Great Directors: Kubrick indicts us all
***This is the second of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Stanley Kubrick deals with isolation. He deals with men who have been secluded from society, from their morals, from their own agency. Consider Colonel Dax from Paths of Glory, who’s removed from the decision making of his World War I fighting unit. Or Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is removed from his command by his ship’s computer, HAL 9000. The list could go on: Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, Jack Torrance from The Shining, Dr. Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, the bomber and its crew in Dr. Strangelove … even robotic boy David in Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of a Kubrick idea, exhibits this theme of isolation. All of these human and non-human characters are marginalized by the forces near them, scorned by an abnormally cruel world or set of fates. But what makes a Kubrick film so decidedly a Kubrick film is the way in which the characters react to their isolation, the way they process it all together and make informed — and sometimes brash and violent — decisions.
And this is where Alex from A Clockwork Orange steps in. Alex always seemed to me to be a loser hero, a stock character crafted under the film noir genre. Loser heroes tried to make the right choices, but were hopelessly misguided, usually by women, which is how femme fatales were born. Alex was never led astray by women, just his unquenchable urge for self-indulgence (ultra-violence, horror show, “in-out/in-out”). He lived a great but terrible life — great to him, terrible to us — and was betrayed by the Droogies he thought he had tamed. There his isolation begins. And the rest of the movie, he spirals downward by a society eager to punish. It’s ironic that at the end of the movie he’s spiraling back up thanks to the society he so callously abused. I’m reminded of the opening lines of The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Alex and his malicious batch of Droogies, all nihilists to a moderate degree, had tried to make their environment products of themselves, to Alex’s downfall.
I’ve always been curious with this film why Kubrick would have used the fashion and architectural choices he picked. The clothing was off-the-wall with purple overcoats, the padded jock straps and purple wigs; and the buildings were modular geometric patterns that seemed to confine the characters inside them. The film, in many ways is very dystopian, a sinister and depressing look at a future society. In some ways — for instance, the milk bar, the Durango 95 car, and the elaborate decorations in Alex’s room — the film is as comparable to science fiction as 2001. I felt that Kubrick was trying to place us outside of the norm, away from what we know and fear to give us new things to know and fear, like the ultra-violence of Alex and his misanthropic stooges. Even the primary colors in the opening and closing credits seem foreign and distant, too bright to even be real — then I remember what Alex said about the blood in the films: “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.” I think Kubrick was involving us on an almost subliminal level. Just as Alex’s videos were brainwashing him, we were being “told” on an almost subconscious level that the world we were watching was somehow more real than our own, and that elements of that world (clothes, architecture, themes) were designed to imprison us inside fortified walls.
In many ways Kubrick was also trying to show us the characters’ glaring inconsistencies. Notice how Dim assists in the rape of a woman in one scene and then speaks with kindness to a mannequin milk dispenser he has named Lucy in the very next. Or notice how Alex views himself in the crucifixion of Christ — dressed in an outfit just as gaudy as his purple record-store robes — as a soldier flailing away on Christ’s back. Yet later in the film, he is the martyr, he is the sacrifice of the immoral Ludovico Technique. So is he a messiah figure or the Messiah’s executioners? The movie would have us believe both, but at different times. Lastly, look at his prison number: “six-double-five-three-two-one” — 655321. It’s almost a perfect sequence in the wrong direction. Was Kubrick playing with us? Was he showing us our descent with Alex in a number that was slightly skewed? I think so.
A Clockwork Orange is a complex movie, a film that can be viewed in too many ways to suggest that any answer is 100 percent correct. It’s my belief that Stanley Kubrick wanted us to interpret the film as we wanted. In some ways I think it does glorify violence to a certain degree. It’s impossible to not enjoy the film’s pacing, the music and that silly dialogue, even as rape and murders are so brazenly and wantonly committed on screen. I also believe that violence is also an adequate anti-violence, and that by showing the scenes he did Kubrick was indicting us right along with Alex; we were his voyeuristic cohorts. By the end of the film, it seems to shoot in all directions, mainly back at the society that allowed such a boy to be created. That, in my opinion, is the ultimate message.
