Horror or Science Fiction- Considering A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick’s stately and mannered dystopic vision A Clockwork Orange lands somewhere between Science Fiction and Horror. I should perhaps justify my description of the film as “stately and mannered” because how could one of the most savage and controversial films of the last fifty years be either one of those things?

Kubrick is first and foremost a photographer, and as such he constructs a tightly controlled frame on any subject he tackles. In A Clockwork Orange this means graceful tracking shots through strange and horrific urban jungles: over-designed cosmopolitan bars and shopping centers, sterile settings for hospital research and incarcerated reform. His tableau, no matter how unsettling, retain elements of the highly designed and fastidiously built.

As for its quality as mannered, that arises from the inherently British nature of the characters in the film. Non-plussed, vulgar but with elaborate affectations, as though taking the long way to say something foul made it more acceptable,  and civilized even when perpetrating the horrendous. The padding between atrocities keeps a mannered tone throughout the film.  It is so committed to the trappings of civilized society that a central plot element are impending elections. how many other dystopic visions make positive concerned mention of the "electorate?"

This remnant of familiar (if lumpen and ugly) social norms makes the atrocities all the more horrific and Kubrick's perspective somehow more snide, The killer in this film is the only one with any panache. Everyone else is shown as pitiable for their craven normality. 

In A Clockwork Orange society is seen as filthy and corrupt from top to bottom. We are introduced to its corrupt bottom first.

Alex, a young hoodlum who heads a gang of casual rapists and murderers is our narrative center. He is the archetypal human fiend, opperating without reason or principle. He seems to live his life in a bored stupor. However eloquent and energetic, it is a stupor nonetheless. One in which he blindly seeks stimulation of any kind.

We slowly work our way up the corruption spectrum as Alex is arrested and eventually selected for a reform program which renders him harmless to society. In a slight inversion of the horror trope of science over reaching and creating a monster, here it takes a monster and leaves him vulnerable to a world of the monstrous that is quick to attack and destroy him.

As science fiction the film falls into the cautionary tale camp, extrapolating current trends into future horrors. And as such it qualifies more as Science Fiction than horror since death and mortality are not so much the main concern as in most horror films but rather a future where horrific things have come to pass.