Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Clockwork Orange
1971 · Stanley Kubrick · A Clockwork Orange on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how faces nearest the camera bulge and loom. (camera)
John Alcott shoots on lenses as short as 9.8mm. Foregrounds swell, corridors yawn, rooms curve. Nothing looks like this to the eye. It looks like this to Alex, who is narrating.
Payoff: The lens is not showing you a world. It is showing you a boy's picture of a world bent toward him. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: you feel the camera perceiving a perceiver, so every frame carries Alex inside it.
Watch Alex look straight down the lens and greet you. (performance)
McDowell opens the film with a stare, one false eyelash, and a conspiratorial voice-over. He keeps turning back to you all through, charming, expansive, inviting you to enjoy the next thing.
Payoff: The film shakes your hand before anyone gets hurt, so your pleasure is already on the record.
Watch the droogs move together like a dance troupe. (staging)
Kubrick blocks the assaults as choreography. Steps land on beats, bodies swing in time, Alex taps the rhythm with his boot while he sings. The violence is mounted, not just committed.
Payoff: Staging cruelty as a number says the culture already makes an entertainment of it. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls these attraction-images: events put on as spectacle rather than carried out as deeds, with staging standing in for doing.
Look at the white plaster women used as furniture. (setting)
John Barry's design builds the near future out of exaggerated consumer taste rather than machines. Mannequin tables, codpieces, sex-shop interiors, Pop Art everywhere. No gadget tells you the year.
Payoff: The world is a few decades of drift from 1971, which keeps the target close enough to recognize.
Listen for Beethoven and Rossini played on a synthesizer. (sound)
Wendy Carlos runs the great classical repertoire through a Moog. The authority of the music survives. The human hand in it does not. Kubrick heard Switched-On Bach and hired her for exactly that.
Payoff: The most exalted music in the tradition arrives already processed, which is what the film thinks culture does to it.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the eye. The film is built on Alex's gaze, and it greets you with that gaze before anyone gets hurt.