A Clockwork Orange - discussion

[BrainGlutton]

@GorillaMan

I don’t have the book here, I think I know who I’ve lent it to…IIRC the corresponding scene is clearly about rape in the book. Because of the restrictions of film censorship at the time, the phallus statue was perhaps just a workaround.

In the book, the cat-lady is much older, and Alex definitely does not rape her.

[askeptic]

@Tenebras

That wacky Roger Ebert. (Full review here.)

Yeah, well Roger Ebert was an idiot who couldn’t review Sesame Street accurately.

ETA: Just skimmed the review, Ebert was clearly wrong as the later Oscar nominations proved.

[GorillaMan]

@Biffy the Elephant Shrew

though he does contemplate performing “the old ultra-violence” on her in the course of the robbery “if need be.”

That must have been it.

I guess that’s proof that the film, being one long rape fantasy, has destroyed my mind

[Darryl_Lict]

@Tenebras

That wacky Roger Ebert. (Full review here.)

I still don’t see where he calls it a two hour rape fantasy. And obviously, I completely disagree with his review.

[askeptic]

When A Clockwork Orange first came out, Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review, denouncing the film as “an ideological mess.” His argument, basically, was that Kubrick was using a variety of script and cinematographic techniques to make Alex appealing, heroic, and someone with whom viewers would identify. Ebert himself found Alex disgusting and accused Kubrick of wanting us to weep and sob for him and make excuses. Ebert claimed that Kubrick was arguing, “In a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.” Ebert’s argument comes under the general category of an effects argument, but it’s based on a misreading of Kubrick’s message, which might be stated as follows:** “We need, as a society, to develop institutions that are less criminal and which promote opportunity, partly because individual citizens will act criminally if they see no reason to invest in the society**.” Kubrick doesn’t so much want us to side with Alex as to ensure that we see ourselves in Alex. Kubrick was not going to give viewers the false comfort of distancing ourselves from the violence in Alex or in the institutions of society that dealt with him.

From here

[mswas]

@Biffy the Elephant Shrew

The person in the Midnight Cowboy thread who called ACO a “two-hour rape fantasy” was speaking figuratively, in a deliberately provocative way. He has a point that the violation of Alex’s mind and the taking of his free will, which is the core of the story, is symbolically a counterpart to the physical violations perpetrated by Alex. But the leap from that to characterizing the film as a “two-hour rape fantasy” is a ludicrous stretch.

Yeah, you got the point. I’d like to expound on it. Contrary to some of the opinions that were posted here, it wasn’t out of some sense of shock and outrage that I came to this opinion. I spent most of my life listening to Industrial Music, watched a lot of shocking movies, played around with S&M. By calling it a 2 hour rape fantasy I am not in any way condemning it.

In this I will take the movie as a standalone work, the book being irrelevant to the nature of the movie. A movie must be able to stand alone in order to make its point. If you must rely upon a companion volume then the auteur failed. I do not think Kubrick failed, I think he was remarkably successful.

A rape is about control and violation. The rapist works to violate the inner sanctum of a person. The most obvious version of this is a man shoving his penis into a woman’s vagina against her will. What this accomplishes is that it makes her feel unsafe in her own body. Someone else can take complete control over her body. Women who have been raped have a hard time feeling safe in their vaginas. For some of them it is hard to enjoy consensual sex afterward because the act of receiving a man inside of them reminds them of the crime that was committed against them. The feel of the violation is pervasive and lingers.

It is not all of Alex’s victims that I allude to when I say it is a rape fantasy, but Alex himself. Alex is the victim of the rape in this movie. Ludwig Van Beethoven represents Alex’s vagina. It is the only thing that is sacred to Alex. The fact that it is used in the videos where he is conditioned violates him on a very deep level. It is not his conditioning as a whole that he regrets. He is able to give up the violence. What he is unable to give up is Ludwig Van. That is the source of his anguish at his behavioral conditioning. From that time forward, any time he has sex (listens to Ludwig Van) he is filled with revulsion and recalls the feeling of his torment.

The movie flips the script on Alex the rapist, and ends up being about Alex the Rape Victim.

@What Exit?

It was a very disturbing movie and it was meant to be, but if anyone thinks it was a 2 hour rape* fantasy, then they missed the movie somehow in their shock.

