A snake in a drawer, because it doesn’t have legs.
If I just describe the basic plot, the movie sounds pretty ordinary, actually. The show is nowhere near as confusing as my joke is.
In an indeterminate time in an indeterminate city, Alex and his young band of “droogs” attack men and sexually terrorize women. I kind of missed what led to their falling out (difference of opinion?), but after Alex accidentally kills a woman, they smash a milk bottle in his face and leave him to be collected by the authorities.
A couple years into his prison sentence, he discovers there’s a radical new therapy available and is pleased to be chosen for the treatment. We discover it’s designed to instill dread and illness in him if he experiences anything involving sex, violence and, unfortunately, Beethoven’s 9th symphony, which had been one of his favourite pieces before the playing of it was inextricably linked with this torturous experience.
But the classical conditioning works like it’s supposed to and Alex is shown to be rehabilitated and capable of returning to polite society – where he soon discovers nobody wants him there. A couple droogs are policemen now, but still thugs enough to cause him some grief. And, the people Alex victimized haven’t forgotten what he did, either. They aren’t content to believe he’s been fixed by science, so they beat him up and torture him for a while themselves, ultimately making Alex so desperate for a quick death he’ll throw himself out a window.
Unable to achieve maximum velocity (or land on his head) he wakes to find himself in plaster casts and once more the topic of newspapers. But this time, the criminals are the government’s men of science who fucked his brain up so horribly. Another attempt is made to “cure” him at a psych facility, and it apparently works, which is where the movie ends.
I don’t know how well Stanley Kubrick’s vision matched what Anthony Burgess wrote in the novel, but you can certainly count on Kubrick’s style to keep a movie mesmerizing, if only because you can’t believe what you’re seeing. My poor eyeballs. Poor poor eyeballs.
One of the posts in a Clockwork discussion provides a little more in the way of analysis:
Though it is true, the sex is important to the story, it is important only in the larger sense of “ultra-violence”. Kubrick makes it so that sex seemed to be something Alex was completely obsessed with, when really it was the experience of rape and abusing a girl that he really enjoyed. Also, he treated rape exactly like he treated the physical attack on people; it was just another chance to hurt someone. In the movie, sex shows up constantly, from the very beginning, with the lewd tables and gaudy drink dispensers, to the end, when Alex is cured. It shows up in an old lady’s home, it shows up in the form of a nurse and the doctor, and yet another time with the two girls in the record shop. Alex did not enjoy sex. He enjoyed ultra-violence. He saw women as objects that were to be used for the ol’ ‘in-and-out’.
In books an author can get away with deeper themes and brutal behaviours that fit those themes. Maybe not as easy to sell to a film audience in 1971? Done as a movie now, I think a writer/director would make more obvious/gratuitous links between the violence Alex enjoys and the violent sex he craves. It’d make more of his desire to have power over people, be it his victims, or his so-called friends. I suppose even the mental castration could be improved upon, but I actually liked how Kubrick showed Alex’s inner torment and the loss of his free will. He looked beaten, broken, devastated by the realization that he’s lost more than he even knew he had.
A new movie might also include the actual end of the book. Later plays based on the book have done so. Burgess shows Alex returning to some of the old behaviours of his youth. He soon loses the thrill of it and the reader discovers he may have matured enough to leave that kind of life behind just like one of his droogs managed. He contemplates married life with kids, but wonders if they’d just wind up being like he used to be. Apparently the 21st and last chapter was left out of early American printings because it was assumed people wouldn’t want to read about Alex’s reform, that they’d prefer a bleak and bitter finish to his tale of woe. Kubrick was also apparently unaware of a 21st chapter when he filmed it, or if he did know of it, also chose to leave it out. From the discussion post again:
Burgess had a point in introducing this chapter. He questioned many things, but one of the crucial questions of his book was quoted by the prison ‘charlie’. “Does God want a person to be good, or does he want that person to choose good over evil?” or something to that effect. Key word: choose. Burgess introduced a bureaucratic feel toward the question of free will. Who cares what it does, or how its done, all that you need to know is that it works. Burgess clearly feels that this bureaucratic opinion toward free will leads to totalitarianism as demonstrated by the Soviet Union at the time. His reason for adding the final chapter in the book was to prove that even people seemingly hopeless did stand a fighting chance in choosing good over evil. First by Pete, and then by Alex. The book lost some of Burgess’ point, but it did not lose all of it, mainly because the violence and sex were not over exaggerated. However, in the Kubrick version, he seemed to revel in the blood, gore, and pain caused by these hoodlums. He completely lost the main point of this fable.
If we take choice out of the equation, we may as well be clockwork oranges.
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