The movie Nicolas Cage called the “ultimate film for an adolescent to see”
As one of Hollywood’s most celebrated eccentrics, it makes complete sense that Nicolas Cage would single out one of the most controversial movies ever made as a must-see experience for anyone trapped in the throes of adolescence.
Society was evidently in staunch disagreement, considering the film’s director actively pulled it from circulation to prevent new audiences from wrapping their eyes around it after the storyline was linked to several high-profile criminal cases, including more than one murder.
The narrative paints the reckless youth of its setting as unruly, bloodthirsty thugs and criminals who’d happily beat innocent bystanders to a pulp just to keep themselves occupied. Censors were up in arms, rating bodies were forced to intervene, and the headlines being generated were very rarely celebrating its artistic and cinematic merits.
Of course, for a person who once had his toes slathered in hot yoghurt to get him in the mood for a sex scene, was forced to return a dinosaur skull he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for after discovering it was stolen, and embarked on a globetrotting quest to uncover the real Holy Grail, it makes perfect sense for Cage to plump for such a lightning rod of controversy as appointment viewing for the younger generation.
“A Clockwork Orange, of course, was like the ultimate film for an adolescent to see,” the Academy Award-winning actor told Rotten Tomatoes. Cage had only just turned eight years old when Kubrick’s dystopian fable was released in the United States in February 1972, and based on what happened in the United Kingdom, he was hardly the target demographic.
Still, he became so enamoured by Malcolm McDowell’s performance as Alex DeLarge that he decided to do some copycatting of his own, albeit to a lesser extent. “It had such an impact on me that I would glue an eyelash on my eye and then go to school with one eyelash,” Cage explained. “My father really lost his patience with that one. He said, ‘You gotta take that eyelash off. You’re not going to school like that.'”
The mental imagery conjured by esteemed academic and literature professor August Coppola telling his young son that he couldn’t further his own studies while emulating the dress sense of A Clockwork Orange‘s main character is quite something, although it probably wasn’t out of the ordinary in a household where creativity was actively encouraged.
Suffice to say, eight-year-olds were not the target audience Kubrick had in mind when A Clockwork Orange was sent out into an unsuspecting world to immediately become a lightning rod for controversy, but it still makes a huge amount of sense given his own idiosyncrasies that one of the impressionable youngsters who fell under its spell grew up to be Nic Cage.
