#70 ‘A Clockwork Orange’

Violence, Virtue, and the Cult of the Charming Sociopath

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is Stanley Kubrick’s cold, gleaming provocation—a dystopian nightmare of Beethoven, ultraviolence, and choreographed rape, wrapped in a philosophy term paper and narrated by a teenage sadist with a posh accent and a codpiece. It wants to shock you, unsettle you, and make you question the very nature of free will. But mostly, it wants you to watch a woman get brutalized in slow motion while the camera marvels at its own aesthetic choices.

Malcolm McDowell plays Alex DeLarge, a sociopathic teenager who leads a gang of “droogs” through a carnival of depravity—beatings, home invasions, sexual assaults—all delivered with stylized glee and fourth-wall-breaking smirks. He’s an unrepentant monster who becomes the state’s test subject in a behavior modification experiment designed to strip him of violent impulses. The film’s thesis is that in making him “good,” the government also strips him of his humanity. And so begins the moral conundrum: is it better to be a monster by choice or a good citizen by force?

Let’s pause and ask a more urgent question: why are we so concerned about Alex’s autonomy when the film barely spares a thought for his victims? The women he rapes are set dressing. The men he brutalizes are props for his transformation. Their trauma is irrelevant, their pain a backdrop for his philosophical awakening. Because apparently, in Kubrick’s future, only the suffering of men counts as existential.

Yes, the film is visually stunning. The production design is retro-fascist pop-art perfection. Walter Carlos’s synth-heavy reinterpretations of classical music create an auditory unease that lingers. And McDowell? He’s magnetic in the worst way—a black hole of charisma that makes you almost forget he’s grinning through scenes of horrifying misogyny. Almost.

Kubrick’s direction is controlled, deliberate, and clinical—so clinical, in fact, that the satire sometimes curdles into complicity. When you stylize rape with classical music and slow motion, are you critiquing violence or fetishizing it? The line blurs, and Kubrick doesn't seem particularly interested in drawing it clearly.

Women in A Clockwork Orange exist for two reasons: to be sexualized or to be destroyed. There is no female character with agency. None with interiority. Their naked bodies fill frame after frame, often lifeless, usually silent. The film claims to critique dehumanization, but it dehumanizes women to make the point. That’s not subversion—it’s narrative hypocrisy.

And the state? No better than Alex. Bureaucrats who torture under the guise of order. Psychologists who reduce morality to stimulus and response. The film wants us to see the system as more monstrous than the individual—but only because it dares to interrupt the male antihero’s spree.

By the end, when Alex grins and declares he’s been “cured all right,” the audience is supposed to feel discomfort, even horror. But Kubrick’s gaze remains infatuated with him. And so does the film.

3 out of 5 milk-plus hallucinations
(One for McDowell’s fearless performance. One for the set design and score. One for raising questions that still matter. The missing stars? Left behind with the unnamed, unremembered women whose violated bodies were used not as commentary, but as canvas.)