***This is the second of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Stanley Kubrick deals with isolation. He deals with men who have been secluded from society, from their morals, from their own agency. Consider Colonel Dax from Paths of Glory, who’s removed from the decision making of his World War I fighting unit. Or Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is removed from his command by his ship’s computer, HAL 9000. The list could go on: Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, Jack Torrance from The Shining, Dr. Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, the bomber and its crew in Dr. Strangelove … even robotic boy David in Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of a Kubrick idea, exhibits this theme of isolation. All of these human and non-human characters are marginalized by the forces near them, scorned by an abnormally cruel world or set of fates. But what makes a Kubrick film so decidedly a Kubrick film is the way in which the characters react to their isolation, the way they process it all together and make informed — and sometimes brash and violent — decisions.
And this is where Alex from A Clockwork Orange steps in. Alex always seemed to me to be a loser hero, a stock character crafted under the film noir genre. Loser heroes tried to make the right choices, but were hopelessly misguided, usually by women, which is how femme fatales were born. Alex was never led astray by women, just his unquenchable urge for self-indulgence (ultra-violence, horror show, “in-out/in-out”). He lived a great but terrible life — great to him, terrible to us — and was betrayed by the Droogies he thought he had tamed. There his isolation begins. And the rest of the movie, he spirals downward by a society eager to punish. It’s ironic that at the end of the movie he’s spiraling back up thanks to the society he so callously abused. I’m reminded of the opening lines of The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Alex and his malicious batch of Droogies, all nihilists to a moderate degree, had tried to make their environment products of themselves, to Alex’s downfall.
I’ve always been curious with this film why Kubrick would have used the fashion and architectural choices he picked. The clothing was off-the-wall with purple overcoats, the padded jock straps and purple wigs; and the buildings were modular geometric patterns that seemed to confine the characters inside them. The film, in many ways is very dystopian, a sinister and depressing look at a future society. In some ways — for instance, the milk bar, the Durango 95 car, and the elaborate decorations in Alex’s room — the film is as comparable to science fiction as 2001. I felt that Kubrick was trying to place us outside of the norm, away from what we know and fear to give us new things to know and fear, like the ultra-violence of Alex and his misanthropic stooges. Even the primary colors in the opening and closing credits seem foreign and distant, too bright to even be real — then I remember what Alex said about the blood in the films: “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.” I think Kubrick was involving us on an almost subliminal level. Just as Alex’s videos were brainwashing him, we were being “told” on an almost subconscious level that the world we were watching was somehow more real than our own, and that elements of that world (clothes, architecture, themes) were designed to imprison us inside fortified walls.
In many ways Kubrick was also trying to show us the characters’ glaring inconsistencies. Notice how Dim assists in the rape of a woman in one scene and then speaks with kindness to a mannequin milk dispenser he has named Lucy in the very next. Or notice how Alex views himself in the crucifixion of Christ — dressed in an outfit just as gaudy as his purple record-store robes — as a soldier flailing away on Christ’s back. Yet later in the film, he is the martyr, he is the sacrifice of the immoral Ludovico Technique. So is he a messiah figure or the Messiah’s executioners? The movie would have us believe both, but at different times. Lastly, look at his prison number: “six-double-five-three-two-one” — 655321. It’s almost a perfect sequence in the wrong direction. Was Kubrick playing with us? Was he showing us our descent with Alex in a number that was slightly skewed? I think so.
A Clockwork Orange is a complex movie, a film that can be viewed in too many ways to suggest that any answer is 100 percent correct. It’s my belief that Stanley Kubrick wanted us to interpret the film as we wanted. In some ways I think it does glorify violence to a certain degree. It’s impossible to not enjoy the film’s pacing, the music and that silly dialogue, even as rape and murders are so brazenly and wantonly committed on screen. I also believe that violence is also an adequate anti-violence, and that by showing the scenes he did Kubrick was indicting us right along with Alex; we were his voyeuristic cohorts. By the end of the film, it seems to shoot in all directions, mainly back at the society that allowed such a boy to be created. That, in my opinion, is the ultimate message.
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