The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stanley Kubrick · a film · 1971 · 136 minutes
Mode
Dystopian satire told by its criminal; a comedy of conditioning that ends as a parable of the state
Mythos
The fallen angel at ease in his fall, evoked through Bible fantasies, a snake in a drawer and a bust of Beethoven; a parable of free will with one pattern built into it, each wrong returned on the one who did it
Phase
Three parts in the shape of a return: a night and a day of violence; prison and the treatment; the same stations walked back through, each victim met again, and a leap from a window
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 136 minutes, wide-angle lenses and a handheld camera in long takes; first-person narration in Nadsat; Beethoven, Rossini, Purcell and Elgar, partly realised on the Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos
Register
From slow-motion brawling set to Rossini to a Minister cutting steak for a bandaged patient; comic, cold and lurid at once
Scale
One young man, his gang, his victims and the state
Governing Proposition
A teenage gang leader in a near-future England spends a night in beating, rape and robbery, told to the audience in his own slang and with his own relish. Betrayed by his gang and imprisoned for murder, he volunteers for a treatment that conditions him to sicken at violence, and at the music he loves, and is released into a world where each of his victims is waiting for him. The wager of the film is that it can make the viewer enjoy the violence and then take the enjoyment away by the same means the state uses on him, so that the argument about choice is not stated but undergone: a man made unable to choose evil has been made into something less than a man, and the viewer who wanted him cured wanted that.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a face. Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell, looks straight into the camera, one eye fringed with false lashes, a bowler on his head and a glass of drugged milk in his hand, and the camera draws slowly back to show his three friends on the bench beside him and the milk bar around them, furnished with white plastic women on their hands and knees, while Wendy Carlos’s electronic setting of Purcell’s funeral music for Queen Mary plays. His voice tells the audience, in a slang made of Russian and Cockney, what the four are drinking and what they are about to do. The audience is fluent in the slang within minutes, and that fluency is the beginning of the trouble.
What they do: they beat an old drunk under a concrete walkway; they interrupt a rival gang’s rape on the stage of a derelict casino and fight them, bodies flying through chairs and a window, to the overture of Rossini’s Thieving Magpie; they steal a car and drive it at night down the centre of the road, forcing others into the ditch; and they arrive at a house with HOME lit over the gate, where a writer, played by Patrick Magee, and his wife, played by Adrienne Corri, let them in on a story of an accident. In masks, they beat the writer and cut the wife’s clothes from her with scissors, and Alex rapes her while singing and dancing the number from Singin’ in the Rain.
The violence is choreographed, shot wide so that bodies and faces distort, and set to music, and the result is that it is enjoyable to watch, which is what the film intends and what it will charge the viewer for later. Kubrick wrote, produced and directed the film for Warner Bros., from Anthony Burgess’s novel of 1962, following the American edition, which omits the novel’s final chapter. It was shot in and around London, in flat blocks, a lecture hall and a derelict theatre, and released at the end of 1971.
Movement II
Back at the milk bar a woman at another table sings a phrase from Beethoven’s Ninth, and Dim, played by Warren Clarke, makes a rude noise at it, and Alex strikes him across the legs with his cane. The music is the one thing Alex loves without wanting to hurt it. He goes home to his parents’ flat in a block whose lobby mural has been defaced, takes a pet snake from a drawer, and lies on his bed playing the Ninth while pictures of a hanging and of explosions pass through his mind. In the morning his mother and father, played by Sheila Raynor and Philip Stone, accept that he is ill again and will not go to school. His post-corrective adviser, Mr. Deltoid, played by Aubrey Morris, visits him in his parents’ bedroom, sits too close, and warns him.
At a record shop Alex collects two girls and takes them home, where the three of them, sped up to the William Tell overture, run through every position in a couple of minutes. His friends meet him in the lobby and tell him they want a new leader and bigger jobs. He agrees, and walking by the marina, in slow motion to Rossini, he knocks two of them into the water and slashes Dim’s hand when he reaches up for help. The leadership is restored, and the film has shown exactly what it rests on.
The bigger job is a health farm where a woman, played by Miriam Karlin, lives alone with her cats. She refuses the accident story; Alex climbs in; they fight in a room of erotic paintings, she with a bust of Beethoven, he with a huge sculpted phallus that rocks when touched, and he kills her with it. The camera turns over as he strikes. Outside, Dim smashes a milk bottle into his face and the police take him. Alex has killed a woman and been betrayed by his friends, and the film’s first part is over.
