MEANS OF DISTRACTION

A Clockwork Orange, a review by Ian Johnston

Does any film have a more entrancing, seductive opening than A Clockwork Orange? Here was Kubrick, after 2001, at the height of his cultural fame and recognition – in Joseph Gelmis’ terms, the ultimate Film Director as Superstar – and at the height of his control of the medium and of us. As an audience we’re mesmerised from the start, by the slow, slightly-distorted, slightly-disturbing strains of Purcell played on a Moog; the glaring primary-colour of the credit stills: bright red, blue, and red again; and the opening close-up on Malcolm McDowell—the young McDowell, at his most handsome, arrogant, and bewitching. In that first close-up McDowell holds us in his gaze, staring out directly, brazenly into the camera, his heaving chest hinting at the barely contained violence. At the same time Kubrick exercises his own grip on us with the slow, controlled zoom-back that reveals Alex’s fellow droogs and the drugged-up spaced-out world of the Korova Milk Bar with its eroticised furnishings and brawny bouncers in white jumpsuits. And then there’s McDowell-as-Alex’s now famous voiceover narration:

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.