Cinema for the Intellectuals: Kubrick’s Portrayal of the Mass in A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) follows the story of Alex, a young working-class man whose rebellious nature cannot be subdued by social conventions. He is violent, uneducable, and a danger to all classes of society. His plot is presented by Kubrick in an elaborate cinematic framework, using highly symbolic scenery and music, and exploiting montage so that it becomes central to both plot and character development. The presentation of such a psychologically complex character, wrapped in a most technically sophisticated structure, places Kubrick’s film at the heart of a debate which has been ongoing ever since cinema’s emergence – the question of whether film is a pastime for the lower classes or a valid form of art. Through an analysis of Kubrick’s protagonist as a symbol of the uncontrollable ‘mass’, followed by an overview of the director’s subtlety in incorporating such a message, we will see how A Clockwork Orange effectively critiques the radical potential of the masses in a way which, ironically, only intellectuals are able to grasp.[[1]]

Kubrick deviates from Anthony Burgess’ novel to present a character that may never be restrained by legal punishment, Christian teaching, medical training or by the simple working of his conscience. According to critic Hans Feldmann, ‘Anthony Burgess, who believes that the forms of Christian civilization are necessary to protect man from his instinctual self and therefore must be preserved, has lamented that Kubrick failed to understand the point of his novel’.[[2]] Rather than having misunderstood Burgess’ novel, one familiar with Kubrick’s work is inclined to believe that the controversial director purposely subverted the psychology of the character and the direction of the plot to suit his own vision of what Alex should stand for. In the film, Alex comes to represent ‘the barbarian, ferocious and violent’, an archetypal member of the unruly mass, prepared to go to great lengths to assert a freedom which can only be expressed through aggression.[[3]] What Kubrick presents here is the disruptive potential of the mass – its capability for social catastrophe when allowed to run free. The protagonist’s progress, or lack thereof, within the film can be traced in order to illustrate his affiliation with the characteristics that Nietzche, Freud, Leavis and numerous other ‘intellectuals’ attribute to the mass. One cannot overlook, first of all, Alex’s social standing – he is an indifferent student, who was brought up within a working-class family, possibly aspiring toward middle-class status, an individual whose only desire in life seems to be to assert his freedom through theft, rape, and an inclination toward violence so intense that it finally leads to murder. From the intellectual’s vantage point, Alex is thus an unexplainable Other, one who must be held in check if society is to evade the risk of anarchy.

The most striking scenes in the film are the ones which illustrate the extent of Alex’s dangerous potential. His gang’s first attack involves Alex raping an unsuspecting woman in her own home, while her husband is forced to watch, bound and silenced by Alex’s accomplices. The husband is depicted seconds before the attack sitting at his typewriter, with a vast library of books behind him, one of which his wife is reading leisurely in another room. This couple, quietly enjoying their affluence and affinity for writing and reading, perfectly exemplifies the intellectual caste. The entire scene therefore illustrates the mass man’s ability to disrupt the intellectuals, to upset their lifestyle by entering their space, bringing chaos into their quietude, and allowing the unrestrained spirit of the mass to disturb both the physical and psychological stability of their sphere. The second house that Alex disturbs is that of a wealthy, solitary woman, lying in a room filled with presumably rare, expensive works of art. This character may be represent a subtle attack on Kubrick’s part on the blind admiration of art which is not necessarily of value, however, she may be seen as an intellectual none the less, and proves to be the one who suffers most intensely at the hands of the mass. Alex taunts, frightens and tests the resilience of this woman before he finally attacks her with ‘a very important work of art’ – a large phallus-shaped sculpture. The symbolism of this act is almost too contrived to require explanation. Alex himself shows that instinctive, phallic drives lead to disaster when they are not held under control by the individual or by his society. Alex may be seen here as an embodiment of the Freudian id – he acts only on instinct, only to fulfil his desires, which are often sexual and always violent. Again, he proves to be the most radical exemplification of a mass man, acting in accordance with ‘Freud’s association of the mass with ‘evil’, unconscious desire’, and proving through these actions that ‘political suppression of the mass’ is a necessity (Carey 1992, p. 29). Feldmann believes that Kubrick’s ‘view of man is clearly Freudian: the primal facet of the human personality is the id, the completely self-oriented structure that demands immediate gratification of its instinctual urges [...]. It is not moral or intellectual or sensitive to the needs or feelings of others. It simply is’ (1976, p. 13).  What Kubrick depicts here is the intellectual’s worst nightmare – civilisation being crushed by the mob, one individual at a time. What ensues after these two scenes is an attempt on society’s part to lock Alex away, to punish him, to Christianise him, to numb his primal desires.

