In Stanley Kubrick’s fantastic dystopian nightmare A Clockwork Orange, the director uses many techniques to defy the standards of Classical Hollywood Cinema. In conventional films, the film might take place from the perspective of the person helping Alex, whereas here we are placed in the mind of the troubled youth. Unlike the vulnerable, flawed antihero we grow to love, Alex is an unrepentant rapist and murderer, only changing his ways as a result of a horrifying social program to correct his behavior. Kubrick criticizes the State, the Church and the Law by making them not stabilizing forces, but dehumanizing ones – their imposing of their own moral codes and the like on Alex simply leaves him a broken, impotent shell of a man, unable to exert himself in any significant way.
In this way, Kubrick exercises self-reflexive filmmaking in his directing of A Clockwork Orange. By depicting all the violence and rape in the film so honestly, he is making a further metatextual comment on the nature of violence in film itself. During that long shot of Alex staring into the camera, it is as though he is staring right at us – the film is intensely critical of the viewer, as by watching and enjoying the violence he inflicts, he become just as complicit in his behavior. We have grown to identify with him, thus turning us into someone no different from him – someone who loves violence. With these techniques, and the cynical, wry darkness of the film’s tone, Kubrick manages to make a film that eschews classical Hollywood conventions of good and evil, and creates a world where protagonists aren’t good, but neither is the system that tries to fix them.
Works Cited
Kubrick, Stanley (dir.) A Clockwork Orange. Perf. Malcolm McDowell. Warner Bros., 1971.
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