It was in December 1971. Three years after the dazzlement aroused by his 2001, A Space Odyssey(2001, a space odyssey), Stanley Kubrick was finally back with a new movie. What exactly did we expect from the brilliant filmmaker? No doubt many things, but not A Clockwork Orange (Omechanical storage), a cinematic assault that divided audiences and critics alike. While one faction was enthusiastic, the other was repelled.
Fifty years after its release, Kubrick’s most controversial film continues to polarize.
From an Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange is camped in the near future, in a vaguely totalitarian, vaguely communist society. We follow young Alex (Malcolm McDowell), the leader of a gang of delinquents. Emboldened by “Moloko Plus”, a doping milk, Alex and his friends, or “droogies”, indulge in “ultraviolence”, multiplying aggravated assaults and rapes.
A candy post
Arrested after having killed an old lady, Alex agrees, to avoid prison, to submit to an experimental program, the “Ludovico technique”, supposed to annihilate his sexual and homicidal impulses.
Ultimately, Alex is not purged of anything, but now manages to better hide his low instincts. In the process, he accedes to a candy post within the government.
In 1971, Kubrick explained to the Saturday Review that his film was intended to be a social satire and an exploration of behavioral psychologies and conditioning as weapons potentially capable of transforming the unwillingly robotic population: “mechanical oranges”.
For his demonstration, the filmmaker relies on destabilizing contrasts. We think for example of this notorious sequence where Alex brings hell to a couple, beating the man and raping the woman, while singing Singin ‘in the Rain : savagery in the image against bonhomie in the soundtrack.
Throughout the film, Kubrick opposes the virulence of the subject with an invoice as neat as it is striking. By virtue of this dynamic of opposing forces, substance and form enhance each other. The horror seems even more horrible, and the technique, even more virtuoso.
In addition, Alex entrusting himself to the public through a narration, the cinephiles become with their body defending involved in the action. Again, Kubrick’s purpose was to undermine. What the film undoubtedly succeeded in accomplishing: on this at least, everyone agreed then, defenders as well as detractors.
Pornographer and genius
For the latter, however, no feat or discovery could have excused the content of the show. In a criticism that made people talk, Pauline Kael, from New Yorker, did not mince his words:
“Is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repulsive – than a clean-minded pornographer?” The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they are calculated with frigidity and pedantry, and because there is no emotional motivation, the viewer may feel them as an indignity and wish to leave. […] The trick of making the victims less human than their attackers, so that you don’t feel any sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in the movies. “
Further on, she said: “The film has a distinctive style of alienation: jubilant close-ups, dazzling, sharp third-degree lighting, and unusually high voices. It’s a style, okay – the movie doesn’t look like the other movies, it doesn’t sound like them – but it’s a lewd and sinister style. “
Seldom of the same opinion as her, Roger Ebert, of Chicago Sun-Times, showed himself on this occasion just as concise: « A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning. The movie claims to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it actually does is celebrate the meanness of its hero, Alex. “
Is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repulsive – than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they are calculated with frigidity and pedantry, and because there is no emotional motivation, the viewer may feel them as an indignity and wish to leave.
Conversely, their colleague Vincent Canby, from New York Times, did not hesitate to cry genius. According to him, Kubrick was supplanting not only the novel, but his own previous film, 2001. “It’s awesome, a tour de force of extraordinary images, music, words and feelings, a far more original accomplishment for commercial films than Burgess’s novel is for literature. […] A Clockwork Orange makes fears real and important that are simply exploited by other much less important films. “
In some countries, including Ireland, Brazil and South Africa, the film was banned outright. In the USA, A Clockwork Orange received the X classification, which limited its theatrical exploitation, so that Kubrick got about thirty seconds of explicit images. In England, after a series of attacks, murders and rapes had allegedly been inspired by the film, the filmmaker demanded that it be withdrawn from circulation – the film did not become available again there until the death of Kubrick.
It’s awesome, a tour de force of extraordinary images, music, words and feelings, a far more original accomplishment for commercial films than
Burgess’ novel is not for literature […] A Clockwork Orange makes fears real and important that are simply exploited by other much less important films.
Masterpiece and firebrand
The storm passed, so did the weather … From a cult film exuding an aura of forbidden fruit, A Clockwork Orange was elevated to the rank of a masterpiece. A avowed admirer and herself the director of another controversial adaptation, American Psycho, Mary Harron noted in 2000 in the documentary Still Tickin ‘: The Return of A Clockwork Orange :
“What strikes me about this film is that it’s so radical. This movie is really disturbing, really extreme, and I find it hard to believe that a big studio produced it. I guess back then, during the 1970s, things were different… Which reminds me that the 1970s was a more liberal time. “
If they are more nuanced than yesterday, the differences of opinion remain nevertheless. In an essay published in 2019 by The Ringer, Adam Nayman, critic and author of the book Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, revisited A Clockwork Orange at the time of the so-called cancellation culture. Although he was not of the opinion that it should be blacklisted, he was nonetheless very critical of the work.
“What’s troubling about Kubrick’s film is that for all of the big, abstract ideas he deals with, that of blame doesn’t really stand out; instead, he views our capacity for cruelty and bloodshed as innate and unchanging. […] Kubrick loved these kinds of archetypal grand ideas, sometimes to a fault, and a good deal of A Clockwork Orange depicts Kubrick’s less appealing aspects: the heaviness of his irony, the dismal humor, the way he literally turns women into objects (the porcelain statuary of the Korova Milkbar), and the stifling formalism of his style. “
In his return to the 2021 film, Scott Tobias of Guardian, argues conversely: “Throughout his career, Stanley Kubrick has never really cared to be loved by the public, so it is an achievement thatA Clockwork Orange […] is the most repulsive film of his career. That’s not to say it’s not a daring and often brilliant film, but watching it can feel like you’re arguing for 136 minutes – with Kubrick, with yourself, and with a struggling society. imperfectly (and often unjust and tragically) with questions of public order and individual rights. There is something here to infuriate people on both ends of the political spectrum. “
And it is precisely in this capacity to overreact in all directions that Tobias perceives the essential character of the film. “Now, we should neither shy away from difficult arguments nor hide from art which confronts us as seriously as Kubrick always did, and whileA Clockwork Orange has settled in the firmament of popular culture […], the film still seems dangerous and vital fifty years later. “
AT Clockwork Orange is available in original version on Crave, as well as available for rental or sale on the iTunes, Microsoft and YouTube platforms. in original version and in french