Once Alex is imprisoned, the intellectuals seem to have triumphed – they seem to have succeeded in stopping his perverse desires from running loose. However, Kubrick shows that the mass can neither be hidden nor reformed. What unfolds in the middle part of the film, which follows Alex’s journey from freedom to imprisonment to possible improvement, is a subtle critique on the failure of every single institution’s attempt to suppress the mass. The justice system, seemingly in control, takes legal possession of Alex’s body but has no control over his mind. He continues to harbour an inclination toward lust and violence, one which formal religion also tries to subdue. Alex willingly moves in the direction shown to him by Christianity, but again it is his body which moves while his mindset remains unchanged. His reading of the Bible gives rise to fantasies of battle, bloodshed and illicit sex – Alex manages, effortlessly, to undermine all the values that the surrounding legal and religious institutions attempt to instil. The key word in this series of scenes is ‘reform’ – the priest in the film sees ‘a genuine desire to reform’ within Alex, and the director of the prison states, ‘you are to be reformed’, however, no such transformation takes place. The last resort in the attempt to pacify the mass in A Clockwork Orange tries to turn the protagonist into an actual clockwork orange, a being that is natural and organic in appearance and mechanical on the inside.

Alex is removed from prison and taken to an institution where he will supposedly be ‘cured’ of his desires, where the urges of the id will be extinct so that he can live in peace with the rest of civilisation. The ‘treatment’ he is given serves as a harsh critique on modern science and radical treatment given to psychiatric patients. The doctors in the institution, permitted by the government, freely experiment with human life in an attempt to transform mass men into individuals who sicken at the thought of violence, crime and sex. This medical institution may be seen as a symbol for the intellectuals’ collective desire to mould the mass’s mind into a perpetual state of conformity. The mass should be quiet, unobtrusive, and above all, ignorant – ideally, the mass is rendered incapable of making its own decisions, and allows the intellectual to make these decisions in its place. The process by which Alex, or the mass, is expected to be cured of his Freudian libidinous desires is illustrated by Kubrick with a brilliant application of cinematic montage. Whereas Alex would previously close his eyes and fantasise about what destructive act he would like to take on next, he is now forced to keep his eyes open to the atrocities that modern civilisation has committed, to the war, the crime and the aggression that it has adopted as its norm. If one goes back to the beginning of the film, as Alex listens to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, presumably satisfying a sexual urge as he listens, the images juxtaposed as he climaxes are as follows – a woman being hanged, an explosion, an avalanche and another explosion, each image separated from the other by a mental picture of his own face endowed with vampire teeth, and blood sliding down his lips. This excellent use of montage is followed later on by an application of the thought behind the very technique of montage as part of an attempt to cure Alex’s condition.  Presumably injected with experimental medication, Alex is now forced to watch clips of rape, brutality and war. The aim of the treatment is that he will feel physically sick each time violence or sex crosses his path. Each time he sees a person or an image which connote aggression or lust, he will associate this image with a feeling of sickness, and thus stay away from such situations. The correlation in his mind between sex or violence and sickness is illogical, but inevitable – just as the connections made between one image and another in cinematic montage are arbitrary in nature but impossible to miss.

At the end of his stay at the medical centre, Alex is supposedly a cured man. However, one is compelled to ask, what exactly is left if one removes from the mass all its instinctual urges, all of its desire to be free? What one is left with, it seems, is an impossible individual, and this is precisely the message of A Clockwork Orange – it is impossible to subdue the mass. At the end, Alex’s treatment is reversed, and his radicalism triumphs over the restrictions of education, law, religion and medicine. All attempts on the part of civilisation to restrict the dangerous potential of the mass will necessarily be unsuccessful, as the mass cannot live without the controlling force of its id – when this id is modified or removed, the individual’s only desires will be in favour of the Freudian mortido or destrudo, a desires to halt life’s progress or destroy it entirely. Feldmann holds that the entire ‘point’ of A Clockwork Orange is ‘that Alex is a threat to his social order’. He asserts that ‘Kubrick presents him as the chief evidence that the significant order of civilization is collapsing’, therefore through Alex’s triumph, Kubrick implies that this collapse is inevitable, that the decline of civilisation by the destructive effect of the masses is unstoppable.

