Film Poster. Note the pyramidal structure, mirroring the structure of society, with the perceptive eye of the elite at the top.

By: Jay

A Clockwork Orange is another installment in the Kubrick canon, and ranks as yet another crucial film rife with deep social and psychological meanings.  The film is adapted from the famous novel that places Alex DeLarge in a dystopian future where society has degenerated into a trashy, concrete mess.  Gangs of thugs titled “droogs” run rampant, and Alex himself is a young gang leader.  The film will raise the question of the use of mass pyschological warfare and control techniques from behaviorist psychology as a means for creating a populace controlled by a scientific elite.

Kubrick considered his film a piece of social satire that would question the notion of totalitarian regimes brainwashing the public into an android state. If the subject could be conditioned through a kind of shock therapy, the loss of willpower would ensue and the “droog” of the future – the future man, would be a controlled slave.   However, my analysis differs from what you see in the typical approaches to reviews of clockwork.  I think Kubrick presents another angle – a Nietzschian/elitist angle that the totalitarian scheme is, in fact, the norm.

In the opening milk-bar scene with the mannequins, the bar is full of sexual imagery.  The film continues this motif throughout, combining sex with violence as the social norm.  Alex’s parents are completely docile and impotent, having no idea of the actual state of world affairs.  Strangely, Alex has an affinity for Beethoven, despite his predominate brutishness, which often plays over scenes of violence or sex, including rape.

Alex and his “droogs” engage in “ultra-violence,” and end up raping the wife of a liberal activist who opposes the state’s draconian control measures.  Later, Alex attempts to rape a wealthy woman who lives in a country estate and is caught.  What we see here is a prophetic view of the future of man’s world.  A globalized, 1984-style slum, where a few elites and intelligentsia live outside the urban areas.

The intelligentsia like the writer and the behaviorist therapist seeking to cure Alex have a faulty view of human nature, and this is the key.  The film is full of sexual (and other bodily function elements) images which display the fact that most men are led about by their bodily desires, and contribute nothing to society.  The liberal activists and therapists continually try to make Alex a “productive” member of society and seek to influence him with religion and other salves.   However, the crucial point of the film is that Alex remains Alex. 

He begins a “droog” and ends a “droog.”  As such the film becomes a powerful commentary on the unavoidable nature of classes.  There will always be classes because there will always be well-bred and ill-bred men.   Nietzsche wrote of master and slave morality, and that is appropriate here.  The misguided placement of blame by the liberal writer ends up leading to his own demise, as the people he writes to defend and protect from what he views as the manipulative political class, end up raping his wife.  In short, he has an unrealistic view of human nature and action, as do all “liberals.”

My view is confirmed by the fact that at the end, Alex is co-opted by the system, as he has been all along. Alex jumps out of a window and injures himself, becoming a martyr for the “people” (who hate the governing class), while the writer who captured and imprisoned Alex for raping his wife, is put away.  Alex is then offered a job within the system, and is pictured with the politician who has offered to reimburse him.  He then dreams of everyone watching him have sex in the snow.  He chides that he was “cured alright.”   In other words, having been run through cleansing/brainwashing of the system, he now becomes a cog in the system.

But all along, all he wanted was to continue his nihilistic savagery, and the final scene lets us know he hasn’t changed or been cured, just more adept at mischief.  The politician and the therapist had made promises that “science” would “cure” Alex and make him a productive member of society.  However, this failed, and Alex remains what he is – a monster.    London recently exploded into riots run by a bunch of droogs.  This was, of course, planned, and co-opted by the system as Alex and his droogs were.  The system relies on the foolish utopianism of the masses to believe the lies they are told, particularly when it comes to “science” perfecting man, and making him into a “new man.”

No, no human means of do-goodery or feel-goodiness will ever perfect man or make him into the state’s archetype.  Men are either well-born and well-bred, or they are savage.  So no, no mystical esoteric doctrines here, aside from the fact that film’s imagery stresses the eye at the top of the pyramid, and given my analysis, I think it means the elite view is that there will always be a caste.  You can’t change the nature of man, and no amount of blaming society or other ills, will ever lead to the “curing” of man in this world.  Understanding this is understanding the nature of the system itself.  As a friend pointed out, an orange is organic, and to try to treat it like a machine (clockwork), is a failed enterprise.

Let me take a little off the top!

By: Jay

At first, I was going to engage in a lengthy, protracted analysis of the symbols and imagery of V for Vendetta, but I have changed my mind.  While it does contain a good bit of esoteric imagery and significant depth beyond most Hollywood trash, the meaning and purpose of the film is much simpler.  The film is based on the famous graphic novel by ritual magician and Crowley adept, Alan Moore.  While Moore is a talented artist and storyteller, the notion that his story is geared towards human liberation, as masses of ignorant fans assume, is laughable.  Fans and reviews offer a wide array of online speculation as to its meaning and imagery, but few will be able to decode it without understanding the ritual element, which I so often highlight.

