A Clockwork Orange

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

Interesting, albeit long, article actually, but only copied and pasted for the final paragraph. Thought it very 'EFM'!!

 

 

The old ultra-violence

 

After a 27-year absence, the infamous Clockwork Orange is back on screen. Peter Bradshaw applauds the return of the late Stanley Kubrick's dazzling, disturbing masterpiece

 

Friday March 3, 2000

The Guardian

 

"Why did they ban Chocolate Orange?" Ali G's stern question last year to James Ferman, the former British film censor, epitomises the alienated, semi-informed bemusement of an entire generation. In 1973, the late Stanley Kubrick instructed Warner Bros to withdraw from UK distribution his extraordinary, flawed masterpiece A Clockwork Orange, based on the Anthony Burgess novel. That remarkable act of selective self-suppression has meant that almost no one under the age of 44 has seen it in this country. And now, for the first time in 27 years, A Clockwork Orange is back on British cinema screens. We can all see for ourselves what the fuss has been about.

 

For decades, Kubrick's explicit and brilliantly scabrous fable of "ultra-violence" has existed only as a fascinating rumour. It has been a spectral, residual influence here, surfacing in strange, analogous forms. From the Sex Pistols, Bowie and Julien Temple to the Gooners and the Inter-City Firm, the film has persisted in making its shadowy inscriptions on our collective unconscious. Kubrick's diktat was taken very seriously by Warner Bros - what modern commercial auteur could hope now for that level of unquestioning corporate support? - and policed so vigorously that no video copies could legitimately be sold or viewed here; a screening at the (now defunct) Scala cinema in north London in 1993 led to prosecution.

 

For years, British fans of Kubrick were forced to watch A Clockwork Orange on grainy, exhausted prints at fleapit cinemas in Paris, Amsterdam and New York. It is only quite recently, with the growth of global internet retail, and the availability of a new generation of "multi-regional" DVD player, that we have been able to import the American DVD edition from amazon.com, albeit at the risk of confiscation by customs and excise.

 

As of next Friday, all this will recede into the legendary past. With it will go the strange dual reality for A Clockwork Orange: it has never been a "lost" or samizdat movie such as, say, Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried, being so freely available everywhere but here. So as a cinematic text, it has had a status at once marginal and canonical. However, there remains its strange position in the history of censorship. Was Kubrick effectively the victim of censorship, or its most notorious and autocratic perpetrator?

 

Without question, his film appeared to have been the inspiration for horrifying acts of rape and murder. Copycat delinquents and wannabe yobbos swaggered around London's west end and football terraces in bowlers and eyeliner, and these incidents were gloatingly magnified on the news pages and shrilly denounced in the leader columns. Outspoken judges hammered Kubrick's film, and home secretary Reginald Maudling solemnly requested a private screening.

 

Certainly, its reception as a film was very different from the purely literary reception Burgess had experienced when the book came out 10 years earlier, in 1962 - part of the huge frenzy of work Burgess embarked on when he thought (wrongly) that he was dying of an inoperable brain tumour. It seemed at this stage to belong to a more cerebral and muted tradition of satire and dystopia: the worlds of Swift, Orwell or Huxley. Provocative, yes, splenetic, certainly, but not incendiary, not an incitement to riot.

 

The book had no very great circulation until the film version appeared, based, to Burgess's considerable chagrin, on the American edition, which had excised a final, emollient chapter showing the older Alex appearing to repudiate violence. As a film, its context was quite different. It seemed to belong to a newer, 70s cinematic movement, along with Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Jewison's Rollerball - sleeker, sexier, more troubling in their amoral violence. Kubrick himself could not or would not justify his film, so the job fell to Burgess; the worldly, well-travelled writer was a natural media performer, and one who was aware that he owed fame and fortune to Kubrick.

