5

Let’s Open with a Sicilian Defence:

A Clockwork Orange

IN SEPTEMBER 1968, the Kubricks were living in Abbots Mead, near Borehamwood Studios outside London. Kubrick had decided to take on the most famous hero in European history: he wanted to make a movie about Napoleon. Paths of Glory and Spartacus were historical movies with large set piece battles. Now Kubrick was moving on to another vast subject, Napoleon’s wartime career. He had been reading deeply for years in military history, and he was particularly obsessed with Napoleon.

Kubrick had been thinking more than ever about how to show war on film. A few years earlier, in August 1964, he wrote to MGM’s Ron Lubin to turn down a film about Simón Bolívar that the studio wanted him to make (“My only problem is I have no real interest in the old boy,” he said). Kubrick remarked to Lubin that “representing a broad panorama of history has always proved to be the undoing of film makers.” He recommended that the movie, whoever was to direct it, have voice-over narration, not too much dialogue, and a “documentary visual style.” Kubrick added that “costume war scenes tend to look like so many extras thoughtlessly dressed on a beautiful hill. . . . The thing that usually makes movie battles idiotic is that the terrain is senseless. Almost all battles are shaped and finally decided by the terrain itself.”¹

While planning his epic Napoleon, Kubrick brooded over the terrain he could use for the film. Most of the actual Napoleonic battlefields had been turned into suburbs or industrial parks, so Kubrick looked elsewhere, to Romania and Yugoslavia. His dreams for the movie were gigantic: he planned on “fifty thousand extras” supplied by the Romanian military. He wanted cinematic diagrams of the battles, showing with maps and voice-over narration how Napoleon cut the Austrian forces in two at Austerlitz. The “sheer visual and organizational beauty” of the battles was important to Kubrick, but also, he told the interviewer Joseph Gelmis, the clash between these rational patterns and the dismal human reality of war.² Kubrick was once again on to one of his basic themes, the split between reason’s all-controlling plans and the blunders and chaos that mark actual life.

Kubrick had a scholarly interlocutor for the Napoleon project, Felix Markham, the Oxford historian. In addition to reading a small mountain of books about Napoleon, Kubrick hired Markham’s graduate students to provide notes on hundreds more sources.

Kubrick’s interviews with Markham on Napoleon make fascinating reading. At one point he tells Markham about the “in-between” move (Entzwischenzug) used by chess players, and asks him whether Napoleon’s Achilles’ heel was his inability to make such a move: Napoleon was comfortable attacking or defending, but remained at a loss when he was prevented from doing either. (Kubrick’s description of the Entzwischenzug is rather misleading: in chess it is part of a tactical sequence, not a delaying maneuver.) Markham agrees with Kubrick that Napoleon had a hard time standing still.³

Kubrick’s script begins with Napoleon the alienated child who suddenly grows up and plunges into action. (Many Kubrick movies and unfilmed screenplays, from The Burning Secret to Lolita to The Shining, share this pattern.) Kubrick begins with a scene of the four-year-old Napoleon “dreamily suck[ing] his thumb.”⁴ Then we glimpse Napoleon at boarding school in France insisting that someone has put glass in his pitcher of water: the Corsican boy had never seen ice before. A few quick scenes later, after the storming of the Bastille, Napoleon coolly shoots in the head a leader of the revolt, one “Citizen Varlac”—a thoroughly fictional incident.

In Kubrick’s retelling Napoleon makes his way effortlessly to the top, and soon he is giving Tsar Alexander military tips as they sit naked together in a sauna. The script ends with Napoleon’s death, and then a maudlin shot of his grieving mother surrounded by her son’s childhood wooden soldiers and teddy bear. Earlier, Kubrick described the four-year-old king of Rome, Napoleon’s son, sitting alone and playing with his soldiers, never to see his father again. The Napoleon screenplay is haunted by childhood, and perhaps suggests that Napoleon’s conquering of Europe was a boyish fantasy come true. After Napoleon lost his empire, Kubrick implies, he once again became a mere boy, bereft of power. He proved to be not a godlike Starchild but instead an all-too-human figure whose life expands grandly and then shrinks back to its minor-scale origins.

