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Stanley Kubrick's mesmerizing 1971 classic is an interesting beast. The film's hallucinatory visuals depicting a strange, narcissistic society of the future - steeped in seventies art deco and harsh, contrasting lighting - paint a bleak, uncompromising picture. Kubrick's use of implied violence, death and cultural destruction throw the viewer into a hellish, emotional quagmire of pessimism and hate.

Yet we're complicit in the violence as Malcolm McDowell's Alex narrates the story to us as if we are his friends, the only ones he can open up to. It is in this that the violence becomes sanitized, that we don't necessarily feel guilty, or pity the victims of Alex's senseless crimes. Kubrick isn't telling us that violence is okay, he's telling the viewer that masculinity is a broken concept. The violence is an indication of pent-up sexual frustration, delivered callously and cowardly to anyone that gets in the way.

Alex Jack, in his essay on Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket' commented that the director flaunted the idea that masculinity is a sick idealized myth'. This interested me because of the phallic symbols, rape and mother theme A Clockwork Orange' plays around with. Here, sex and violence are not two disparate entities that just so happen occur at the same time: sex equals violence, and this relates to the very opposing view that Kubrick was a misogynist.

There is an obsession with sex that permeates throughout the movie. Whether it's Alex raping somebody, having consensual sex, thinking about sex, or being in a situation where sex is alluded to (the bar with the erotic, female shaped tables; his home with penis graffiti on the wall; the nurse and doctor at the hospital; the murder weapon at the woman's house), the idea that it is a motivation in art, in crime, in society, is constantly portrayed. This motivation is male dominated. Women are the ultimate harbingers of sexual desire, and it is only them who can suppress it. This power leaves the male Droogs' (Alex's gang) inwardly feeling threatened, which in part leads to cowardly rape. The Droogs attempt to re-establish themselves (redressing the balance between the sexes) by choosing to take what females hold sacred. This choice' is later explained by the priest who tells Alex: When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.' They see nothing wrong in the choices they make but Kubrick mocks them as they return to feed on mother's milk back at the bar the drinks and the breast-shaped pourer asserting motherhood

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