Clockwork Orange - Leftist?

[korovaorange]

Would CO be leftist?

[Napalm Dust]

I haven't read the book, but I saw the film.
I don't know where you're coming from in suggesting it's leftists.

[deadpool 52]

The film had a different message from the book.

The book's message was more along the lines of anarchy: it is better to do bad on your own free-will, then be forced to do good.

[Fires of History]

Yes, the film was masterful in and of itself as a movie, but the book had more of an edge to it.

Burgess asks how moral freedom can exist, and the themes of free will vs. predestination are well thought out.

Here's something from the introduction:

Burgess says that if one "can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or- since this is increasingly replacing both- the Almighty State."

To me, yes, this is a leftist work, much in line with 1984. But that's just my personal interpretation. And Deadpool52 is right to say that many foundational concepts of Anarchy are to be found therein. Happy reading, you should read it if you liked the movie :)

[ellipsis]

the book is much darker and more perverse than the movie, but i cant speak as to whether it is leftist

[lvleph]

Originally posted by deadpool [email protected] 22, 2002 01:26 pm
The film had a different message from the book.

The book's message was more along the lines of anarchy: it is better to do bad on your own free-will, then be forced to do good.
How is that Anarchy?

[Red Terror Doctor]

On film critic called it an "ideological mess" and "a paranoid fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Clockwork Orange

Release Date: 1972

Ebert Rating: **

By Roger Ebert / Feb 11, 1972



Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex.

I don't know quite how to explain my disgust at Alex (whom Kubrick likes very much, as his visual style reveals and as we shall see in a moment). Alex is the sort of fearsomely strange person we've all run across a few times in our lives -- usually when he and we were children, and he was less inclined to conceal his hobbies. He must have been the kind of kid who tore off the wings of flies and ate ants just because that was so disgusting. He was the kid who always seemed to know more about sex than anyone else, too -- and especially about how dirty it was.

Alex has grown up in "A Clockwork Orange," and now he's a sadistic rapist. I realize that calling him a sadistic rapist -- just like that -- is to stereotype poor Alex a little. But Kubrick doesn't give us much more to go on, except that Alex likes Beethoven a lot. Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the same way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music -- to add a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension.

Now Alex isn't the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British movies of the early 1960s. No effort is made to explain his inner workings or take apart his society. Indeed, there's not much to take apart; both Alex and his society are smart-nose pop-art abstractions. Kubrick hasn't created a future world in his imagination -- he's created a trendy decor. If we fall for the Kubrick line and say Alex is violent because "society offers him no alternative," weep, sob, we're just making excuses.

Alex is violent because it is necessary for him to be violent in order for this movie to entertain in the way Kubrick intends. Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization and not by creeping fascism -- but by the producer, director and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick. Directors sometimes get sanctimonious and talk about their creations in the third person, as if society had really created Alex. But this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being too modest: Alex is all his.

I say that in full awareness that "A Clockwork Orange" is based, somewhat faithfully, on a novel by Anthony Burgess. Yet I don't pin the rap on Burgess. Kubrick has used visuals to alter the book's point of view and to nudge us toward a kind of grudging pal-ship with Alex.

Kubrick's most obvious photographic device this time is the wide-angle lens. Used on objects that are fairly close to the camera, this lens tends to distort the sides of the image. The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the wide-angle lens almost all the time when he is showing events from Alex's point of view; this encourages us to see the world as Alex does, as a crazy-house of weird people out to get him.

When Kubrick shows us Alex, however, he either places him in the center of a wide-angle shot (so Alex alone has normal human dimensions,) or uses a standard lens that does not distort. So a visual impression is built up during the movie that Alex, and only Alex, is normal.

Kubrick has another couple of neat gimmicks to build Alex into a hero instead of a wretch. He likes to shoot Alex from above, letting Alex look up at us from under a lowered brow. This was also a favorite Kubrick angle in the close-ups in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and in both pictures, Kubrick puts the lighting emphasis on the eyes. This gives his characters a slightly scary, messianic look.

And then Kubrick makes all sorts of references at the end of "A Clockwork Orange" to the famous bedroom (and bathroom) scenes at the end of "2001." The echoing water-drips while Alex takes his bath remind us indirectly of the sound effects in the "2001" bedroom, and then Alex sits down to a table and a glass of wine. He is photographed from the same angle Kubrick used in "2001" to show us Keir Dullea at dinner. And then there's even a shot from behind, showing Alex turning around as he swallows a mouthful of wine.