Napoleon’s “sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler,” Kubrick said to Gelmis.⁵ (Schnitzler wrote thousands of pages recording each of his sexual encounters.) In the screenplay Napoleon meets Josephine at an orgy, though Kubrick refrains from depicting explicit sex. Kubrick verified with Markham that such an event was historically possible: Josephine, the lover of the rakish politician Paul Barras, traveled in fast circles.

But Napoleon’s rapturous desire for Josephine never seems quite real in Kubrick’s script, and he treats their infidelities with clumsy prurience. Despite several sex scenes in mirrored bedrooms, nothing here sizzles. Kubrick’s heart is instead with Napoleon the brilliantly innovative general, a personality rather like Stanley Kubrick the film director. “There is nothing vague in it. It is all common sense,” the Corsican says about the art of war. “Theory does not enter into it. The simplest moves are always the best.”⁶ This Napoleon is an elegant, cold-blooded calculator. His disastrous Russian campaign is depicted, briefly, but left unexplained: if Napoleon was such a genius, how could he have erred so mightily?

Kubrick completed his Napoleon script in September 1969. The next month, he estimated the budget for the movie at four and a half million dollars if it was filmed in Romania.

Christiane remembered that during the negotiations over Napoleon “the studios told Stanley that Americans don’t like films where people write with feathers.” This line, originally the complaint of a movie exhibitor in the mid-thirties who was saddled with yet another costume epic drawn from a classic European novel, had been kicking around Hollywood for decades.⁷

MGM was wary of the Napoleon project because Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970), starring a somewhat weaselly looking Rod Steiger, had bombed at the box office. (During the making of Waterloo the Romanians received warnings not to work with Kubrick, but they carried on doing so anyway.) United Artists was interested for a time, but negotiations ended in November 1969. After this point Kubrick still wanted to make the movie. He was dreaming of Audrey Hepburn as Josephine, and for his hero he had in mind Jack Nicholson, also a Napoleon buff. If Nicholson said no, David Hemmings or Oskar Werner would do, Kubrick thought.⁸

“Napoleon is a character unfinished, like Hamlet; and like Hamlet, a puzzle—full of contradictions, sublime and vulgar,” writes his biographer Steven Englund. In Kubrickian terms, the contradictory Napoleon has something of both Starchild and ape, as James Naremore suggests. Napoleon’s life gives us “the awe-evoking sense of human possibility, which is a different thing from hope,” Englund judges.⁹

Just as Napoleon pushed the world to extremes, so Kubrick expands cinema. It’s possible Kubrick’s film would have been more equal to its subject than any earlier movie about Napoleon, because Kubrick, as he showed in 2001, knew how to approach a giant enigma. Yet his script, which glosses over the catastrophic aspects of the retreat from Moscow, doesn’t inspire confidence. Masses of freezing, starving men could not be harmonized with Napoleon’s heroic image in Kubrick’s mind.

As his chances to make Napoleon waned, Kubrick realized he needed a new project. Terry Southern and Bob Gaffney, Kubrick’s right-hand man with the Romanians on the Napoleon deal, had both turned Kubrick on to the novels of Anthony Burgess. When Kubrick read Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, he knew right away that this was his next movie.

A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962. “I was very drunk when I wrote it,” Burgess said. “It was the only way I could cope with the violence.” Burgess added, “I was trying to exorcize the memory of what happened to my first wife, who was savagely attacked in London during the Second World War by four American deserters. . . . I detest that damn book now.”¹⁰

Kubrick closely followed Burgess’s plot in his movie. Alex, Burgess’s teen thug antihero, terrorizes London by night with his gang, and is sent to prison for murder. Scientists then give him the innovative Ludovico Treatment, which manipulates his responses, causing him to feel nausea when he sees violence, which had thrilled him before. Alex is now harmless, but, Burgess implies, the Ludovico Treatment has sidestepped the question of good and evil, ignoring the human soul and opting for rigid social control instead.

