Can A Clockwork Orange be seen as ideological and how is the idea of conventional ideology critiqued/”denaturalised” throughout the film?
Kubrick once said about A Clockwork Orange that “part of the artistic challenge is to show the violence as Alex sees it, not with the disapproving eye of the moralist” (Wild, 2016). The film starts with several scenes in which the main character is shown enjoying violent behaviour and commiting crimes. Most scenes are underlined by music.
This brings up the question of to what extent conventional ideological ideas can be found in a film that represents a naturally immoral protagonist. Does showing violence cause emulation or aversion in the audience? This essay will evaluate to what extent the film is critical of its shown images and story.
A Clockwork Orange is a film directed by Stanley Kubrick from 1972 that is based on Anthony Burgess’ book under the same name. Situated in a near-future London, the spectator follows the main character, Alex, and his friends through a life of commiting crimes, including burglary, physical violence and rape. Alex is captured by the police and imprisoned. After two years, he is offered to be part of a psychological experiment that could free him within two weeks. He becomes subject to aversion therapy in which he is forced to watch crimes like the ones he has committed. The films are accompanied by different classical music and are supposed to turn Alex against violence and sexual desires.
As promised, he is released after two weeks from the supposedly successful experiment. Turned away from his family and sent away from home, he now becomes subject to violence of former victims and friends. One of his victims finds him and first helps first but later decides to torture Alex when he recognises the young man. Being locked in a room and exposed to the music used in the experiments, Alexs committs a suicide attemt. When he wakes up in a hospital the people responsible for his therapy visit him. They have a conversation about what happened to him. Finally, as last scene before the closing credits, the audience witnesses his old self being back by a visualisation of Alex’s fantasy of having sex with a woman in front of an applauding audience. He has returned to his evil self (Hughes, 2000: 160).
The film uses often minimalist scenery and alienating decorations such as mannequins that remind of theatre stage design. Through this, the film emphasises the strange, timeless world it seems to represent. As the scenery feels abstract and unnatural, the spectator is interrupted in the process of possibly becoming comfortable with the set design throughout the film.
The feeling of a theatre performance is enhanced by the way the protagonist seems to perform through singing and dancing when he and his group of friends rob a writer and his wife in their house. Whilst beating up the man and undressing the woman to presumably rape her, Alex performs Singing in the Rain. The protagonist’s positive, rather childish nature but immoral and brutal behaviour is hereby first truly emphasised.
This is underlined by what is explicitly shown to the audience and what is left to assumption. The violence in the scene as well as in others is mostly styalized as the act of killing characters or raping the female character is not shown to the audience. Later in the film when Alex kills the cat woman, the camera cuts to one of the paintings in the room showing an open mouth in bright colours whilst hearing the womans scream. All brutality is left as abstract, letting the audience connect this to the main character who does not seem emotionally affected by his actions (Kubrick, 1972).
A film with a protagonist like Alex Burgess seems to oppose the Ideology of most Hollywood films. They often represent a hero or heroine for audience to identify with and who after all can represent society’s idea of the “good”. If the character does not fit the heroic image the ideology required, they learn and change throughout the film. By learning personal responsibility, the protagonist develops traits through actions such as saving (in literal or moral sense) other characters for example. This reassures the moral certitude which is usually easier to identify with (Wild, 2016).
If thrills of sex and violence are presented, they very often need to be overcome by the hero to inspire a change of the self in the spectator. This can also reassure the spectator their as negative seen traits are part of human nature. The cinematic experience becomes a source of release of own fears (Dudley, 1984).
Struggle with id and unconscious desires can be represented in an evil figure or force that gets defeated. This overt representation can be a way for the spectator to unconciously understand their own fears and desires and deal them in a non-active way (Wild, 2016).
An alternative or additional anti-hero can become hero through recognising societies ideologist ideas are true and natural (ibid). Reffering to A Clockwork Orange, this was a possible way to let Alex develop in the end. The British Version of the novel suggested the protagonist actually having changed and finally seeking to settle down to have a family of his own. Kubrick although preferred the ending of the American Version of the book (Hughes, 2000: 177). With his ending, he moves away from an ideological main character entirely. Alex does not inherit any moral but returns to his old behaviour.
