A Clockwork Orange: The droog rides again
by Steve Rose, guardian.co.uk
May 11th 2011
It was the moment, perhaps, when A Clockwork Orange ceased to be dangerous. In
Cardiff in April 2002, halfway through the first night of her world tour, after
a blast of Beethoven's Ninth, Kylie Minogue pranced on stage – in a black
bowler hat and a white jumpsuit. She then launched into Spinning Around,
surrounded by dancers dressed as truncheon-swinging droogs in red codpieces.
Minogue was by no means the first to borrow A Clockwork Orange's iconography
over the past 40 years. In live music alone, such a list would include David
Bowie, Led Zeppelin, countless punk bands, Madonna, Megadeth and Sepultura, as
well as Blur, Usher and Lady Gaga, who, in her live shows last year, made her
entrance to the film's theme music. And with each new appropriation, it gets
that little bit harder to remember what all the fuss was about in the first
place.
In this country at least, A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's stylised sci-fi
tale of a delinquent gangleader's sadistic crimes (and the state's equally
sadistic rehabilitation of him), always benefited from an extra aura of
mystique – for having generated moral panic on its release in 1971, and for
being withdrawn from circulation by its director in 1974. Until Kubrick's death
in 1999, just about the only way you could see it in Britain was on an illicit
third-generation video copy, which added a frisson of danger but made for a
fuzzy, muffled watch. This week, to mark its 40th anniversary, a newly restored
version will be unveiled at Cannes, and released shortly after on Blu-ray. So
the film's journey into mainstream respectability, and availability, is finally
complete.
About time, too, says its star Malcolm McDowell. "When we made the film 40
years ago, we made it as a comedy, albeit a very black one. There was a lot of
humour, but when it came out, because it was so startling and shocking, people
just sat there dead silent. At the end, they didn't move out of their seats. Of
course, I know it has a lot of violence and stuff, but it's more psychological
than ketchup on the screen. Now audiences take it how we meant it. They really
have a good time and laugh. They have caught up with it."
The making of A Clockwork Orange, including McDowell's punishing experience of
working under Kubrick, is now the stuff of legend. In the second half of the
movie, McDowell's character Alex receives just about every punishment that he
has dished out in the first. This made for a shoot characterised by beatings,
bruisings, near-drownings and extreme torture in the name of the notorious
"Ludovico treatment", during which McDowell's eyes were held wide-open by
clamps.
The fact that Kubrick never really knew what he was after until he found it
meant that each traumatic scene had to be enacted again and again, a technique
that infuriated many of his actors. "I was subjected to physical abuse," laughs
McDowell. "But I understood. I thought, 'Here I am playing one of the greatest
parts I'm probably ever going to play. A little pain now, a little gain later
on.'"
Humour was the essence of his relationship with Kubrick. "The blacker the joke,
the more he'd roll about laughing. He was always looking in every scene for
'the magic'. I'd say, 'Have we found any magic yet?' And he'd say, 'No.' And
I'd say, 'Go off to the bathroom, Stan. Whenever you go to the bathroom, you
always have some idea.' I think he would just pause while having a pee and go,
'Ah!' And he'd come running back and go, 'Right. Now put the camera over here.'
It used to be a standing joke."
At the time, cheap, youth-oriented movies like Easy Rider were making the older
generation look square, as well as turning a handsome profit. So when his
beloved Napoleon project fell through, the 40-year-old Kubrick set about making
his own youth movie, closer to Easy Rider's methods than those of his
labour-intensive 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was mostly location shoots, a
relatively small budget, and no script beyond Anthony Burgess's novel, which
they would work through almost page by page on set. It was the fastest,
cheapest film he would ever make.
McDowell has his revenge
Kubrick was never exactly down with the kids, though. While he was happy to
film Alex and his droogs joyriding through the night, as a driver Kubrick was,
says McDowell, "so careful, he was dangerous". McDowell remembers once giving
him a lift home: "I had a little MGB. I gunned it, and Stanley was absolutely
terrified. I was going, 'This is a fantastic car! I love this car!' Revving it
up and flying around corners. The more I did it, the more terrified he was, so
the more I did it, just to get my own back. He was, like, 'Never again.'"
There may have come a point at which Kubrick stopped identifying with Alex and
started identifying with Mr Alexander, the intellectual whose home is invaded
by Alex's gang, and whose wife is raped by Alex to the tune of Singin' in the
Rain. The media storm thrown up by A Clockwork Orange certainly took Kubrick by
surprise. It was released into an already-simmering debate over censorship, sex
and violence, following Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Ken Russell's The Devils.
