cliterature

I beleive I have mentioned that I have some antique and vintage pin-up photographs. They are part of a larger collection of ephemera relating to sexuality in the arts. Today I thought I would show this 1972 publicity shot for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In this scene Alex (Malcolm McDowell) uses a phallic statue to murder a women referred to as the “cat lady” after breaking into her house. (by the way, I plan at some point to write a post about the connections between cats and women in sexually-charge literature, particularly of the more abusive type).

There is no doubt that A Clockwork Orange, like the Anthony Burgess novel on which it is based is overflowing with highly objectionable sexual violence. For almost 30 years (until 2001) is was banned from being shown in the UK. It was widely rumored that Kubrick asked for this ban because the movie was implicated and real life rapes and murders. However more recent reports suggest he was motivated more by threats directed against his own family. I have linked to the actual scene below–note that although it contains no explicit material at all it is a deliberately unsettling, violent scene and you should only view it if you are an adult and this will not be disturbing to you.

A Clockwork Orange-Death of the Cat Lady

I think that, in both the novel and the movie, seeing depiction of extreme hyper-masculine violence does give us cause for thought (that is, it is not gratuitous). Delinquency and violence against women are still with us. In the era of this novel and movie it seemed possible that behaviorist psychology could effectively program people to obey the law, whether they chose to or not. And that certainly does raise issues about how meaningful forced virtue is. These days we realise that temperament is not quite so plastic, but other methods of control (chemical, genetic) seem to lie just around the corner.

However both in reading the book and watching the movie one thought occurred to me.  Why is there such a focus on the ethical morass of Alex’s coerced change in behavior–and so little to the rape and murder of his female victims?  They are placed in the scene merely to illustrate Alex’s degenerate state, not to represent real people.  My main discomfort as a consumer of the story was for it to be meaningful you have to accept that the key point is how Alex is changed and whether it is acceptable, the death of these women is beside the point–their perspective silenced as effectively as the cat lady is with the statue.  The Clockwork Orange, like the phallic sculpture, is certainly art–but art of a hyper-masculine type with preoccupations to match (e.g. male autonomy).  And that, more than the sex and violence (which is actually rather mild by modern standards) is what makes me so uncomfortable watching it and so  taking on that point of view.

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