A Clockwork Orange (1971) | |||||||||||||
Plot Synopsis (continued)
In a memorable, sado-masochistic sequence, there is a successful demonstration of Alex's learned lessons - of how his behavior has been reformed and conformed - "actions speak louder." In a two-part play, Alex is first insulted, humiliated and attacked by Lardface (John Clive) - an abusive, curly-haired, homosexual Irish man who calls the passive Alex a smelly "heap of dirt." After slapping Alex across the face, stamping on his toes, twisting his nose, pulling his ears, and pushing him over, Alex is forced to lick his shoe in subservience. As an obedient zombie, he suffers tremendous sickness and revulsion against violence:
In a second demonstration to the tune of "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary," he is tempted before a stage actress (Virginia Wetherell), a half-nude platinum blonde woman wearing only bikini panties. Eyes glazed and on his knees, Alex lustfully reaches out for her breasts (filmed both from a low angle and an overhead shot to emphasize their firm ripeness). As he cups his hands tantalizingly close to her pink-nippled, fleshy protuberances, his urge for sex instantly turns to an urge to vomit and he falls to the floor belching to his former passion:
The Minister summarizes Alex's cure to the audience: "Our subject is impelled towards the good by paradoxically being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these, the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude. Any questions?" Although pronounced cured, the prison chaplain objects that in actuality, Alex has been deprived of his free will with the shock therapy that has nauseated him. He is not a free man but "a clockwork orange" - a mechanically-responsive non-human:
To the jaunty song, "I Want to Marry A Lighthouse Keeper," Alex returns home. He finds his parents reading newspapers with headlines: "Cat-Woman Killer Alex Freed," "'Crime Cure' Will Strengthen Law and Order Policy," and "Murderer freed: 'Science has cure'." His parents are bewildered and surprised by his unexpected return. Alex proudly pronounces himself "cured": "They did a great job on me. I'm completely reformed." He discovers that he has been displaced from his own house - his parents have rented his room to the "strange fella sitting in the sofa munchy wunching lomticks of toast" - Joe (Clive Francis), the new teenaged lodger, who has quickly become like a son to them. Instead of being civil, Joe immediately criticizes Alex: "I've heard about you. I know what you've done. Breaking the hearts of your poor grieving parents. So you're back, eh? You're back to make life a misery for your lovely parents once more, is that it?" When Alex cocks his arm back to punch Joe, it causes him to belch and retch violently, and he stumbles into a chair:
Frail and crushed by despotic training and brainwashing, Alex becomes a victim of violence himself, totally unprepared and helpless to cope with the real world when he is returned to society. Alex also learns that all of his personal things were taken away by the police due to "new regulations...about compensation for the victims." Basil his snake, has passed away, and Pee stammers that Joe cannot be asked to leave because he has already paid next month's rent. Truly suffering, Alex weeps after hearing Joe disdainfully chastise him and take his place:
Unable to defend himself, Alex leaves the flat and announces he will make his own way in life:
During the remainder of the film, Alex is helplessly assaulted or rejected by the people from his past who had been his abused victims, but he cannot retaliate in each case. The revenge-seeking former victims include: the drunken old bum, former gang members, and widower of the rape victim - leftist writer Mr. Alexander. Along the banks of the Thames, accompanied by a slow movement within the "William Tell Overture," Alex sadly walks and contemplates committing suicide in its waters. The Tramp which he assaulted with his droogs earlier in the film recognizes him, and drags him to a dark underpass where other toothless, stubbly-faced bums are encouraged to join in the bashing during the vengeful attack: "This is the poisonous young swine that near done me in. Him and his friends, they beat me and kicked me and punched me. Stop him, stop him. They laughed at my blood and my moans. This murderous young pig."
