Tag: A Clockwork Orange

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Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden

In this installment of Never Seen It, I sat down with the boss, Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden, to check out Stanley Kubrick’s infamous, 1971 low-budget masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. We were joined by my wife Laura Jean, and a couple of bottles of red wine.

BEFORE THE MOVIE

Chris McCoy: What do you know about A Clockwork Orange?

Bruce VanWyngarden: I’m sure back in the day I read a lot about it. I know it’s Kubrick, I know about the Droogs, and I know there’s a lot of violence, and it’s set in some kind of futuristic Great Britain.

CM: Why didn’t you ever get around to seeing it?

BVW: I was probably stoned. When it came out, I was probably 17 or 18. When did it come out?

CM: 1971.  After 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick was going to do Napoleon. It was going to be huge—there was going to be 40,000 extras, he was literally going to recreate Waterloo. It never happened. I have a .pdf of the script on my hard drive, but I’ve never actually read it. The whole thing fell apart, and he said, “Screw it, I’m going to make a movie with one light kit.” And that’s what this is.

BVW: My wife’s mother made her watch this over and over again. She was really into it. They were living in France out in the country, and it was one of the few VHS tapes she had. I asked her if she wanted to come see this, and she said no, she had seen it too many times already. She was like, I can’t believe you never saw this! I said, That’s the whole point of the column…At the time, there was suddenly a lot more nudity in movies. I was watching stuff like Blow Up, and my mind was being blown. How did I miss this one? I don’t know.

Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden

DURING THE MOVIE

[Alex returns to his bedroom after a long night of rape and pillage to listen to Beethoven]

BVW: The micro cassette was advanced technology in 1970!

[Alex’s mother is revealed to have purple hair]

CM: People in the future really do have purple hair!

BVW: That woman has Eileen Townsend hair.

[Alex picks up two girls at the record store]

BVW: Everyone is sucking on popsicle dicks!

CM: There are a lot of dicks in this movie.

[The infamous time lapse menage a trois]

CM: This has got to be one of the greatest single takes in movie history.

BVW: I wonder how long that really took?

(I looked it up: 23 minutes)

[Alex is sentenced for his crimes]

BVW: 14 years for murder. He got off easy.

CM: You just wait.

[While reading the bible in the prison library, Alex imagines himself as one of the Roman guards taking Christ to the cross.]

BVW: I love Alex’s interpretation of the bible!

[Bruce looks up Malcom McDowell’s IMDB page]

BVW: Oh my god! Do you know how many movies he’s been in? He’s acted in 258 movies! That’s an average of 7 movies a year! That guy works.

CM: He works. And that was because of A Clockwork Orange. Every single director wants him to do Alex.

BVW: He should have gotten the Oscar for that eyeball thing alone.

CM: They scratched his corneas and he went temporarily blind.

BVW: You couldn’t get away with that today. That would be CGI. I hope he got paid a lot of money for this role.

AFTER THE MOVIE

BVW: It started out just as intense and crazy and violent as I had expected, except for the cartoonish character of the violence. I watch violent movies now, and I just turn away. I can’t stand it. But like in the early scenes where they’re fighting and beating up the old man, there’s nothing I can’t look at. It wasn’t as horrible as I thought it was going to be.

Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden (2)

Laura Jean Hocking: When the woman gets killed with the big penis sculpture, I can’t watch that.

BVW: I couldn’t watch that, either.

CM: He went totally abstract during that killing.

BVW: There was no visual of it.

CM: t’s like a comedy and a horror at the same time.

BVW: That’s what I expected: Horrible violence and drugs and futuristic shit. But the rest of it, by the third act, I was ready for it to end. I was not as compelled by it by the time it ended as I was in the beginning. It’s totally front loaded…Halfway through the third act, I had to pee. I was like, I’m done with this. But you said it was almost over, and my bladder made it. I was thinking, where is all this going to go? Alex is obviously going to be an evil fuck again. I get it.

LJH: I loved the paparazzi swooping in.

CM: The press is the ultimate bad guy in this movie.

