“I Was Cured All Right…”: On Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”

Konrad Klejsa

Abstract

Kubrick’s movies show distrust in society, seen as an individuality-suppressing prison. That individu­ality is forced by the ideological machine of the State to act in an artificial and unnatural way. Two spheres of problems make up a universe of Kubrick’s meanings defining the world as an unfriendly place inhabited by the heroes who unsuccessfully try to break away from the limits of culture. One of them is associated with the Freudian concept of duality of nature as the most important trait of man, torn between primeval instincts and cultural rigours, and the other with man’s functioning in a social system, perceived as a repressive individuality-suppressing mechanism. Klejsa writes how the film was made and analyses it, stressing the issue of violence. According to Klejsa, A Clockwork Orange is a tangential point of Kubrick’s key motifs; it suggests man’s unconscious killer instincts and at the same time is the voice against society. Man is stripped of its inborn dispositions when society tries to curb that nature and create an ideal citizen.