Cinema: Kubrick: Degrees of Madness

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The milk-plus at the Korova, according to Alex, "sharpens you up and makes you ready tor a bit of the old ultra-violence." After a glass or two, Alex and his droogs have made up their ras-soodocks what to do for entertainment.

They bash up an old drunk who lies singing in a tunnel. They bloody Billyboy and his gang. They steal a Durango-95 and roar out into the countryside, running cars and pedestrians off the road. They pay "the old surprise visit" to a quiet home, force their way in, tie and gag the man of the house and rape his wife. Then, all feeling "a bit shagged and fagged and fashed," they retire once again to the Korova. After all, as Alex says, it has been "an evening of some small energy expenditures."

The language may be a bit strange, the setting slightly unfamiliar, but Alex is immediately recognizable. He is a true child of the near future, a freak for violence, who would understand and enthusiastically approve Charlie Manson's credo: "Do the unexpected. No sense makes sense." Yet the confounding thing, and perhaps the ultimate irony of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, is that Alex is surprisingly but undeniably engaging.

A Clockwork Orange, based on the Anthony Burgess novel, is a merciless, demoniac satire in the future imperfect. It posits a world somehow gone berserk, in which there are no real alternatives, only degrees of madness. Kubrick makes the whole thing (as he did in Dr. Strangelove) chillingly and often hilariously believable. Alex, so contemptuously in control, soon becomes a victim of his own lunatic society.

Imprisoned for a random murder, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) manages to have himself chosen as a guinea pig in a scientific experiment designed to rehabilitate him in two weeks. He submits to the Ludovico Technique, a behavioristic barrage of electric impulses and motion-picture film that cripples him with nausea at the mere thought of sex or violence. Thoroughly zapped, Alex is transformed into a kind of automaton, a clockwork orange, with no free will of his own. "As decent a lad as you would meet on a May morning!" gushes the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp), who hopes to use Alex and the Ludovico Technique for political gain.

Soon Alex is menaced on all sides, by the old bum, by his former droogs (now turned policemen), by the husband of the woman he raped. It is what Kubrick calls "an almost magical coincidence of retribution"—so magical, in fact, that it eventually brings Alex back full circle, recovered from the Ludovico Technique and ready to embark on a life of ultra-violence with the blessings of the Minister of the Interior himself.