LJH: They validate everyone’s bad behavior.

CM: The motivation of the journalist whose wife was raped and killed in the first act was to ultimately distort society. It’s arguably the greater evil than this thug at the center of the whole thing. As a journalist, that’s weird.

BVW: Oh yeah. I think, after seeing it, Malcolm McDowell should have gotten an award for the greatest physical abuse ever taken by an actor. It was amazing the shit he went through.

LJH: The eyelid thing! Aaaahhh!

BVW: The eyelid thing, and the drowning! He was underwater for a long time!

CM: There are all these huge, long takes, but it ultimately drags. The individual scenes work, but it really doesn’t hold together in the end.

BVW: Maybe it was the wine, but I was dragging at the end. There were not enough tits, not enough beatings, just a whole lot of close ups of people’s faces, leering.

CM: Something I noticed this time was, Kubrick was really excited about his lens choice….When we went to L.A. In 2013, there was a Kubrick exhibit at LACMA…

LJH: There was an entire room that was just his lenses. It was like pornography.

[Extended, largely incoherent discussion of Carl Zeiss lenses, Watergate, Trump, and mid-century modern architecture ensues.]

CM: So, here’s what the ultimate point of the movie, or the text, is supposed to be. Anthony Burgess, the writer, his wife was raped and beaten by a bunch of drunk American soldiers during World War II.

BVW: Americans?

CM: Yes. The novel came from that experience. The central question is, what if you had a technology that could change a person from a criminal to an ideal citizen? Whoever gets to decide what an ideal citizen is. Is Alex actually able to exercise free will and do good, and do his good works have any meaning, as Christian morality would suggest? Or is he just faking it? Is he a robot? It he like an orange, an actual orange that you could eat, or is he a clockwork orange, a fake orange that you can’t eat and therefore has no value? So that’s supposedly the deeper meaning of all this violence and stuff. The one scene when he’s in the theater and he’s the entertainment and they’re all debating about the Luduvoco technique, the priest stands up and says, “If he can’t make a choice between good or evil, this doesn’t matter. Why are we doing this?” That’s the most crucial scene in the movie. Did you get any of that from the movie?

BVW: No. Hell no.

Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden (3)

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Film Features Film/TV

Time-Warp Drive Returns with the Films of Stanley Kubrick

The July edition of the Time Warp Drive-In is devoted to a director whose work is more often associated with the art house than the drive-in. On the occasion of what would have been Stanley Kubrick’s 86th birthday, Malco’s Summer Drive-In will host an all-night marathon of the director’s work. Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy, who, along with Black Lodge Video’s Matthew Martin, programs the monthly events, says that Kubrick’s influence stretched far beyond film.

“Kubrick created worlds,” McCarthy says. “A hippie, like David Bowie, could enter the theater, inhabit the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and exit as something else.” The character of David Bowman, the astronaut who ends 2001: A Space Odyssey “lost in space,” inspired Bowie’s first hit, “Space Oddity.” Kubrick’s next film, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, would similarly inspire the look of Glam rock and the attitude of punk rock.

The evening of films will begin with what is probably Kubrick’s most popular work, 1980’s The Shining, a masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. With Kubrick, who started out as a photographer for Look magazine in 1946, the richness of his images conveys the richness of his ideas. A common criticism of Kubrick’s style is that the performances are flat or cold. But that is a misreading of what the director was trying to do, for it is not the actors who are emoting, but the man behind the camera. The Shining, while filled with luscious images, is an exception. In Jack Nicholson, Kubrick met his artistic match, much as he had 20 years earlier when he did Paths Of Glory and Spartacus with Kirk Douglas.

A Clockwork Orange

The evening continues with another literary adaptation, A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess spoke more favorably of the film than King does of The Shining, but Kubrick made both texts jumping off points for his meticulous, arresting imagery. The near-future dystopia is dominated by Malcolm McDowell as Alex, a middle-class street thug obsessed with classical music whose path to redemption is almost as ethically queasy as his ritualistic ultraviolence.