 

Only when Burgess was wheeled out did the general public become widely aware of the inspiration for the original text: an assault by four army deserters on his pregnant wife in 1944, an appalling event which he had creatively merged both with the Teds-and-Rockers clashes he witnessed on returning to 60s Britain after many years abroad, and the teenage hooliganism he and his wife had seen on holiday in Russia in 1961. This terrible personal history became a vital part of the Clockwork Orange myth. Burgess now assumed an unquestioned moral authority to speak in the film's defence, for had he and his wife not suffered directly as a result of precisely this sort of violence?

 

But, for all this, it was never banned. The film's commercial run ended; the moral panic subsided and the unspoken consensus seemed to be that there was no increase in the quantum of crime. Put baldly, the rapists and criminals were doing what they would have done anyway, except with funny make-up. It was only in 1979, when the NFT was unable to screen it for a Kubrick retrospective, that anyone realised what the director had done. Infuriatingly, Kubrick never favoured his audience with a clear explanation, leaving anti-censorship liberals like me unsure whether to revere him or not.

 

It may be that, with the magnificent self-belief of the artist, and displeased with a British establishment that had misrepresented a serious work of art, he was exercising his prerogative of deciding who gets to see his film and where. Perhaps he was sick and tired of being made the scapegoat for society's violence, or was understandably scared by (rumoured) death threats against his family. But withdrawing his film also looks, then as now, like a monumental loss of nerve, and a catastrophic concession to the pro-censorship lobby. Removing it from distribution here and nowhere else, and, moreover, appearing to retreat to the secrecy of his Hertfordshire hideaway, was arguably a pusillanimous abnegation of responsibility.

 

Why was it all right for the rest of the world to experience the socio-cultural consequences of A Clockwork Orange - whatever they may be - and not the United Kingdom, where Kubrick happened to live? Did the director believe his film really was dangerous? The only answers are to be found in the film itself, which anticipates in the most extraordinary way the whole question of censorship, screen violence, the imposition of power by the judiciary and media as the agents of the state - all the questions in which Kubrick and his most famous film have been entangled for nearly 30 years.

 

Seeing this remarkable and very British film for the first time is an exhilarating and disturbing experience. So far from being dated, it seems, in many respects, breathtakingly in advance of almost anything else around in its torsions and its longueurs, its magnificent coups du cinéma, its narrative scope and sweep, and its moments of sheer, bizarre offensiveness "intentional and unintentional".

 

A Clockwork Orange deserves to be called a work of raddled genius, if anything does, with all that the word implies of dysfunction, waywardness and dazzling, delirious insight. It is like seeing a mixture of Jacobean revenge drama, 18th-century picaresque novel, sci-fi porn and horror comic. Only in its quaint and questionable approach to women and rape is Clockwork Orange a let-down - of which, more in a moment. From the very first shot, of the charismatic tearaway Alex (Malcolm McDowell) smirking at the camera, we are immersed in the disquieting tale of the leader of a menacing gang of costumed "droogs".

 

They speak in "nadsat", Burgess's quasi-Joycean experimental youth patois, a hybrid of English, Latin and Russian, a literary and linguistic adventure that already puts this picture in an IQ league miles above everything else. They dress in fetishistic costumes and make-up, and stage sadistic beatings and sexual assaults. Alex is finally arrested and subjected to grotesque psychological experiments.

 

The shock of recognition is what hits you first. Is that a cherubic young Warren Clarke as Alex's mutinous sidekick Dim? Is that a sideburned Steven Berkoff as a thuggish police sergeant? Can that possibly be Michael Bates as the shriekingly malevolent prison guard - an actor that my thirtysomething generation remembers solely as the blacked-up punkah-wallah in the 70s sitcom It Ain't Half Hot Mum? A Clockwork Orange is a virtual gallery of British character actors, including Patrick Magee, Anthony Sharp and Margaret Tyzack.

 

It is at least partly their presence that gives A Clockwork Orange elements of an early 70s soft-core sex comedy - with McDowell as a kind of Bizarro-world Robin Askwith, larking about with his mates, picking up birds at the local record shop and getting laid. The rape scenes that caused all the flap then are pretty wince-making now: unpleasant and uncomfortable for the wrong reasons.

