A Clockwork Orange: has it finally been rehabilitated?

It’s a film that once caused outrage and was even withdrawn from circulation by its own director following consultation with the police. Copycat acts of violence were blamed on it and cinemas were closed down for showing it. Nonetheless, in 2020, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) appears finally to have been rehabilitated. Once almost impossible to see, it is currently available to stream on Amazon in the UK and is one of the “classic” new movies out on Netflix in the US this month.

If you’re bored of The Crown or jaded by watching yet another Scandi-noir box set in lockdown, you can therefore give yourself a jolt with “a bit of the old ultra-violence” as the “droog” protagonist Alex (Malcolm McDowell) describes his gang’s behaviour. One of cinema’s most notorious movies is only a click away.

In the first 10 minutes of the film alone, Alex and his pals kick an old drunk almost to death beneath an underpass, have a vicious scrap with a rival gang and break into a writer’s house. They cripple the writer (Patrick Magee) while raping his wife (Adrienne Corri). The scene is all the more disconcerting because Alex performs his misdeeds while dancing around, giving a sprightly rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”. There is something disturbing too about the way the droogs spend their leisure time, between bouts of violence, enjoying soft drinks in the Korova Milk Bar.

A Clockwork Orange caused paroxysms of anger and indignation when it was released in the UK. The New York film critics had already voted it the film of the year but the British press reacted furiously to what the Daily Mirror called its “sick malevolence”. However, there are certain myths about the film that don’t stand up to scrutiny. It was never banned in UK cinemas. By the time in 1974 when Kubrick asked Warner Bros to withdraw it because of the real-life violence it was alleged to be inspiring, the film had already been on release for well over a year, doing bumper business in the West End of London. That was a far longer run than for any new films released in cinemas today.

Anthony Burgess, who had sold the rights to his 1962 novel for a few hundred pounds, had been inspired to write A Clockwork Orange by a horrific real-life incident in wartime London in which his wife was sexually assaulted by American army deserters. There was no intention on either the novelist’s part or that of Kubrick to glamorise the violence.

“Nobody except people who were trying to prove that Clockwork Orange was an evil film, nobody could believe that one was in favour of Alex. It’s only that in telling a story like that, you want to present Alex as he feels and as he is to himself,” Kubrick explained in an interview with French critic Michel Ciment. The director’s words are also heard in Gregory Monro’s new documentary, Kubrick By Kubrick, which recently premiered at the virtual Doclisboa Festival and features rare audio recordings of the reclusive American film-maker speaking about his work.

Kubrick insisted that A Clockwork Orange was satire. “The nature of satire is that you state the opposite of the truth as if it is the truth.”

In other words, this was the cinematic equivalent of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, the 1729 essay in which he argued that the poor could improve their economic prospects by selling their children as delicacies to be eaten by the rich. Swift wasn’t seriously advocating that babies should be stewed or roasted, baked or boiled, and Kubrick wasn’t arguing that Alex’s delinquent, psychopathic behaviour should be imitated. He was startled that anyone could consider Alex as the hero.

McDowell, though, was a very charismatic star. Filmgoers couldn’t help but identify with him. He brought swagger and humour to his role. His character’s disarming love of classical music and strangely soulful quality differentiated him from the typical Bill Sikes-like thug. Alex may have liked the “old ultra-violence” but he was equally keen on a bit of “Ludwig Van” (as he called Beethoven) to round off an evening of skullduggery. “Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven… Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh,” he rhapsodises about the composer’s Ninth Symphony.

Kubrick likened Alex to Shakespeare’s malignant but fascinating humpbacked antihero Richard III and speculated that the reason he was so attractive to audiences, in spite of being “the personification of evil”, was “his honesty, his lack of hypocrisy, his energy and his intelligence”.

Not that detractors were paying much attention to Alex’s better character traits. Nor did they acknowledge the ironic use of music or the film’s highly stylised costume and production design. They weren’t listening to the deliberately archaic, Shakespearian-style language. They didn’t notice the ingenious techniques Kubrick borrowed from silent comedies – the speeded-up sex scenes or the balletic but comical slow-motion violence. (It's extraordinary that A Clockwork Orange was a major studio movie – Warner Bros certainly wouldn’t pour money into a film as anarchic and experimental as this today.)  

A Clockwork Orange was actually a very moral cautionary tale. The sadistic behaviour of Alex and the droogs toward their randomly picked victims is more than matched by that of the state toward Alex. Once arrested for murdering a woman with a giant sculpture of a phallus, he is thoroughly brutalised himself. He is beaten up by warders, given shock therapy and humiliated. Perhaps the most famous image in the entire movie is of Alex with his eyes prised open and electrical nodes stuck on his scalp as he is forced to watch images of sex, violence and Adolf Hitler as part of his aversion therapy.

Kubrick’s film was dragged into an ongoing war between the generations. Older, more conservative elements within British society were deeply distrustful of youth culture. They imagined they saw real-life young droogs on their own street corners. A Clockwork Orange gave them an excuse to express the anxiety and hostility they already felt. Letters appeared in newspapers from readers who claimed they had been harassed by “hefty young men dressed almost exactly” like the thugs in the film. However, there are no pictures to accompany the claims that city centres were suddenly swarming with delinquents in bowler hats, black boots, codpieces and white braces.

The BBFC passed A Clockwork Orange with no cuts, and its secretary, Stephen Murphy, described it as “a valuable contribution to the whole debate about violence”, but that wasn’t how it was regarded by the British media.

“For over a year, it was blamed for just about every episode of violence that happened in England,” Kubrick’s assistant Emilio D’Alessandro remembers in his memoir, Stanley Kubrick and Me. “The way the press framed it, anyone who saw the film automatically wanted to do the same things as the protagonist did.”

Absurdly, a 1973 report into the alarming number of violent acts committed by adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 in London linked the stabbings, shootings and arson to A Clockwork Orange. The fact that the young people in question were not old enough to actually watch the movie was overlooked.

The film was described as “the ultimate in screen brutality”. It didn’t help that it was in cinemas around the same time as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Ken Russell’s The Devils and Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, all equally full of blood, mayhem and violence.

Now, nearly 50 years later, A Clockwork Orange has been placed on subscription video on-demand (SVOD) streaming platforms with hardly a murmur of the controversy that once dogged it. It’s as if the film itself has been through the same treatment as Alex when he has his propensity for violence and criminality brainwashed out of him. Netflix lists the title under several categories – “films based on books”, “classic films”, “crime dramas” and “cult sci-fi and fantasy” among them. There is no asterisk, though, pointing out that this was once considered among the most explosive and disturbing films of its era or that Kubrick received a death threat for making it.  

The case of A Clockwork Orange underlines how, eventually, even the fiercest old controversies fade. No one is going to downplay the droogs’ antics but nor are they going to suggest that Kubrick’s masterpiece will inspire copycat crimes. The technique here is formidable. The satire is as sharp and as relevant as ever. The difference now is that viewers can finally be trusted to watch the film. Those Netflix and Amazon subscribers are not going to put on their bovver boots and bowler hats and rush out to commit their own acts of ultra-violence the moment the final credits roll. 

A Clockwork Orange is available on Amazon Prime in the UK and has just been released on Netflix in the US