Oh bliss, bliss and heaven ... oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh ... and then, a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now ... I knew such lovely pictures. 

Alex is describing his adoration of Ludwig van Beethoven (I concur), but it is prose so gushing in its ebullient verbosity that it could easily double as my views about the film itself. One of the many pleasures of A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’ marvellous invented argot that Alex and his droogs wield as distinctively as their codpieces, bowler hats and canes.
Kubrick’s genius is to stage the horrifying subject matter like a grotesque and comic ballet. The reality of violence is disguised in hyper-stylisations allowing them to remain recognisably real at the same time as rendering them fantastical, and uncomfortably entertaining. And it’s this corruption of horrors that made the film so controversial - so obviously subversive as to be dangerous. But time has stripped the panic of its fervour and now it is easier to watch the film simultaneously as both an entertaining artifice and a savage satire. 

It is frequently crude, ugly, distorted and gleeful in its wilful destruction of our cherished middle-class values. Singin’ in the Rain gets the full reinvention and Beethoven’s Ninth, the holy cow of classical music, gets slaughtered at the altar. The language is an abuse too: poetic, declamatory, fused with Russian via heavy regional accents as a further assault on the Queen’s English.

The film opens with Alex enjoying ultra-violence upon nice middle-class folk. He might be a rogue, lower class hoodlum, but he is also the natural spittoon of fascism. However you view him he is then smashed by a system that tolerates and practices equivalent violences, provided they are organised, state-sanctioned and appropriately institutionalised; and not, under any circumstances, the product of individualised free-will. Alex’s subsequent reparation sees him subdued by authority and becalmed by religion. He is taught to want to be good and he willingly accepts experimental treatment to put him in his place. 

What’s the treatment? It is telling that it is in the form of film - a kind of television as the opiate of the masses exponentiated beyond passive obedience to be modelled into a desirable citizen. Alex becomes the War Against Crime played out as theatre on the moral public stage. And the treatment works. He can no longer do bad, and therefore the logic goes, he can only do good. And so he is set free, but what price freedom? He discovers the lawless hoodlums of his past have become fascist lawmen. And the innocent victims of his past have returned to haunt him, intent on vengeance. And so my droogs, we learn, there is no cure for the pervasive violence of a violent State.

A few quick notes on the music...

First up we get one of the father figures of the English tradition, Henry Purcell and his Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, a regal and ceremonial funeral march, which Kubrick reimagines via squelchy synthesiser. The music’s import remains but it is disoriented, abused, misappropriated, indeed stolen by Alex and his droogs laying in their lair. High art subverted as cartoon menace. 

Kubrick often takes classical works and transforms them to his particular ends. Barry Lyndon has it with its slowed down, stripped back, accentuations of Handel’s Sarabande; The Shining has it with the opening Dies Irae sweeping over the mountains leading up to the Overlook Hotel. And here Purcell, Beethoven and Rossini get the full treatment. Purcell’s dirge becomes Alex’s menace. Beethoven’s glory becomes his drug. And Rossini’s joyous William Tell Overture becomes his pleasure, accompanying his merry threesome like a sped-up, raunchy parody of comic opera. There’s more Rossini too when he’s fighting the cat-lady with a giant phallus, while she tries in vain to defend herself with a bust of Beethoven. But Ludwig Van is Alex’s drug and is no weapon against him ... or so he thinks. 

While he is undergoing the experimental Ludovico Treatment to cure him of his violent urges, the filmed images of Hitler and other abhorrents is soundtracked to none other than Beethoven’s resplendent Choral Symphony, and in doing so they taint his euphoric drug. Now whenever he hears LvB’s Ninth it will induce nausea and such extreme discomfort as to make him wish he were dead. Beethoven’s real world musical beacon of joy and peace is soiled and desecrated. Just as Hitler once did and fascists will continue to do, transforming art for their nefarious ends; and just as Kubrick does freely and brilliantly, transforming the music to serve the severe rules of his own meticulously controlled worlds. 

Final thoughts ... Have you noticed how A Clockwork Orange is basically a low budget remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Act 1 - Alex is an enlightened and dangerous monkey. His world is all about the exhilaration and power that ultra-violence brings. But in his early evolutionary form it isn’t long before his fellow droogs learn to ape his primal ways.

Act 2 - Alex is now part of the institution. He’s so far from the world he once knew that he might as well be on the moon. He has evolved to survive and thrive by conforming; learning how to operate according to the rules of the institution. He is doing well. He knows it. He feels powerful again. But then a secret higher power reveals itself. It might offer the key to his better future. He comes face to face with it but it turns out to be terrifying. It overwhelms his senses.

Act 3A - Alex is now an automaton. He’s like a computer, programmed by theoretical scientists but with human characteristics. Let’s call him HALEX. In this new advanced form he’s only capable of doing what he’s been programmed to do, which is to be “good”. He is designed to serve the mission as set by the government. But he malfunctions. And then he is incapacitated by a man who wishes to shut him down.

Ellipsis - As Alex falls through space we can only imagine the mind-altering forces that must be flooding through his head.

Act 3B - Alex is in a bed, in a strange room. He is physically helpless yet once again he finds himself face to face with a higher power that seems prepared to offer him another step in his evolutionary journey. 

And so my droogs, we are left to ponder ... will Alex become the State’s “Star-Child”, or will he revert to his primal ways? Or to paraphrase: is human evolution a continuum or is it an endlessly repeating cycle? Stay tuned for Barry Lyndon where Kubrick answers this question and more by guiding us through the evolution of young Barry from his origins as a no-good pauper scoundrel to becoming a no-good wealthy scoundrel to becoming a ...

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