It was a movie about brutality, violence, rehabilitation, the future getting scarier, brainwashing, the government over-stepping the bounds and victims becoming as bad as those that assaulted them.

He is not rehabilitated in any way shape or form. There is not even an attempt made at rehabilitating him. The attempt is to program him like a computer so that he cannot perform the act. Alex’s fate is inconsequential next to the goal of making him less dangerous to society. As the final scene shows, Alex is in no way rehabilitated. He still has the same desires he always did. What changed was that he was unable to act upon them in the same way he once did.

[askeptic]

That I can understand. It is “a little” different than what you implied in the other thread.

[mswas]

@askeptic

That I can understand. It is “a little” different than what you implied in the other thread.

I didn’t ‘imply’ anything. I said it was a two-hour rape fantasy. I mean, I don’t really care if people see it as that, I do though.

[BrainGlutton]

@askeptic

Ebert’s argument comes under the general category of an effects argument, but it’s based on a misreading of Kubrick’s message, which might be stated as follows: “We need, as a society, to develop institutions that are less criminal and which promote opportunity, partly because individual citizens will act criminally if they see no reason to invest in the society.”

I don’t get that from the movie – nor the book either. Alex and his droogs don’t commit crimes out of a sense of frustration or lack of opportunity for productive lives. They do it because it’s fun, it gives them a sense of power, and they have no moral restraints. And in the last chapter of the book (omitted from most American editions), Alex decides to give up crime, not because he’s had any moral epiphany but just because he’s losing interest in it, and he’s just run into his old friend Georgie, who has found a steady job and gotten married.

[BrainGlutton]

I’m flashing on an old National Lampoon article/cartoon spread, “How To Tell a Kid His Parents Are Dead.” E.g., in one toon, the adult and the kid are cresting the top of a roller-coaster. Caption: “By the way, Billy, your parents are dead! HANG ON!” In another, the adult is dressed as Santa in a department store and the kid is on his lap.

KID: Gee, Santa, I haven’t seen my parents in days!

ADULT: Well, Billy, your Dad hadn’t paid my bill, and so I came by your house with a couple of big elves, and, well, things just got out of hand. It was a lot like A Clockwork Orange.

[mswas]

@BrainGlutton

I’m flashing on an old National Lampoon article/cartoon spread, “How To Tell a Kid His Parents Are Dead.” E.g., in one toon, the adult and the kid are cresting the top of a roller-coaster. Caption: “By the way, Billy, your parents are dead! HANG ON!” In another, the adult is dressed as Santa in a department store and the kid is on his lap.

KID: Gee, Santa, I haven’t seen my parents in days!

ADULT: Well, Billy, your Dad hadn’t paid my bill, and so I came by your house with a couple of big elves, and, well, things just got out of hand. It was a lot like A Clockwork Orange.

That’s evil.

[BrainGlutton]

@mswas

That’s evil.

Not as evil as this one:

KID: Gee, Uncle Bob, we’ve been walking around the fair for hours! I’m starving!

ADULT: I’m glad you brought that up, Billy, because you’ve got to choose right now between all the ice cream you can eat and seeing your parents alive again!

[mswas]

@BrainGlutton

Not as evil as this one:

KID: Gee, Uncle Bob, we’ve been walking around the fair for hours! I’m starving!

ADULT: I’m glad you brought that up, Billy, because you’ve got to choose right now between all the ice cream you can eat and seeing your parents alive again!

Nah, less evil than Santa and his elves raping Billy’s parents to death.

[BrainGlutton]

@mswas

Nah, less evil than Santa and his elves raping Billy’s parents to death.

But, you see, the other one puts the guilt on the kid!

[Will_Repair]

By the way, the nearly raped girl in the movie was much older than the one in the book. The movie could of been filmed by Russ Meyers.

[mswas]

@BrainGlutton

But, you see, the other one puts the guilt on the kid!

True enough. I think most kids would forego the Ice Cream though.

