Stanley Strangelove
By Pauline Kael
Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, Stanley
Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and
exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi
Comedy. Is there anything sadder -- and ultimately more repellent --
than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings
have no ferocity and no sensuality; they're frigidly, pedantically
calculated, and because there is no motivating emotion, the viewer may
experience them as an indignity and wish to leave. The movie follows the
Anthony Burgess novel so closely that the book might have served as the
script, yet that thick-skulled German professor may be Dr. Strangelove
himself, because the meanings are turned around.
Burgess's 1962 novel is set in a vaguely Socialist future (roughly, the
late seventies or early eighties) -- a dreary, routinized England that
roving gangs of teen-age thugs terrorize at night. In perceiving the amoral
destructive potential of youth gangs, Burgess's ironic fable differs from
Orwell's 1984 in a way that already seems prophetically accurate. The
novel is narrated by the leader of one of these gangs -- Alex, a
conscienceless schoolboy sadist -- and, in a witty, extraordinarily sustained literary
conceit, narrated in his own slang (Nadsat, the teen-agers' special dialect).
The book is a fast read; Burgess, a composer turned novelist, has an
eubellient, musical sense of language, and you pick up the meanings of the
strange words as the prose rhythms speed you along. Alex enjoys stealing,
stomping, raping, and destroying until he kills a woman and is sent to
prison for fourteen years. After serving two, he arranges to get out by
submitting to an experiment in conditioning, and he is turned into a
moral robot who becomes nauseated at thoughts of sex and violence.
Released when he is harmless, he falls prey to his former victims, who
beat him and torment him until he attempts suicide. This leads to
criticism of the government that robotized him -- turned him into a
clockwork orange -- and he is deconditioned, becoming once again a thug,
and now at loose and triumphant. The ironies are protean, but Burgess
is clearly a humanist; his point of view is that of a Christian horrified by
the possibilities of a society turned clockwork orange, in which life is so
mechanized that men lose their capacity for moral choice. There seems to
be no way in this boring, dehumanizing society for the boys to release
their energies except in vandalism and crime; they do what they do as
a matter of course. Alex the sadist is as mechanized a creature as Alex
the good.
Stanley Kubrick's Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is not so much an
expression of how this society has lost its soul as he is a force pitted
against the society, and by making the victims of the thugs more
repulsive and contemptible than the thugs Kubrick has learned to love
the punk sadist. The end is no longer the ironic triumph of a
mechanized punk but a real triumph. Alex is the only likable person we see
-- his cynical bravado suggests a broad-nosed, working-class Olivier --
more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more
attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with the power and
slyness of a young Cagney. Despite what Alex does at the beginning,
McDowell makes you root for his foxiness, for his crookedness. For most
of the movie, we see him tortured and beaten and humiliated, so when
his bold, aggressive punk's nature is restored to him it seems not a joke
on all of us but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes
an exultant tone. The look in Alex's eyes at the end tells us that he
isn't just a mechanized, choiceless sadist but prefers sadism and knows
he can get by with it. Far from being a little parable about the dangers
of soullessness and the horrors of force, whether employed by individuals
against each other or by society in "conditioning," the movie becomes
a vindication of Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being
and only the good Alex was a robot.
The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so
you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude
in movies. This attitude says there's no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick
has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young 5
punk who says, "Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want?
They're worse than I am." In the new mood (perhaps movies in their
cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the
hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims
-- that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can't accept that
Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I
think he's catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.
This picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way.
And though it has no depth, it's done in such a slow, heavy style that
those prepared to like it can treat its puzzling aspects as oracular. It can
easily be construed as an ambiguous mystery play, a visionary warning
against "the Establishment." There are a million ways to justify identifying
with Alex: Alex is fighting repression; he's alone against the system.
What he does isn't nearly as bad as what the government does (both
in the movie and in the United States now). Why shouldn't he be
violent? That's all the Establishment has ever taught him (and us) to be.
The point of the book was that we must be as men, that we must be
able to take responsibility for what we are. The point of the movie is
much more au courant. Kubrick has removed many of the obstacles to
our identifying with Alex; the Alex of the book has had his personal
habits cleaned up a bit -- his fondness for squishing small animals under
his tires, his taste for ten-year-old girls, his beating up of other prisoners,
and so on. And Kubrick aids the identification with Alex by small direc-
torial choices throughout. The writer whom Alex cripples (Patrick
Magee) and the woman he kills are cartoon nasties with upper class accents
a mile wide. (Magee has been encouraged to act like a bathetic madman;
he seems to be preparing for a career in horror movies.) Burgess gave
us society through Alex's eyes, and so the vision was deformed, and
Kubrick, carrying over from Dr. Strangelove his joky adolescent view
of hypocritical, sexually dirty authority figures and extending it to all
adults, has added an extra layer of deformity. The "straight" people are
far more twisted than Alex; they seem inhuman and incapable of suffering.
