad, also hilarious. Oh my God Mr. Deltoid! What a world if all humans spoke as Mr. Deltoid does.

Goddamn dude, what a great movie. It grabs me by the balls and it hits me in the balls but thank god only metaphorically. And I respect all opinions to the contrary but I wholeheartedly endorse the ending. Yeah this is just the top banger for me, through and through. Go see it if you haven't, nerds.

I would later sell 95+% of all those DVDs to buy a Nintendo Wii, and three months later sell that Wii for cash 'cause I'm a hustla baby, I just want you to know.

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Viddy This Veshch

Alright, back to Joe. Thanks to Fisher for taking some of the pressure off and writing half of this blog post. I personally liked the film a lot. This is sacrilege, but I probably liked it better than the book version, since the absurd slang was a lot easier to digest when it was also being portrayed on the screen. I also agree with Fisher in that I thought it was provocative, especially for a film released in 1971. Like, yup, there's explicit rape and violence in the film, and it was nominated for Best Picture?

My big takeaway from A Clockwork Orange kind of spins off of that thought. I am always fascinated when a film seems to be commenting on the audience's viewing experience, and I thought that A Clockwork Orange toed that line.

So in the back half of the film, Alex is being forced to watch videos of violence so that he will form negative associations with depictions of it. The idea being that if he watches enough of these videos, he'll become physically ill if he is confronted with violence in real life. There's an in-film argument among tertiary characters as to the moral implications of such a "treatment." The priest is saying that Alex can't be moral if you take away his choice.

But one of the doctors makes this point (I'm paraphrasing): "It is normal to feel ill and uncomfortable when confronted with physical or sexual violence. By forcing Alex to negatively associate with violence, we are actually making him normal, and thus are treating him."

If you zoom out, that doctor could be talking about the audience's experience with A Clockwork Orange itself, no? It's an uncomfortable movie (I explicitly remember a high school classmate begging me not to watch this movie because it was "too fucked up"). Some of the rape and senseless violence could be tough to stomach.

And that took me down a road that I don't necessarily need to bring blog readers down too—questioning why I personally didn't really get too squeamish about any of this, whether it was because my job has made me numb to this kind of stuff, or if it's a general modern-societal thing, in that we are all conditioned to see such depictions of violence as normal because we are surrounded with violence every day, at least a lot more compared to an audience almost exactly 50 years ago.

Suffice it to say that I thought it was a very interesting idea, and it pushed the film up a level for me. Otherwise, a good film, visually stunning enough to more than make up for its shaky (but ultimately intriguing) story.

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A Quick Mention of Kubrick

I usually like discussing whether film directors typically have a "style," or if there are certain aspects of their different films that can tie them together, like if the audience can say, "Yup, this is definitely a film directed by _____ for X and Y reasons." I'm also usually the wrong person to be having such a discussion, because I very rarely am familiar enough with a director's filmography to be able to speak to it competently.

So anything I know about Kubrick's "style" or whatever comes from other people / the internet, because I have seen only a fraction of his filmography. In fact, this is only the second Kubrick film I've ever seen (the first being war film Paths of Glory for Sam and Frank's erstwhile Zoom film club). So just based on having seen these two films only, I can assume that the internet is correct in that Kubrick does not necessarily have a particular style, and in fact is famous for successfully making enjoyable films covering a really wide range of styles and content.

I didn't make my Never Seen It list with any directors in mind, and probably for 90% of them, I had no idea who the director was when I put the title on the list. So it is only coincidence that this list is absolutely packed with Stanley Kubrick films. We will eventually cover Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket, Spartacus, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. That's a really interesting and wide-ranging lineup!

Hopefully I will be able to answer the question "What makes a Kubrick film?" by the end of this project, even if the answer really is that there's no similarities at all.

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GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We switch gears with Cloverfield—not switch gears emotionally, since that's another film that's probably designed to freak you out, but more so filmmaking-wise, because of the found-footage conceit? But we'll see.