Burgess invented a new lingo for A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, which incorporates smirking, coiled-syntax eighteenth-century inflections (“to what do I owe the extreme pleasure?”) as well as a passel of transmuted Russian words. Alex narrates the book in raw and electric fashion. Listening to classical music, he dreams up a rapturous bout of violence:

As I slooshied, my glazzies shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them.¹¹

Kubrick echoes this page when Alex, playing with his pet snake in his bedroom, listens to his favorite Ludwig van’s Ninth Symphony. In both book and movie, the scene ends with our hero masturbating to orgasm. Here once more is the solitary transport felt by Strangelove rising from his wheelchair, by Major Kong riding his missile, by Moonwatcher excitedly pounding a carcass with his bone weapon. All these characters are boys at heart, autistically sheathed in their ecstasy. Kubrick loves these passionate rocketings. Frightened like the rest of us, he makes clear the cost of such savage masculine exultation, but his attraction to it is always there.

Kubrick was drawn to Burgess’s Alex. He “wins you over somehow, like Richard III despite his wickedness because of his intelligence and wit and total honesty,” Kubrick said.¹² Kubrick’s Alex is a ’70s Candide as well, a vicious innocent making his progress. Clockwork is an Enlightenment movie if ever there was one, with its meditation on using science to reshape human nature.

Finding the right Alex was crucial to Clockwork’s success. Kubrick selected Malcolm McDowell, the twenty-eight-year-old hero of Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . (1968). There was really no other choice, Kubrick later said. McDowell had a curled-lip insolence and a ready way of mimicking the British aristocratic accent (as Kubrick biographer John Baxter describes it, “always too quick and too loud”).¹³ He could put underlings in their place, and with superiors he could lay on the smarmy obsequiousness.

“If you need a motor car, you pluck it from the trees,” says Alex to his droogs. “If you need pretty polly [money], you take it.” Alex is an overgrown child who delights in his easy life. Whatever he wants, he just grabs it. Living with his parents, sleeping late, he awakens yawning, scratching his buttocks, ready for a nice breakfast and a day of record shopping, drug taking, and a bit of the old ultraviolence.¹⁴

A Clockwork Orange is a movie about juvenile delinquency, a key Hollywood genre whose most famous instances are The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean, and West Side Story (1961). Brando and Dean were trained in the Method, and both had the soft inwardness that Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler nurtured in their pupils. Brando used delicate, distracted gestures to convey his vulnerability. Dean sometimes seemed, for obscure reasons, on the verge of tears. These rebels were tender, confused teenagers, not roughnecks. Like French existentialists, they carried the weight of the world. Though it was never very clear why the world was so intolerable, their beautiful souls were clearly suffering from it. Rebel Without a Cause depicts suburban existence as a quiet hell.¹⁵ “You’re tearing me apart!” Dean yells at his befuddled parents, as Nicholas Ray’s canted camera angles pinion him like a Christ figure. West Side Story, like Rebel, deals in teenage tragedy, adding an amused contempt for the headshrinkers and sociologists who try to diagnose adolescent rebellion. But West Side Story has a split consciousness. With its freewheeling dance routines it says, “We’re only in it for kicks: Take that, Officer Krupke.” But it also sells poignance in typical Hollywood fashion, shedding tears over young lives wasted by violence.

Kubrick declares an epochal break from these earlier movie classics of juvenile delinquency. There is nothing tender or tearful about Malcolm McDowell’s Alex. He is the natural man as hoodlum, a character that the sixties couldn’t imagine. That decade was hung up on revolution and expanding consciousness, neither of which would ever occur to Alex. McDowell’s superb performance is full of force but also simply matter of fact. He has killer style: jaunty and sharp in his Chaplinesque bowler, a buoyant boychik who will never realize how dumb he is. When MAD magazine depicted Alfred E. Neuman as Alex (in “A Crockwork Lemon”), it had Alex’s number: “What, me worry?” is his credo. McDowell turns on the charm, and doesn’t sweat it. We sense that, somehow or other, he will thrive in the end. Alex is not an abandoned soul like Humbert in Lolita, though they both have verbal talent to burn. (“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Nabokov’s Humbert.) Instead, Alex plays our louche pal: “O my brothers,” he says to us.