Movement III
In prison Alex is processed by the chief guard, played by Michael Bates, who shouts every instruction and inspects every orifice. Two years pass of a sentence of fourteen. He helps the chaplain, played by Godfrey Quigley, with the services and reads the Bible for its pleasures: he is a Roman soldier whipping Christ along the road, and an Old Testament man among concubines. The chaplain tells him about an experimental treatment and warns him against it: goodness, he says, must be chosen, or it is not goodness. He is the one man in the film who means what he says, and Alex ignores him.
The Minister of the Interior, played by Anthony Sharp, tours the prison in search of a subject and chooses Alex for his insolence. The treatment is given in a clinic. Alex is strapped into a seat, his head held, his eyelids clamped open with metal, a doctor dripping saline into his eyes, and he is shown films of beatings and rape, and then footage of Nazi parades set to the Ninth. He is sick, and he screams that the music is a sin, and Dr. Brodsky, played by Carl Duering, says the music is a regrettable but unavoidable side effect. The viewer sits where Alex sits and sees what he sees.
The cure is demonstrated on a stage before an audience of officials. An actor insults Alex and knocks him down, and Alex, retching, licks the sole of the man’s shoe. A woman in nothing but her skin walks up to him, and he reaches for her breasts and collapses. The audience applauds. The chaplain objects from the floor that the boy has no choice left, and the Minister answers that the point is to cut crime, not to argue ethics. Alex is declared cured and released.
Movement IV
He goes home to the flat with flowers for his mother and finds a lodger, Joe, played by Clive Francis, in his room, who lectures him, and parents who have been happier without him. He leaves. Under the embankment the old drunk he beat in the first part recognises him, and a crowd of old men beat him, and he cannot lift a hand without sickness. Two policemen pull the men off. They are Dim and Georgie, played by Clarke and James Marcus, in uniform now, and they drive him into the country, hold his head in a trough of water and beat him with their truncheons.
He staggers through rain to a house with HOME over the gate, and the writer, in a wheelchair now, with a bodyguard played by David Prowse, takes him in, bathes him and feeds him, because he has read in the papers about the boy the government has treated and sees a weapon against the government. In the bath Alex sings the number from Singin’ in the Rain, and the writer’s face as he hears it through the door is the film’s one moment of pure recognition; Magee plays it with a shaking that is nearly comic and is not.
Two friends of the writer come to dinner and question Alex while the writer, trembling, watches him eat. The wine is drugged. He wakes locked in an upstairs bedroom, and from the floor below comes the Ninth, played through the boards at full volume, and he cannot bear it and cannot escape it. He goes out of the window. Each of his victims has now returned in the order of the first part, and each has done to him what he did, and the film has shown that a man who cannot defend himself is not reformed but delivered.
Movement V
He wakes bandaged from head to foot, his jaw wired, with a nurse and a doctor busy in the next cubicle. His parents visit and ask to have him back, and he tells them through the wires what he thinks of that. A psychiatrist shows him cartoon slides and asks him to fill in the captions, and his answers are the old Alex’s, filthy and quick. The fall has undone the treatment, or the state has undone it, and the film does not say which. The question it has argued is answered not in a clinic but by chance, from a window.
The Minister comes to the bedside with a tray, cuts the steak and feeds it to him piece by piece, while explaining that the writer has been put away, that the government regrets everything, and that it would be useful if the two of them were seen to be friends. Photographers are brought in. Two loudspeakers are wheeled in and the Ninth is played, and over it Alex sees himself in slow motion, naked on a white ground with a woman, while men and women in Edwardian dress applaud around them. His voice tells the audience that he is cured, and the film ends on his face, in pleasure, as it began.
