“The Décor of Tomorrow's Hell”

Summary

Some movies are so inventive and powerful that they can be viewed again and again and each time yield up fresh illuminations. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is such a movie. Based on Anthony Burgess's 1963 novel of the same title, it is a merciless, demoniac satire of a near future terrorized by pathological teen-age toughs. When it opened last week, Time Movie Critic Jay Cocks hailed it as “chillingly and often hilariously believable.” Below, Time's art critic takes a further look at some of its aesthetic implications.

Stanley Kubrick's biting and dandyish vision of subtopia is not simply a social satire but a brilliant, cultural one. No movie in the last decade (perhaps in the history of film) has made such exquisitely chilling predictions about the future role of cultural artifacts – paintings, buildings, sculpture, music – in society, or extrapolated them from so undeceived a view of our present culture.

The time is somewhere in the next ten years; the police still wear Queen Elizabeth II's monogram on their caps and the politicians seem to be dressed by Blades and Mr. Fish. The settings have the glittery, spaced-out look of a Milanese design fair – all stamped Mylar and womb-form chairs, thick glass tables, brushed aluminum and chrome, sterile perspectives of unshuttered concrete and white molded plastic. The designed artifact is to Orange what technological gadgetry was to Kubrick's 2001: a character in the drama, a mute and unblinking witness.