For Alex, like 2001’s Moonwatcher, bloodletting has the freshness of discovery. In one of Clockwork’s set pieces, the flatblock marina scene, Alex, struck by “inspiration, like,” rises up in the air, mouth contorted like Moonwatcher, about to teach his droogs a lesson by slashing open the hand of Dim, the most cloddish of the gang.

In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick argues against the hugely popular behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. Kubrick told Rolling Stone that he thought Skinner was wrong, and his movie clearly denounces Skinner’s behaviorist plans for social control.¹⁶ His two doctors, Dr. Brodsky and Br. Branom, are satirical portraits of Skinner-like behaviorists.

Kubrick’s point wasn’t just about Skinner. Behaviorism could be the movie industry ratcheted up a few notches: both of them manage our responses by doling out exciting stimuli. Significantly, Alex is rehabilitated by being forced to watch films as palpably violent as Clockwork itself.

Kubrick, when he read A Clockwork Orange, must have been drawn to Brodsky’s words to Alex during his Ludovico Treatment. Brodsky has been showing Alex films of Nazi atrocities to the tune of Beethoven. “The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence,” Brodsky tells Alex: “the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.”¹⁷ He is echoing Alex’s own insight throughout the novel, where sublime music conjures up the joys of ultraviolence. Kubrick in many of his movies shows rapture and destruction blending together. Brodsky aims to control this dangerous combination, quashing Alex’s fervor with his sterile mastery.

“In less than a fortnight now you’ll be a free man,” Brodsky tells Alex reassuringly, patting him on the pletcho (shoulder).¹⁸ For Brodsky freedom is subjection to behavioral law, the trained response grilled into the body by chemical injection. As in Orwell’s 1984, freedom is slavery.

Shot in winter 1970–71, A Clockwork Orange cost a mere two million dollars. Except for some key scenes, it required fewer takes than usual in a Kubrick film. This was partly because “Malcolm knew his lines,” as another brilliant boyish star of the day, Tom Courtenay, said, but partly also because Clockwork has an improvisational feel unusual in Kubrick.¹⁹ It uses slow motion and fast forward in the rough-and-ready way of early-seventies cinema.

The film required design genius: as with 2001, Kubrick imagined the world of the future in unforgettable fashion. He commissioned the sculptor Liz Jones, who had crafted the Starchild, to design nude female mannequin tabletops for the Korova milkbar. Drug-laced milk plus spurts from a mannequin’s nipple (“ ’Allo Lucy, ’Ad a busy night?” asks Dim as she squirts out the liquid drug). Kubrick dressed his droogs in white pants and shirts, bloodshot eyeball wristbands, paratrooper boots, bowlers, and codpieces. A Clockwork Orange heavily influenced the punk movement, then still years in the future. The movie eschews the glam gender-tweaking of Bowie or Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (1970) in favor of a tougher, quasi-military style.

A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick’s most zestful movie, a joyride from the moment it opens with a steady backward zoom from Alex’s false-eyelashed stare and hearty smirk. Many of its vignettes are pure oxygen, like the comic opera turn when Alex’s boys tussle with a rival crew of hoodlums.

The dazzling, dangerous brio of A Clockwork Orange is nowhere better shown than in its West Side Story–style rumble between the two bands of young goons. Alex interrupts Billy Boy and his gang, who are about to rape a squirming, half-naked girl on an abandoned theater stage: “Just getting ready to perform something on a weepy young devotchka,” as Burgess puts it. When Alex appears, the girl, grabbing her clothes, runs away unheeded. Rape takes a second place to the male-on-male showdown. Here Kubrick follows one of Ardrey’s key ideas, that men want power and territory more than sex.²⁰

“How art thou?” Alex sneers to Billy Boy like Prince Hal addressing Falstaff, as the soundtrack strikes up Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture. What follows is a balletic showdown, with the two bands of droogs rhythmically flipping and socking each other.

We next see the droogs on a hell-for-leather car ride, with their hair whipping in the wind and the road in cheap-looking back projection: shades of Bonnie and Clyde. Suddenly they glimpse a sign reading HOME, and, Alex reports, he gets that “vibrating feeling all through my guttywuts.” (Alex’s Nadsat is ear-catching: a painter I know works while listening to the Clockwork Orange soundtrack, including the dialogue.)

