Straight Outta Brompton: N.W.A. and A Clockwork Orange

Fifteen years before the birth of gangsta rap, A Clockwork Orange bore witness to the strength of street knowledge

A Cliffs Notes summary of N.W.A.’s 1988 breakthrough Straight Outta Compton might look something like this: Senseless beatdowns. Misogyny-by-numbers. Gangland murder masquerading as casual, cruel bloodsport. A new slang understood only by the perpetrators themselves. All carried out with gusto by loquacious street-toughs whose easy familiarity with the thug life would go on to influence the generation that followed, desensitizing these latecomers to behavioral and societal extremes while encouraging ever-greater feats of outrageously violent indifference.

And yet that same description also applies to the Original Gangsters of ultravivid ultraviolence: Alex de Large and his derby-hatted droogs, the central figures in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 dystopian frightmare A Clockwork Orange. This masterpiece of social commentary—based on the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess—paved the way for a profane sort of cinematic savagery in much the same way Eazy-E and his crew cleared a path for future studio-created musical hoodlums and hustlers. It’s difficult to imagine the existence and success of 50 Cent or Eminem without N.W.A.’s groundbreaking combination of hardcore beats and rhymes, but nearly impossible to imagine Friedkin’s The Exorcist or De Palma’s Scarface without accounting for the face of evil first represented by A Clockwork Orange.

Back in the day, most audiences saw Clockwork as little more than a hysterical, hard-to-watch reaction to a world gone mad with increasingly unruly youth. At the time of the film’s release, real-life England—which Kubrick stylized into a sort of timeless futureworld—was dealing with rising homicide and robbery rates, as well as football hooliganism on an unprecedented scale, with so-called “firms” of violent, working-class youth springing up around local soccer teams (Chelsea’s “Headhunters,” Manchester United’s “Red Army,” etc.) and wreaking bloody mayhem both at home and abroad.

But seen through today’s eyes, it’s clear that Kubrick’s film was ultimately about the complexity of free will—when Alex’s wickedly wanton ways (a tour-de-force performance from young Malcolm McDowell) land him in prison, he seeks an early
release by volunteering for an experimental aversion therapy program that results in physical illness every time the prospect of violence is presented. Once released—having been declared “completely reformed” after a sickeningly subservient demonstration in front of government officials and the media—Alex fails to re-integrate into mainstream society, resulting in a near-miss suicide attempt that embarrasses the government into admitting that its criminal reforms are a disaster. Clockwork closes with Alex cutting a deal to serve as a government propaganda mouthpiece by reverting to the same sociopathic behavior that landed him in prison to begin with—as his rightful freedoms were restored, so too was the terror of England’s citizenry now that the young devil was able to roam free. Again.

As with Straight Outta Compton, controversy stalked Clockwork like a shadow. The film was initially assigned an X rating in the U.S.—later downgraded to R after minor changes—and withdrawn altogether in the U.K. by Kubrick himself in 1974, after the sexual violence in the film spurred copycat behavior in several gruesome crimes, including the rape of a Dutch girl during which her English attackers sang “Singing in the Rain” just as Alex had done so chillingly in the film. (It would be another 27 years before British audiences could view the film publicly again.) Like N.W.A., the film’s creators fell out and warred in the media. Seen today, Clockwork isn’t particularly gory or profane—the average Sopranos episode contains more foul language and blood—but the implied menace and knowing terror inflicted by Alex and his droogs nonetheless infuses the story with its horrorshow edge.

N.W.A. seems much less dangerous today—Ice Cube morphed into a Disney Dad, Dr. Dre became a hip-hop industry heavyweight and the group’s most authentic gangsta, former drug dealer Eazy-E, died of an AIDS-related illness in 1995. But Alex’s white-pantsuited boyz ’n’ the Borehamwood have remained the same unsettling menace to society since their vicious mugs first shocked us out of complacency during the Nixon administration.