A little of the old ultraschizoviolence oh my brothers

AFI100 #70 A Clockwork Orange (1971)

This review is part of my Reel Stuff series where I watch and review each movie in the American Film Institute (AFI) 100 Greatest American Films Of All Time 10th Anniversary Edition counting down from #100.

My Rating: 91/100

Pollice Verso: 👍

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Suggestion: listen while you read, the old Ludwig Van:

To say A Clockwork Orange is the strangest film I’ve ever seen would be slanderous to the word strange. It’s the type of weirdness on knife’s edge between lunacy and genius, and my socially-adjusted self wants so badly to mark it the former. And yet I’m disturbed by how much I enjoyed it.

Stanley Kubrick’s psychotic trip follows Alex, a protagonist like no other, in the sense that you would get along just fine in a world where no one conceives of such a singularly grotesque character ever again. He’s like your prototypical antihero but with as little of the hero part as you can have while still being labelled an antihero. Indeed the only thing heroic about him is how he manages to not be institutionalized before the events of the film take place. And whereas usually those types of characters tend, like the Joker, to garner audience sympathy as victims of some outside force like a cruel society, or bullying, or their parents, Alex deserves no such absolution. He is the unmoved mover of his own immorality, evil to his rotten core and constantly sliding further into wickedness as he spends more time breathing his own air.

Somehow, despite this, you sort of have to root for Alex. The central question of the film requires it. It is a question of crime and punishment and free will. One of those late-night college dorm room type moralistic questions about the purpose of punishment and corrective action. Is it right to punish someone for a past crime if you can be certain, without the use of further punishment, they will never commit such crimes in the future? And would you even be punishing the same person if that person no longer has free will to even commit said crime?

As much as those questions can be fun to punt around with friends over whiskey, I found the sort of aesthetic focal point of the film much more moving. It is a noticeably peculiar aesthetic, consisting of ugly exterior epiderma of a post-industrialist city that give way to overeroticized baroque interior spaces. You are literally hit on the head with this theme as Alex bashes one of his victims dead with a giant rocking penis sculpture. It is, as they say, as queer as a clockwork orange.

Besides being a feast for the eyes, the film’s aesthetic is its sort of raisons d'être. We are in Alex’s world. And Alex's world is both a playground and a battleground, where the rules of right and wrong are blurred by Beethoven and brutality. The beauty only a thin cushion at the nadir of a high-dive of bottomless moral corruption. If one were to strip away our protagonist’s violence, we would be left with a still bellicose and schizo passion.

Taken together — the reprehensible antihero, the quandary of crime and punishment and free will, the aesthetic — what does it all mean?

For me personally, it meant hearing myself saying what the fuck out loud in response to how many times I’ve said what the fuck in the span of any given five minute interval of glazed-eye viewing. Those what the fucks provided the melodious background chorus for the rest. Violence is currency. Control is illusion. Art is freedom.