Dom

A Thanatopic Palimpsest of Viscid Radiance: An Ecstatic Disquisition on A Clockwork Orange. To conflate A Clockwork Orange with “cinema” is to perpetrate a category error of the most vulgar magnitude; it is not watched so much as it is osmosed. Ergo, an ambulatory excrescence of sensorial fulminations, gnawing at the corpus callosum like a hermeneutic tapeworm. Kubrick, in his hyperlucid maladroitness, has contrived a work so intransigently anti-mimetic that even its longueurs thrum with an almost autoerotic obsolescence. What happens in the film? To ask is to expose oneself as tragically philistine. Narrative here is an atavistic relic, a bourgeois palliative. Instead, we are sluiced through a succession of diegetic palpitations: a boy in a dun field stapling moth wings to a weathered ledger; a prophylactic ballooning slowly with rainwater in the gutter’s maw; the peristaltic shimmer of a sodium lamp in the post-rain gloaming. Ergo, each image a punctum of such retromanic gravitas that it verges on the thaumaturgical. The performances resist acting’s plebeian histrionics. Faces hang in the frame like unblinking reliquaries; words are emitted, not enunciated. Ergo, demiurgic exhalations as if language itself were tired of its own phonemic skeleton. The violence, when it erupts, is an epiphanic caesura: viscera sluicing across the mise-en-scène with the languid inevitability of melted ecclesiastical wax. Cinematographically, Kubrick eschews focus in favor of ontological haze. Shadows do not merely obscure; they interrogate. Light is less illumination than epistemic foreclosure. His camera, operating in what can only be described as a state of transcendental boredom, refuses to flatter the ocular instinct for resolution. To endure A Clockwork Orange is to submit to an ecstatic erosion. Ergo the self sloughing away in slovenly increments until all that remains is the pure, unlettered apprehension of being. It is not for those who seek entertainment, catharsis, or even sense. It is for those willing to be unmade. In the parlance of the uninitiated: it is “good.” But such terms are jejune. This is cinema as ontological vivisection. Ergo, the unutterable made celluloid.

Loved the cast, especially Nick Cage. Hated the script and story. While horror as a genre can be heavily campy, Longlegs was big-time camp. Mild spoilers ahead. I died of a cringe-induced aneurism every time they said "hail satan". It needlessly ruined the narrative mystique.