Between Mary Whitehouse, the home secretary Reginald Maudling and Christian
pressure groups, the film was besieged. "He felt maligned," says Kubrick's
widow, Christiane. "He felt that it was unfair to suddenly blame every crime on
him. He did not feel guilty. He felt frightened. He didn't like the sudden
storm. Who would?"
Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and his producer from A Clockwork Orange
on, says: "His big mistake is that he never talked back to the press. Nonsense
was written, but his attitude was, 'Don't talk to them or you'll never get rid
of them.' He could have avoided all that by being a bit more accessible, but he
just hated it." McDowell and Burgess found themselves defending the film on
Kubrick's behalf. "We had to circle the wagons," says McDowell.
Kubrick's stance changed, though, when two police officers came to see him at
his Hertfordshire home. "I'd had my head firmly in the sand," says Christiane.
"But I woke up at that point. The police said this was now beyond normal, and
we had to do something. We had people standing in front of our house; our
children were being approached; wherever I went people would come up to me. I
don't think we even knew how famous he really was at that point. The noose was
closing on us, so we did get frightened." Having fought against the film's
censorship, Kubrick then effectively censored it himself, quietly withdrawing
it in early 1974. "Stanley felt stupid," says Christiane, "but relieved."
Kubrick's suppression of the film could be seen as a defeat at the hands of the
moral brigade, but the American director, says McDowell, did not want to give
up his life in England. "He was an Anglophile. He'd lived in the UK since
making Lolita [in 1962], and he certainly wasn't going back to live in New York
or LA." McDowell, by contrast, relocated to the US shortly after the movie,
where he has been recognised on the street ever since, primarily on the
strength of A Clockwork Orange.
Beyond the UK, the movie has never been out of currency, particularly in the
US, and particularly among the young. Its sci-fi stylings have aged remarkably
well, and its almost abstract portrayal of out-of-control youth and
paternalistic society have made it something of a teenage rite of passage, the
movie equivalent of The Catcher in the Rye. Remarkably, it has been a style
guide for pretty much every subsequent musical genre: punk, metal, emo,
hip-hop, Britpop. Minogue's homage was entitled Droogie Nights. On the big
screen, meanwhile, every time you see a gang walking along in slow-motion, a
speeded-up party scene, a slow pan out from a closeup of a face, a torture
scene set to cheerful music, the chances are it was plundered from Kubrick's
original.
'Hitler loved good music'
So is there any danger left? The movie's sex and violence looks quaint compared
with today's offerings (not to mention Burgess's original book), but its power
always came from more than simple explicit shock. The rapes and beatings are
"presented" to us in stylised form throughout – on stages, on cinema screens,
accompanied by song and dance, and in unsettling, contradictory combinations of
high art and low violence. Singin' in the Rain mixes with modernist interiors
and sexual violence; Beethoven plays over Nazi propaganda; we hear Rossini
while a murder is committed using pop art. It's as if Kubrick is messing with
the power of culture to morally "improve" society, just as he denied the film's
own power to degrade it. "Hitler loved good music," he once told an
interviewer, "and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it
didn't do them, or anyone else, much good."
As with most Kubrick films, the movie still poses big questions – about power,
the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of social order, personal
freedom and morality. "I think it's still a perfect parable about evil," says
Christiane. "Evil that's not hampered by the slightest conscience. And it seems
to me that Alex lives in a microcosm of our world. His parents are revolting in
their weakness and stupidity, and the police, the doctors, the church, the
social worker, the intellectual victims – all the people that surround him are
really western society as we are now. The youth are opting out of politics.
They're just watching vampire movies. And the rest of us are like Alex's
parents, whingeing and whimpering."
Kubrick once said: "One of the conclusions of the film is that there are limits
to which society should go in maintaining law and order. Society should not do
the wrong thing for the right reason, even though it frequently does the right
thing for the wrong reason."
When it came to the future of humanity, Kubrick was never much of an optimist.
But then again, he didn't live to see Kylie Minogue play Cardiff.
• A Clockwork Orange screens on 19 May at the Cannes film festival. The
Clockwork Orange 40th Anniversary Edition will be released on Blu-ray, as part
of the Stanley Kubrick: Limited Edition Collection, and on download through
iTunes, on 23 May.
Original Page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/11/a-clockwork-orange-cannes?mobile-redirect=false
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