Stanley Kubrick
Arancia Meccanica

Reviewing this film brings me back to some embarrassing situations: during the gloomy pre-1980 carnivals, in Venice there was a gang modeled after A Clockwork Orange. Not the ones that were nicknamed by the newspapers of the time, intent on committing robberies, but they were rather competent thugs armed with baseball bats, dressed in white and bowler hats. Is it possible that this film is guilty of encouraging loser gangs from the suburbs to live a day of glory (or more) and to take out revenge on others' heads? Perhaps: I am not a supporter of the idea that films are dangerous for viewers and transmit messages of violence. At worst, they rummage through a hornet's nest of compressed turmoil.

Second episode: I was handling film screenings for meetings. When money was lacking for the social center's electricity, "A Clockwork Orange" was the favorite title to see throngs of fans, looking for a two-hour space to feel ultraviolent and pay a few loose change as an offering. Among them, the most fervent fan was a real criminal, now gone, killed with metal bars, who asked me for a copy of the film. That Che Guevara t-shirt effect, which does not do justice to Kubrick's film.

35 years later, what can "A Clockwork Orange" still give us? Why its success and influence over different generations? What are the qualities that make it more loved than “Switchblade Sisters”, or Corman's biker films, etc., etc., etc.? Or than "If..." by Lindsay Anderson, which indeed launched Malcom McDowell as a hallucinated rebel?

The secret lies in the plastic qualities of the film. Kubrick is not an inventive genius; his films always derive from other films. Just as for "2001", the director took pains to rummage through the arsenals of celluloid from other works, including Margheriti, so for "A Clockwork Orange", he did not stop at even the most terrible of drive-in movies about youth violence. He resembles Miles Davis, a fisherman of others' ideas but unique in bringing them into the right light, completing puzzles in need of the last piece. Perhaps Kubrick is an engineer genius.

It is the language that Kubrick uses that makes the difference. His work on lenses, often overused in cinema, like symmetries and the American plan, or wide-angle and telephoto lenses, to deform faces and environments or squash characters like in a grotesque and allegorical painting, which he knows to revitalize as if they were novelties. Burgess' story (which he disowned in old age, as it allegedly incited violence...) was a fantasy on the parodic-mimetic use of the youthful slang of the 60s/70s youth.

Where the word in the film cannot reach (in the film Alex's first-person Finniganian babbling was of no small complexity) the work is done by the images. Kubrick immortalizes and immobilizes prosaic scenes, such as the fall into water of Alex's rebellious mate or the legendary zoom in the Korova Milk Bar that opens the film, among many others). Just like the narrative irony of shooting a film that in the second part retraces the path of the first part in reverse, with Alex’s atoning walk in the places frequented for his ultraviolent brawls. We are in the world of opera buffa; unsurprisingly, the challenge with the antagonist rabble in the first minutes of the film takes place emblematically in a disused theater, with musical commentary by Gioacchino Rossini. We are also in the moral tale: as in "Strangelove" here Kubrick, a lifelong enemy of violence, takes care of enlightening us on the sinister relationship between power and petty crime; on how Alex is interested in power but conquers it with the weapon of artistic flair, as a beautiful gesture because it is free, making oneself a work of art with the brushes of primary urges. And "A Clockwork Orange" is also a science fiction film: I leave aside the uniforms of the Droogs, bizarre everyday astronauts. I think of the room of the paralyzed writer (by Alex), the reverberated sounds and opalescent light and I think of the final scene of "2001". I think of Alex jumping and grinning after breaking his rebellious accomplice, like the monkey in "2001". I think of the beaten tramp cursing at the crazy era where "men go to the moon" (and I think... here we go again!). Destiny would have it that the bodybuilder-caretaker of the writer (the actor David Prowse) would become Darth Vader in the Star Wars saga... it's just a case I know.

Sandwiched between two giants like "2001" and "Barry Lyndon" (this latter is Kubrick's artistic summit), "A Clockwork Orange" risks being seen as a "minor" film, less intense, less significant. Instead, it is another step for the development of directorial technique (which is the content of the director's moral); a proverbial and sculpted film, whose only fault is having won over more audiences than others. Without Kubrick wanting to make it a trend or a fashionable film. Probably today as in the past, and beyond the misuse and miserable surface interpretations, this film still speaks to us. The rest is nonsense.