A Clockwork Orange is a movie about being shown pictures, whether in the mind's eye (as in Alex's violent fantasies), on the movie screen (the Ludovico treatment), the drama stage (as in the demonstration of Alex's "cure") or in the film's next-to-the-last instance before the final visual fantasy, the psychologist's slide show of moral provocation that seems to empirically verify the cure of the Ludovico cure. It is this vision of the life of the human in civilization as one of the creation of, and response to pictures, that drives whatever the film may have to say about what it means to be a member of civil society and free--as opposed to merely at liberty--at the same time. To say the movie it not sure if those two things are happily compatible may seem an understatement. After all, Alex's sadistic impulses are shown to be of a piece with his ecstatic appreciation for Beethoven's post-Napoleonic ode to civil love. What Kubrick's film shows US is a vision of Burgesse's novel that takes the emphasis off of Alex's development (from boy to man) and places it squarely on the existential dilemma he embodies as both a perpetrator and a victim of his (our?) society's desire to brutalize and/or objectify its members. The dilemma, as Kubrick presents it, is one in which "moral choice" is no longer tethered to a clear shared moral landscape and becomes instead like the wide open formalistic choices of the artist. Violence is just more interesting to Alex, not because he lacks moral maturity (and he does, although not because of his youth, but because it does not interest him any more than going to school does), but instead because he has "too much" of the kind of formalistic maturity that so easily outshines the moral message of, say, Beethoven's ninth symphony.
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