Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization Term Paper

While "Kubrick's authorial style was viewed by both supporters and critics as an aloof criticism of the social scene" (Staiger 54), it is apparent that none of these supporters cared to question why, in fact, masculinity is so often contingent on "excessive displays of virility and violence" which it then uses to paradoxically maintain "its aspirations to the normal" (DeRosia 63). In depicting Alex murdering a woman with a gigantic phallic symbol, Kubrick is not taking pleasure in the act or encouraging us to do so; rather, he is showing us a rather extreme, aestheticized reflection of the relations between men and women in society, as the artist perceived them. What a Clockwork Orange, then, presents us with is an aestheticized version of violence that comes about not merely as a means of social control, but as the result of relations between men and women that have been strictly codified by norms of gender that are then left unquestioned.Works Cited

Beehler, Roger. "Containing Violence." Ethics 92.4 (1982): 647-660.

Costello, Donald P. "From Counterculture to Anticulture." The Review of Politics 34.4

1972): 187-193.

DeRosia, Margaret. "An Erotics of Violence." Stanley Kubrick's a Clockwork Orange. Ed. Stuart Y. McDougal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 61-84.

Gracyk, Theodore a. "Pornography as Representation: Aesthetic Considerations."

Journal of Aesthetic Education 21.4 (1987): 103-121.

Staiger, Janet. "The Cultural Productions….....