 

There are quite a few: a woman is brutally raped to Singin' in the Rain, while the audience is forced into the position of her husband, bound, gagged and made to watch. A woman is almost raped by a rival gang, and there is another sexual assault in the filmed violence Alex is made to watch in prison. A Clockwork Orange shows that the master's penchant for tits-and-panties semi-nudity did not begin with Eyes Wide Shut; there is a lot of raunchy sashaying about from bare-breasted women and the juxtaposition of these swinging moments with fairly crude rape scenes suggests that Kubrick mentally filed rape under "sex" rather than "violence".

 

The assault on the tramp that begins the film still delivers a spine-tingling shock to the senses: a hypnotically unpleasant moment. After a few liveners in the weird milk-bar, with its pseudo-sexy decor and fashion-shoot lighting, the droogs arrive at a strange, deserted underpass to see a drunk, prostrate tramp singing. When they sneeringly start to applaud, the sense of imminent violence is horrible, chillingly enhanced by its strange, semi-realist setting. This violence has been widely called amoral, and this is probably right; it was a misplaced gallantry for the film's supporters to claim it is "intensely moral".

 

That is not really true, though there is a queasy slickness to the violence, a balletic ritualisation that arguably acts as a prophylactic, as Alexander Walker has argued. (And the slow-motion scene of the droogs strolling along the marina is very reminiscent of Mr Blue, Mr Orange et al.) But what is also important is that A Clockwork Orange, in its own warped way, shows the consequences of violence, and gives violence an intelligible context. The tramp is not forgotten; he returns at the end and exacts a terrible vengeance. And we learn that the victim of Alex's rape died after the assault, ostensibly of an unrelated illness, but that her grieving widower knows in his heart that the rapist is guilty. It is a strangely affecting moment, unexpectedly drawing on the messiness and pathos of real life.

 

It is the scenes in prison that take A Clockwork Orange into the realms of inspiration; here it becomes a brilliant essay in cynicism and paranoia, rooted in an age in which Harold Wilson's progressivism had been trounced in the 1970 general election by Ted Heath's "Selsdon" project of political reaction, an age in which race violence was on the increase and the Northern Ireland Troubles had just begun.

 

Keen to clear "ordinary" criminals like Alex out of prison to make room for political subversives, the government makes him the guinea-pig for a fast-track rehabilitation-brainwash: an aversion therapy in which he is forced to watch scenes of violence, his eyelids clipped open, saline solution dropped into his flinching eyeballs.

 

The ghosts of Foucault and RD Laing attend Kubrick's vision of the state's economy of violence: how criminal aberrance is countered with clinical, scientific subjection. These scenes are unforgettably horrible and offer a prescient commentary on censorship: here is the traumatised cinemagoer, unable to stop the state flooding his consciousness with screen images of violence.

 

Is this the censor's world turned upside down? Or actually the power of the censor writ large - the censor's yearning to control and regulate human reaction to screen images? ("It's funny how the colours of the real, real world are not real until you viddy them on film," muses Alex between sessions, anticipating a very modern critical discourse on how we have come to think of screen representations of the world as more real than reality itself.)

 

Finally, Kubrick shows the nation being scandalised by this technique, via headlines in the Telegraph and the old broadsheet Mail - eerily, just the sort of newspaper hue-and-cry which would drive A Clockwork Orange off the screen.

 

What an incredible punch Clockwork Orange packs, like a visitor from another planet, among the production-line dullness of most cinema. This is ironic violence, stylised violence, but violence with human consequences and human cost.

 

The reissuing of A Clockwork Orange is a reclamation of part of movie history. While American movie brats such as Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin and Altman were making the 70s a thrilling era for movie-making, it turns out that this country had a part to play in it as well. Here in Britain, Kubrick was showing that the spirit of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era was conceived not just in Los Angeles, Burbank and Manhattan, but in Radlett and Harpenden and St Albans. For all its flaws and cracks, this is a film that has to be seen, and its re-release is a festival day in the history of British cinema.