The notorious home invasion–rape scene that follows took three days of sitting around the set to figure out, with the cameras not yet rolling. After much cogitation, Kubrick asked McDowell, “Can you sing?” McDowell answered that he knew only one song, “Singin’ in the Rain.” So Alex does his famous routine while preparing to rape the helpless wife of the writer Mr. Alexander, played by Adrienne Corri in a red pantsuit. Alex’s chipper singing, the throwaway air of the scene, the distorting fish-eye lens that targets Mr. Alexander as he is forced to watch the assault on his wife, all this throws us off balance. As Kolker says, “the whole sequence is slightly ridiculous, as well as horrifying.” We feel “disgust and astonishment,” rather than the thrill that violence in movies usually provides.²¹ Much later in the movie, Alexander, played with vindictive glee by Patrick Magee, gets his revenge, and we are again disconcerted. We don’t know how to take this simpering, twitching, red-faced nutball blasting Beethoven’s Ninth at Alex, who after the Ludovico Treatment reacts with suicidal desperation. Our laughter is uneasy; we can’t relax into enjoyment.

McDowell’s sloppy brilliance in the “Singin’ in the Rain” rape scene is to give Alex not the glossy brutality of a film noir thug but the self-satisfaction of an eleven-year-old boy. Predictably, the scene was hard to film. Corri said, “For four days I was bashed about by Malcolm and he really hit me. One scene was shot 39 times until Malcolm said ‘I can’t hit her anymore!’ ”²²

Alex lands in jail after murdering the “cat lady,” a skinny middle-aged woman in a leotard who commands him to put down a penis-and-buttocks sculpture: “That’s a very important work of art!” she screeches. We can’t help but root for dildo-nosed, codpieced Alex over the snobbish cat lady. Here Alex’s native wit contends with a snooty bourgeois whose taste is far more vulgar than Alex’s own. Alex is a primitive and, like all primitives, has integrity. But the cat lady leans toward kitsch: paintings of women in bold pornographic poses hang on her walls. When Alex brutally smashes the sculpture into the cat lady’s face, Kubrick cuts to Roy Lichtenstein–like cartoons of a mouth, echoing the jump-cut extreme close-ups of Janet Leigh in Psycho’s shower.

Clockwork draws from Chaplin and Keaton in its artful routines of physical violence. (“I wanted to slow it to a lovely floating movement,” Kubrick told Gelmis about the marina scene where Alex fights his droogs.)²³ The movie is also, like nearly every Hollywood musical, an ode to feeling good. The Ludovico treatment lowers Alex to the depths of nausea, as the crown of thorns–like apparatus that encircles his head and pries open his eyes turns him into a version of Frankenstein’s monster. But at the end he is riding high once more. In Clockwork’s finale, joy reappears.

Naremore notes that A Clockwork Orange ends like Dr. Strangelove, “with the maimed body of a villain brought back to virile life.”²⁴ Worldwide nuclear annihilation was Strangelove’s fantasy, but this is Alex’s: lying naked on snowy ground, he is having sex with a lovely, nearly naked woman who, rocking on top of him, is clearly enjoying herself greatly. Meanwhile a crowd of gentlemen and ladies in Edwardian getup applauds the couple enthusiastically, all to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth heaving toward its conclusion. Once again Alex adores the pummeling of Beethoven’s rapacious sublime, the overflow of spirit, healthy and violent. Alex, in voice-over, speaks the famous last line, “I was cured, all right,” and we cut to credits accompanied by Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”

McDowell reported that when he ran into Gene Kelly at a party some time after Clockwork opened, Kelly walked away without shaking his hand.²⁵ Fair enough, but McDowell and Kubrick were repurposing the tune in the way great art does. What a glorious feeling, and a disturbing one too.

