Orange

A Clockwork Orange

The Oranges

Hello, dear readers, orange you glad it’s time for another double feature? It felt like this blog needed a pop of color, so this week, amid stubbornly-still-present thunderstorms and stubbornly-still-present orange presidents, I wanted to explore a round of films that have orange in the title. I’ve already covered the colors red, blue, green, pink, and purple, all of which symbolize different things and evoke different feelings. Orange is often bright and energetic, impossible to ignore in an attention-grabbing marketing campaign or a warm, melting sunset. Orange famously doesn’t rhyme with anything (except door hinge, if that counts), it is Ru Paul’s favorite color, and it is often associated with creativity and vibrancy, though it can be quite spiritual and calming too. Buddhist monks wear iconic orange robes—traditionally made with bits of unwanted cloth that were dyed using vegetable matter and spices such as turmeric and saffron—and it is a symbol of their desire for simplicity, and their rejection of material things. Growing up in Austin, TX, where burnt orange UT garb is inescapable, I’ve often felt indifferent or even resentful of this color—though I do wear this particular shade well, randomly. Oranges—the color and the citrus—are very Summery and social and welcoming, albeit a bit tart sometimes. But my personal favorite oranges are those natural, Autumnal shades in the falling leaves and crackling fires of the Fall. It’s a hopeful, happy, prideful, enthusiastic, youthful color, and yet both of tonight’s orange films were not exactly bright, shining examples of these positive things. Playful and prickly at best, let’s get into tonight’s films with “orange” in their titles and depravity in their stories.

