Deadpool: When Our (Anti)Heroes Do Less and We Reward Them More

In an ultimately narrow and limited reading, scholars and critics most often compare and contrast Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange not with cinema but with its literary source material, especially Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. In this way, they ignore the film's cinematic intertextuality. Krin Gabbard and Shailja Sharma argue that the film departs from the established conventions of "art cinema" defined by directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, and Federico Fellini in favor of "the Joycean text of Anthony Burgess's novel" (851. They contend that the European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s "took large helpings of inspiration from the Realist novel of the nineteenth century," whereas the "more nihilistic" and dystopian aspects of A Clockwork Orange reflect writers such as "Vladimir Nabokov, Bertolt Brecht... as well as Samuel Beckett" (85). These comparisons perpetuate the traditional association between high art cinema ana literature, differentiating this brand of cinema from its inferior counterparts via literary antecedents.While such comparisons are undoubtedly valuable to the study of comparative literature, to reduce Kubrick's film to an adaptation of a novel denies the extraordinarily cinematic nature of its sensory properties and distinctly visual tropes, as well as its explicit concern with screen imagery and its power. Furthermore, the film's status as a controversial cult title places it in a legacy of often youth-orientated films dealing with socially taboo subjects. This theme was picked up by popular critical responses at the time of the film's release, which, in contrast with the reception of the film and of Kubrick today, initially largely defined the film as "not art but exploitation" (Staiger 44). David Denby went so far as to pejoratively label the hlm as a "grotesque extension of the youth movie" (qtd. in Staiger 44). Although Denby intends this comment as a dismissal of the film's value, he in fact identifies a productive ground of comparison.In assessing A Clockwork Orange as cinema, it is tempting to consider the film solely from an auterist standpoint as a key work in tne cannon of Kubrick films and to ignore its alternative generic context. Indeed, the film contains several of the hallmarks of Kubrick's work: repurposing of classical music, a controlled visual style, and a concern with deviance from societal conventions. Despite this strong affinity with the director's oeuvre, however, the film nevertheless possesses another genre-based lineage and one that has not been adequately explored in scholarly analysis. To read the film in the context of an adaptation and partial subversion of a genre or cycle in no way diminishes either the film's significance within the study of Kubrick's career or its status as high art, but simply adds a different dimension to analysis of this ground-breaking work.Focusing on the story of an aberrant and socially destructive adolescent, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), and his crimes, punishment, and so-called "rehabilitation," Kubrick invokes, while significantly transgressing, the conventions of a popular cycle of American films produced in the 1950s about the social problem of juvenile delinquency. This cycle of films responded to public hysteria over so-called juvenile delinquency as it underwent "significant increases in its frequency, emergence of new types, and the concern and attention paid to it by the public and the various media" (Miller 63). In the 1950s, juvenile delinquency migrated from "urban slums into suburbia" as youth rebellion became not only about criminal acts but about a particular youth identity or subculture that "viewed itself as separate and distinct from- and often hostile and opposed to-adult society" (64). Hollywood capitalized on this new subculture to produce a number of films on the theme, such as The Wild One (1953), Blackboard Jungle (1955), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which were tasked with the difficult balancing act of appealing to both concerned adults and adolescents themselves (64-65). …

Jennifer Kirby

Papers

A New Gang in Town: Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as Adaptation and Subversion of the 1950's Juvenile Delinquent Cyce