Or Was He? [DH]

A Critical Re-appraisal of the Ending to A Clockwork Orange.
[Written by David of Hamburg]

It is universally known among fans of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange that the film's ending is vastly different from that of the Burgess novel. Viz., the film entirely omits the "happy" ending of the novel's twenty-first chapter, in which Alex comes around to a more "mature" or "normal" frame of mind vis-à-vis battery, rape, etc., through the effect of time. It is also a commonplace to observe that although Kubrick claimed not to have been aware of the final chapter when he was writing the screenplay (since it was omitted from the American edition), he would under no circumstances have included it, since it would clearly have been entirely contrary to his uncompromisingly bleak vision for the film. (Remember, this is a man who said of The Shining, "Any story which shows a life after death is ultimately an optimistic story.")

In fact, Kubrick's vision is even darker than most viewers realize, for as I shall show, at the end of the film Alex remains, despite the trivial material gains he has secured from the toadying minister, deprived of that which was most important to him: his very identity, his creative energy. In short, his concluding statement "I was cured all right" is shown by what has come before it to be false in every meaningful sense. To demonstrate this conclusively, I will closely reëxamine the entire closing sequence from Alex's suicide attempt, and show what is really going on.

First, Alex awakens in his hospital bed. In one of Kubrick's brilliant parallelisms, his moans of awakening are answered each for each by the moans of a nurse being fucked by the attending physician in the adjacent bed. Breasts flapping wildly, she rushes over to him. But does Alex make any amused, wittily sarcastic commentary on this? No. Naturally the Alex on screen is in no position to do so, being only barely conscious. But what of the Alex of the voiceover? He has just finished telling us that if he had died, he couldn't be relating the story, and from this we gather that this voiceover Alex is the real Alex of some future time relating the story to us, and thus everything that we see on the screen is known to him (and that point is confirmed at several earlier points also). So why so suddenly silent? This is the first troubling, if indirect, sign that Alex is not as he was before the Ludovico monstrosity.

Next he is visited by his parents, but after their stunning betrayal of him to the odious, oleaginous Joe, all he can manage is a weak "What makes you think you are welcome?" instead of the glorious wordplay that charmed us in the first two acts. Again, he's still weak and recovering, so this is mere foreshadowing.

But now we come to the most crucial scene: the interview with the psychiatrist. First, Alex reports on doctors messing about in his brain. Are they likely to have reversed the Ludovico process with precision? Of course not. Far more likely is something akin to a lobotomy, which as is well known maintains the subject's intelligence but has a devastating effect on his joie de vivre. Then on to the association test. To "Isn't the plumage beautiful?" he replies "It's not got a beak!" Now the interesting thing here is that the bird in the picture clearly does have a beak, so Alex's reply has modest surrealism value, but notice that he hesitates before the final word "beak". Was he perhaps thinking of another monosyllable ending in "k", one which the pictured bird clearly does not have? Was his twice-damaged brain desperately trying to come out with that word, but was prevented, and settled on the inoffensive (and wrong) "beak"?

"The boy you always quarreled with is seriously ill." "And I'll smash your face for you, yarblockos!" The violence is back, yes, and the aggression. But where is the fun? Where is, as Alex so eloquently put it, the "sort of joy of battle"? Random assault of whoever's nearest was never Alex's idiom. Like Highlights magazine, his fun was always with a purpose.

"What do you want?" "No time for the old in&out love; I've just come to read the meter." Superficially, this response seems encouraging: it's actually funny! But think about what he's actually saying: Alexander deLarge is turning down sex in favor of performing his duty as an employee. What is going on? Have we entered BizzaroLand? (Notice that new Alex makes essentially no effort to seduce the very willing-seeming psychiatrist.) Moreover, a minute's further reflection reminds us that this is in fact a very old joke that Alex is merely parroting (with slightly updated Nadsat language). What we have here is a grotesque simulation of the old Alex: enough to satisfy the press (even the ditzy psychiatrist, perhaps), but to us, the viewers, quite plainly an abomination.

"You sold me a crummy watch. I want my money back." "You know what you can do with your watch? Stick it up your arse!" The utter insipidity of this is self-explanatory.

And now the last nail in the coffin: "You can do whatever you like with these." "Eggy-weggs... I would like...to smash 'em!" To smash 'em? To smash 'em?!?!?! Is this what his genius is reduced to, the Incredible Hulk?? The old Alex would have tied down the mother bird and made her watch him slowly destroy each one. The old Alex would have forced one egg into each of the orifices of the pretty devotchka offering them, then informed her that if any of them broke during the subsequent gangbang, he would beat her to within an inch of her life. But the new Alex, the sad shell of an Alex (no pun intended), can only think to smash 'em. And maybe pick them up, and smash 'em again. It's enough to make one cry.

The minister comes. Alex continues to be stubbornly literal-minded: "What job and 'ow much?" His one break into poetry: "As an unmuddied lake, sir. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer" is, of course, a word-for-word repetition of what he told Deltoid at the beginning of the film. It is indeed a telling callback, naïvely seeming to indicate a return to his old scheming ways. But in the light of the psychiatrist scene, we know it for what it is: confirmation that Alex is now but an empty shell, parroting his old self but only on the most superficial level.

And then we move into the final sequence. Alex can hear the 9th without nausea, yes, and it appears to give him one of his trademark visions, but look again. His face as we cut away is not rapture as it was before: it's more like a seizure. And unlike before, when the fantasy shots were quickly intercut to show the activity of his mind, here we have a single shot, in slow motion no less. And what of the content? It appears to be Alex being given a very pleasant ride on the beach by a little blond number, with staid Victorian society applauding on the sidelines. But look closer: Alex and the girl are sunken, and slowly sinking farther; they're being buried! This is what society is applauding, the burial of Alex's joy, his creativity, his precious essence! There's no other way to interpret it: we are watching in real time the final collapse of his mind.

"I was cured all right"? Not even close.