‘A Clockwork Orange’ Is Poised To Trigger A Whole New Generation After Landing On Netflix

Trigger warning: Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 A Clockwork Orange is now streaming on Netflix. All these years later, it’s hardly for nothing that this sex-and-violence drenched sensationalist parable remains Kubrick’s most problematic film. You hardly need be a “snowflake” to find it objectionable; even as an admirer of the movie, I consider large swatches of it near-repellent. For all that, it’s definitely a product of its time.

The movie’s based on a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess whose protagonist, Alex, begins as an unrepentant thug. Living in a not-too-distant future in which the youth speak a Russian-inflected slang called Nadsat, the first-person chronicle relates how Alex is imprisoned and subjected to a medical treatment that renders him nonviolent by sapping him of free will.

On publication, the book had some hipster cachet in Swinging London and elsewhere. Then-Rolling-Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham dropped some Nadsat in the liner notes to The Rolling Stones…Now! and floated the idea of a film version of the book in which Mick Jagger and his gang would play Alex and his “droogs” (buddies). Weirdly enough, American pop artist Andy Warhol beat Oldham to the option, and made a typically lo-fi version of Orange in 1966, called Vinyl.

By the time Kubrick got around to the property, he had spent the better part of the 1960s making his monumental, and ultimately G-rated, 2001: A Space Odyssey. During that time, the U.S. Production Code had collapsed, the counterculture and Swinging London had happened, on-screen nudity was a thing, and so on.

It’s not quite correct to say that Kubrick approached his vision of Burgess’ novel like a kid in a perv candy store. But a combination of the new freedoms and Kubrick’s own dyspeptic view of humanity wound up giving A Clockwork Orange a little too much exuberance in its depictions of rape and other forms of assault. It’s not that the film condones these acts so much as tilts the scale hard toward the aspects of them that sociopaths find seductive.

It doesn’t help, really, that Malcolm McDowell, in the lead role of Alex, is such a winning screen presence. The movie begins with an extreme closeup of his false-eyelashed peeper — a visual rhyme, obsessive Kubrick heads will tell you, with the gaze of the Star Baby at the end of 2001. His relaxation session with the droogs at a “milk bar” is enlivened by a bit of Beethoven lieder, sung by a woman at a nearby table. (In Burgess’ scheme, and Kubrick’s, a love of the composer Alex refers to as “Ludwig van” is posited as his sole redeeming quality — one which is also sapped from him after he is subjected to his “cure.”)

When droog Dim mocks the music, Alex — like his pals dressed in a white jumpsuit and bowler hats, and threateningly accessorized — gives his boy a swift smack in the crotch with his cane. McDowell makes the gesture seem not merely justified but kind of charming. (McDowell clearly based his performance, including the vocal mannerisms, on Albert Finney’s groundbreaking work as a sometimes ingratiating, sometimes brutal working-class cad in 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.)

After that it’s off to the races, beating homeless guys, doing a home invasion of a writer’s country home, beating him and raping his wife, getting in a knife-and-bottle fight with another gang (and interrupting a not-yet-begun gang rape in the process) and other acts of what Alex calls “ultra-violence” — until internecine gang conflicts lead to Alex’s capture and imprisonment. After which he’s subjected to the “Ludovico Treatment” which makes him wretch at even the thought of violence. Released into the world a “cured” subject, he then relives the film’s first half in reverse, only this time as the victim of brutality, leading to a thoroughly sarcastic punchline.

As a parable, Kubrick’s vision is substantially less cerebral than Burgess’ and mainly reflects a (not unearned) cynicism about government hypocrisy. Burgess’ take on the free will question grappled with both Christian theological and societal implications. The committed atheist Kubrick contented himself to mock religion (the dancing Christ statues in one of Alex’s Beethoven reveries is one of cinema’s snidest montages) and eyeroll at societal pieties.

The movie has no female characters as such, and those that it potentially has are all sexual playthings or rape victims. In 1970 Terry Southern published the novel Blue Movie, dedicated to Kubrick, about a genius director who tries to make an artistically legitimate porno. In some respects Clockwork takes Southern up on the challenge. At the very least in the dirty-middle-aged-man department. The various displays of pulchritudinous female nudity in the film remind one of the scheme concocted by Dr. Strangelove near the end of Kubrick’s spectacular 1963 nuke satire. Imagining a long term fallout shelter system of caves in which the patriarchal power structure can wait out radiation for several generations, he says there must be women there for breeding, and that such women must be chosen for their “sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.”

Adrienne Corri, the British actor who played the victim of the movie’s most excruciating assault, was a friend of Kubrick and family who, according to John Baxter’s biography of the director, lobbied for the role and was initially asked of Kubrick, “but what if we don’t like the tits, Corri?” Apparently they passed muster, but if that’s what you’re focused on during the actual scene, there’s a problem. Of course Kubrick was being glibly familiar with a friend, but it’s also clear that he was concerned with what we’ll call aesthetics to a degree that the gravity of the themes that such violence addresses was at least a little lost on him. (I think my speculation is borne out by the fact that Kubrick himself pulled the film from British distribution for some time after its release, alarmed by, among other things, the prospect of real-life copycat gang violence he came to believe it could inspire.)

Kubrick was also pulling out the stops in other ways. If 2001 represented not just the ultimate trip but the ultimate in big-scale moviemaking, Orange was an exercise in doing more with less. It was with this movie that the director began pushing what could be done with pared-down lighting. There’s a lot of hand-held camerawork, faster film stocks, fast-motion, slow-motion, fish-eye lensing. There’s evidence that Kubrick was studying younger filmmakers. The scene where Alex picks up two young women at a record store then has fast-motion sex with both of them to a synth version of the “William Tell Overture” was perhaps inspired by a more rudimentary fast-motion sex scene in Brian De Palma’s 1968 Greetings, the overall attitude of which partakes of a post-adolescent snot-nosed disposition that definitely seeped into Kubrick’s film as well. (The movie’s use of “Singin’ In The Rain” didn’t sit well with Gene Kelly or anyone else involved with the classic musical bearing that song’s title, and nor should it; when it plays over the end credits it’s like Kubrick’s ultimate bird-flip to Hollywood, a town he visited for the last time while editing 2001.) The movie still exerts considerable influence on other directors. To name just one recent example, the post-dinner drive that Daniel Day Lewis takes Vicki Krieps on in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a single-shot homage to the “hogs of the road” bit in Clockwork.

For all this, the chilliness of the film spreads like a shroud over its luridness. Its view of power relations and authoritarianism attempting to adopt a humanist face is rudimentary but also convincingly bleak. The director Luis Buñuel famously said of Clockwork, “I was very predisposed against the film; after seeing it I realized it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.”

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream A Clockwork Orange