The law executed in A Clockwork Orange recognises him as flawed person in their system. This brings up the question if it’s authorities could be seen as acting in an ideological way. By punishing the protagonist for his crimes, they first appear to do so. However, the aversion therapy he is offered to be part of breaks this idea. He becomes object to their torture and is shown suffering on screen (ibid.: 159-160). As he is defenseless and object to their power, he slowly starts losing control over his own will. This lets the spectator become partial empathetic for the more and more childish seeming character. This process finds its climax when Alex is tortured by his former victim. The man is playing the one piece of music to Alex that he used to enjoy but now can not stant because it has been used in his therapy. He tries to commit suicide as an escape from his inner suffering. The audience hereby is torn between disliking the main character but not agreeing with the film’s authorities’ position either.
By showing the audience the opposite of an ideological process, Kubrick lets the audience become aware of their own values through being shocked by the film’s violence. The film however opposes the process of identification through the cinematic apperatus.
When looking at the role of overtly failing ideology in the film, Kubrick’s use of the cinematic apperatus is important. In ideological films the cinematic apparatus is of central importance for the process of the spectator’s identification. Per theorists, such as Christian Metz, the oversized screen, the dark room and the loud surrounding sound make the audience watch the film in an almost hypnotic state. If the protagonist acts in idealistic way, the oversized characters’ images on the screen make an identification easier. Knowing the film is fictional but at the same time being caught by the attractions of large, fast moving images result in the spectator not thinking but identifying with characters (Dudley, 1984: 43).
In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick uses the cinematic apperatus to engange the spectator in the protagonists struggle and to provoke confusion about which side is bad and which is good. The therapy scene lets the audience become unsure about who’s side they are on, as the therapy appears to be torturous. A change of Alex’s nature is being initiated through identification in film through the cinematic apperatus he cannot escape.
The films he is forced to watch show scenes that strongly resemble the ones that have been shown earlier to the cinematic audience of Kubrick’s film. They are however more explicit, which Alex’s comment underlines when he has his first therapy session. He states: “It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem real when you viddy them on a screen.” (Kubrick, 1972). The quote emphasises his feeling of not having been aware of the reality before seeing them on screen. Which means that he has seen his own violence and crimes in the way the audience in the cinema has seen them, underlined with music and without realising the actual impact through missing explicity. Kubrick uses the medium of cinema to shock the audience instead of letting them passively accept and inherit the images.
The character soon starts to feel unwell and is opposed to the images. Hereby the main character is experiencing what the audience supposibly has throughout the first half of the film. By suddenly going through similar feelings and throughts as Alex, one can partially feel empathetic for him. At the same time Kubrick demonstates what even an immoral character feels when being confronted with such images through the cinematic apperatus. He seems to underline that opposing this level of violence when being exposed to it in cinema is the natural reaction.
He states:” I don’t believe that anyone sympathises with Alex, and there is absolutely no evidence that anyone does. Alex clashes with some authority figures in the strory who seem as bad as he is, if not worse in a different way.” (Hughes, 2000: 180) Kubrick demonstrates that a non-functioning system of society is possibly worse and more sinister than one chaotically evil character who is being portraid as the bad within the system.
A Clockwork Orange represents an immoral main figure who glorifies violence, misogyny and crime by not being empathetic and seemingly immune to judgement of what is right and wrong. Kubrick uses a deeplpy flawed protagonist and the cinema as medium to not only reverse the principles of ideology and let the audience see it as more than a covert element of film but also highlight the inner struggle represented in human nature. Kubrick lets the audience struggle between aversion and and partial empathy. About the criticism he received for the film he states that “he (Alex) is within all of us, which makes some people very angry and uncomfortable. They are unable to accept this view of themselves and, therefore, they become angry at the film.” (Wild, 2016).
The aversion therapy forces new ideas such as the societies ideology of non-violent behaviour into Alex’s mind through the medium of film. This can be seen as a metaphor for cinema and its audience in general. Kubrick sees the evil as part of anyone’s character and could seem to question whether a “healthy”, violent free ideology is as natural to the audience as it is thought to be, considering cinema is present constantly and projects ideologies upon the spectator in the exact same way as the film’s therapy of Alex DeLarge.