I was a wayward child.
I did not love my home.
I did not love my father’s voice.
I loved afar to roam.
--- A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange is director Stanley Kubrick’s vision of author Anthony Burgess’s novel by the same name. The title ’A Clockwork Orange’ means a human being who functions like a mechanical toy. The author of the book Bruggus said that ’clockwork’ means mechanical and ’orang’ in the Malay language means a man/person, so the title really translates to ’A Mechanical Person.’ How is this significant to the movie? Read on.
I’m going to divide the movie into three parts for clarity.
Part 1: Ultra violence
The story takes place in Britain somewhere in the future and focuses on four wayward youngsters, who call themselves ’droogs.’ The unofficial leader of the group is Alex DeLarge (portrayed by Malcolm McDowell).
Alex and the rest of the droogs enjoy committing violent crimes (which they call ’the old ultra violence’), including beating to death of old, homeless people, raping (which Alex calls ’the old in-out’) young and middle-aged women alike etc. One can call them ’sociopaths’ at best. The droogs sometimes speak in Nadsat (a slang dialect of English with many Russian influences). To give you a better feel, let me give you a couple of example Nadsat words and their original counterparts in English. The word ’Apology’ is ’Appo Polly Loggy’ in Nadsat. Very well would be viddy well. And a young girl would be called a ’ devotchka’ (Russian word devochka meaning girl).
Apart from committing ultra violence and the old in-out, Alex’s other passion is Beethoven’s music. On some of their usual nightly rampages, Alex beats up a homeless tramp and leaves him to die, breaks into an author’s home and rapes and kills his wife (the author would later be crippled because of the blows delivered to him) and also rapes two girls on different occasions. Alex uses and neglects his own parents. Somewhere along the line, one of the droogs talks back to Alex and is soon taught a lesson for his impudence by being stabbed and thrown in water. Soon after this, the droogs commit an act of treachery and become the reason for Alex to be caught by the police and go to prison.
Part 2: Prison
In the prison, Alex volunteers for an experimental aversion therapy called ’Ludovico technique, ’ because after the treatment they would have to set him free. During the procedure, Alex’s eyes are clamped open (so that he cannot close his eyes during therapy) and he is shown shocking images through which Alex forms certain associations with his old interests like ultra violence and rape. He is now conditioned against acts of sex and violence, but also has inadvertently been conditioned against Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
Part 3: Karmic Cycle
Once he is set free, Alex goes back to his parents’ house only to discover that they have now adopted another young man as their son and have given him Alex’s old room etc. Thus rejected by family, Alex while wandering the streets is recognized by the homeless man he beat up earlier. The tramp brings back men similar to him, and they all together beat up Alex. He is spotted by two police men who come to disperse the crowd. They are two of his former fellow droogs, Dim and Georgie. For the brutality he handed out to them at a regular basis in the past, they lead him down a path, take him into the woods, beat him, dunk his head underwater for long periods of time and leave him to die.
Alex somehow makes it to the nearest house and that house belongs to the author whose wife he earlier raped and murdered, but being in a bad state Alex fails to notice this. The author Mr. Alexander is now confined to a wheelchair and displays traces of insanity. The day the droogs came to his house on a rampage, they were all wearing masks and Mr. Alexander fails to recognize Alex as the offender. Later however, he recognizes him by his voice and knowing that Beethoven’s ninth symphony makes Alex very sick, traps him and plays the music nonstop. Alex jumps out and hurts himself and wakes up in a hospital. By now the government has become very unpopular with the general public because of their experimental aversion therapy and what it did to Alex. He is then cured of his cure. The last scene shows him enjoying Beethoven’s music.
On a personal note:
A lot of controversy surrounds this film. Upon its release, Catholic Christian associations gave it a rating of ‘C’ for ‘Condemned’ thus prohibiting Catholics from watching this film. The film initially received an ‘X’ rating for extreme violence by the Motion Picture Association of America in the USA but now is rated ‘R’ for ‘Restricted.’ The reason for these ratings was the popular opinion that the film glorified violence and rape.
In the United Kingdom, a couple of murder cases while in court, had the prosecutors referring to this film as the cause of the criminal behavior in the accused.
Popular opinion is that this flick inspired atleast one copycat murder. The author of the book on which the movie is based had a hard time justifying his writings to the media.
I personally felt that the movie in a weird way showed us the cycle of Karma, or “what goes around comes around.” Note that most of the people who were treated badly by Alex got the chance to deliver similar treatment to him, be it his parents, pals or strangers.
The central question of the film is “Is being good i.e. abstaining from acts of evil only because one is ‘conditioned to do’ only good acts, the same as doing good because one ‘wants’ to?” And when does a person cease to be a human being? Is it when one’s freewill is taken away from them? Again I felt that doing good because bad acts make one physically sick (note that I said ‘physically’) although bad acts are ‘mentally’ appealing does not make one a good citizen. A law bound citizen? Maybe. But not a good person.
A person without freewill to perform acts of his/her own liking is not a real human being. Again, this is my personal opinion. Such a person is best considered to be a piece of mechanical work.
Free will separates living beings from inanimate machines. Don’t you think so? Hence the name (as I explained in the beginning of the review) ‘A Clockwork Orange, ’ or ‘A Mechanical Person.’
Also a person lacking freewill would be an easy target to pick on, to those who possess it, as depicted by the third part of the movie.
Malcolm McDowell is brilliant as Alex. Colors and images have been used in contrast to the happenings on the screen, and this makes the visuals stunning while making the happenings more tolerable for the audiences. The soundtrack is marvelous.
The film was nominated for four Oscars. Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing. Watch it if you like offbeat movies that encourage you to ask questions.
Please leave comments and let me know if you liked my review or NOT.