 

 

[AFF]

Peter Bradshaw [the critic what wrote that] should take himself a little more seriously, in my humble opinion.

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

Haha! I know what you mean!!

 

 

[AFF]

'Eyes Wide Shut': Rubbish.

 

Burgess' book ['A Clockwork Orange'] is unreadable. I didn't know that he was mistakenly diagnosed with a brain tumour at the time he wrote it. Quite possibly, the diagnosis was made by doctors who didn't actually examine the chap. They just tried to read the thing.

 

I was interested in the comparison to James Joyce. What did the guy write "quasi-Joycean"? "Quasi-Joycean"? What a poser! 'A Clockwork Orange' has a common factor with Joyce's 'Dubliners'. They are both unreadable.

 

A couple of generations of sixth form, University students and wannabe intellectuals have been handed Joyce's work and told "This, my son, is masterpiece. Read and enjoy", by someone who has, himself read that the thing is a masterpiece. Instead of saying "I tried to read it but can't. It's junk", the reader has thought 'I'd better go along with this. The Literary Establishment says it's great so it must be'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

Did you enjoy the film of A Clockwork Orange, AFF?

 

Admittedly, I have not read the book.

 

 

[Claire!]

I didn't like Clockwork Orange.

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

I wasn't talking to you.

 

 

[Claire!]

Oh <img src="/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

 

I still dont like it though!!!!!!!!!!

[AFF]

I haven't seen the film, Zealster. I will probably watch it some time. An interesting concept from the bits that I have seen on T.V. My father remembers its release and withdrawal in the early 70s and the press comment at the time. The skinhead era was, what, 1968/70. They wore the boots, braces and trousers but no eyeliner or bowler hats, of course. A few did briefly when the film was released.

 

I suspect that other than a few pseudo-intellectuals Burgess' book hadn't been read by many of the yoof at the end of that decade.

 

The book is complete junk. It's actually written in a 'foreign' language, described by your critic chap at the start of the thread whose name I have forgotten already, as 'patois'. Kubrick must have had Burgess translate it in order to make the movie.

[YB941 5thD EFM ~soul~]

I enjoyed the film very much the first couple of times I saw it.

 

You're welcome to a lend of it if you're interested??

 

 

[JKiF]

good, good film tho' dated now...

 

 

i was one of those guilty people who saw it in a flea pit in Paris (well on the champs elysee) sp.)

 

 

quite a few bands have seen it too...

[G Angel]

Quote:

The book is complete junk. It's actually written in a 'foreign' language, described by your critic chap at the start of the thread whose name I have forgotten already, as 'patois'. Kubrick must have had Burgess translate it in order to make the movie.

Whilst one is never sure whether or not to take AFF with a pinch of the finest, these views, and the views cited earlier on Dubliners, if serious, are quite sad. Let's just all read Harry Potter and Jackie Collins.

[AFF]

Greetings G Angel.

 

I am happy to state that I have never read anything by Jackie Collins or any of the Potter books and I am unlikely so to do.

 

I was quite serious in my views of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Joyce's Dubliners. I have tried to read them both. More than once. I wonder when you last read A Clockwork Orange? Scan a few pages again soon and let me know that you sill believe that it's a masterpiece.

 

The Emperor's New Clothes, GA. The Emperors New Clothes.

 

Best regards.

 

 

[G Angel]

I last read CO on holiday in the Maldives in spring 2001.

 

It may not be a masterpiece, but it is undeniably clever. You try writing something which is essentially horrific on every level in a manner which conveys emotions other than fear and rejection in the reader.

[Big J R]

Brilliant book and brilliant film.

 

Originally written as a severe warning as to the worlds future, which, I fear, has become a painful reality !

 

(Sorry guys ! A bit high brow, maybe, but then I am knocking on a bit.)

 

Read the book at boarding school, even though it was banned, just before the film 'IF' was released. (Another Malcom MacDowell masterpiece).