V for Vendetta is a manifestation of sophisticated managed dialectics and ritual psychodrama that deludes the rebellious young pop mind into thinking it is part of an anti-establishment “V Mask” movement, known as anarchism.  True Satanism is anarchic, and certainly given the ridiculous, backwards “civilization” we live in, this is understandable.  Yet the solution to three hundred years of “revolutions” and full spectrum subversion can in no way be more of the same.  My friend Mark Hackard has highlighted this in his recent essay translation on monarchism and republicanism/democracy, and I commend readers to consider its import.  Political solutions are understandable, given that we are weary of past engineered attempts that ended in miserable failure – communism, fascism, and now world socialism/egalitarianism.  But the other option – anarchism, is no different, as it has the same starting point – universal human egalitarianism.  Ironically, anarchists tend to be the most elitist after a few years, recognizing their fellow cell members are dupes of larger foundation-run interests.

I do have a soft spot for anarchism, due to it being the ultimate high point of the left – they are the most likely to realize the vacuous nature of modernity.  Yet anarchism is a worldview of ultimate atomism, where the individual reigns supreme in a meaningless universe of self-imposed meaning.  This atomized, pseudo-ubermensch mentality is generally short-lived, as the entirety of one’s experience soon comes in to dispel this teenagey, mytholological fantasy worldview.  Anarchism is the worldview par excellence of the elite, as it is the most destructive.  Anarchism is chaos magick, intent on releasing the forces of destruction under a self-deluded belief in engineering a mass “dark night of the soul” to create the “New Man.”  It is the final manifestation of the revolutionary faith 1789 and 1776 began.  As an occultist, Moore is well aware of the effect such semiotic acts of aesthetic terror can have.  How quickly the intellectual leftist revolutionary realizes his comrades are morons, and then purges them.  Anarchism is therefore the fullest manifestation of Jacobin “lady liberty” living.  Yet Jacobin lady liberty living leads to self-destruction when taken to its fullest.   The chaos unleashed upon society comes home to roost in the lives of the “revolutionaries.”

Winston from 1984 becomes O’Brien.

So this is the real masonic mystagogy of V for Vendetta: V is Satan, as the graphic novel even states.  V initiates Evey, as a new Eve, into the cult of liberty. V utilizes all the same mind control techniques and torture the system uses to “free” Evey.  This is why Evey is “locked up” and has her head shaved, as we have seen with many Hollywood brainwashed starlets.  The cult of liberty is a harsh master, however, as absolute liberty is really absolute slavery to the passions.  Meanwhile the establishment in the film and novel is a far right establishment which persecutes homosexuality and tries to enforce Christianity as a state religion in the UK.  This is utterly laughable, except in the sense that the neo-conservative establishment in the US does wear a thin veneer of evangelical covering.  However, that is quickly wearing thin, and as the film is set in the near future where the US has collapsed and the UK is under a theocracy, its thesis is absurd.  As with other Wachowski films like The Matrix or Cloud Atlas, the message conveyed is that all law is slavery – even that of gender.  To be male or heterosexual is to be a slave to imposed social constructs, not to the fulfillment of natural order.  This transformation process is symbolized by Evey being shown with butterflies following her mind control torture.

Brittney?

From this perspective, we can also gain insight into the staged bio-release theme.  The plot revolves around a pharmaceutical establishment and political elite that have staged a bio-release to gain political power.  This aspect of the film does have contemporary esoteric significance, as that is what we are presently seeing in the US with the hyped Ebola fear.  As Jon Rappoport has shown, the tests for Ebola are themselves questionable at the least, and speak to older managed crises like AIDS and H1N1 that never delivered on their presaged apocalyptic doom.  However, don’t put it past the establishment to release a real bio-attack!   While that is yet to come, my analysis of the present Ebola crisis is that it is not what it is said to be, but rather, a cover for AFRICOM intervention as the hilarious Kony propaganda was.  And to further add to this point, Webster Tarpley has a reasonable thesis in his Synthetic Terror that Guy Fawkes himself was an agent of British intelligence who ran a false flag to frame Catholics as “terrorists.”  V, then, as Satan, is merely a ruse of managed anti-establishment rebellion that plays into the hands of the establishment like putty.  Prompting the V Mask wearing rebels in the populace to engage in terror acts only fuels the establishment’s designs.  Therefore, for V for Vendetta, I’m avoiding all the symbolism and esoterica and looking at the main point – managed, Hegelian dialectical faux rebellion. So put your mask on and grab your Dawkins and your comic books, the revolution will be televised! V is Hot Topic mall rebellion.

As Oswald Spengler stated:

“There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.”