A Clockwork Orange was rated X in the United States and opened to a divided press. In Britain, where newspapers tied it to crimes by young men, Kubrick asked Warner Bros. to withdraw it, and it was not shown there again until 2000, after his death. Burgess, whose novel ends with Alex growing out of violence, kept his distance from the film’s ending. Its look passed into punk, its music into pop concerts, and its charming narrator into later films about likeable criminals, and it is still argued about, which was its wager: that the viewer who enjoyed the first part and wanted the cure would have to answer for both.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The argument requires the three parts and most of their stations: the night of violence has to be enjoyed before it can be taken away, the prison chaplain has to make the case for choice before the treatment removes it, and the Ludovico sequence has to be watched as Alex watches it, eyes clamped. The second half’s return to each victim in order is required twice over, as justice and as proof that the cured man is defenceless. What could go is weighed in full: the fight with the Cat Lady, with its rocking sculpture and bust of Beethoven, runs on as stylised excess beyond its need; the sped-up threesome is a joke that proves nothing the Korova has not; the prison intake is comedy at length.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a man made incapable of choosing evil has not been made good but unmade, and a state that would do this to him is worse than the crime it cures. The chaplain says it, the Minister demonstrates it on a stage, and the film makes the audience feel it by taking its own pleasure away: the Ninth, which was Alex’s and ours, becomes the instrument of his torture. The second half adds the social half of the argument, that the state will use him again the moment he is useful. This is a meaning, not a mood. Held at the figure because the argument is Burgess’s; the film demonstrates it with great force, and Alex’s victims are given no interior from which to answer it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation is real and is mostly cold. The Korova pull-back from Alex’s stare under the electronic Purcell; the fight in the derelict casino to the Thieving Magpie overture; the slow-motion revenge at the marina, bodies falling into the water to Rossini; the Ninth in the record shop and over the Ludovico films; the last fantasy on the white ground with the applauding gentry. Beethoven, played straight and through the Moog, keeps the film near height. The frequency is the limit, and it is weighed: the second half is mostly flat and comic by design, the hospital and the parents’ flat are drab on purpose, and the heights are nearly all in the first forty minutes, where the film wants the viewer’s pleasure. The elevation serves an argument, and the argument cools it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth is evoked in the figures and built once in the structure. Alex is drawn as a fallen angel at ease in his fall: the Bible fantasies in which he is a Roman scourging Christ and a patriarch among concubines, the snake kept in his drawer, the bust of Beethoven, the false eyelash and the bowler. The built pattern is retribution. The second half returns him to each victim in the order of the first, and each does to him what he did, so that the old law of the wrong returned on its doer bears the plot. Held there because the rest is Burgess’s parable, a thesis with a demonstration: the victims carry no archetypal weight, and the state is a Minister.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the social-problem film and the literary adaptation, and the departures were absolute. Violence staged as choreography and set to Rossini; a rape sung to a Hollywood tune; a narrator speaking an invented slang in which the audience is made fluent in minutes; Beethoven as the criminal’s love and the state’s weapon; a wide-angle, handheld, pop-art England of flat blocks and furniture made from women. The stake was real and was paid: an X rating in the United States, a press campaign in Britain linking the film to crimes, and Kubrick’s own withdrawal of it from British distribution, where it was not shown again until after his death. Held just below the top only because the material and the argument were Burgess’s.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is complicity, and the form produces it: first-person narration that makes the audience Alex’s confidant, wide-angle lenses that give his violence the pace of a cartoon, music that makes the beatings dance. The viewer enjoys the first forty minutes, and then sits with Alex, eyes clamped, watching films of violence set to Beethoven, and the sickness is the viewer’s too. A third-person, realist telling would give a case study and lose the argument, since the argument is that the audience wanted the cure and should not have. The symmetry of the second half is the form’s proof. Held below the top where the form becomes a container: the prison and hospital scenes play in conventional comic grammar.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise, and fifty-five years of it. The film has been argued over since release, on its violence, its treatment of women, its politics and its relation to the novel’s omitted last chapter, and the argument has not closed. On return the design keeps yielding: the Korova’s sculptures, the paintings in the Cat Lady’s house, Alex’s room, the Minister’s manners, the texture of Nadsat, the placing of each piece of music. Held at the figure because the argument exhausts faster than the images. The thesis about choice is fully stated by the chaplain and the Minister, and once understood is understood; later viewings deepen the surface and the irony, not the meaning. The second half’s symmetry, once seen, is a mechanism rather than a well.