This isn't just simple visual quotation, I think. Kubrick used the final shots of "2001" to ease his space voyager into the Space Child who ends the movie. The child, you'll remember, turns large and fearsomely wise eyes upon us, and is our savior. In somewhat the same way, Alex turns into a wide eyed child at the end of "A Clockwork Orange," and smiles mischievously as he has a fantasy of rape. We're now supposed to cheer because he's been cured of the anti-rape, anti-violence programming forced upon him by society during a prison "rehabilitation" process.

What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he really want us to identify with the antisocial tilt of Alex's psychopathic little life? In a world where society is criminal, of course, a good man must live outside the law. But that isn't what Kubrick is saying, He actually seems to be implying something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.

Well, enough philosophy. We'll probably be debating "A Clockwork Orange" for a long time -- a long, weary and pointless time. The New York critical establishment has guaranteed that for us. They missed the boat on "2001," so maybe they were trying to catch up with Kubrick on this one. Or maybe the news weeklies just needed a good movie cover story for Christmas.

I don't know. But they've really hyped "A Clockwork Orange" for more than it's worth, and a lot of people will go if only out of curiosity. Too bad. In addition to the things I've mentioned above -- things I really got mad about -- "A Clockwork Orange" commits another, perhaps even more unforgivable, artistic sin. It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.

Cast & Credits

Alex Malcolm McDowell
Mr. Alexander Patrick Magee
Chief Guard Michael Bates
Catlady Miriam Karlin
Mum Madge Ryan
Dad Philip Stone
Prison Governor Michael Gover
Minister Anthony Sharp

Warner Bros. presents a film produced, directed and written by Stanley Kubrick. Based on the novel by Anthony Burgess. Photographed by John Alcott. Electronic music by Walter Carlos. Production designed by John Barry. Rated X. (later changed to R).

[Dr Mindbender]

it is a progressive movie on the basis that it challenges beourgiose pretentions about the proletarian intellectual capacity; ie. Alex, a working class boy with an appreciation for classical music and fine wines.

[Sky]

Although it mocks bourgeois values, I interpreted Clockwork Orange as a paranoid right-wing thriller that opposes all state power even if it was the power of a proletarian state. The precedent of the revolutionary movement expects for dangerous criminals and those holding insane political beliefs to be rehabilitated through labor, education, and persuasion. The lead character in this film is an anti-social degenerate with low life friends who is not a part of the working class.

[Lenin II]

Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning.

How was this movie right-wing? Please tell me Kubrick was not a reactionary bastard. I wondered if he was progressive. At least that's what Full Metal Jacket led me to believe. Where's the right-wing message?

[Angry Young Man]

How is that Anarchy?

Because anarchists (both syndicalists and individualist ****s) place emphasis on making one's own moral choices without dominant external influence. Of course that means that syndicalists can't tell people to communize and as for AnCapism, I can just see that crumbling like old mortar under a jackhammer.

Anyway, I'm unsure of Burgess' politics. Overall in ACWO he seems like a liberal optimist - in Pt III, chapter 7, Alex grows up and decides against the "ultra-violence" after meeting Pete in a cafe. There is more of a class sub-theme in the novel. It seems like a model of Post-war Britain.
Regarding the minister of the interior in the film, Kubrick got a post-war Tory minister down to the bone: a smarmy, hypocritical, self-serving, slimy, obsequeous and patronising leech.

[ckaihatsu]

I read the book when I was a teenager, and I credit it, along with _1984_ and _Brave New World_ as one of those dystopian gems that got me thinking about society early on. I was actually pissed when my high school English teacher gave _1984_ a cursory treatment in class when I had turned it into a personal hobby on my own....

I've seen "Clockwork Orange" several times, and it's very watchable as a movie -- terrific story, from an entertainment point of view.... Seeing this thread got me thinking about the politics of it -- for the first time ever -- surprisingly....



Burgess asks how moral freedom can exist, and the themes of free will vs. predestination are well thought out.

Here's something from the introduction:

Burgess says that if one "can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or- since this is increasingly replacing both- the Almighty State."