“But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick,” Alex says in Burgess’s novel. “What I do I do because I like to do.” He gives us his sermon: “Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God. . . . They of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.”²⁶

“Old Bog or God” (Bog is Russian for God) keeps coming up in Clockwork. The behaviorist doctors recite a parody of Pauline Christianity, where knowing your miserable sinfulness puts you on the road to Jesus. Dr. Branom tells Alex, “You are getting well,” and explains that this is why he feels sick. The doctors only manipulate Alex’s physical reactions, instead of making him see that his crimes are wrong. The minister in Alex’s jail similarly misses the point. Alex need only respond properly to his cues for piety and obedience to be thought well on the road to redemption. But really Alex relishes the Bible for the sex and violence done by “those old Yehudis,” not for its moral fiber. The prison minister naïvely thinks Alex’s good manners signify sincere repentance, while the Ludovico treatment instills knee-jerk responses so that we no longer have to worry about anyone’s sincerity. Rehabilitation becomes a matter of outward behavior only. “Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all,” as Burgess’s novel puts it.²⁷

Kubrick shows how the Ludovico treatment fails when Alex’s unruly libido bursts out again at the end of the film. But he doesn’t celebrate this liberation so much as ask us why we find it so exhilarating. The choice between behaviorist repression and raging desire is, Kubrick knows, too neat a dichotomy. Though he imagines himself a free man, Alex’s banquet of pleasures is just as predictable as the behaviorists’ nausea-inducing program. Libido too can be a form of bondage. And some regimes, like the Nazis, combined behavioral manipulation of the masses with the unleashing of violent desires.

In Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Alex watches wartime atrocities, including Nazis murdering Jews, during his rehabilitation. Kubrick merely shows a snippet from Triumph of the Will, along with German newsreel footage of tanks and planes, all set to a Moog synthesizer version of the Ode to Joy. Kubrick mentioned to one interviewer “the enigma of Nazis who listened to Beethoven and sent millions off to the gas chambers.”²⁸ But he decided not to juxtapose death camps and Beethoven. Instead he cuts from Riefenstahl’s banal propaganda to a few Nazis kicking in a door. We are reminded, though, of the central place of Beethoven’s Ninth in Hitler’s Germany: though the words of the Ode celebrate peace and brotherhood, the victorious surge of chords suggests triumphant aggression.

Kubrick’s anti-Rousseauian animus, richly apparent in A Clockwork Orange and already forecast in 2001’s Dawn of Man, put him at odds with sixties dreams of peace and love. In a February 27, 1972, letter to the New York Times he condemned “Rousseau’s romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society,” adding that this was a “self-inflating illusion leading to despair.”²⁹

In Clockwork, the party of Rousseau loses. When Alex stumbles back to HOME late in film, Mr. Alexander, Rousseau-like, welcomes him as “a victim of the modern age.”³⁰ Alexander, Alex’s namesake, hates government repression, and with Rousseau he is convinced that human impulses are benign. The joke is on him: when he realizes that Alex is the man who raped his wife and crippled him, he tortures him with vindictive glee by playing Beethoven. Alexander is no longer a good-hearted believer in humanity.

A Clockwork Orange was released a few years before Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees enjoy murdering and torturing their fellow chimps. No movie has ever been a better illustration of Freud’s declaration that in our unconscious we are all rapists and murderers. It still has the force of scandal, after all these years. Along with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), it is one of the most controversial films ever made. The film originally got an X rating in the United States, where the Motion Picture Association of America had recently instituted ratings (censors were much concerned about the speeded-up scene where Alex has a threesome with two teen girls). Kubrick trimmed less than a minute to secure an R rating.

In Britain the press crowed that Kubrick’s film had led to a wave of copycat crimes. Young British hoodlums, the reporters said, were being inspired by Alex, and even dressing like him, with his bowler hat, long underwear, false eyelash, and codpiece. Kubrick had given them a taste of ultraviolence, and they wanted more. The movie, so the charge went, made raping and killing look like fun. Though in fact there is slight evidence for copycat crimes inspired by Clockwork, the furor that the newspapers aimed at Kubrick had its effect. Because of threats to him and his family over the movie, Kubrick in 1973 withdrew Clockwork from circulation in the United Kingdom.

