Anthony Burgess Novel a Clockwork Orange

        One might be forgiven for thinking that Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange is a bloodbath and orgy for the sake of being a bloodbath and orgy at first glance. However taking into account the reputation of Kubrick being a director so focused on minutia and detail it must go deeper than that. The fact of the matter is that it does. A Clockwork Orange is filled with metaphor and abstract linkages between seemingly unrelated concepts. Explicitly these concepts are art, music and violence, as strange as the correlation might be the film goes to great lengths to link these ideas. This linkage stemming from a great deal of intricacy placed in the direction and production of the film serves to further the original novel’s message about the conflict between social outcasts and society. Kubrick’s film rather than being a pointless bloodbath is a carefully crafted exploration of the relationship between society and members of that society.

        A Clockwork Orange  follows the violent exploits, eccentric obsessions, and subsequent incarceration and re-education of Alex DeLarge the novel and film’s protagonist. Alex serves as a revolting but oddly endearing antihero. His capacity for violence is contrasted by his general charm and later in the film sympathetic suffering. The first act of the film shows Alex as he gallivants about with his gang of young “droogs” as they drink milk laced with drugs, beat a homeless drunk, stop a rape perpetrated by a rival gang then proceed to get into a fight with them, and immediately thereafter break into the house of a writer beating him and raping his wife. All this “ultraviolence” is brought to an end when Alex is caught by the police after bludgeoning a rich old woman who lives with her cats to death with a phallic sculpture and being turned on by his gang. Alex is imprisoned for his crimes in the second act and after two years he elects to undergo an experimental treatment which causes him to feel physically ill while witnessing or attempting to perpetrate acts of violence. This reeducation left him both incapable of violence but also sicked by Beethoven’s 9th symphony which was used during the treatment. The third act shows Alex released back into society where he meets up with his former enemies who all enact some form of vengeance upon him he is eventually driven to attempt suicide when the aging writer whose wife Alex had raped tortures him by locking him in a room playing Beethoven’s 9th symphony. Now somehow free from the effects of the treatment and having survived jumping out a window a severely wounded Alex is confronted by the government official who oversaw the procedure striking a deal with him to improve the government’s image to the press. The final shot of the film shows a fantasy of Alex’s where he is having sex with a woman stating in voice-over “I was cured, alright.”

        It’s a very visceral experience. The violence and sex in this film are portrayed almost revoltingly. However in stark contrast to this violence the scenes in which it takes place always contain some form of high art. This is the basis of the argument made by Vivian C. Soheback in Decor as Theme: A Clockwork Orange. She suggests a connection is deliberately made between the high arts and violence by Kubrick. There is a great deal of evidence found within the film to support this claim. The fight with Billyboy of the rival gang takes place in an abandon casino’s theatre where the establishing shot is taken of a close up shot of an elaborately decorated proscenium arch. While the visual of the arch is displayed the cries of the rape victim can be heard, linking the two in separate dimensions of audio and visual.

In Burgess’ novel the fight with Billyboy does not take place here but rather a power plant, Kubrick has instead “placed the action in a setting of his own invention one which allows the camera to focus on art as it focuses on violence.” (Soheback 3) A key example of this being the fight with the Cat Lady which takes place in a hidden away room of the “health farm” with erotic paints hung on the walls as well as a large phallic sculpture on display. In the Burgess novel the “health farm” is decorated with antiques and dusty old trinkets. The fight itself is shot in shaky erratic fashion switching between Alex battling with the Cat Lady who is trying to bludgeon him with a bust of Beethoven and the erotic decor of the room, these two sets of images “linked together by the recurrent image of an open mouth from one of them which seems to be screaming in paroxysms of orgasm and death.” (Soheback 5) Perhaps this is an attempt by Kubrick to suggest that orgasm and death are the ultimate forms of art and violence.

Also startling is the absence of art from locations where violence does not take place. In order to further place further emphasis on this connection Kubrick removes any notion of high art from locations where violence is absence the blandness of the prison and the sterility of the Ludovico facility are apparent. The municipal flatblock where Alex lives is in shambles and the only art present, being a mural which is defiled, essentially artistically neutering it. The importance these artless scenes add to the scenes with art help drive home the connection Soheback believes Kubrick is making.

Expanding the concept of art from the aesthetic of the film to also encompass the use of music in the film the connection between violence and art grows even stronger. Elisa Pezzotta examines the use of music in Kubrick’s films in The Metaphor of Dance in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket. In this essay Pezzotta suggests that in these three films even the “mise-en-scene, the editing, the dialogue, and voiceover obey the rhythm of music.” (Pessotta 52) This holds particularly true for A Clockwork Orange. Returning to the fight with Billyboy for example, the sequence is accompanied by Gioacchino Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, a classical piece in the same vein as Beethoven. Pezzotto demonstrating an example of the metaphor of dance which she refers to points out how the fight between Alex’s “droogs” and Billyboy’s gang synchronizes with the rhythm of this pieces, bringing it to the forefront of our attention.

In the same way Soheback shows the violent acts portrayed in the first third of the film are accompanied by physical representations of art Pezzotta shows these acts are also accompanied by classical music. Small details about like the woman in the milkbar singing An Die Freude, the doorbell to the writers house playing Beethoven’s 5th, or the songs sung by the homeless old man Alex and his “droogs” beat add a level of depth that is not accomplished in the book. But, more apparently, there is Alex’s affinity for Ludwig Van which incites his violent acts and drives him to socially destructive behavior as well as the Ludovico treatment which connects Beethoven’s 9th to nazi imagery and violence as a whole. The latter is a traumatic experience for Alex it should be pointed out that “the doctor defines the Ninth Symphony as ‘background score’, a definition that does not appear in the novel, while for Alex … this music is foregrounded” (Pezzotto 6) Kubrick has gone out of his way to show how Alex’s life and his very existence revolve around both violence and music. He has places an emphasis not only on the violence present in Burgess’ original but has also elevated music and art as a whole to the same level creating profound contrast and aforementioned link between the two.