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Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

by T.O. Lawrence
10/31/2006

The Tate Center theatre is exhibiting its second Kubrick flick in October, making a particularly appropriate choice for Halloween with A Clockwork Orange. Based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, it depicts human cruelty taken to the greatest extreme through the acts of its humble narrator, Alex (played by Malcolm MacDowell). In an astounding visual display of the worst kind of evil, Kubrick draws us into a fantasy land of amorality, viciousness and cruelty, all the while making us cringe with joy at the bloodlust that can only come with being young. Because really, what's more terrifying than youth?

Kubrick assaults the audience with renditions of a modern apocalypse, sending a young Alex and friends on a rampage for fun at all costs. He rapes, kills, fights and rages all the while, staring out at the world with the cold blue eyes of a heartless adolescent drinking moloko-plus. All around him, the hollow result of a world taken to the extreme flashes forth through garish displays of color and a cacophonic soundtrack of Beethoven gone mad. Horror and psychosis eat away at the very structure of their world in a fearsome game of trick or treat with every type of terror on display.

Little monsters pop out of corners without warning, driving us further through the shadows of our own desires. Characters become their flaws, latching onto greed, power and revenge. Colors, colors, extraordinary colors come as a visceral barrage in a cartoon of violence that becomes realer than real. Like Dante into the inferno, we follow our Virgil into the mires of vice, sampling each along the way. All the while, Alex, that little imp on your shoulder and only real friend, whispers for you to eat the apple. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Because sin can be oh so much fun.

But don't feel guilty for liking it, everyone wants to do the same in a world where everything is at your fingertips as long as you have the will to take it. Fun is around every corner as long as you have the stomach to be cruel. Women can be had, money is not an object and really, it's all just a means to the sickly-sweet stimulation we long to lash out at our nerves.

But really, with an actor so charming as Malcolm MacDowell to act as our tour guide on this house of horrors, how can you not want to have fun? The characters act as if the world is a videogame, the people to be played with and won. Despite his evil and loathsome life, you can't help but love our narrator for all of the terrible desires we live through his hijinks. He becomes a cartoon-character of perversions mocking passages from the Bible which begs us not to go along with his kind. But we follow along anyway, despite our best intentions.

And visually, is there anything more appetizing than the stabbing jolts of color, drawing us in like magpies to sparkling curiosities. He reinforces our appetite for stimulation, offering more and more until you can no longer realize that what's going on is actually wrong. The irony in its construction is just one of the many things that makes this movie so wonderful and terrible to watch.

The real fright that comes from this movie is the fact that it reflects the most basic and terrible urges of every type of person. A mélange of characters caricature our own personal demons, giving us the chance to taste the sweets we try to deny in life. The brilliance is that no matter how much you want to hate Alex, you love him. No matter how much you want to be sickened, you are attracted to the screen. The real fright comes from looking into a mirror, rather than to the world outside.

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