6. When and Where is A Clockwork Orange Set?
Kubricks offering of 1971 seems to portray a strange Sixties working class English subculture crafted to create maximum friction with the bourgeoisie, what with the Bowler hats, braces and Bowie-esque make-up. However, almost immediately, other elements begin to work against this assumption. Plastic codpieces, for one thing. Thats just a little
too strange to belong to that era. And the blaring, clashing synthesizers seem a shade avant-garde. Indeed, after noticing the well-behaved patrons, stylised décor and stalwart security presence, the viewer will permit himself an adjustment: Alex is a petulant princeling with every advantage in the world, acting out in accordance with the means afforded to him. Moments later, though, the setting takes a turn for the commonplace. Under a concrete-reinforced bridge of modern construction, a vagrant who could very well belong to the Sixties is encountered. And yet next up, the gang speeds through the countryside in a Durango 95a fictional car which by its styling suggests 1995while our humble narrator, Alex, speaks in a strange mix of English and Eastern European (sounding) words, mixing old, modern, high culture, low, communistic, and liberal democratic modes of speech. Then, after some lashing of the ultraviolent, we find ourselves back in the Korova Milk Bar, where we learn that the droogs inhabit a world in which the works of Beethoven exist. Finally, were introduced to Alexs apartment in a dilapidated building decorated with utopian state-countenanced art, whose décor matches the glaring kitsch of teen-orientated music shows of the age. In other words, before the end of the first act, its clear that the film takes place in a fantastical patchwork dystopia. The real point of interest, however, lies beneath this realisation: that by creating an ambiguous alternate reality, the artist may, in fact, create a more effective stage for his production; that by emphasizing a story's distance from reality, he may put the rational mind (which is prone to dismiss things as lacking pertinence if they dont fit reality) at ease, permitting the emotional/conceptual basis of a story to be received more readily, and perhaps with even greater impact than it otherwise would have been.