A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971, UK, USA)

The most fascinating moment in the whole film comes on the tail end of a whole lot of brutal, cartoonish unpleasantry (which I'll get to later) when a bathrobed Alex sits eating dinner in the home of his wheelchair-bound former victim, unaware that his host has just discovered his identity. Seething with rage, he barely keeps up the hospitable facade enough to offer Alex a glass of wine, and as our perturbed protagonist delays drinking, a rather gratifying lady-or-the-tiger effect comes into play. A Clockwork Orange is (at least ostensibly) concerned with the problem of moral choice, how our ability to choose between good and evil makes us human. Confronted with the man who has wronged him (a person who has been deprived of his own choice), does the host poison him in revenge? The answer is somewhat unexpected, but still appropriately cynical. 

I find it troubling that this movie, which purports to be about the choices that makes us human, is populated almost entirely not with humans but with shrieking, stuttering caricatures. The only characters in the whole film whose mannerisms are not directly intended to provoke either laughter or a surrealist effect of alienation are Alex, the focal point of Kubrick's (Burgess's, I should say) satirical concerns, and the cleric, who nevertheless plays mostly an unwitting straight man to Alex's mockery and later on as a mouthpiece for the rather obvious moral question at hand. 

This is the only explanation I can give for the film's popularity: it is not challenging. The scenes of violence are brief and accompanied by striking, inherently pleasurable cinematography and musical selections, as well as titillation for the younger crowd to which it appeals. The humor is unsophisticated and mostly sexual in nature. Nicholas Winding Refn's 2009 film Bronson contains all these elements and succeeds in many different directions. Kubrick makes his technical brilliance known in A Clockwork Orange, but his montages have never been more lucid, more easily deciphered. It is very hard not to roll one's eyes at the sight of Alex imagining himself as a Roman Centurion scourging Christ on the way up calvary. Virtually nothing is left to the audience; you've figured it all out by the time you're out of your seat.