In the age of the anti-hero, among the Lannisters and the Underwoods, A Clockwork Orange’s
hero Alex stands out as a prototype and prime example of a strange but fascinating subset
of the anti-hero type. We like to call the glamorous psychopath.
[What we were after now is the old surprise visit. That was a real kick. And good for laughs and lashings of the
old ultra-violent.]
Unlike with other villains, in the case of the glamorous psychopath, it’s not the backstory
or some justification like cancer, or abuse, or oppression that explains behavior and keeps
us grudgingly sympathetic towards the horrible hero.
With Alex Burgess, it’s his pure elegance and the feeling that he is somehow superior to all
others around him.
We are fascinated, because he’s smarter, more cultured, and does what he does better
than anyone else.
In the years since, we’ve been seduced by more examples of the glamorous psychopath type:
Catherine Trammell from Basic Instinct, Kathryn and Sebastian from Cruel Intentions, Silence of the Lambs’
Hannibal Lecter and NBC’s TV version Hannibal, the Wolf of Wall Street's Jordan Belfort , and American
Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.
The image is so popular, it’s seeped out of movies and TV into the rest of our visual culture,
For music videos to fashion shoots.
As the unremitting violence of our entertainment proves, we are an aggressive species, but
society mostly requires us to suppress our violent urges.
So the fanciful glamorous psychopath allows us to vicariously experience a cathartic release
for this aggressive impulse, while remaining just surreal enough to make us feel it’s
all safely fictional.
So let's look closer at how Burgess’ story and Kubrick’s images, music and direction work together
to elevate Alex from a teenage thug to a cult anti-hero, whose antics we guiltily enjoy.
[I've been doing nothing I shouldn't sir.
Alex is highly sophisticated and cultured, embodying a civilized intelligence
that sets him above and apart from others around him.
As Burgess puts it, Alex is a human being endowed, even over-endowed with the three
essential attributes of man.
“ [1] He rejoices in articulate language and even invents a new form of it… ; [2]
he loves beauty, which he finds in Beethoven’s music above everything; [3] he is aggressive.”
Alex is obviously more intelligent and well-spoken than his droogs and the other characters in
the movie.
He quotes, he sings, he dances.
He is ridiculously imaginative and his daydreams are humorous as well as vile.
His speech and tastes are refined.
He’s also the only character in the movie who has a true appreciation for art -- he
loves Beethoven as much as he loves violence.
Interestingly, NBC’s Hannibal Lecter, another cultured, elegant psychopath, at one point
cooks a human leg to Beethoven’s ninth symphony, one of Alex’s favorites.
On top of all these charming characteristics, Alex is played by Malcolm McDowell, who can’t
help but be charming, in a creepy Ramsey Bolton kind of way.
In short, Alex is more human than any other character in the movie.
Alex narrates the movie, so this privileges his perspective, but it’s not just that
-- he narrates in a language of his own invention, called Nadsat.
Nadsat is a mix of Old English, rhyming slang and Anglicized Russian.
Irvine Welsh points out that this language does more than simply show off Alex’s linguistic
talents.
Alex’s lingo forces us to struggle to understand him, grasping at recognizable words and syntax
to complete his sentences.
In this way, Alex quite literally forces us to hang on his every word.
Language reflects how we see the world, and in A Clockwork Orange we can either try to
understand Alex’s world on his terms, or not at all.
His narration highlights his nature as a true individual, which (even despite the need to
protect society from him) makes it somehow heartbreaking when he’s deprived of this
individuality.
Kubrick made sure to use every ounce of set to show us more of Alex’s character.
The room he created for Alex has a cult status of its own — one fan even spent 6 months
recreating Alex’s bed-cover.
(Which, by the way, is designed to look like citrus fruits cut in half!)
Through the decor we see Alex’s idiosyncratic sense of style and his appreciation for music
and art.
Also, movie-Alex has a pet snake named Basil, which symbolizes his sexual and violent instincts,
but also shows that he has enough heart to care for another living creature.
In the book Alex is only 17.
McDowell, playing Alex, was 28, but thanks to the script and Kubrick’s set choices,
he still seems very juvenile.
He uses a lot of childish words of his own invention.
He decorates his prison cell wall with a collage of clippings and photos, reminding us that
he really is just a grumpy teenager -- a kid who skips school, demands to have a lock installed
on his door and cries when his parents upset him.
Next to his evil hobbies, this childishness seems perverse, but still makes us inclined
to cut Alex some slack.
Roger Ebert points out that the visual language Kubrick created for the movie encourages us
to see the world as Alex does.
For parts of the movie, Kubrick uses a wide-angle lens, which at close range, distorts the sides
of the image.
The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant
upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated.
Kubrick often places Alex at the centre of a wide-angle shot or uses a standard lens
on Alex alone so that he is the only one who is almost never distorted.
As Ebert puts it, “so a visual impression is built up during the movie that Alex, and
only Alex, is normal”.
In the world of a Clockwork Orange, Alex is not alone in his delinquent activities.
There are other bands of criminals just as violent, if less stylish.
And Alex’s merry band of sadists prowl a world that is just as morally bankrupt as
they are.
