5. Why is A Clockwork Orange Considered One of the Most Violent Films of All Time?
Continuing from the previous point, the capacity of fictive films to provoke concern and outrage is testament to the fact that a storys realness is constituted by its emotional impact, rather than any overt relation to real life. A Clockwork Orange, then, for all its arch satire, was still taken extremely seriouslyif for a somewhat paradoxical reason. It was precisely because the film had fun with ideas such as societal decay, delinquency, totalitarianism and punishment, that segments of the community became hysterical. By todays standards, A Clockwork Orange barely causes the needle on the Winding-Refn metre to budge. Even for its time, it wasnt particularly graphic or confronting. Rather, its reputation as being gratuitously violent was a result of its irreverence. By portraying human appetites in the mode of a polemica problem without clear or simple answersaudiences became acutely aware of the tensions beneath the façade of societal stability. As is so often the case, rather than confronting the tensions, they chose to demonise the work of art shedding light on them.