DARK DAYS AHEAD (ENGL-239-0AG)
ASSIGNMENT NO: 2 PREPARED BY: YASHESH GANDHI
(STUDENT # 824-357-982
CIVIL ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY)

INSTRUCTOR: CAMERON ELLIS

QUESTION:
Assuming, as A Clockwork Orange suggests, a precondition for moral virtue is the possibility of atrocities (e.g., rape, murder, and valdalism of various kinds) -- which is to say the possibility to freely choose 'evil' -- the question is: would you rather live in a society/world with no possibility of atrocities (i.e., a utopian society/world completely unlike the one depicted in A Clockwork Orange) or would you rather live in a society/world where these atrocities constantly threatened to interject into your life at any moment? Support you argument with good reasons and using a minimum of 3 references to the film (e.g., “The scene where Alex..." or "The scene where the Minister of the Interior...").

ANSWER

Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological chaos, a neurotic conservative dream taking on the appearance of an Orwellian cautioning. It puts on a show to restrict the police state and constrained personality control, however all it truly does is commend the terribleness of its legend, Alex.I don't know how to clarify my disdain at Alex (whom Kubrick enjoys all that much, as his visual style uncovers and as we should see in a minute). Alex is the kind of fearsomely weird individual we've all run over a couple times in our lives - generally when he and we were youngsters, and he was less slanted to disguise his leisure activities. He must have been the sort of child who detached the wings of flies and consumed ants simply on the grounds that that was so appalling. He was the child who constantly appeared to know more about sex than any other person, as well - and particularly about how messy it was.Alex has experienced childhood in "A Clockwork Orange," and now he's a cruel attacker. I understand that calling him a vicious attacker - much the same as that - is to generalization poor Alex a bit.

Alex is violent because it is necessary for him to be violent in order for this movie to entertain in the way Kubrick intends. Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization and not by creeping fascism -- but by the producer, director and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick. Directors sometimes get sanctimonious and talk about their creations in the third person, as if society had really created Alex. But this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being too modest: Alex is all his.
I say that in full awareness that "A Clockwork Orange" is based, somewhat faithfully, on a novel by Anthony Burgess. Yet I don't pin the rap on Burgess. Kubrick has used visuals to alter the book's point of view and to nudge us toward a kind of grudging pal-ship with Alex.
Kubrick's most obvious photographic device this time is the wide-angle lens. Used on objects that are fairly close to the camera, this lens tends to distort the sides of the image. The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the wide-angle lens almost all the time when he is showing events from Alex's point of view; this encourages us to see the world as Alex does, as a crazy-house of weird people out to get him.
When Kubrick shows us Alex, however, he either places him in the center of a wide-angle shot (so Alex alone has normal human dimensions,) or uses a standard lens that does not distort. So a visual impression is built up during the movie that Alex, and only Alex, is normal.
Kubrick has another couple of neat gimmicks to build Alex into a hero instead of a wretch. He likes to shoot Alex from above, letting Alex look up at us from under a lowered brow. This was also a favorite Kubrick angle in the close-ups in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and in both