Welcome to the Future (on 35mm Celluloid, where it belongs)

Welcome to the Future (on 35mm Celluloid, where it belongs)

FILM

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Directed by Stanley Kubrick Warner Bros.

The novel William Burroughs once claimed was the only one he�d been able to get through in years has finally been made into a film, by the man who gave us Dr. Strangelove and 2001 and who has probably done more conclusive thinking about the shape of things to come for Western society than anybody else making movies today. A Clockwork Orange is neither as witty as Strangelove nor stuffed with the kind of obfuscations, cheap head trips and semi-documentary bathrooms-of-Tomorro wland gimcrackery that bogged down 2001; rather, it takes a searing look at something much closer to the chemically and technologically controlled Utopias of our own real (and near) future.

The shape of the tale has not been much altered from Anthony Burgess� book, and is still narrated by the hero, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), in a kind of Russo-derived juvenile-delinquent jargon called Nadsat. Alex and his three �droogs� roam the ravaged cities and countryside of a cancer-ridden civilization, stealing and dealing out random violence to those who happen to offend them, especially old people, and raping whatever women strike their fancy, especially the wife of an opposition party writer, whom they cripple in the process of smashing his typewriter and hurling his book in every direction (in a brilliant stroke, Kubrick has Alex sing the old Gene Kelly song �Singin� In the Rain,� from the musical comedy of the same name, while dealing vicious blows to the writer and his wife with a cane and raping her — and, unlike many current movies, the violence is ultra-, in Alex� term, and ugly but never gratuitous). Afterhours and offnights they decamp to the Korova Milkbar, where they guzzle various drug-laced concoctions.

Alex himself is the perfect product both of the schizoid repressive-permissive society we have built and the largely anti-intellectual and impulse-worshipping counter-culture we are building. Bright, energetic, surfeited with rage at the social order, his hipster apathy is as total as his nihilism and the absolute randomness of his-violence. Turning his rage now upon institutions and now upon his own chemically and socially imploded person, he�s never believed in love or the possibility of working with others in close relationships for common ends outside the mutual consent of a gang-bang or gang-stomp, and doesn�t even have the sense of pack loyalty we associate with streetgangs. Every inch the existential hipster fascist, he exacts absolute obedience from his droogs and strikes like a viper when it�s not immediately forthcoming. And, like many totalitarian men great and small, he loves great art: aside from the occasional fuck and his pet boa constrictor, he finds his only true solace in listening to Beethoven, whom he admires with a ferocity that makes plain what he finds in the music.

The chaos outside turns grimly on him, however, when he attempts to rob ands rape a middle-aged woman artist, kills her with a giant stone-sculpted phallus in the process, and is knocked down and betrayed by his own fellow pack-members, who are tired of his rigid dominance, as he tries, to escape. Once in prison, his survival instinct sharp as ever, he first suckers the chaplain by spending long hours reading the Bible and making pieteous faces, then volunteers for a new experimental treatment which promises to reduce his 14 year sentence to two.

The treatment carries the heart of Clockwork Orange�s moral and a chillingly accurate prognostication of where we�re headed in the last half of this century. It consists of forcible deconditioning right out of Burroughs, applied on a theory bearing the very Burroughsian satiric irony that all you have to do to eradicate the disease is maim and burn the symptom out of existence. Alex the protean rumbler and rapist is strapped down ip a straightjacket, metal tongs are applied to his eyelids so he can�t close them, he�s fed drugs and shown films of violence and sexual assault so close that he cannot turn away. At first he enjoys the flicks, but after awhile the combined effect of the drugs and the uninterrupted blitz of cruel images drive him into helpless foaming agonies. Finally, after licking the bottom of a punk�s shoe and cowering before a nude girl for the edification of an appreciative audience of doctors and corrective officials, he is released, a cured criminal who cannot disrupt the social order now because the slightest suggestion of violence or sex sends him into violent retching fits, curled up like a tortured infant.

Retribution follows, of course, from most of the people he�d abused in his swaggerings earlier, but that�s not what�s important about this film. The pointed statement that he, and anyone else victimized by technology�s benevolent social applications, can be used with equal ruthlessness by both political parties or any — is not the crux of the matter either.

What makes this film so crucial, like the book before it, is that it is one of the very first works of art (Naked Lunch is another) to deal honestly and penetratingly with the belatedly recognized fact of �psychedelic fascism,� the programming and deand reprogramming of human beings by other humans, and how terrifyingly easy it is for anyone with �access to tools,� as Whole Earth would have it, to control and direct the pathetic individuals subjected to this experience which amounts literally to the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.

The tools are drugs, electronics, psychology, hypnotism and the ability to direct the subject�s thoughts along the desired association lines, creating the desired context of understanding and action, with the desired ends in miiid. Said ends seldom being anything but malevolence and more control.

It�s the most revolutionary fascist gimmick in history, because it roots out resistance with forceps instead of crudely enforcing obedience at the end of a cattle-prod. Alex� relationship to his gang is a stereotype of primitive fascist arrangements, and one of the movie�s many revelations is how easily,even the most iron-willed kingpins of such situations are brought down and turned into whimpering acolytes as abject as any of their followers by drugs and technology. But then, maybe all dominance implies subjection — I think Manson said something like that, that the way to get people to do anything you order is to make the motions of subjecting yourself to them — just like all sadism implies innate masochism.

In any case, A Clockwork Orange is the movie of the yearv It must be seen, because it concerns you and me and everybody alive right now and tomorrow. And it concerns us not only because the tortures which are imposed on Alex might well happen to us, but also because in a very real way we are quite close to Alex in temperament and direction. Our infant institutions have turned brittle and predatory, and none of us is so wise or so far �mutated� that we couldn�t mutate further and with perfect organic logic into any beast we see. Because power has come to us, through chemicals, through action, through various disciplines — and power pure runs in a channel in the same riverbed and ditch where the most monstrous forms of manipulation gather strength with the current. The Man Outside can probe, but The Man Within can eat your vitals before you know. In the candy-colored, multilabyrinthine boutique of the future where Alex strolls and picks up girls, they still have posters of Janis on the wall (as well as copies of the 2001 soundtrack album — but that�s a Kubrickian yuk). It�s not so very far away. Not so far at all.

(And if I had my way, Kubrick�s next film would be Naked Lunch.)

Lester Bangs