Mr. Deltoid is vile, the prison guards are incompetent, the victims are cartoonish and
unpleasant [the author and the cat lady especially].
Dr. Brodsky and his colleagues, while “curing” others of cruelty, obviously enjoy the spectacle
of Alex getting beaten up and humiliated on stage.
Unlike all these hypocritical characters, who pretend to be good and socially responsible,
Alex, at least, is honest with the audience from the start, which also helps to get us
on his side.
Most of the dialogue scenes in the movie are taken directly from Burgess’ text, but a
few scenes have been cut or altered.
Interestingly, all the changes that were made make Alex seem less horrible and the world
around him seem more horrible.
Alex’s first three assaults are cut.
So is the murder Alex commits in prison.
Kubrick also glossed over certain especially incriminating details.
For example, the girls Alex meets at the record shop were no more than ten years old according
to the book, and in the book, Alex brutally rapes them.
In the movie, the girls are consenting adults and the sex is, if anything, comical, the
skip-frame high-speed motion making the girls and Alex look like wind up toys.
Most importantly, Kubrick completely excluded the last chapter of the book, in which Alex,
wiser and calmer at the ripe old age of 18, starts to reevaluate his evil ways.
Kubrick dismissed it as “unconvincing and inconsistent with the style and intent of
the book.” and chose to end the movie on Alex’s return to his natural violent state.
By making this the last scene of the movie, Kubrick gives it special meaning and weight
— Alex is violent again and all is well with the world, he seems to say.
[“Oh I was cured alright!”]
Kubrick shoots the “ultra-violence” in a way that makes it feel unreal and distant.
The violent scenes are often set to music or slowed down, and this along with the wide-camera
lens breaks the illusion of reality.
Alex and his crew are dressed in matching white suits, their movements are choreographed
— at a certain point the whole thing starts looking like a zesty dance more than anything.
Alex, guided by Kubrick’s eye for beauty, manages to make even sexual assault look perversely
aestheticized.
Other scenes, with their exaggerated movement and sound effects, are almost slapstick, no
more frightening than a Tom and Jerry Cartoon.
The beautified choreographed violence is what made Kubrick’s critics especially angry,
and what makes the film enduringly controversial and upsetting to many.
But actually, most of Alex’s violence is shot in a way that makes it allegorical and
easier to stomach -- compared to the hyper-real brutality that’s commonplace today -- so
it’s almost as if we’re not meant to interpret the violence as real or part of our world.
A Clockwork Orange has a lot in common with a fairy tale, especially in its deliberately
heavy use of coincidence and plot symmetry - Alex is assaulted by the exact same victims
that he assaults This fearful symmetry is especially evident in the scene with the author
torturing Alex - here Kubrick uses the same long pull away zoom shot he used to introduce
us to Alex in the opening scene of the film.
This fable-like mythical quality further distances us from the story, because it signifies that
what we are viewing is an allegory for aspects of our own lives -- like our individualism,
aggression and frustration -- set in a world that’s removed from our own.
In a clockwork orange Kubrick built a world that is recognizable but also weirdly grotesque,
just like a clockwork orange.
The costume design, casting and sets are peppered with details that make the whole thing seem
like a perverse fairytale.
Alex’s mom is a wispy old lady, crying quietly into a Kleenex, but she wears patent leather
dresses and colorful wigs.
Both the young delinquents and respectable opera singers seem to go to the same Korova
Milkbar where they all, presumably, squirt drugged milk into their glasses out of plexiglass
breasts.
The Clockwork Orange world ends up looking more like a funhouse mirror reflection of
our world, rather than a real dystopian future.
The central idea of Burgess’ book has to do with the question of free-will.
Is it better to be bad of one’s own free will, or to be good through scientific brainwashing?
Burgess points out that when something cold and mechanical, like scientific conditioning
or state oppression, is forced upon a living thing, the result is perverse and senseless
— like a clockwork orange.
Kubrick’s adaptation was very faithful to Burgess’ book, but he understood that in
the film “the dramatic impact […] had principally to do with the extraordinary character
of Alex.”
Audiences and critics alike were horrified by Alex when Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation
of Anthony Burgess’ novel first came out.
The New Yorker called Kubrick a “bad pornographer,” while Roger Ebert criticized the film for
pretending to “oppose the police state and forced mind control,” while really just
enjoying the nastiness of the hero, Alex.
But it is precisely this nastiness that keeps the film’s cult status alive and growing
today.
So, by the end of the movie, we’ve been seduced by the hero and by Kubrick into actually
feeling relieved when Alex returns to his natural violent state.
For a while, watching the film, we enjoy seeing things Alex’s way, with no decency to hold
us back.
His antics make us feel powerful.
They offer an antidote to the anxiety of our own social structures.
Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange with the citizens of huge industrial cities in mind,
like New York and London, whose work is often terribly routine, their food and clothing
and home standardized.
“When your life ticks along like a Woolworth’s alarm clock,” characters like Alex offer
audiences a vicarious respite from all that, allowing us to briefly fantasizing about being
some exceptional, out-of-this-world creature who ignores the rules imposed by society and
is good enough to get away with it.