A Clockwork Orange (1971) | |
Plot Synopsis (continued)
Hearing Rossini's The Thieving Magpie drifting in from an open window, Alex "viddies" what to do - he turns on his pals. First, he spins and strikes Georgie in the crotch with his cane and then thrusts both Georgie and Dim into the water. [The image of Alex leaping with his cane and ape-ing at the camera resembles the man-ape in the opening sequence of Kubrick's own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).] To impose his will over his followers and subjugate them into submission, he draws his knife from the end of his cane and slices Dim with it across the back of his hand. Later, in the Duke of New York pub, Alex resumes power over them and is acknowledged as their "Master and Leader:"
Alex accepts Georgie's scheme to visit and rob ("it's full up with like gold and silver, and like jewels") an almost-deserted, isolated health farm outside of town "owned by this like very rich ptitsa who lives there with her cats." [Their plan is part of a plot to betray Alex so that he will be caught after the crime.] Before a description of the Woodmere Health Farm is completed, they are knocking on the door of the carpeted facility, wall-papered with gigantic, modern pornographic art (lewd scenes of sexual intensity and bondage), and decorated with garish, decadent art objects. [Note: One of the paintings resembles Mrs. Alexander with her breasts exposed.] The exercise facility is run by a wiry, introverted Englishwoman named Miss Weathers, known as the 'Catlady' (Miriam Karlin) - wearing an emerald-colored leotard, she is exercising on the floor surrounded by dozens of cats when she hears knocking. Cursing, she goes to the door, but rejects Alex's familiar accident/emergency ploy. Instead of letting him in to call the police, she uses the phone to notify the authorities at the Radlett Police Station, while the droogs put on their masks and sneak around to the rear of the house. Alex enters through an open window on the second floor. When she hangs up the phone, she turns and suddenly sees Alex, who grins: "Hi-hi-hi-hi there!" and calls her giant phallus artifact: "Naughty, naughty, naughty. You filthy old soomka." When Alex sets to rocking her giant, obscene phallus sculpture on its testicles, she screams: "Leave that alone! Don't touch it! It's a very important work of art." Her demands that Alex get out fail, so she picks up a bust of his beloved Beethoven and rushes at him. They duel each other with antagonistic weapons - he holds her off with the oversized phallus, and she thrusts the small bust of Beethoven at him. The scene, another balletic dance, is filmed with a hand-held camera to emphasize its urgency. When she goes down on the floor, Alex raises the Beethoven sculpture above her and plunges it down into her - filmed from a low angle. As she screams, a close-up of a mouth within another open mouth (from one of the pop paintings in the rooms) flashes on-screen with other dismembered body parts in an orgy of modern art. Alex leaves her senseless and beaten on the floor, mortally wounded by her own sculpture-turned-weapon, when he hears sounds of distant police sirens. As he races out the front door to join his henchmen, Dim - holding a milk bottle behind his back (a visual clue of the impending revolution) clobbers him across the face with the object. Alex is left screaming: "I'm blind, you bastards. I'm blind. I'm blind, you bastards. I can't see. O, you bastards! I'm blind!" Alex is left to be arrested - and taken to the police station house where he is interrogated in a windowless room by bobbies in uniform - one is a young policeman named Tom (Steven Berkoff). Sporting a bloody-nose bandage, Alex refuses to speak without a lawyer: "I won't say a single solitary slovo unless I have my lawyer here. I know the law, you bastards." The Inspector (Lindsay Campbell) responds: "We'll have to show our little friend Alex here that we know the law too, but that knowing the law isn't everything." After Alex burps into one of the policeman's faces, the man brutally jams his thumb down on Alex's injured nose. Alex grabs the attacker's genitals. In retaliation, Alex is beaten and kicked - his wound is freshly opened and blood is splattered on the immaculate wall of the interrogation room. Mr. Deltoid, Alex's social worker, appears after being summoned to participate in Alex's questioning in the interview room, but he announces gleefully that it is "the end of the line":
Alex, "love's young nightmare," argues that he is innocent and "was led on by the treachery of others" - he was forced into murdering the Catlady by his "stinking traitorous droogs." In a subjective point-of-view shot, Deltoid bends down and stares into the camera, vindictively telling Alex:
