Stanley Kubrick
Arancia Meccanica

After the astral and hallucinogenic visions of "2001: A Space Odyssey," Stanley Kubrick returns to Earth and dives into the hell of metropolitan violence.

From the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess (futuristic in the highest sense of the term), Kubrick draws a sort of anti-utopian pamphlet about our near future. In narrating the personal and collective events of Alex and his droogs (devoted to violence as the main reason for their existence, to drugs, to alcohol), Kubrick aims to represent not only the discomfort, and horror, of a generation but also to tell, without false moralism, the issue of being free: what does freedom mean? Being able to do and say what one wants? And what are the limits within which freedom can truly be considered such?

Upon its release, the film caused scandal and controversy. The violence present in the work is, at times, still difficult to endure (memorable, in this sense, the rape performed while humming "Singin' in the Rain") and certainly the emotional strength of the film stems from various elements, first and foremost the visual and sonic intersperse of high and low, popular culture and elitist culture. Kubrick dares where no director had ever dared before (nor will they in the future): high culture vulgarizes, becomes an object of mockery, and bends to the will of the lower. The Korova Milk Bar (Alex's gang's hangout) is a kitsch triumph of cheap pornography and sex, but in the background, one hears Beethoven; the cat lady's house (where the first rape takes place) is a little jewel of almost Asimovian futurism; the slang language becomes almost derisive (the brain becomes "the gulliver", it's a Western-declined language derived from nadsat, an artificial English slang with Russian influences created by Burgess); the systematic destruction of reality (the continuous accelerations, slow motions, wide angles).

Even if, perhaps, the argument Kubrick seems to want to emphasize most concerns the concept of power and authority. When Alex is punished by another authority (the State) and forced to watch sequences of violence for entire days (with insistent Beethoven in the background) and obliged, through special equipment, not to be able to close his eyes (should he do it he would go blind), he isn't serving some kind of sentence, but is increasing his own sense of violence. And when he will use this charge of violence in a "useful" function for the State, he will no longer be considered a madman, but a manageable and integrated person. There isn't, it seems Kubrick tells us, a single violence: there is the one authorized by an entity higher than us to which one must obey and in which to channel all one's frustrations, and there is a personal violence that, should it not be inserted in a broader context, would be considered pure anarchic madness. Anarchy in the futuristic, yet so modern, world of "A Clockwork Orange" is not contemplated: order, discipline, even if loaded with extreme violence, is the only solution to feel useful to the cause. Evident, in this way, are the appeals to totalitarian regimes (fascism, Nazism, communism) reread in a sarcastic key (impossible not to notice the different reading levels present throughout the film: from drama to farce, Kubrick tells us, the step is short).

Despite the extraordinary performances of the entire cast (with special praise to Malcolm McDowell, the hallucinated Alex who made history), it is not only the most controversial and discussed film of Kubrick, but one of the most controversial and discussed films of all time. The implications present in the work eluded many, and only the sense of raw violence present in all 136' of running time remained: yet the dilemma with which Burgess recounted his work seems, after years, to have remained entirely intact, "is it more immoral to take away a man's freedom by imprisoning him, or instead transforming him into a clockwork orange, a robot?"