A Clockwork Orange

“It's funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.” I must say that this is the most ambivalent and confused I have felt on how I should feel after watching any film I have seen up to now. I think how people feel so strongly about this film and what it is saying and how it said is a testament to Kubrick's storytelling and why he is hailed as one of the greats. I had put off this film for a while even though I am high on the other works of Kubrick's that I have seen, the Shining, Dr Strange Love and Eyes Wide Shut, as I had known of its portrayal of violence particularly its horrific portrayals of rape. Before I attempt to provide an interpretation of what this is, I would like to mention the directing of the film itself. I love Kubrick's style, the vibrant usage of colour, the long set shots allowing the characters to enter and exit our screen, the slow zoom ins and zoom outs. This is apparent at its peak in the Shining and is done extremely well here as well. Along with this, the score is wonderful, the mysterious and dark tone repeated during acts of violence and of course along with “Ludwig Van” and Singing in the Rain. I am currently taking a course in university on Ethics, Conflict and War. And while this of course, is not of particular interest to the film, our most recent topic I believe is of relevance. It is that of the role of media and how it shapes our views on the “other”, meaning far away people from what we conceptualize as our “own” (mostly in the context of contemporary nation states). It hones in on how images of violence have a certain affect on us as those perceiving from another lens, away from the conflict or act of violence itself. One may think at first that this must relate to how the repeated exposure to such violent images will lead to a greater sense of desensitization, and while that is a part of it, that is not the main point. Rather, the value is that instead of us feeling a certain way from solely the viewing of violent images, there is instead a moment of reflection that states “how SHOULD I feel about this.” And this specifically relates to how society conditions us to respond to the image, for example in how this may be done deliberately by states to shape how their citizens respond to what they see. The example arises within that of war contexts and how when you show one side an image they will have a different conception of what is going on in the images and who is doing what than the other side would, no matter what the objective nature of the image or video is. A specific example can be seen in the Balkan wars of the 1990s where the same photographs of children being killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serbian and Croatian propaganda briefings. Instead of the images being used for a general condemnation of war and violence, it instead is curated to fit a particular means, abstracting it from its moral value as an objective piece. I also could work to highlight that of those images circulated of Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers horrifically tortured Muslim prisoners of war during the war on terror. For certain viewers, I mention that of George Bush, we were given ambiguous interpretations of the images. Leaving his senate chamber, Bush had stated, after viewing an image of a man being raped, that it was “disgusting.” Lacking any moral condemnation we are left to question whether Bush thought the fact of the actions taken place were disgusting merely because they were homosexual ones, which would miss the point that this is an act of horrific torture utilizing sexual abuse. Which highlights greater societal mechanisms within early 2000s American that would refuse to imbue an moral objectivity in these images as a condemnation as torture, as these were their American soldiers. And rather, we get a vague statement that may not even relate to the nature of torture. In a way, this conditioning is something which is offered to Alex. With his lacking moral framework, there are no boundaries in which he interprets the world. So the government works to make one for him. Through his repeated exposure to violence and terror, ranging from rape to Nazi Germany, the British state tells him what to do in response. Based on becoming sick, he now knows how he should respond to such images. There is then the ability to frame and mold the way he lives from this, in how these associations are now made in a specific moral framework contrasting his barbaric and unlawful way of life that he previously lived. I believe we are also then offered further insight into how states work to shape the way we respond to violence to better fit the states functioning. By reinforcing that this is how we should feel about this thing through this moral framework, a greater sense of governmentality is cultivated. While, of course, Kubrick goes into the extreme, so the framing that the things Alex does are bad are quite morally necessary, considering how the British state functioned in this film as they changed their tactics afterwards towards Alex’s being, it is clear the focus is on how the state shapes him for their purpose and that this shaping just happens to be moral as tackling lawlessness is what would have got them votes. With regards to the ending, we are then told to sit with the question of whether or not this conditioning can be effective in providing law and order, if we are actually able to live a moral way through such shaping of individuals. Or if, instead, we are unable to provide an all encompassing framework and we are at the whim of hyper-subjective conceptualizations of law that only work to serve certain purposes of the state. “We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons.” 4.25/5