Up first was one of my biggest blind spots as a cinephile and film critic, a movie I have attempted to watch twice but have turned off about ten minutes in each time, this is Stanley Kubrick’s controversial classic: A Clockwork Orange. My middle school best friend was a lot cooler than I was, with a better-developed palate for shocking and/or surrealist cinema than I possessed at twelve, so I wasn’t necessarily ready to view this movie at the time she was. But I tried! For my budding love of film in general and my everlasting adoration of horror films in particular, I knew had to see this one. So when college came around, and I’d survived watching all manner of disgusting Human Centipede movies as well as disgusting high-brow thrillers, I thought I was more prepared to watch A Clockwork Orange. Again, I was mistaken. Once again, my curiosity was soured by the first (FIRST) rape scene in this movie, and my friends and I glanced at each other in mutual off-puttness. Desperate to improve the vibe, we turned it off and opted for a more palatable viewing experience—which, in those (somewhat drunken) days, mostly meant a rabbit hole of music videos. In both middle school and college, I suffered from probably the worst eras of my depression, which may or may not have had to do with my immediate disdain with this movie. In my time as a critic and consumer of culture, I have viewed an immeasurable amount of fucked up horror movies, arthouse thrillers, bizarre and stomach-turning content of both the true crime and fictional variety, and yet this rape scene was borderline unwatchable for me. No amount of exposure to these kinds of scenes makes them easier to stomach, and in fact, as I get older I feel more and more picky when it comes to how rape is utilized in storytelling. And even now, finally successfully making it through the entire 2+ hours of A Clockwork Orange’s exhausting debauchery, this scene is the hardest to witness—as are the other rape scenes, and sequences of needlessly exploiting the female form. Kubrick was a big fan of a bodily spectacle, and yet A Clockwork Orange feels like the only of his films to really confront his obsession, though it is a feeble confrontation, imo. Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, based off of Anthony Burgess’ novel of the same name, follows the daily activities, eventual downfall, and inevitable absolution of a fucked up youth named Alex DeLarge within dystopian, near-future England. Crime is Alex’s life—he doesn’t go to school (though his absentminded parents make half-assed pleas) he just sleeps all day, admires his pet snake and the treasures he’s stolen off of others, and occasionally goes to the record store. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is the leader of his gang of “droogs”—one of many Nadsat slang phrases in this story that I find to not only be silly but tedious—and together, they engage in various forms of vicious, random ultraviolence every night. Ultraviolence like beating a homeless man to near-death, beating up a rival gang, and raping seemingly any woman they can get their paws on. When they trick a writer and his wife to gain entry into their ultra-lush, futuristically-furnished home, Alex and his gang brutally beat him and make him watch while they rape his wife—all while Alex sings “Singin’ In the Rain.” (When Malcolm McDowell met Gene Kelly years later, Kelly apparently didn’t even want to engage with him.) It is so much more disturbing to watch than it is to read about, and to its credit, this scene alone qualifies A Clockwork Orange as a horror movie to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Afterwards, Alex and his gang retreat to their favorite hang, Korova Milk Bar, where milk is infused with various drugs and dispensed from the nipples of some pretty cool but bizarre statues of naked women. (Fun fact: my college had a coffee shop called Korouva Milk Bar, which, in my opinion, really underscores the student body’s desperate and obvious attempts to seem cool, but I digress.) The one thing Alex seems to truly respect and admire beyond causing general chaos is music, specifically classical, particularly Beethoven. So when another milk bar patron begins to sing opera and a droog rudely makes a fart noise, Alex slams his friend’s balls with his weapon of choice: a cane. This is the first of many disagreements within Alex’s gang—the droogs want to move on to higher-yield theft, and move away from Alex’s beloved petty crimes. This inner-gang turmoil comes to a head when they break and enter into a cat-lady’s chic home, Alex accidentally kills her, and the droogs break a bottle of milk over Alex’s head and abandon him there—rendering him temporarily visionless and helpless, falling right into the custody of the police. (The most satisfying part of the whole movie.) When the police finally get ahold of Alex and question him, he denies any calculated involvement, and claims that his droogs made him do it all. The police laugh in his face, and the judge sentences him to 14 years for murder. The rest of the film details the misery and attempted rehabilitation of Alex DeLarge, which heavily features the well-known pseudo-therapy known as the Ludovico Technique—which involves his eyes being clamped open while he watches films of murder and assault and societal collapse. He is injected with a drug designed to rewire his senses, so when he witnesses the depravity that used to give him pleasure, he instead feels nauseous. It works to an unnerving degree, but as a priest notes, Alex is not actually conjuring up these feelings on his own—he is not making the choice to be disgusted by sadism, he is at the whim of his doctor’s orders. Can goodness truly be thrust upon people? Or is it only something you are biologically endowed with? A Clockwork Orange poses this question, as well as several others, and much like the unsatisfactory feelings that come with life’s endless unanswered mysteries, this film doesn’t provide much of an answer. There’s a lot to be said about the ultraviolence in society, and particularly our numbed indifference toward it in our own dystopia, but I’m not sure if A Clockwork Orange says anything coherent enough to be truly satisfying. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick asserted that the film held comparisons between both ends of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated: “The Minister is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, is a lunatic of the Left... They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable.” And while that’s all fine and edgy and holds some merit, I find explanations like this to be… kind of a cop out? The easiest thing in the world is to say, “it’s both side’s fault”, and it’s a lot harder to say that the violence in society does not stem from any one particular party, but it is perpetuated by the systems kept in place like racism, classism, capitalism, and the identity politics designed to distract from the fact that every human being is more alike than we are different. And to say nothing of the psychopathy of Alex’s character—who is treated as a sympathetic scoundrel here instead of the terrifyingly-irredeemable horror movie villain that he is—is not just lazy, it’s reckless. There were a series of copycat crimes in the UK following the release of this film, but it was banned in several countries before this even happened. I’m not someone who views films like A Clockwork Orange or American Psycho and comes away wanting to place these brutish men on a cool-guy pedestal, but unfortunately, many foolish viewers do. It’s not that these complex movies shouldn’t be made, but as media literacy and symbolic comprehension dwindles, I do think it’s necessary to have a clearer answer from subversive creators when they are questioned about the meaning(s) behind their work. I can see from an artistic, big-swing perspective why this movie is considered to be so important, but beyond aesthetics and iconic imagery, I’m not coming away from A Clockwork Orange with much appreciation. I’ll be honest, upon finally making it past the various rape scenes in this movie, I was bored. Not bored in the usual Kubrick way, where the pacing is clearly the last concern for a meticulous and perfectionistic director like him, but bored in an existential sense. Visually it is just as stunning as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but narratively, it felt even more disjointed than Eyes Wide Shut. I was certainly compelled, but I was nowhere near satisfied, and certainly not entertained. My appy polly loggies but the slang was profoundly irritating, and no performance stood out to me beyond Malcolm McDowell’s. I enjoyed the retro futuristic set design and the colorful hair most women in this film had, but not much else. While I feel like the film’s themes of delinquency, corrupt power structures, and dehumanizing forms of “rehabilitation” are still relevant, I feel like little was accomplished in the way demonstrating where this all violence stems from, what keeps it going, and what the true consequences of keeping it alive can be. And if a coherent intention isn’t even implied, whatever, fine, but I just wish this had been more fun. Is it all Anthony Burgess’ fault? Would I have liked it better if the film had been made as it was originally planned, with Ken Russell directing and the Rolling Stones playing the droogs? I’m not sure. But I know this movie is not for me, and I know I am in the minority, as its initial controversy primed it for its now cult-classic status. Countless appreciators of this film still voice their love for it, though I’m not entirely alone in my displeasure. Future Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborn attended the first Hollywood press screening of this film and walked out at the first rape scene, and Roger Ebert described it as a “ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex.” But my favorite hater of this film is Pauline Kael, whose opening sentences of her review really sum up my feelings best: “Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, (this film) might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi Comedy. Is there anything sadder — and ultimately more repellent — than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they're frigidly, pedantically calculated, and because there is no motivating emotion, the viewer may experience them as an indignity and wish to leave. The movie follows the Anthony Burgess novel so closely that the book might have served as the script, yet that thick-skulled German professor may be Dr. Strangelove himself, because the meanings are turned around.” She goes onto explain a new attitude in movies: “This attitude says there's no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, ‘Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.’” Which, I think, is still present in many pretentious films of today that want to say so much that they end up saying nothing at all.