The intellectuals project, throughout this film, their desire for the mass to be hidden, but Kubrick forces his audience to watch as the mass takes over the peaceful life of the intellectuals, entering their sphere and utilising their most cherished possessions to its advantage. Alex, in response to the intellectuals’ desire to control all civilisation, takes over and misuses their most prized cultural artefacts. He throws an entire bookcase, symbolising elitist literature, to the ground, he uses an artistic sculpture as a murder weapon, and above all, he listens to Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in an uncomfortably subversive manner over and over again. It is when listening to Beethoven that Alex dreams up his most disturbing fantasies – fantasies of violence, assassination and uncontrollable lust. In A Clockwork Orange it seems that the masses have gained access to all that the intellectuals held dear as markers of their superiority. Kubrick sets the masses free to abuse high brow music, literature and art, and high brow individuals themselves. Through the portrayal of Alex, he illustrates the catastrophic proportions that mass anarchy will lead to, all the while weaving this message into his plot in a matter so subtle that no mass man could detect it. Feldmann sees three of Kubrick’s films, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, as collectively ‘a disturbing study of a decadent civilization’, a civilisation in which man tries to conceal the disruptive potential of the id and bury the individuals who allow it to control their consciousness.

Alex constitutes a quintessential mass man, and serves to create within A Clockwork Orange a critique of the struggle between the intellectuals and the masses so acute that the masses who attempt to watch it will fail to grasp its logic. Critics who insist on viewing film as simply ‘escapist entertainment’ without any potential to take on the status of ‘introspective art’ seem to be blind to films such as Kubrick’s, which trigger a profound response and an intricate thought process in the minds of those who are willing to recognise it.[[4]] There is no question, moreover, that Kubrick’s eye for technical detail excels in A Clockwork Orange. His portrayal of each character, from Alex’s working-class mother, to the prison’s strictest police officer, to the kind-hearted priest, to the intellectual at his desk, and so on, is almost cartoon-like in its stereotypical nature. Each character, it seems, is an archetype of society’s most common characters. Kubrick seems to place a great amount of effort in highlighting the fact that, with the exception of Alex, each character in the film is a clockwork orange, mechanically conforming to society’s rules, suppressing the id in favour of the ego or superego, and continuously struggling to prevent the ‘horrifying’ effect that the ‘instinctual self’ within them may have if it is allowed to realise its potential (Feldmann 1976, p. 15).

Apart from its finely tuned portrayal of society’s most typical characters, Kubrick’s film also excels in its combination of music and image. The entire film seems to keep dialogue to a minimum, focusing on the monologue inside Alex’s consciousness, the images which accompany it and the music that surrounds it. Charles T. Samuels describes Kubrick as ‘a man who always knows when to feature image and when to highlight word’, and this talent is nowhere more evident than in A Clockwork Orange.[[5]] This mastering of the use of image is also illustrated in his brilliant use of montage, and just as striking as his mastery of image is Kubrick’s excellent combination of classical (or intellectual) and contemporary (or mass) music in a film which captures intellectual and mass culture at its moments of greatest struggle.

When one watches a film which combines technical precision and exquisite aesthetic qualities, with a message so profound that it denies any viewing of the film purely for pleasure, the status of that film as a work of art becomes unquestionable. A Clockwork Orange, with its critique of mass culture encapsulated within a character so complex that the masses themselves fail to recognise his significance, is essentially a form of cinema for the elite. This film is in a sense comparable to Modernist literature – purposely difficult to follow and necessarily too complex for many to understand, A Clockwork Orange represents a type of art which is far from facile or escapist – art entirely for the intellectual.

Endnotes

[1] The exploration of Alex’s character as a mass man will move closely with John Carey’s conception of the ‘mass’ in The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1992).

[2] ‘Kubrick and his Discontents’, Film Quarterly, 30 (1976), 12-19 (p. 15). Subsequent references to this article will be given after quotations in the text.

[3] Carey, 1992, p. 28. Subsequent references to this edition will be given after quotations in the text.

[4] Lisa A. Barnett and Michael Patrick Allen, ‘Social Class, Cultural Repertoires and Popular Culture: The Case of Film’, Sociological Forum, 15 (2000), 145-163 (p. 149).

[5] ‘Cinema in the Sixties’, American Libraries, 2 (1971), 461-473, p. 470.

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