Not only British tabloids but the New York film critics felt their bile rising in response to A Clockwork Orange. Pauline Kael, who had hated 2001, lashed out in disgust at the movie. It was “an abhorrent viewing experience,” she wrote in the New Yorker, with a “leering, portentous style.” Kubrick, she said, was “sucking up to the thugs in the audience,” and she worried about “the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality.”³¹

Kael’s unspoken complaint in her review of A Clockwork Orange is that if only the movie were not so arch and forced, “literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor,” we might enjoy some of this bad behavior.³² The same month she panned Clockwork, January 1972, Kael thrilled to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, a movie that exults in ultraviolence far more straightforwardly than does Kubrick’s. The two films were released the same week, causing a minor panic among moralists.

Andrew Sarris was just as negative as Kael. “See A Clockwork Orange . . . and suffer the damnation of boredom,” he wrote in the Village Voice: “What we have here is simply a pretentious fake.”³³ Audiences disagreed, in Europe as well as America: they rushed to see Kubrick’s scandalous bombshell of a movie.

Before Kubrick came along, Burgess had unluckily sold the screen rights for Clockwork for a few hundred dollars, so he never profited directly from the film’s success. But sales of his novel skyrocketed, and Burgess defended Kubrick’s version of his work in a series of newspaper and television interviews. Burgess made the case that the film was a serious statement about human freedom, not a thrill ride for wannabe teen gangsters.

A Clockwork Orange deals with freedom by depicting its opposite: the compulsive nature of both Alex’s enjoyment and the behaviorists’ programming. Kubrick also provides a hidden commentary on the lack of freedom in the cathartic release that most Hollywood movies provide. After its release the Hollywood Reporter enlisted a psychiatrist named Emanuel Schwartz to comment on A Clockwork Orange. “It is the recurrence of peak experiences in clockwork, mechanical fashion that makes this particular film instructive,” Schwartz said. “The pursuit of the peak experience is the manic search for omnipotence.”³⁴

Hollywood movies are all about repeating peak experiences to feed the audience’s fantasy. Kubrick was intent on troubling that fantasy. He said to Rolling Stone, “We have seen so many times that the body of a film serves merely as an excuse for motivating a final blood-crazed slaughter by the hero of his enemies, and at the same time to relieve the audience’s guilt of enjoying this mayhem.”³⁵ A Clockwork Orange, unlike most Hollywood products, made the audience feel guilty about enjoying it—a key point that Kael failed to catch. The guilt gets mixed with the pleasure, so that neither feeling controls our viewing experience. A failure of mastery, then, to remind us what radically imperfect creatures we are.

When it came to showing the movie, though, Kubrick exercised all his mastery. With A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick became more concerned than ever before that his films be screened properly. Julian Senior remembers that after the first print of Clockwork had gone out for the press screening at Cinema Five in Manhattan, Kubrick discovered that the wall around the screen was glossy white. “That’s going to be terrible. There’ll be reflections,” Kubrick said. “We have to repaint the theatre.”³⁶ Kubrick then pored through the Manhattan phone directory for two hours to find painters who could redo the wall in matte black.

Kubrick was hands-on with the European distribution of Clockwork as well. “Ask the managers if they know what lenses are being used,” Kubrick told Senior. “I want everything projected in 1.66.” The theaters didn’t have 1.66 lenses. “Well let’s get them some lenses,” Kubrick said. “He bought 283 lenses,” Senior remembers, “gave them to Andros [Epaminondas, his assistant], gave him the Mercedes and a map.”³⁷ Kubrick got his way: A Clockwork Orange was projected in Europe with 1.66 lenses.

“Let’s open with a Sicilian defence,” Kubrick would tell Senior, who didn’t play chess and so missed the point (be aggressive), before beginning one of his campaigns to ensure correct distribution and publicity. “I’ve been measuring the ads in the Frankfurt newspaper, they’re screwing us,” he might say.³⁸ With publicity as with screening everything had to be right: this was Kubrick’s gift to the moviemakers who came after him, as well as his audience and himself.

A Clockwork Orange has always done brisk business, and has remained the notorious must-see item among Kubrick’s oeuvre. Christiane, whose paintings appear in Mr. Alexander’s home, detested it for its violence. In the wake of Clockwork’s bloody mayhem, Kubrick would return to the slow, contemplative mode of 2001 with a grandly poised movie set in the eighteenth century, when people wrote with feathers, as far away from Alex and his droogs as could be imagined: Barry Lyndon.