The policeman rests his head on Deltoid's shoulder and invites him to "bash" Alex one final time: "If you'd care to give him a bash in the chops, sir, don't mind us. We'll hold him down. He must be a great disappointment to you, sir." Instead of taking up the policeman's offer, Deltoid opts instead to spit in Alex's face. An aerial shot of the exterior of the government's prison compound, surrounded by green fields, appears. Following his arrest and conviction by the totalitarian government for first-degree murder, Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison, and he melodramatically narrates the next section of the film - "the real weepy and like tragic part":
In an extended scene, Alex is systematically inducted into H. M. Prison Parkmoor. He is led in handcuffed to a bobby and presented to the Chief Guard (Michael Bates). As he must obey the directive to not cross the white line painted on the floor in front of him, he is given a new identity ("You are now 655321, and it is your duty to memorize that number"), stripped of his clothes (that are packed with mothballs to preserve them) and his personal effects - by confiscation:
The Chief Guard examines Alex's rectal area for VD, crabs, and lice with a flashlight grasped between his teeth, before ordering the new inductee to the bath area. During a typical service in the prison chapel, two years later, the inmates are threatened by the chaplain/priest (Godfrey Quigley) for their crimes. After the crucial question regarding free, moral choice: "What's it going to be then?", they are assured that they have a choice between Hell's damnation or Heaven's redemption:
The prisoners are forced to bring their discordant voices together and sing, "I Was a Wandering Sheep." Alex participates in the service by cranking the overhead projector for displaying the words of hymns:
Left with only his vivid fantasy life, Alex studiously peruses and reads the Bible in the prison library, imagining the more lurid and violent parts of the Old and New Testaments. The chaplain, the moral voice of the film, misinterprets his sincerity and religiosity when befriending Alex:
Alex brutally fantasizes about being a Roman guard at the Crucifixion, lashing out and shouting to Jesus in an American accent - like in a bad Hollywood movie: "Move on there!" All that Alex has left to feed his violent and sexual personality are his fantasies of being an Old Testament warrior in battle, and surrounded by half-naked, bare-breasted handmaidens (Jan Adair, Vivienne Chandler, Prudence Drage) feeding him grapes:
Moments later, Alex tells the chaplain of his "genuine desire to reform," and the kindly chaplain is taken in by Alex's phony contrition. Patronizing the chaplain, he presses for information about a new, experimental, brain-washing reprogramming treatment called "aversion therapy," the Ludovico Treatment Technique. Alex wants to be civilized and "good" and believes that this new form of enforced therapy will work and be effective for him - "this new treatment that gets you out of prison in no time at all and makes sure you never get back in again...all I know (is) that it gets you out quickly." The chaplain of the prison doubts the expedient treatment methods of the State to cure anti-social behavior, considering them dangerous because they scientifically would deprive him of his humanity. He warns Alex against volunteering - it is a powerful theological statement of the importance of free will and moral choice:
During an exercise yard session, the inmates circle the yard. To the sounds of Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" March, the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp) visits the prison and glances into the interior of Alex's cell, picking up a bust of Beethoven and noting the sexy pin-ups on the wall. During the inspection, the 'law-and-order' Minister lectures the Prison Governor (Michael Gover) about overcrowded prisons. He advocates the imposition of the Ludovico Technique to clear the prison of mere "common criminals" so that there may be more room for "political offenders":
