Audiences were always a little fickle with Kubrick's work (although A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Dr. Strangelove are accepted classics, and The Shining and Full Metal Jacket have seeped into our popular culture, Barry Lyndon was a bomb and Eyes Wide Shut is considered a joke), and critics were often sharply divided. According to Richard Schickel in that wonderful blow-job-disguised-as-a-documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, it was then really other filmmakers that have categorically canonized the films of Stanley Kubrick. It makes complete and utter sense, as Kubrick is probably the most purely filmic of all filmmakers. The content of his films is not unimportant of course, but the attraction has always lain primarily with his visual style, which is in no uncertain terms inerrant. Anybody who loves film itself cannot help but to be dumbfounded by his work.

It could be said that the only three things that an aspiring filmmaker really needs are a camera, a decent editing system, and Warner Home Video's Stanley Kubrick Collection boxset. I'm not sure if I can readily identify another filmmaker whose films lend themselves so easily to shot-by-shot deconstruction. The typical favorites, Welles and Hitchcock, infect too much warmth in the process. Comparatively speaking, their pictures feel organic, spontaneous and human. Kubrick's films on the other hand are pure cinema, absolute art, the movies distilled down to its very essence. The most accurate summation of his aesthetic I have ever heard was defined by Pauline Kael in her (negative) review of Barry Lyndon: Kubrick doesn't take pictures to make movies, he makes movies to take pictures.

David Lynch once said that his interest in filmmaking began when he realized that he wanted his paintings to move. Just a little bit. Kubrick at one point must have found his original vocation of photography similarly limiting, and decided to endow his photographs with several additional attributes. As a filmmaker Kubrick can add camera movement and movement within the frame. He can control how long we view a certain image and in which order we view them. And of course there is an entirely new audio element to introduce. Every shot in a Kubrick film serves a distinct purpose, thematic, narrative or psychological; thus justifying why an aspiring filmmaker would and should value his library. But it's more than that. It feels as if he has selected these shots from an entire universe of possible shots. Kubrick is the filmmaker as chess wizard; he's rummaged through a mental library of all possible moves in which to gain checkmate and chosen the one movement that would actually work.

There is a greater temptation to do a shot-by-shot remake of A Clockwork Orange than there is for one of something like Psycho or Citizen Kane. While I doubt that the results would ultimately justify the procedure (I do appreciate Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake, but I would certainly concede that it works pretty much only as a work of conceptual art and probably should not be repeated), the fact remains that it's tempting. You read a Kubrick film like you read a piece of music: each shot is but a note on a lined sheet of paper. He's discovered a formula which pretty much anybody else could repeat. This is pure, man. Pee you are ee, pure, like a drop of rain metamorphosing from the heavens.

While we are always conscious that every shot in a Kubrick film has been slaved over, this consciousness of technique does not sabotage the power of his films as much as accentuate it. There is a scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex knocks down the bookcases of a cuckolded intellectual (Alex is just preparing to rape his wife in front of him), and the camera pushes in. The push-in indicates that this sequence has been planned, perhaps even repeated numerous times, and is thus not spontaneous. But of course the power of the image does not rest with its spontaneity; rather it rests in the degree of the destruction. In taking away the degree of spontaneity, the shot develops a measured weight that multiplies the terror of the destruction. Had it been spontaneous, it would have been meaningless; as it is measured and focused, it bypasses the digestive process and goes right for the brain.

One is tempted to call Kubrick a genius, like those kids who can solve complex mathematical equations in their heads. That he is somebody who nature has somehow gifted with the ability to pick out the right pattern out of the many wrong ones. But I'm not so sure about attributing what he does to Mother Nature. I think that if he did in fact have The Gift, it was greatly nurtured by an extraordinary sense of patience. Patience is not one of my virtues. I am terrible at chess and photography, and while I'm sure that much of that could be attributed to the fact that I just haven't taken the time to properly learn them, I think that my inability to just sit down and wait out the possibilities has contributed more to my failure in those pursuits.

When Kubrick came to the set, he often didn't know how he would shoot a scene and would work with his actors in trying to come up with an approach. Those infamous fifty-some takes were just as much for him to find his niche as for the actors to find theirs. Kubrick wasn't a creative type in the strictest sense of the word. He couldn't spin something out of nothing. (Killer's Kiss was the last film of his that was not based on pre-existing material.) Rather, he was a perfectionist in the strictest sense of the word, perfectionism being defined as the absence of error. His art was that of taking away.

