Kubrick's Total Cinema: Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities by Kuberski Philip

Author:Kuberski, Philip [Kuberski, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Published: 2012-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

Disciplining the gaze

Where Humbert’s gaze connects Lolita’s flesh to a personal mythology of nymphets, Alex in A Clockwork Orange has only the barren and anonymous premises of the “old ultra-violence” and the “old in-out, in-out” with which to adorn the will. He has no other element in his representational repertoire to mediate or inflect his impersonal appetites for sex and violence: An old man is to be beaten, a young woman is to be raped, and a middle-aged woman is to be taunted and murdered. As the society of a “near future” (as imagined circa 1970) falls to pieces, crime has become nearly the norm. Young Alex and his droogs are simply uninflected manifestations of the will.

The first assault on a woman takes place in the ornately framed stage of an abandoned theater. The film audience is thus doubly situated and doubly framed—and the violence, to those paying attention to such things, made doubly artificial. The nude girl whom Billy Boy’s droogs are dragging off to rape is groped, picked up, and twisted. Her breasts swing and her arms flail. Just as the rape would have seemed inevitable, Alex and his droogs appear, and Billy Boy’s gang discards the woman, who manages to escape, for the perhaps headier instinctual pleasures of a brawl. The artifice has made the scene less disturbing but not less involving, and perhaps easier for some to watch. It is this threshold of pornography and art that leaves some viewers with an uneasy sense of kinship with the would-be rapists as they gaze on the unfolding scene. Who is degraded in this scene other than a self-conscious viewer?

Following his cinematic conditioning, Alex is brought onto a stage by Dr Ludovico to show the success of the violence-aversion treatment. An inoffensive and grinning Alex is confronted by a comic who insults, provokes, and having mastered him, makes the prostrate boy lick the sole of his shoe. He then confronts a beautiful woman, nearly nude, before whom he ends cowering as his impulse to seize her prompts a gag and vomit reflex. Here, it is Alex who is degraded, and the exposed woman, having vanquished the rapist, takes a series of flamboyant bows as she leaves the stage. Once again the scene is doubly framed and staged, and the audience in the theater sits in judgment with the audience of politicians. Yet those who felt an unwelcome identification with Alex in the earlier scenes will now suffer a similar degradation. By abandoning a morally superior stance, Kubrick’s film inevitably gains pornographic as well as moral energies that threaten to go off in unpredictable directions.

After his conditioning is undone by hypnopedia, Alex is once more staged, this time at a press conference arranged by the Minister of the Interior. Alex has become celebrated in the tabloids as the “poor boy” driven to suicide by the government. Lying in a hospital bed, his body is covered by plaster casts. A massive stereo is wheeled into the ward and Alex listens to the coda of Beethoven’s “Glorious Ninth .

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