[Tenebras]

@askeptic

From here

askeptic, did you read that person’s review? I can’t tell whether he is restating Ebert’s summary in that quote or proposing a theme for Kubrick’s movie. The review as a whole is something of a jumbled mess. Witness this paragraph from near the end where he’s beginning to wind down. I copied them here plain text, but there is significant bolding in the original. If you’re going to argue from authority you should pick one who can decide which side he wants to argue.

Aggression is part of how repressed groups resist being exploited by more established groups. A humane society should fear and reject suppression of subconscious aggressive impulses (through tactics such as conditioning, drugs, brain surgery, etc.) in any subset of the population because such tactics could be used as a device for the exercise of aggressive exploitation and control. Instead, a humane society should want the management of aggression to be governed primarily by the exercise of individual, conscious, volitional oversight. The frontal lobe of the cerebrum is responsible for volitional activity (the closest biological equivalent to the religious term “free will”) and for suppressing limbic system influences, when appropriate. The obvious “cure” for violent aggressive impulses and sadistic tendencies, therefore, is ensuring that each person has the will to control such antisocial outbursts. That, in turn, requires that each person be invested in the society. People will exert conscious control over their aggressive impulses, most of the time, if they have something significant to lose. People with good jobs, property, and opportunity are loath to throw those things away on random acts of aggression. Ask yourself, which people are engaging in looting in New Orleans with the breakdown in law and order? It is the ones who live in poverty and who have little hope and, thus, little to lose.

To sum up: if society is criminal then there is no reason for the citizens not to be criminals as well.

Clockwork Orange uses the language of film to make the viewer sympathetic to Alex and his viewpoint. I agree with mswas that the movie is about violations in both directions. Cinematically the movie does everything that it can to make Alex the point of view that the viewer identifies with, even up to his eventual triumph. (“I was cured, all right.”) He has gone back to his old ways and “won” against society, vindicating his previous lifestyle.

I Spit on Your Grave does something similar but in the opposite direction. Shot mostly from the girl’s perspective, she is first victimized and then turns on her attackers, extracting revenge by turning their own vile game around on them and sexually assaulting and killing her assailants one by one and emerging triumphant. Clockwork Orange is structured so that Alex lashes out against society with sex and violence and then is punished in the same way. He also emerges from the movie unrepentant and on top.

Clockwork Orange is pretty to look at, and all the weird lenses and the music and the stylized dialogue make it interesting to watch, but the film itself is about rape and the perspective of the film vindicates those sentiments.

[askeptic]

To sum up: if society is criminal then there is no reason for the citizens not to be criminals as well.

I was not arguing from authority just letting someone who I agree with me say it, call it lazy if you want but there it is. Also, I agree that the quoted text is a succinct statement of the movie. Rape is used as a metaphorical tool to make that statement. While rape is a theme the recurs I was only taking exception to mswas’s glib dismissal of the film as “Two hour rape fantasy.”

[Tenebras]

That summation is Roger Ebert’s summation.

I can’t tell whether the person you quoted agrees with the summation or not. The paragraph you quoted is ambiguous. In particular:

Ebert’s argument comes under the general category of an effects argument, but it’s based on a misreading of Kubrick’s message, which might be stated as follows: “We need, as a society, to develop institutions that are less criminal and which promote opportunity, partly because individual citizens will act criminally if they see no reason to invest in the society.”

To what does the “which” in that sentence refer? Is it Ebert’s purported misreading or is it Kubrick’s actual message? If the former, then why does the essay proceed to sum up the movie in more or less exactly those terms. If the latter, in what way is that different from what Ebert wrote? (Well, aside from being a little less catchy.)

The movie is a two hour rape fantasy. The question is whether it is anything more than that. I posted the link to Ebert because Darryl Lict said he didn’t think anyone with any appreciation of cinema would say such a thing. Darryl, I missed your earlier reply. The place where he calls it a rape fantasy is when he complains that the movie glorifies in the violence and the violation. I submit the following three paragraphs:

@Roger Ebert

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.

<snip>

When Kubrick shows us Alex … 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.

[saoirse]

Just because no one’s mentioned it yet, Anthony Burgess was a lot closer to Ebert’s opinion on the movie than anyone else’s.

Also, that “last chapter” he had added to the book was absolutely awful. I don’t know if he really wanted it in the original book or not but if he did, thank god for good editing. “I was cured” is as far as the reader needs to get with that character.