Kubrick's method has proved to yield purer results than that of a storyboard filmmaker like Hitchcock or the Coen Brothers. I think that this is because while the storyboard filmmaker must focus his energy on creating each shot, the storyboarded shot still stems from the human, that is to say fallible, imagination of its creator. As they are not on the set and looking through the camera lens at the actors and their performances in the studio environment, they can never reach that one-hundred-percent mark of purity. Purification is not something that one creates; rather to achieve purification, you must eliminate impurity.

I probably should be careful to plug the filmmakers in such a rigid Sarris-esqe hierarchy (then again, one could argue that such claims are part of the fun of amateur film criticism), but I do feel Kubrick is a superior filmmaker to Hitchcock. I've mentioned that his films were never quite as pure, and there are other problems: at best Hitchcock was Catholic about sex, food and violence, whereas Kubrick was detached and anthropological; at worst Hitchcock was insincere, making films about the idea of psychoanalysis, or the idea of guilt or repressed sexuality, et cetera, as opposed to films that actually deal with it. The occasional throwaway line of cheeseball dialogue: ("No! I will not hide in the fruit cellar! Ha! You think I'm fruity, huh?" - Psycho; "You look all banged up"- Notorious) and his use of back projection and walk-on cameos ensure that his films feel self-consciously artificial.

In many ways, I believe that Hitchcock never quite had the sort of freedom that he really needed; his films are constrained by the Hayes Code, genre conventions, cinematic conventions of the time and the demands of the marketplace. Jimmy Stewart's tirade against the evils of fascism at the end of Rope is difficult to justify and is regrettably something that modern audiences are forced to forgive.

Yes, the period details of A Clockwork Orange date it back to 1971, but I do feel that the film has and will age much better than most of Hitchcock's work by virtue of Kubrick's absolute cinematic style. I feel almost cruel in saying all of that, but of course we must be cruel as the end product is ultimately all that matters. Hitchcock once complained that most films are simply photographs of people talking. With that in mind I found myself shocked to discover that his classic Notorious was an absolute chatterfest. It pretty much consisted of photographs of people talking, to the point that when we are given a rather interesting shot, such as that of Cary Grant hovering over a waking Ingrid Bergman, we are greatly disoriented. It doesn't gel with the rest of the picture. Notorious is talky, I am sure, because most of the films at that time were talky.

I bring that up because A Clockwork Orange has itself been accused of talkiness. The reason that I exonerate A Clockwork Orange but condemn Notorious is because in Notorious, they were actually saying important things, things that revealed character and plot information. That is not the case with A Clockwork Orange. I recall Roger Ebert's observation of 2001: A Space Odyssey that it would work well as a silent film. Kubrick was more concerned with showing us that they were talking than in exploring the content of their speech. I think that it's the same with A Clockwork Orange. Those boring talky parts, they happen after Alex has been incarcerated and brainwashed.

There is a constant voice-over narration in the film and there is little said in the voice-over narration that we really need to know. It then serves two distinct purposes: 1) to provide an audio counterpoint to the visuals and 2) to inform us that what we are seeing has been filtered through the mind of Alex. That we are getting only his point of view. As he is bored in prison, so are we. Kubrick knows very well that he is being "acinematic."

The concept of banality, of the bored utopian, has been an ongoing subject of Kubrick's work. 2001: A Space Odyssey seems to give us the clearest framework into his filmography. In that film, we see man evolve from an ape to his present affluent, bored, pampered and altogether banal utopian form, and then finally to angel or "Star Child." No other Kubrick film shows the utopian evolve into Star Child. In Full Metal Jacket, the utopian hero thought that he had become a Star Child when he executed a Viet Cong sniper, but the triumph was hollow. Incomplete. In The Shining, Jack Torrance escapes utopia by de-evolving back into his ape stage (a parallel to Ken Russell's brilliant Altered States, also released that year).

Another major subject of Kubrick's work is fate, either the inescapability of it or the quest to fulfill it. The message of A Clockwork Orange, however, is that, "If a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man." It is, in other words, a film that argues for both the possibility and the necessity of escaping fate. This is because Alex is the Star Child grown up to be a Star Man. The transformation of Alex into a banalized "clockwork orange" is seen by the film as being immoral, a forcible de-evolution from his perfect superhuman state. A Clockwork Orange is nothing more or less but a Nietzschean libertarian text.

The violence in A Clockwork Orange is unusual in that it does not stem from any weakness on Alex's part. He has not been displaced in a socioeconomic sense. He is not trying to gain or regain lost power through violence, which of course is the primary motivation behind most gang violence. In fact, although his parents appear to be working class (his mother works in a factory), Alex is by all appearances rather spoiled and pampered, aristocratic even. (The stories about George W. Bush's "youthful indiscretions," namely his drunk driving arrests, immediately triggered flashbacks of that famous sequence in the film where Alex defiantly drives on the wrong side of the road.) Alex is not lost in some sort of deep existential fog, like the antiheroes of Paul Schrader's work. The violence is not borne out of Alex's failure to communicate either, as it was with Frank Booth in Blue Velvet or The Thief in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. There isn't a culture of violence in the way we would really think of the word; there is no ethnic machismo on Alex's part. Rather the opposite really; he's sort of boyishly androgynous, very comfortable in his own sexuality and not needing to define it.