Well, that's definitive, then, from the author's mouth. This would be the most overarching, worldview-oriented take on it -- therefore, it's existentialist in its outlook, preserving the isolated, Western individual as the protagonist, an anti-hero of sorts, either trying to live in spite of the world, or else taking on the world on his own terms, as he sees fit -- this part is *very* cliched....



The film had a different message from the book.

The book's message was more along the lines of anarchy: *it is better to do bad on your own free-will, then be forced to do good.


While the theme of the story deals foremostly with the dead-end, existentialist / Cartesian / dualistic question of "What do I do with myself, alone in this vast ocean of a world?", I have to object to that being called anarchistic. While I am not an anarchist myself, I am a revolutionary Marxist, and I know anarchists to not be existentialistic -- they recognize the reality of the capitalist-based world and its historical predecessors.



The lead character in this film is an anti-social degenerate with low life friends who is not a part of the working class.


Yes, in political terms we'd have to say that Alex is of the lumpenproletariat -- he sponges off his family, and off of society by committing petty, then serious, offenses.



It seems like a model of Post-war Britain.


It very much looks like postwar Britain, a society of the has-been superpower, now adrift in the world, dependent on its waning parasitic connections, through finance, soon to be surpassed by its former underling, the U.S.



Regarding the minister of the interior in the film, Kubrick got a post-war Tory minister down to the bone: a smarmy, hypocritical, self-serving, slimy, obsequeous and patronising leech.


Yes.



it is a progressive movie on the basis that it challenges beourgiose pretentions about the proletarian intellectual capacity; ie. Alex, a working class boy with an appreciation for classical music and fine wines.


I think this is a bit of a stretch -- yes, Alex's character is rounded out a bit with these touches, but can one expect any less from a youth growing up in a postindustrial, consumer-oriented, First World kind of place? Both high and low culture rubs off on all of us these days....

So does that make the movie progressive, or leftist? Perhaps it's most accurate to say that, like all superlative works of art, it holds a mirror up to us -- I'd say the movie is mostly illustrative, and doesn't mean to make a statement of its own. Its main theme, as stated by Burgess above, is at the worldview level, so it's more of a general, society-and-the-individual kind of treatment.



Alex has grown up in "A Clockwork Orange," and now he's a sadistic rapist. I realize that calling him a sadistic rapist -- just like that -- is to stereotype poor Alex a little. But Kubrick doesn't give us much more to go on, except that Alex likes Beethoven a lot. Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the same way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music -- to add a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension.

Now Alex isn't the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British movies of the early 1960s. No effort is made to explain his inner workings or take apart his society. Indeed, there's not much to take apart; both Alex and his society are smart-nose pop-art abstractions. Kubrick hasn't created a future world in his imagination -- he's created a trendy decor. If we fall for the Kubrick line and say Alex is violent because "society offers him no alternative," weep, sob, we're just making excuses.

Alex is violent because it is necessary for him to be violent in order for this movie to entertain in the way Kubrick intends. Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization and not by creeping fascism -- but by the producer, director and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick. Directors sometimes get sanctimonious and talk about their creations in the third person, as if society had really created Alex. But this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being too modest: Alex is all his.


Ebert -- from my hometown -- is as reductionistic as the character of Alex is, in this excerpt above. Alex is *not* an abstract character, a creation of pure imagination -- fortunately Ebert corrects the perspective in the following paragraph.... (Kudos on the cross-Kubrick and stylistic stuff, though.)



What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he really want us to identify with the antisocial tilt of Alex's psychopathic little life? In a world where society is criminal, of course, a good man must live outside the law. But that isn't what Kubrick is saying, He actually seems to be implying something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.


This part is right-on -- postwar Britain had nothing left to do *but* be parasitic and criminal -- the U.S. profited handsomely off the war, and rose to dominance, soon to be challenged by Japan, and now the EU and China. My thesis on the 20th century (please do a search for "The Next Big Thing") is that we've seen industrialization, modernization, standardization, and digitization -- there's nothing left for the bourgeoisie to get us hyped up about at this point...!

Of course I don't think people need to resort to individualistic criminality -- we've seen much better results through mass labor actions, especially when the bourgeoisie is in the crisis it's currently in.


Chris






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