Nasty Scenes: A Clockwork Orange (1972)

Admittedly, a big part of the reason this one hit so hard was because I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s lude classic after recovering from a corneal ulcer – a type of eye bacteria which eats away at the eye and can, if left alone, perforate the pupil. I was enough of an idiot to sleep in my contact lenses while travelling and nearly paid a heavy price. Thankfully I kept my eye, but later watching Alex have his eyelids pinned open and being given constant drops was hard going.

Not being able to sleep is a real pain. It’s incredibly pointless. Being literally unable to close your eyes though is a hellish thought for anyone – corneal ulcer or not. As the fiendish lead character Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell) is subjected to what is termed “aversion therapy” he runs the full emotional gamut from indifference to true terror. We hear him yelling, we know he’s suffering, and yet because we can’t see the proper changes in expression there is a trapped quality to his pain. The drops in themselves are a kind of torture, an irritating but necessary evil to stop eyes drying out.

And then of course there is the poignant ending of having done worse than what was required, of overcooking a delinquent and the things he was accountable for. It’s straight from the bowels of Room 101, from the “correction therapy” horrors in which homosexuals had their genitals zapped with electricity. There is something particularly evil about it, about trying to kill off one’s spirit. You see, you can stalk someone, injure them, but to try and change an individual’s nature through systematic “correction” is a whole other beast.

It’s funny to think there are series out there like Saw which try to produce the exact same feelings of disgust this simple scene almost fifty years old can, and yet for all of the former’s bone snapping and blood spilling, in a total of eight films, it has never quite hit the mark like when poor Alex is strapped to that chair, eyelids pinned open.