Imagery. An accused soldier at a wartime court-martial stands as a pawn on a checkerboard floor. A maniacal scientist hurtles out of his wheelchair, screaming, "Mein Führer, I can walk!" A man-ape seizes a jawbone, smashing it on an animal skull. Imagery, the kind that mythologizes and endures, is the nucleus of the film experience. And few are better at conceiving, transmitting and illuminating imagery than Stanley Kubrick. In Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and now in A Clockwork Orange, producer-director Kubrick has infused raw celluloid with moments of human drama widely regarded as unique. Part of his mystique centers on the singularity of his work. Kubrick's biographer, British critic Alexander Walker, said, "Each film [Kubrick makes] enables him to extend his own investigation of himself." It is in this mise en scène of self-analysis that his newest film, A Clockwork Orange, has come into being. Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, it concerns, in the director's own words, "the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven." Though this seems a far cry from the themes of 2001, Kubrick disagrees. In a Playboy Interview three years ago, he said, "The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning." Is that dismissable as mere self-indulgence? Kubrick, aware of the special (text concluded on page 204) unity of all his work, thinks not. He commented in Walker's biography, Stanley Kubrick Directs, "People in the 20th Century are increasingly occupied with magic, mystical experience, transcendental urges, hallucinogenic drugs, and the belief in extraterrestrial intelligence--so that fantasy, the supernatural, the 'magical documentary,' is closer to the sense of the times than naturalism." Hence, Dr. Strangelove can be seen as a surreal plunging into the destructive element of man's irrationality and the absurdity of war, whereas 2001 explored the positive potentialities of otherworldly intervention into the destiny of man. Sharing similarities with both films, A Clockwork Orange is set in England in the near future. The nation, already totalitarian, is being terrorized by gangs of youths called Droogs. The Droogs speak in a violent, strangely onomatopoeic jargon, Nadsat. It is no departure for Kubrick to be thus attracted to language. From Killer's Kiss, his first major film, made in 1955, he has consistently examined the dimensions of human communication. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is the spokesman of a Droog clan and narrates his bizarre autobiography in Nadsat's ferocious tones, actually a blend of Russian, gypsy argot and portmanteau slang purely of Burgess' invention. Alex describes a mugging thus: "Pete held his lookers and Georgie hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies. Then we razrezzed his platties.... The knives in the milk-plus were stabbing away nice and horror show." The vision of Alex' world is hypnotically scarifying; seamily corrupt politicians, gratuitous violence, sexuality in an emotional void. But, as the final frame leaves the film gate, only one image is confirmed: that A Clockwork Orange is, like its director, both luminous and inscrutable.
