Red red krovvy flowing through the perforations of the celluloid and spilling onto your eyes in a stylistic dystopian wasteland of morality
You don’t need me to tell you at all that A Clockwork Orange is a movie worth watching, it’s an absolute classic and even the laziest amongst us film freaks like myself have seen it. But for the few out there who may have been living cosily underneath a rock or up in the trees paying no heed to what goes on above or below and have assimilated yourself into human society and have just figured out the wonders of cinema, let me jabber on about this film for a moment.
Having just reread the book for a second time, I saw it fit to re-watch the movie tonight, caved in my room refusing to see the outside world, the only form of entertainment I need. A drop-dead marvellous story of violence, freedom of choice and the totalitarian order of the state, the movie follows Alex DeLarge as his rampage of sex, milk and violence is stopped dead in its tracks when he’s finally apprehended. Prison failing to rehabilitate him he’s put through an experimental reformation programme that will make all his previous vices seem grotesque in their nature and how he struggles in the world as he’s turned loose outside.
Stanley Kubrick is a polymath of cinema, with such an adept touch upon the mechanisms of cinema, this film creates an almost dream-like, eye-catching dystopia where teenage violence has erupted on the streets and the ordinary god-fearing citizens are forced to stay inside. Now this is a world I would want to live in!
Saturated colours of all hues and tints bedazzle the eyes, laid atop the patterns on walls and floors, making the interior design of the film to die for. The outside world left in sheepish abandonment contrasts this as grey and pallid, bureaucratic in appearance with tumbleweed strewn about the place. The same goes for the costume design, swirling colours clad the characters, often times I’d be lost in their outfits and what it says about them all. Kubrick’s camera work is something that catches you by surprise, smooth tracking shots and buttery pans hide behind the eyes as we often forget that camera is even there and witness the world directly with our eyes, until the camera crash zooms in or out of a subject and we realise that the camera has been puppeteering us this whole time.
Trombones, kettle drums, trumpets and their whole orchestras blast blissful notes that fit as well with the violence on screen as gravy and toast, not supposed to ever be put together but then you realise how sublime this union is. There’s just something about antithetical soundtrack that really takes a savage scene to a corner of our mind where it becomes more palatable.
The actors that fill in the skins of these characters are all so stupendous and at times comedic, especially Michael Bates playing the Chief Officer at the prison, a militant caricature of state authority, obnoxiously barking orders, hailing salutes and clicking his heels tourettically.
Although the film makes some slight adjustments to the book, it’s a very faithful interpretation of the original text, and much like a vast group of the readers, I prefer that the film omits the last chapter where Alex is freed from the hospital and has his little epiphany of wanting to wash his hands off his life of the bit of the old ultra-violence, I find it inconsistent with the rest of the book. I don’t want a happy ending if I never went out looking for one. A seminal piece about morality and what makes us human; choice or a moral compus, that’ll at moments make you rethink your affiliation with the human species.
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