Two young policemen rescue Alex - they turn out to be Georgie and Dim, two of his former Droogs, who have since joined the increasingly-violent, fascist state to impose law and order. Alex is shocked when he recognizes them and Georgie explains that they are now on the side of the law:
Now belching and choking, Alex is roughly dragged to their patrol car and driven into the country. As he is led out of the vehicle with handcuffs, Alex feebly jokes:
As they lead him down a forested, muddy lane, in a long tracking shot filmed with a hand-held camera from behind, accompanied by a Moog synthesizer playing "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary," Dim wants to make sure that he remains cured: "This is to make sure you stay cured." When they reach a water trough, Georgie viciously hits Alex in the stomach with his blackjack club, doubling him over. For retribution, Dim pushes him headfirst under the water and holds him there, while Georgie methodically beats him with his nightstick. After the vicious beating, lightning strikes as Alex stumbles down a torrential rainy night road. Coincidentally, he comes upon a panel sign welcoming him: "HOME," in another scene filmed with a hand-held camera:
In the Alexander home, the old widower is typing at his IBM typewriter, now impotent, crippled, and confined to a wheelchair. He has a newspaper lying on his desk with headlines: "SCIENTISTS HAVE CURE FOR CRIME." Alex is admitted to the Alexander home by a young, giant weightlifter/male manservant named Julian (David Prowse, the future Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy). The bloody-faced victim gasps at the door that he was beaten up. He isn't immediately recognized because of the disguise-mask he wore during his first visit to the home:
For a shocking second, Alex thinks he has been recognized when the writer exclaims:
Wishing to capitalize on the horrible experiences of the treatment, Mr. Alexander excitedly welcomes Alex into his home as a victim of the Ludovico Treatment. Alex is offered a warm bath and as he soaks in the tub and hears water dripping in the echoing bathroom, he starts quietly and involuntarily humming "Singin' in the Rain." In the other room, Mr. Alexander crouches down and phones some of his Leftist associates, to explain how they can plot to use Alex as "the most potent weapon imaginable" to discredit the government's new approach to dealing with crime to "the people - the common people":
As Mr. Alexander becomes more aware of the echoing sounds of "Singin' in the Rain" emanating from the bathroom, he wheels his wheelchair over to the door - and then his twisted, distorted, apoplectic face, shot from below, expresses his horror. He knows that Alex was one of the hoodlums who earlier had invaded his house and left him a crippled widower. Alex sits by himself in a dressing gown over a dinner of spaghetti and a bottle of wine. After the muscle-bound weightlifter carries Mr. Alexander into the room seated upon his wheelchair, Alex senses something fatefully foreboding will happen to him. Glasses of wine (drugged) are offered to him. Mr. Alexander's voice trembles, his eyes bulge and his body shakes, and he grits and bares his teeth - anticipating the retribution that Alex deserves. Unwisely, Alex asks about Mr. Alexander's wife - "a victim of the modern age":
[There is a curious homosexual subtext to this scene - Mr. Alexander appears to have forsaken a woman as a life companion, after the brutal rape of his wife - although she allegedly died of pneumonia!] Two of Mr. Alexander's fellow conspirators/associates who were phoned arrive - they are both interested in Alex's case: a fat, bald intellectual man named Dolin (John Savident) and a blonde female named Rubinstein (Margaret Tyzack). They have learned that Alex has been conditioned against music too: "...in addition to your being conditioned against acts of sex and violence, you've inadvertently been conditioned against music." The government's inhumane, inadequate technique to cure crime is causing Alex to have the same reaction to the playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as he has to sex and violence. Alex explains the sensation of hearing the Ninth: "I can't listen to the Ninth anymore at all. When I hear the Ninth, I get like this funny feeling and then, all I can think about is like trying to snuff it...death, I mean...I just want to die peacefully, like, with no pain." Suddenly a few moments later, the drug in the wine takes effect and Alex collapses face-first into his plate of spaghetti. When Alex awakens, he finds himself belching and locked in a lavender wall-papered attic bedroom of Dolin's Country Manor, with the sound of Beethoven's Ninth pouring up from below:
Alex staggers around, crying out: "Turn it off!! Stop it!!" Downstairs, the conspirators fiendishly turns up the volume, with Mr. Alexander especially delighted with his revenge and torture. In despair, Alex suicidally throws himself out of the upstairs window. In a spectacular subjective shot, he plunges to the pavement below [the camera was literally thrown out of the window], but survives the fall:
Taken to a hospital following the suicide attempt, in a long panning shot from right to left up his immobile, convalescing body, Alex wakes up in a hospital ward, both his legs in traction and his head wrapped in gauze and a cast. He has literally "fallen" from his mechanistic behaviorism to his old self:
Alex's moans are coupled in a duet with the moans of a night doctor and nurse making love from behind a screened-off bed. As they adjust their clothes, the nurse exclaims: "Oh, he's recovered consciousness, Doctor." A montage of newspaper headlines highlights the embarrassment of the government over its inhuman experiments that motivated Alex's attempted suicide. The Ludovico Technique calls "into question the whole policy of law and order which it had made a plank in its election programme." He has been turned over to the opponents of the government, who wish to reverse his conditioning, and hailed as a victim of inhuman criminal reform methods:
Alex's father and mother visit him in the hospital, and a point-of-view shot shows them leaning over his bed. They blame the government for the great wrongs done to him that led to his suicide attempt: "...the Government drove you to try and do yourself in." They accept some of the blame, apologizing and begging him to return home: "Your home's your home when all's said and done, son." Alex's next visitor is psychiatrist Dr. Taylor (Pauline Taylor), and he tells her about concerns over "very nasty" dreams he has been experiencing:
After cheerfully dismissing his complaint as "all part of the recovery process," she shows him slide-show cartoons which he is to caption with "the first thing that pops" into his mind. His responses reveal that there is the possibility that someone has been tinkering with the inside of his brain, deconditioning him and returning him to his old self. His responses to the slides reveal childish, violent cravings:
His answers reveal that the evil gleam of terror of his former "uncured," raping and maiming self is returning to his eyes - "well on the way to making a complete recovery." Alex is told "it won't be long now" until he gets out of the hospital. The Minister of the Interior, Alex's next "very special visitor," embarrassed by Alex's death wish and "deeply sorry," explains how he has authorized the undoing of the effects of the Ludovico Technique and attempted to restore Alex to his previous condition (with the freedom of choice and therefore the right to take pleasure in violence). As the Minister feeds Alex spoonfuls of his dinner, Alex behaves like a newborn bird in a nest with its mouth open for every morsel of food - symbolically, the spoon-fed child of the corrupt totalitarian society. The Minister apologizes patronizingly, feeling "deeply sorry about this." He explains how the menacing Frank Alexander ("a writer of subversive literature") was made a political prisoner and put away ("for his own protection"). He also assures Alex that he will leave the hospital with a guaranteed job and good salary if he can be "instrumental in changing the public's verdict" by presenting a respectable front and promoting the Government's party ("We always help our friends, don't we?"). The Minister effectively seduces Alex over to the government's side:
Their perverse bargain and alliance are agreed upon and the deal is cemented - Alex is bought off by the Government and the Minister as a figure of the conservative Right:
As a surprise, attendants bring arrangements of flowers and fruit to the new celebrity figure. A hi-fi stereo system with stereo amplifiers is wheeled in to play the triumphal "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth, and dozens of reporters and photographers rush into the room to take pictures. The smiling, beguiling Minister poses for a picture beside Alex to take credit for their alliance:
Alex offers a thumbs-up gesture and mugs for the cameras. And then suddenly, his eyes glaze and roll back (in a semi-Kubrick stare) and an enigmatic dream-like image comes on the screen - Alex, now "cured," has truly returned to his former self - with his free will intact and with his old proclivities for sex and violence. The final scene emphasizes the enormity of the state's hypocrisy for manipulatively flip-flopping its stance in order to gain votes. In his Ascot fantasy, a nude Alex finds peace and fantasizes copulating (making love to/raping?) with a beautiful blonde woman (Katya Wyeth) who wears only black silk stockings. They are frolicking in slow-motion on piles of white snow, while two rows of genteel-looking, Victorian Londoners (ladies and gentlemen), the men dressed in top hats and the women carrying parasols, look on and sedately applaud toward them. Alex has reverted to his old, pre-conditioned behavior:
His words are followed by a hard cut to a bright orange title card pronouncing: 'Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick.' The film implies that Alex is not cured -- rather, he is still "a clockwork orange" lacking free will, only programmed by the government in the completely opposite direction.
During the closing credits, Gene Kelly's original rendition of Singin' in the Rain, Alex's theme song that accompanies brutal atrocities, is reprised on the soundtrack.
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