I would love to know what my fellow critics thought of tonight’s next movie, except I think I’m the only person who’s ever seen it, this is Julian Farino’s 2010 film The Oranges. A Clockwork Orange is a shocking, puzzling, hard-to-watch film that still hasn’t lost its severity, so I really thought this next one would be easier to swallow. But then I realized that it is an indie slice-of-life mumblecore-coded family dramedy of the early-to-mid 2000s, so there was no shortage of absurdity or audacity in this movie. The Oranges follows two very close families who live across the street from one another in West Orange, New Jersey, during a particularly tumultuous time in their lives. The story is narrated by a young woman named Vanessa Walling (Alia Shawkat), though she’s not exactly the main character, which is always a bit odd to me. Vanessa graduated design school a couple years ago, and is crashing with her parents, David and Paige (Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener), while working at a furniture store to save up money for a place in New York City. She’s not thrilled to be in this situation, and her much more successful brother Toby (Adam Brody) is out of the house, but she says she’s using this time to build up her design portfolio. Her dad’s best friend Terry (Oliver Platt) lives across the street with his wife Cathy (Allison Janey), but their daughter, the elusive Nina (Leighton Meester) is off galivanting in the big city and hasn’t been home in years. Vanessa and Nina were childhood besties, until Nina ditched Vanessa for the popular girls and made out with Vanessa’s crush, and on top of everything else is now living the dream in New York that they both planned to experience together. Everyone and everything has settled into the right, acceptable place, that is, until Nina’s heart gets broken and she has to come crawling back home to suburbia. I explained so much of A Clockwork Orange and talked such in-depth shit that I wonder if I should even tell you about the batshit plot of The Oranges or not. It’s just so wild, so uncomfortable, so stupid at times, but ultimately incredibly entertaining, and it’s Christmas movie, I wonder if my plot synopsis will even do it justice. So I’ll keep it vague, in the hopes that you’ll open up the Peacock app to go on the goofy and gaggy ride The Oranges takes you on, and you’ll have to let me know if you think the juice was worth the squeeze. It’s not a perfect movie, I’m still trying to decide if it’s even good, but it was far less boring than A Clockwork Orange and yet… potentially just as unsettling. It’s shot like a sitcom at times, with strange zoom-ins for comedic and dramatic effect, and fade to black editing between scenes—another potential symptom of its time. It reminded me of The Kids Are Alright, with its similarly bold premise and chill indie music, and its ability to cause mind-bending chaos then go, “so what?” I wish more had gone into the friendship and rift between Alia and Leighton’s characters, and I wish there had been more Adam Brody (pretty much always.) I loved when things had Hugh Laurie in them, he’s just the coolest, even in an uncool movie like this one. It wasn’t bad, just out of pocket! And I wish I could have that feeling toward A Clockwork Orange, but it just insists upon itself too much. Well, my dear, sweet, juicy orange readers, I hope you’re well and swell and I thank you for reading my color-coded rambling once again. Until next time, orange you glad this is over?