When Alex blurts out: "You're absolutely right, sir," he is asked about his specific crime: "The accidental killing of a person, sir." Because he is the perfect guinea-pig candidate ("he's enterprising, aggressive, outgoing, young, bold, vicious"), Alex is chosen for the controversial rehabilitation treatment which is designed to curb violence and sexual behavior and enable a prisoner to leave after only two weeks. But Alex doesn't realize the consequences of the government's desperate and brutal attempt to deal with its hoodlums with a harsh conditioning treatment: "This vicious young hoodlum will be transformed out of all recognition." Alex is signed out of the prison and volunteers willingly, although the Prison Governor theorizes that new treatment methods are displacing the 'eye-for-an-eye, a tooth-for-a-tooth" retributive form of justice: "The new ridiculous ideas have come at last and orders are orders...The new view is that we turn the bad into good. All of which seems to me to be grossly unjust...You are to be reformed." Alex is transferred to the Ludovico Medical Center from Parkmoor the next morning, where the dark-dressed, 'by-the-book' prison guards are replaced with the white-coated medical staff at the Ludovico clinic. As they accept him, the prison guard prophetically warns them: "You'll have to watch this one. A right brutal bastard he has been and will be again, in spite of all his sucking up to the prison Chaplain, and reading the Bible." The young subject is injected by a hypodermic needle filled with an experimental serum No. 114 (filmed in gigantic closeup) by female Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan). He is then strait-jacketed and transported to a screening room where he is tied down in a seat and made a captive audience. Alex is forced to watch films with his eyelids clamped open with pitiless clamps, while an assistant lubricates his bulging pupils at various intervals. His tortured face and head are wrapped in straps, and connected with electrodes and wires. The scenes of violence consciously follow the succession of crimes that Alex committed with his droogs: first, the bloody violence of a beating by a group of teenage thugs, and then a gang rape of a victim (Cheryl Grunwald) of Billyboy's gang. In the rear of the theatre, the group of white-jacketed doctors with Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering) watch his reactions and record his behavior on scientific instruments.
The images of violence in the films are environmentally paired to an induced, convulsive nausea caused by the injections, part of the behavioral theory of conditioned-reflex therapy. As he watches, a feeling of revulsion passes over him and slowly engulfs him, as predicted by Dr. Brodsky - "Very soon now, the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis, together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness. One of our early test subjects described it as being like death, a sense of stifling or drowning, and it is during this period we have found that the subject will make his most rewarding associations between his catastrophic experience-environment and the violence he sees." Later, Dr. Branom assures Alex that he has "made a very positive response" to the conditioning, but there will now be two sessions per day instead of one. Alex is on his way toward a cure: "Violence is a very horrible thing. That's what you're learning now. Your body is learning it...You felt ill this afternoon because you're getting better. You see, when we are healthy, we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all. By this time tomorrow, you'll be healthier still." The next day, scenes of Nazi atrocities are screened in the film theatre. Newsreels of Hitler's sturmtroopers, seig-heiling, and the blitzkrieg with the background music the classical soundtrack of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony cause agonizing revulsion in Alex, and he screams to his doctors to stop:
Alex pleads for them to stop playing his favorite piece of music - Beethoven ("It's a sin..using Ludwig van like that"), since Beethoven created only beautiful music: "He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music...." Dr. Brodsky responds to the accidental contact of the music with the treatment: "(To Dr. Branom) It can't be helped. Here's the punishment element perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased...I'm sorry, Alex, this is for your own good. You'll have to bear with us for a while." Dr. Brodsky wants the treatment to proceed and Alex must see it through to the end - as he ironically chose: "You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours." At the breaking point, Alex admits and confesses that he is being cured of his anti-social tendencies:
Made "a free man" and trained to become docile and harmless, Alex is destructively robbed of his individuality, personality and humanity by being transformed into a 'clockwork orange' - a compliant and mind-numbed citizen. He is brought - after two weeks - to an auditorium and subjected to an unusual graduation ceremony. With his arms crossed, the Minister of the Interior introduces a shy, smiling Alex to the packed lecture hall and announces his political motivations to achieve law and order, and how the treatment changed a "wretched hoodlum" into a well-behaved saint ("undrugged" and "unhypnotized"):
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