Past future: The troubled history of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

National Forum, Spring 2001 by Carruthers, Susan

ome years achieve premature celebrity. George Orwell made 1984 infamous in 1948. If 1984 is Orwell's, then zooi is assuredly Stanley Kubrick's, a claim staked with 1968's release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reaching that year means catching up with a future famously mapped in advance. But where few social commentators in 1984 could resist holding Orwell's totalitarian dystopia to the test of time, only the most crushing literalist would seek to fault Kubrick for defective powers of prophecy. With hindsight, we look back on cinematic imaginings of both past and future as mirrors of their own age, not as reliable guides to the times they purport to inhabit.

Indeed, whether movies seek to recreate history or to anticipate it, they often come to appear unshakably anchored in particular temporalities however ambitious the auteur's attempts at transcendence. But the fact that celluloid conjurings of other times are so perishable, quickly exposing their own fixity in a specific time and place, is surely central to the kitsch appeal of swords-and-sandals epics and previous generations' sci-fi movies alike. They unwittingly afford us the ironic satisfactions of distance and knowingness.

With the 1970s still the hippest retro decade, perhaps it is no wonder that another of Kubrick's exercises in futurology, A Clockwork Orange, garnered such laudatory reviews on rerelease in Britain last year. Withdrawn by Kubrick in 1973 after feverish press reports of a copycat Clockwork crimewave, the film remained barred from British screens - both small and large - until shortly after his death. In the interim, Kubrick's "lost masterpiece" accumulated the allure of long-term forbidden fruit, but also gathered dust. Suddenly exposed to daylight again, A Clockwork Orange - for all its futuristic locations and trappings - appears a quintessentially Seventies artifact. Even though we may suspect that the decade's sartorial lapses did not - quite stretch to extravagant codpieces fetchingly teamed with bowler hats, the film's look is entirely of its era. Likewise, its sexual politics and "artfully" pornographic violence bespeak an age that now appears alien. Its British rerelease serves as an opportune moment to consider the film's troubled relationship with its own time, and the questions that its adulatory reception may raise for ours.

BURGESS'S CLOCKWORK

While he was shooting 2001, Kubrick's imagination was captured bv a novel that had been dubbed a "nasty little shocker" on its publication in 1962. Crystallizing pervasive anxiety over mind-control, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange appeared in tandem with cinema's most stylishly chilling treatment of brainwashing, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. But where Frankenheimer looked (with considerable artistic license) to the Korean War for his experiments in mental repatterning, Burgess drew on much more personal history. One night during the London blackout of World War II, Burgess's pregnant wife was gang-raped by four American deserters, an episode that shatters nostalgic mythologization of the Blitz as all cups of tea and sing-a-longs. The vicious attack, which induced a miscarriage and a subsequent suicide attempt, formed one of the book's points of departure. Burgess's fascinated repulsion with the Mods and Rockers then strutting and scooting the streets of London sought a literary outlet - his novel conjuring a not-so-distant future (circa 1970), where brutish youths confront an equally brutal regime. Conscious that his "space-age hooligans" needed to be inoculated against premature signs of aging, Burgess coined a Russian-inflected argot, "nadsat," for his amoral antiheroes: youths with a taste for both "ultra-violence" and classical music, whose delinquency the state seeks to neutralize through Pavlovian reprogramming.

Burgess's A Clockwork Orange offers a meditation on the moral paradoxes that follow from an acceptance of free will. Free to follow their natures, humans may choose to do evil. But attempts to engineer law-abiding citizens constitute a greater ill than individual acts of immorality. They may also, Burgess suggests, prove unnecessary. In a final twist, the novel's antihero Alex, surviving the "Ludovico treatment" with violent impulses intact, is finally crushed by the conformism that accompanies turning twenty-one. Domesticity and paternal stirrings quash Alex's taste for violent "tolchockings" and rape. Being bad becomes a bore.

KUBRICK'S CLOCKWORK

In Kubrick's hands, however, A Clockwork Orange delivers more muddied morality. Having read W.W. Norton's American edition of the novel, he was apparently ignorant of the concluding "optimistic" chapter significantly, the twenty-- first - until the screenplay was completed. (Kubrick rejected all other scripts, including one by Burgess, in favor of his own). Kubrick's Alex, played with mesmerizing panache by a youthful if scarcely teenage Malcolm McDowell, remains defiantly unbroken. And, as many contemporary reviewers pointed out in 1971, it is hard not to relish Alex's enduring appetite for badness. Sooner the inventively agile delinquent - whose assaults are synced to "Singin' in the Rain" and whose rapes are choreographed to Rossini - than the servile automaton that initially emerges from the Ludovico facility.