Alex doesn't wish to dominate others; rather, he is ALREADY dominant. Again, there is no struggle to gain power; he already has all the power he needs. This is post-Star Child. There are only really two reasons that Alex does what he does: 1) It feels good, real horrorshow as the boy would say, and 2) he has the divine (God-given?) right to do so. Among the more chilling lines in the picture is Alex arguing to his droogs that they needn't try and make a big score: "Have you not everything you need? If you need a motor car, you pluck it from the trees. If you need pretty polly, you take it." Women basically exist to be raped and homeless men basically exist to be beaten up. That's what they are there for; it's life there for the taking: fun, games and even a little sport.

There is no anger there; in the Kubrick universe Alex's every movement is measured and smooth. Even when he thwaps his colleague Dim in the crotch with his large phallic staff for blowing a raspberry in response to a woman's singing of Ludwig Van, his deameanor is not cracked. He isn't losing himself to his emotions; rather, he's savoring the simple pleasures of hurting another human being.

Is A Clockwork Orange an immoral picture, an incitement to violence? The short answer is, of course, "absolutely." Questions: what is wrong with conditioning Alex against violence, given especially that we have established that social factors don't contribute to his criminality? He has actively chosen to be a criminal and when given back the freedom of choice, he becomes a criminal again (albeit one who now has backing from a fascist government). In the novel's 21st chapter, given the freedom of choice, he opts to give up his life of crime as he has grown bored with it. Is this realistic? Is a solemn life of moderation really more experientially satisfying than beating up the homeless and raping lovely devotchkas without ever having to face the consequences? I somehow doubt it. How much are values of altruism and compassion (of what I suppose we would say "goodness") reliant upon our being in the same boat as everybody else? To what extent are altruism and compassion at service to our need toward self-preservation?

If we can establish that Alex is not in the same boat as those he oppresses, he accordingly would find little of interest in Christianity. I don't believe that the angry, the Frank Booths of the world, really get much from violence. They can't help themselves and are miserable while doing it. This is not the case for Alex. After his conditioned self is let loose upon the world, his victims, his inferiors, take revenge on him. Here we see the ignobility of the oppressed; they are not any better, any more moral than Alex. The humanist political beliefs of the liberal cuckold melt away once he learns Alex's true identity. He simply becomes interested in getting his.

Christianity could perhaps help Alex's victims as their crimes are crimes of revenge, of anger. But then again, what is Christianity but the religion of the creatively, physically and intellectually inferior? The embracement of victimization? The inferiority that is characteristic of the victimized prevents them from effectively bypassing oppression and from truly enjoying violence for its own sake, and so it necessary that they make a religion out of victimization. Alex masturbates to a crucifix and upon studying the Bible fantasizes himself as a Roman soldier scourging the carpenter Jew. He rather likes the iconology of Christianity; he probably loved Passion of the Christ, because he understands that it's the religion of the lambs sending themselves off to the slaughter. Turn the other cheek and he'll be happy to strike that one too.

A Clockwork Orange is not only immoral, it's concrete and thorough about it. This is an airtight film. As with most philosophies, it begins with a untestable thesis statement (that Alex is the overman) and builds upon it. Those films that updated it, the admittedly still excellent Trainspotting and Fight Club (both also based on cult novels, this time unread by me), added on A Clockwork Orange's 21st chapter, exposing their underlying hypocrisy. They make mayhem and cretinism all fun and games, but then dodge out in the third act and claim to be moral works all along as their protagonists/narrators see the light of respectable middle class life and "grow up." It's sort of depressing; the filmmakers see it as their responsibility to close the floodgates to anarchy.

I think that the cult for Trainspotting, Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange (ah, and the ridiculous but perhaps thornier American History X also) consists mostly of shithead kids: the "punks." They are rebelling against religion, government, their parents et cetera, but they don't have anything to replace these institutions with once they tear them down. Void of hypocrisy and moralizing, A Clockwork Orange is a purer film than either Fight Club or Trainspotting and is thus more satisfying experientially. It's also more dangerous, as Stanley Kubrick is a very intelligent guy and has designed a well-executed and thorough justification for rape and pillaging, whereas Trainspotting and Fight Club don't have that sort of courage.