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1971, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film fixed the look of the screen dystopia for a generation, white interiors, pop-art furniture, concrete walkways, and made the counterpoint of classical music and violence a device others have used ever since. Its iconography, the bowler, the white suit, the single eyelash, passed into punk and into pop performance; David Bowie opened his Ziggy Stardust concerts with Carlos’s Ninth. Heirs are open: Trainspotting (1996), with its charming criminal narrator; Natural Born Killers (1994); Fight Club (1999); Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), which answers it. The redirection is credited and discounted: the film reorganised style and tone more than it reorganised what a film could argue. Held at the figure for that reason.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-five years. The pop-art design, the Moog synthesizer, the bowlers and the sixties flesh all date the film to the moment of its making, and the surface is charged in full: the Korova and the Cat Lady’s house are 1971 as surely as the hair. What has outlived the surface is the question. The debate about whether a state may condition a man, and whether a conditioned man is a man, has not aged, and each decade’s reading finds the film current. Its presence was broken where it was made: withdrawn from British distribution at its maker’s request, it was not shown there again until 2000. Held below the top because so much of what the film is lies in a style fixed to its decade.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: John Alcott’s photography, wide lenses and a handheld camera in long takes; John Barry’s production design, the milk bar’s furniture, the Cat Lady’s paintings, Alex’s room; Wendy Carlos’s electronic realisations of Purcell and Beethoven, and the placing of Rossini and Elgar; Bill Butler’s cutting, the sped-up threesome and the intercut Ludovico films; Malcolm McDowell’s performance, in the body and in the voice-over, carrying the invented slang as if born to it, charming and vile without a seam; Patrick Magee’s writer, Michael Bates’s guard, Aubrey Morris’s Deltoid, each a precise grotesque. The making is load-bearing: the complicity is produced by lens, pace and music. Held a step below the top by the second half, where the prison and hospital scenes are staged in a conventional comic grammar the first forty minutes never use, and by the Cat Lady fight, cut on past its point.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Alex’s night of violence, set to Rossini and sung to a show tune, and the Ludovico treatment, administered in a clinic by doctors. One law governs them: appetite. Alex wants, and takes; the state wants a result, and takes it from him; the Minister wants a headline and feeds him steak; the writer wants revenge and plays him Beethoven through the floor. Every figure in the film is driven by the same hunger, and the film treats them alike. The music is within the law, since it is the one thing wanted purely and the one thing used as a weapon. Held at the figure by the one element outside it: the chaplain, who alone wants nothing, and is given the argument and no power.
Score: 9.2 / 10
A few orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in a mind given to the audience from inside; the state, in prison, police, a Minister and a treatment; art, in Beethoven as love and as weapon; medicine, as an arm of government. They are integrated: the Ninth is the hinge on which consciousness, art and the state turn together. What holds the axis lowest is the rest. The family is glanced at: parents who are furniture, a lodger, no children. Labour does not exist; nobody in the film works except doctors and police. The sacred is a chaplain’s speech. History is a near future with no past. Women are victims and furniture. It is a film about one young man and the state, and the world between them is a set.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.5, then The Made at 9.4 and The Inner Law at 9.2, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. A departure so complete that it cost its maker his audience in his own country, a making in which lens, pace and music produce the complicity the film is about, one law of appetite from the milk bar to the Minister’s steak, a disclosure about choice that can be stated and holds, a form that makes the viewer undergo the argument, and a look and a device taken up by a generation.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5, a film of one young man and the state with no labour, no love and a family glanced at. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, where one pattern is built, each wrong returned on its doer in the order it was done, while the fallen angel is only evoked in Bible fantasies, a snake and a bust of Beethoven, and the rest is Burgess’s parable; then The Sublime at 8.0, heights that are real, cold and concentrated in the first forty minutes.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis alone: The Swerve at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 falls short by seven tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, unmet on The Archetypal Deep, and by its aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of A Clockwork Orange as released by Warner Bros. in December 1971, about 136 minutes, the theatrical cut, from the stare in the Korova to the fantasy under the Ninth. No print, script or recording was consulted. Anthony Burgess’s novel of 1962 is not part of the work; its omitted final chapter is named only because the film’s ending depends on its absence, and nothing from the novel is imported. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, and Nadsat is named rather than reproduced, beyond the word for the gang itself. Figures that could not be verified, among them the length of the Ludovico sequence, the number of pieces of music, the box-office returns, the cuts made for the later American rating and the date of the British withdrawal, are not given.