Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Đedović, Mateja

Titel

Utopia Gone Wrong: Mirages of Communist Totalitarianism in the Clockwork Mirror

Ist Teil von

• Historical journal of film, radio, and television, 2022-01, Vol.42 (1), p.103-116

Ort / Verlag

Dorchester-on-Thames: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

EBSCOhost Film and Television Literature Index with Full Text

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and so was, seemingly, the road to totalitarianism in Communist states originally envisioned as socialist utopias for the working classes. These quickly degenerated into paranoia-led dictatorships of Orwellian proportions. Many artists of the time sought to comment on these states in their works, not the least Orwell himself in the now-classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But is it possible that A Clockwork Orange itself was a response to Communist totalitarianism? This article seeks to examine that claim using Yugoslavia as a model of comparison to the England we see in the Burgess novel and Kubrick's film. By looking at such concepts as dissidentism (Alex as the true dissident and Mr Alexander as the state puppet version) and 'conditioning' in A Clockwork Orange and comparing them to their historical counterparts in Communist Yugoslavia - namely the dichotomy between the famous intellectual dissidents such as Milovan Djilas and Dobrica Ćosić and their less well known reactionary counterparts, as well as the state-run 'brainwashing mill' that was Goli Otok - I will try to see to what degree is the well-intentioned English dystopia similar to the humanist idea gone wrong that was Communist Yugoslavia. I will also look into the reception of A Clockwork Orange and similar films in Communist countries and whether such parallels were noticed at the time.