The Allure of Ultraviolence

Still from A Clockwork Orange (1971)

In Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel and its 1971 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, A Clockwork Orange, psycho-delinquent Alex and his gang of Droogs speak Nadsat — a fictional language which mixes rhyming slang with Russian-influenced English. In the film’s opening monologue, Alex, sipping on a glass of hallucinogenic milk, is excited to revel in an evening of  “a bit of the old ultra-violence". Ultra-violence is a Nadsat word referring to the extreme, desultory acts of barbarity that the young men in the text inflict upon innocent victims. Beyond Kubrick’s film, the term ultraviolence traces a lineage of suffering turned to artistic spectacle from Alex’s stylised assaults to Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence (2014), where Lana writes, “he hit me and it felt like a kiss.” Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Lana Del Rey’s album Ultraviolence are two celebrated artistic endeavours which reveal a cultural tendency to fetishise violence against women. These works prompt a deeper question of whether our artistic fascination with violence is a glamorisation, a critique, or a coping mechanism in an ultraviolent world.

The Old In-and-Out

In A Clockwork Orange, after one of his gruesome assaults kills a woman, Alex is incarcerated and must undergo the Ludovico technique as his only hope of rehabilitation into society. The method intends to make him so physically repulsed by violence that he is left incapable of reoffending. While Burgess’ story condemns the undermining of Alex’s free will, Kubrick's film conditions its audience in its own way: through the power of aesthetics. Alex remains a problematic protagonist. He and his Droogs call sex “the old in-and-out,” a total objectification of the female participant. While his attacks on men are merciless, his assaults of women are purely to assert sexual dominance. He cuts at garments to expose breasts, and turns a phallic sculpture into a murder weapon. Pursuing the vulnerable and unsuspecting, he is completely devoid of empathy. 

Still, when Alex is ‘cured’ at the end of the film after a head injury reverses the effects of the Ludovico technique, as viewers we cannot help but celebrate. It shouldn’t be an easy task to convince spectators to sympathise with a deranged and unfeeling psychopath but Kubrick imbues his evil with undeniable panache. The film’s masterful audiovisual manipulation seems to stimulate something primal in the viewer.

As Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony plays, Alex writhes in bed with a woman, surrounded by clapping onlookers. Beethoven’s Ninth, the ‘Ode to Joy’, famously celebrates the kinship of mankind. In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012), Slavoj Žižek asserts that Alex represents the antagonism that exists within every social order. His being so connected to this piece of music shows us what is denied in fantasies of universal beauty — the presence of the irreparably evil. 

When we sit down to watch this film, we become much like Alex undergoing the Ludovico technique (though hopefully without our eyes propped open), indoctrinated in front of a screen which shows us ultraviolence. Yet instead of it repelling us, the stylised film world seduces. When suffering is made beautiful it becomes consumable. A Clockwork Orange tells us that moral good is subordinate to aesthetic manipulation, or at least that beauty creates allure to just about anything, even the brutal. 

Sad Girl Theory 

Lana Del Rey is the expertly marketed heteroglossic persona of Elizabeth Woolridge Grant. She has played everything from jean-short clad Americana goddess to a dichotomous Jackie Kennedy/Marilyn Monroe character. In Ultraviolence, she became the ultimate icon of feminine melancholia. The speaker of the album is pretty when she cries, and her devotion to her male lover is expressed not in spite of his mistreatment of her, but seemingly because of it. On the title track, she croons a controversial throwback to The Crystals’ 1961 song ‘He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)’. The tune blurs the line between romanticisation and critique of abusive relationships. Many argue it glamourises intimate partner violence and harmfully moulds her impressionable, young audience of women into believing that having a shitty boyfriend is cool. Though sonically praised, Ultraviolence has been lyrically considered anti-feminist album. 

However, the album has also been interpreted as empowering through the “Sad Girl Theory” which perceives a fragile, submissive and romantic persona as its own form of female agency. The “Sad Girl” becomes a resistance to suffocating neoliberal ideals of female empowerment, critiquing an individualistic, career-focused culture in which gender inequality is still rife. By playing into this image and providing a woman’s perspective on an abusive relationship, Lana Del Rey disrupts power structures that privilege masculine control. While the speaker is in a controlling relationship, she still has agency over the narrative. 

While Ultraviolence alludes to A Clockwork Orange in its title — a work where Kubrick aestheticises violence as a male auteur, the album departs from his phallocentric lens. Lana Del Rey honours the consumable violence that exists in the film, but repositions narrative authority to the subordinate feminine. Drawing from the lineage of ultraviolence as masculine spectacle, Del Rey shows how the portrayal of violence in art evolves through time and gender perspective. However, despite social change, our cultural fascination with violence has endured.

Ultraviolence: a work of fiction 

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would advise us that ultraviolence becomes a spectacle in these works of art; a highly stylized pop culture image divorced from the consequences of actual violence. It is in these aestheticised images that we run the risk of desensitisation. But is it truly the case that we will accept anything if it is dripping in style? Or are these works of beauty meant to unsettle, to draw our attention to the enjoyment we experience in consuming what is undeniably wrong so that we can distinguish it from the real violence in our world? 

Ultraviolence is a double-edged sword. It opposes the unrealistic cheer of glorified meritocracy, shining a light on rampant social issues. But it is also guilty of mythologising women’s pain, and celebrating antagonism. Should we feel guilty for enjoying violence, even that which is surreal or choreographed? Perhaps the truly unsettling thing about these works isn’t ultraviolence, but it’s how much we love to devour it.

Designed by Ege Yurdakul