Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization

¶ … Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization of Violence

Early feminist readings of Stanley Kubrick's a Clockwork Orange asserted that the film was pornographic and inherently misogynist. But is this really the case? In what follows, I intend to explore the relationships between the men and women in the film. I will explore early feminist readings of a Clockwork Orange, and, in examining their dismissal of the film for its supposed misogyny and anti-feminist message, will show that the film's ultimate "message" may in fact be a lot more subversive than early feminist readings would attest to. Ultimately, a Clockwork Orange deploys aestheticized violence as a means of exploring not only social control, but also relations among men and women in society. But is Kubrick really taking sides in his portrayal of masculinity, as so many early critics of the film have argued? Many of these early critics point to discrepancies between Kubrick's film and the original novel by Anthony Burgess. They argue that Kubrick effectively exaggerated those aspects of Burgess's film that eroticized and exploited the female body in order to satiate the tastes of the (male-dominated, patriarchal) popular culture. Such a reading rests, however, on assumptions that male audience members will immediately identify with Alex and his gang of droogs, while female audience members will immediately feel repulsed by their actions. Such a binaristic approach to the film is symptomatic of the limitations of early feminist critique. As later research clearly indicates, the truth about a Clockwork Orange is much more ambiguous - but perhaps no less disturbing for the ordinary viewer.

Rather than beginning by exploring the role that women play in a Clockwork Orange, I would like to ask another question that is more pointed: What role does feminism play in a Clockwork Orange? Before we begin to answer that question, a brief overview of the film's plot: A Clockwork Orange follows the misadventures of a gang of young male hoodlums, or "droogs," led by anti-hero Alex (Malcolm McDowell.) the gang's sole pleasures include "ultraviolence," listening to classical music - especially Beethoven, and raping women. When the gang sets Alex up at a rape that goes terribly wrong, he is put into prison, whereupon he learns that the victim of the crime has died. He is offered a chance to get out of prison by becoming a participant in a "Ludovico" experiment, in which his violent tendencies will be brainwashed out of his system. The results of the experiment give the film its morally dubious conclusion. In the words of Costello,

The impossibility of choice becomes the theme of the film. The droogs are not shown as choosing creatures, but seem conditioned by their society - apathetic, private, drug-laden - into behavior of violence, sex, and hatred, into anticulture. But the alternative, the Ludovico Technique of reconditioning, espoused by the law-and-order party, is equally anticultural because it, even more directly, eliminates human choice. "When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man," contends the Chaplain" (191).

It is this eerie future that is predicted by a Clockwork Orange - a period of time when no one has the ability to choose, when we have all become instruments of the state, which has emerged as a sort of Godlike entity, an omniscient force that thinks, feels, and acts on our behalf. "But it is not true," responds Beehler, "what the chaplain asserts (and students with whom I have discussed these issues insist), that Alex ceases upon treatment to be capable of moral choice. What is true is that he ceases to be capable of moral choice respecting acts of violence" (650).

In Kubrick's film," Costello goes on to write, the colors are primary, unsubtle. The landscape is vandalized, garbage-ridden. The taste in artifacts is totally pop and crude and vulgar: phallic lollipops; nude white plastic women bent into tables; huge plastic nipples as milk dispensers; a bloated phallic sculpture, now a dirty joke, now a work of art, now a murder weapon (192).

It is this blatant "unsubtlety" that proved to be the most disturbing for critics upon the film's release in 1971. The general argument against a Clockwork Orange was that its gratuitous depictions of violence and brutality might desensitize viewers to such acts in real life (Staiger, 39).

But this was not the only line of attack on Kubrick's film. As Staiger goes on to narrate in her history of the critical response to a Clockwork Orange,

By the end of the first year of its release, a third line of attack opened on a Clockwork Orange. The film was accused of misogyny. Beverly Walker, writing in an early feminist film journal, charged the film adaptation with "an attitude that is ugly, lewd and brutal toward the female human being: all of the women are portrayed as caricatures; the violence committed upon them is treated comically; the most startling aspects of the decor relate to the female form" (39).

Walker would go so far as to claim that Kubrick had made "an intellectual's pornographic film" (Staiger 51). Walker's words were carefully chosen, and fitted in well with the early feminists' stance against pornography. Feminists viewed pornography as being inherently exploitive of women - something akin to rape - and demanded that pornography be outlawed. The problem of such an assertion, however, is that the early feminists' definition of pornography, as elucidated in the famous Dworkin/MacKinnon law, was so inclusive so as to defy the United States' protective freedom of speech, as stipulated in the first amendment. In the words of one commentator,

My objections stem from the fact that the ordinance is aimed at "graphic" and "sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words" and stipulates that at least one of nine further elements must be "presented" to make a work pornography. Requiring that materials must be "graphic" means that they must be "vivid" and "lifelike" as representations. But no representation, either literary or visual, is straightforwardly "lifelike." Failure to acknowledge that interpretation hinges on the training and prejudices of the interpreter leads to genuine difficulties with the ordinance, particularly because it tries to capture something that cannot be graphically presented in terms of what is graphically presented (Gracyk 105).

Indeed, it is difficult to determine where there is anything "lifelike" about Kubrick's movie. Rather than resembling reality, it seems more like a nightmare, characterized by the decidedly unrealistic features that have been elucidated by Costello in the quote above.

While Kubrick's film would definitely not have appealed to the sensibility of early feminists, the question must be raised as to whether or not Kubrick's film contains a "message" or ideological strand that might be more acceptable in today's postfeminist arena. In order to evaluate this question, I will now turn my attention to an analysis of the Cat Woman scene in a Clockwork Orange.

This is the sequence in the film that leads to Alex's downfall. He gains entry, alongside his gang of droogs, to the house of a female artist. Her home is filled with cats, as well as works of art that are, by and large, filled with sexually loaded imagery. He eventually murders her with an art object that is shaped like a penis.

The very conditions of the Cat Lady's murder inspires the viewer to ask herself many questions regarding the nature of identity and gender, as they both function in our society. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that aestheticized violence, such as that which most of Kubrick's narrative is built on, must always be addressed in terms of gender - something that evidently escaped the earlier feminists who critiqued a Clockwork Orange for its apparently "pornographic" imagery and violence. As DeRosia has written,

While violence is a central element in the film, however, few besides Daniels have discussed the ways in which gender and sexuality influence Alex's "ultraviolence." Although Alex attacks both men and women the kinds of violence he perpetuates are not analogous. Furthermore, any analysis of violence should take masculinity into account. Especially given the historical context of Vietnam, films with traumatized and violent male subjects should not be read as gender-neutral statements on violence; indeed, such films may target and traumatize male subjects with a greater intensity than female ones (62).