He alone suffers. And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell --
screaming in a straitjacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless
when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleed-
ing lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for
death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex
is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to
justify Alex's hoodlumism.
The movie's confusing -- and, finally, corrupt -- morality is not,
however, what makes it such an abhorrent viewing experience. It is offensive
long before one perceives where it is heading, because it has no
shadings. Kubrick, a director with an arctic spirit, is determined to be
pornographic, and he has no talent for it. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel
showed teen-agers committing horrible brutalities, and even though you
had no illusions about their victims -- one, in particular, was a foul
old lecher -- you were appalled. Buñuel makes you understand the
pornography of brutality: the pornography is in what human beings are
capable of doing to other human beings. Kubrick has always been one
of the least sensual and least erotic of directors, and his attempts here
at phallic humor are like a professor's lead balloons. He tries to work
up kicky violent scenes, carefully estranging you from the victims so
that you can enjoy the rapes and beatings. But. I think one is more likely
to feel cold antipathy toward the movie than horror at the violence -- or
enjoyment of it, either.
Kubrick's martinet control is obvious in the terrible performances he
gets from everybody but McDowell, and in the inexorable pacing. The
film has a distinctive style of estrangement: gloating closeups, bright,
hard-edge, third-degree lighting, and abnormally loud voices. It's a style,
all right -- the movie doesn't look like other movies, or sound like them
-- but it's a leering, portentous style. After the balletic brawling of the
teen-age gangs, with bodies flying as in a Westem saloon fight, and after
the gang-bang of the writer's wife and an orgy in speeded-up motion,
you're primed for more action, but you're left stranded in the prison
sections, trying to find some humor in tired schoolboy jokes about a
Hitlerian guard. The movie retains a little of the slangy Nadsat but none
of the fast rhythms of Burgess's prose, and so the dialect seems much
more arch than it does in the book. Many of the dialogue sequences go
on and on, into a stupor of inactivity. Kubrick seems infatuated with
the hypnotic possibilities of static setups; at times you feel as if you
were trapped in front of the frames of a comic strip for a numbing ten
minutes per frame. When Alex's correctional officer visits his home
and he and Alex sit on a bed, the camera sits on the two of them. When
Alex comes home from prison, his parents and the lodger who has
displaced him are in the living room; Alex appeals to his seated, unloving
parents for an inert eternity. Long after we've got the point, the composi-
composition is still telling us to appreciate its cleverness. This ponderous
technique is hardly leavened by the structural use of classical music to
characterize the sequences; each sequence is scored to Purcell (synthesized
on a Moog), Rossini, or Beethoven, while Elgar and others are
used for brief satiric effects. In the book, the doctor who has devised the
conditioning treatment explains why the horror images used in it are
set to music: "It's a useful emotional heightener." But the whole damned
movie is heightened this way; yes, the music is effective, but the effect
is self-important.
When I pass a newsstand and see the saintly, bearded, intellectual
Kubrick on the cover of Saturday Review, I wonder: Do people notice
things like the way Kubrick cuts to the rival teen-age gang before Alex
and his hoods arrive to fight them, just so we can have the pleasure of
watching that gang strip the struggling girl they mean to rape? Alex's
voice is on the track announcing his arrival, but Kubrick can't wait
for Alex to arrive, because then he couldn't show us as much. That girl
is stripped for our benefit; it's the purest exploitation. Yet this film lusts
for greatness, and I'm not sure that Kubrick knows how to make simple
movies anymore, or that he cares to, either. I don't know how consciously
he has thrown this film to youth; maybe he's more of a showman than
he lets on -- a lucky showman with opportunism built into the cells
of his body. The film can work at a pop-fantasy level for a young audience
already prepared to accept Alex's view of the society, ready to
believe that that's how it is.
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence
as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us
its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors.
You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-
sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes
must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems
to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are
somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship.
But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use
of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's
anything conceivably damaging in these films -- the freedom to analyze
their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly
saying that no brutality is too much for us -- that only squares and
people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually,
those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and
they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means
that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects
of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are
served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become
clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's
in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of
movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in
the audience?
From The New Yorker Magazine, January, 1972. All Rights
Reserved