Stanley Kubrick explains why the violence of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was “absolutely necessary”
For Stanley Kubrick, cinema gave him the chance to challenge and explore some of life’s biggest questions, using carefully crafted images to communicate everything from technological evolution to moral implications. In A Clockwork Orange, perhaps his most violent film, the director dissects the true meaning behind good versus evil, leaving many audiences in a state of shock.
A Clockwork Orange was inspired by Anthony Burgess’ novella of the same name, published nine years before the release of Kubrick’s film, which premiered in 1971. After making the expensive and ambitious 2001: A Space Odyssey, the filmmaker chose to create A Clockwork Orange on a much smaller scale. Set in Britain, the movie was made on a budget of $1.3million, ten times less than Kubrick’s previous film. Yet, it still proved to be a success, grossing around $114m.
Despite its success, Kubrick soon removed the film from circulation in Britain due to the spate of copycat crimes that emerged in its wake. Paired with the fact that protestors often gathered outside of the filmmaker’s home, he found it easier to withdraw it from the country until further notice. It wasn’t until 1999, the year that Kubrick died, that British viewers were able to fully enjoy A Clockwork Orange.
The reason the film caused such a stir relates to its extreme use of violence, particularly sexual violence. Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell, is a Beethoven-loving teenager with a penchant for violence, or as he calls it, ultraviolence. He leads a gang of droogs who beat people up, break into homes and rape and kill women. Alex is vile in every sense of the world, presenting himself with a charming cheeriness, attempting to mask the true grotesqueness of his personality.
Some of the most intense scenes include those where women are raped and murdered. We see Alex and his droogs break into a woman’s house and slice her clothes off before Alex forcibly has sex with her. The group perform a cruel rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ while they commit the disgusting act, showing how truly depraved and soulless they are. In another sequence, Alex breaks into the home of Mrs Weathers and beats her to death with a giant penis sculpture, leaving her dead.
For many viewers, this explicit violence was too much, with some even labelling the film exploitative, particularly due to its portrayal of violence against women. For Kubrick, however, these heinous crimes needed to be seen so that audiences could realise how evil Alex really was, subsequently allowing his treatment at the hands of the government to hold more potency.
Talking to Sight and Sound, Kubrick said, “It was absolutely necessary to give weight to Alex’s brutality, otherwise I think there would be moral confusion with respect to what the government does to him. If he were a lesser villain, then one could say: ‘Oh, yes, of course, he should not be given this psychological conditioning; it’s all too horrible and he really wasn’t that bad after all.’”
He continued, stressing that the depiction of violence helped to convey the whole point of the film: “On the other hand, when you have shown him committing such atrocious acts, and you still realise the immense evil on the part of the government in turning him into something less than human in order to make him good, then I think the essential moral idea of the book is clear.”
To Kubrick, evil and goodness both exist in the world, and it would be naive to assume that we can completely wipe out the former. “It is necessary for man to have [the] choice to be good or evil, even if he chooses evil. To deprive him of this choice is to make him something less than human – a clockwork orange.”