Even though A Clockwork Orange was initially rated X for violence, its body count pales next to Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In 1961, Kubrick set out to make a serious movie about the dangers of nuclear war. But the more he read about the Cold War doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the more absurd it seemed. So Kubrick made the radical decision to turn his film into a comedy by bringing onboard writer Terry Southern and comedic super-genius Peter Sellers. Even taken apart from its Cold War context, Dr. Strangelove is a clear triumph and still one of the most important comedies ever made. That the civilization-ending mass killing is, in retrospect, somehow more acceptable than Alex’s mundane street thuggery is just part of the joke.

The last film on the drive-in program is Kubrick’s biggest and most intimidating masterpiece. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not only the greatest science fiction movie ever made, it placed second behind only Ozu’s Tokyo Story in the 2012 Sight & Sound Directors’ poll of the greatest films ever. Every shot is a meticulous work of art in its own right, and taken together, they offer too much to comprehend in one sitting. But the pleasure of returning to unravel works of genius is part of what gives Kubrick’s films their enduring power.

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Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: The Rover

For films and literature about dystopian societies, there’s no better setting than England (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Children of Men, Never Let Me Go, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, V for Vendetta…). But when it comes to post-apocalyptic locations, the place to (not) be is Australia (on the strength of Mad Max and The Road Warrior and even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome alone, not to mention the classic On the Beach and Tank Girl). Perhaps it’s the way Australia already seems like a post-apocalyptic place, with its natural wasteland scenery of the Outback, its racially and ethnically troubled society, and its mondo-poisonous animal kingdom. Plus, the events of the pre-apocalyptic film The Last Wave could take place tomorrow, and it wouldn’t be a bit surprising.

Add The Rover to the antipodean eschatological list. The film, starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, takes place Down Under “ten years after the collapse.” Eric (Pearce) goes into a way station in the middle of nowhere to get something to drink. A group of outlaws (Scoot McNairy, David Field, and Tawanda Manyimo), on the run from a violent robbery, wreck their truck and steal Eric’s car. Eric, desperate to recover his car for unknown reasons, goes in hot pursuit. A man the criminals left behind for dead, Rey (Pattinson), is grievously injured but goes on the chase as well. Eric and Rey find common purpose but have disparate agendas.

The script (David Michôd and Joel Edgerton) is assembled in deliberate, stripped-down fashion. Each plot thread comes together slowly but surely. The film drives right into the story, then explains its world slowly and only partly. Brief bouts of dialog punctuate long stretches of silence. As director, Michôd’s long takes consider the land and the survivors’ place in it. Antony Partos’ spare, foreboding, primal score takes up instruments seemingly one at a time: percussion, piano, euphonium, bass, tin whistle.

Post-apocalyptic Australia, with car chases over endless, uninhabited highways, concern over the price of petrol, a plot fueled by vengeance, a violent, once-civilized loner you root for in spite of yourself: No, it’s not one of George Miller’s Mad Max films, though there’s no reason you couldn’t pretend it’s an unacknowledged prequel. That said, The Rover is more Mad Max than The Road Warrior. The harsh action is closer to the brutality of the original than the gonzo sequences from its sequel. (And, it must be noted, Eric drives a sedan, not a DIY armored supercharger.) Emotionally, too, The Rover mimics the existential angst of Mad Max.

In fact, The Rover may be the most depressing, black-mooded film seen in some time. I think I recall one moment of levity, in the first five minutes, before the shape of the movie came into focus. Michôd and company challenge you to keep pulling for Eric amid his relentless, Ahabian quest for his car. He takes no prisoners who don’t serve his purpose. You’ll pull for him because we are inculcated to cheer for the protagonist. But The Rover, when all is said and done, retroactively positions Eric less antihero and more … well, someone both more and less sympathetic than he appeared.

The script paints the mourning at the core of The Rover, and cinematographer Natasha Braier proves the point: Eric and Rey, after the fall, face to face in a dry and waterless place. “If you don’t learn to fight, your death is going to come real soon,” Eric warns Rey. Hilarious!