One of the better defenses of A Clockwork Orange against charges of immorality is in observing that it does take place entirely within Alex's head, and so we are seeing him in the way that he sees himself. Indeed, but the film is so thorough and purified, that we aren't given anything that violates this strict internal logic. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange proves to a superior work to something like Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho in that in the latter, Ellis put in episodes where the narrator (the evil Patrick Bateman) looks like an idiot and knows that he looks like an idiot. One would think that Bateman's ego would preclude the inclusion of things like that. There is a lot of comedy in A Clockwork Orange, mostly physical stuff. Slapstick. Some seems to be at the expense of Alex; i.e. his parole officer hits him in the nuts and we see him squat and re-adjust. After being assaulted by some of his former droogs, he is carried to the door of one of his previous victim's by the victims bodyguard. At the end of the film he is in a full body cast and has to be forkfed. When seeing if he has been effectively de-programmed, he gets overly excited at seeing some of the suggestive pictures and hurts his hand, causing him to curse to himself. (Aside: When I got around to seeing The Public Enemy, I was surprised to discover many similar scenes to A Clockwork Orange. In this film, the James Cagney character comes in from the rain after being assaulted and ends up in a full body cast by the end of the picture. According to Steven Spielberg, James Cagney was one of Kubrick's very favorite actors, and in seeing Cagney in this film one is able to easily spot the origins for the infamous Kubrick stare that begins A Clockwork Orange.)

Does any of this make Alex look stupid? Ideologically, like the "communist stooges" rebuttal in Dr. Strangelove? I don't really think so; it seems to fit in comfortably with his perception of himself. He's like a satyr figure, a Dopey Dwarf who falls on his rump and just bounces back again. Had Alex been a traditionally masculine figure, perhaps the comedy could be seen as an affront to him. But as a pansexual figure, he's able to assimilate with slapstick. It makes sense that A Clockwork Orange is a comedy, because to Alex, life is but a lark.

Of course, in adding episodes where the narrator looks like an idiot, Ellis effectively prevented the reader from accepting American Psycho at face value and understood that it was a satire. As Kubrick doesn't allow any perspective but Alex's to infect the sample, there is nothing to contrast his values against. Satire can't really exist in a work like this, unless there is an external perspective that can penetrate the characters' universe. (The problem with Trey Parker and Matt Stone is that both external perspective and internal perspective are interwoven, constantly contrasting, and altogether ill-defined.)

I do understand that absurdity can introduce an innate external perspective. That is why Swift's "A Modest Proposal" works as satire, as well as Dr. Strangelove for that matter. But the moral premise of A Clockwork Orange is not absurd. Particularly six years after the Columbine massacre. Deluded or not, the idea of the teenage killer as ubermensch has teeth to it. A Clockwork Orange can be bought into wholesale.

And so it would follow that A Clockwork Orange is either a failure as satire, or it is something other than satire altogether. (The most primitive of critics will identify a cat as being a failure, because it does not meet all the criteria of doghood.) I think that A Clockwork Orange is very intelligently and very thoroughly an evil piece of work. I think that it has an attractively evil message. This does not bother me however. On one level, I would argue that escapism is one of the pleasures of the movies and relieving our basest desires vicariously is not at all unhealthy. On a second greater level, however, I think that the evilness of A Clockwork Orange is useful simply in a conceptual way. As the film is perfect and absolute in that conscious-of-every-shot way, it lends itself easily to detached conceptual digestion. Evil is just another angle in which we can examine the ongoing issues that Kubrick is exploring.

I often wonder about the problem of utopia to the social activist. We struggle toward change, but once change comes, where do we go from there? Once change has come, the social activist is obsolete. And if we define the struggle as the important part and not the end goal, then does the struggle become altogether meaningless? Of course this isn't only about society, it is also about religion. Of what use or value is faith once we meet God after we die? Won't heaven get boring after a while, so boring that you begin to get depressed in the same way that suicidals do, depressed at the thought that your life no longer has any meaning or purpose? After all, you are already in heaven. Nowhere to go once you are on top.

The ideas in A Clockwork Orange stem from a post-rapture framework; Alex has evolved into an angel whereas the rest have stayed mere men. The discrepancy between men and angel, between the peers and peerless, appears necessarily to be "evil." Unlike Kubrick's other antiheroes, Alex is never bored or dissatisfied. He has moved beyond the utopian 2001 state and is enjoying his new divine nature. If there comes a time in which he does become bored, his second focal goal proves to be far beyond our reach (ideologically speaking, this makes A Clockwork Orange simultaneously Kubrick's most primitive and most advanced work). Today, Alex doesn't need to work toward or dream toward anything. He's happy; when he wants something all he needs do is pluck it from the trees. That is, after all, his divine right.