Clockwork Orange, A Easter Egg - Subliminal Illustrations in Clockwork Orange

Those are not subliminal messages. It is a directing technique that Stanley Kubrick (and other directors) use. If you can identify the images with your conscious mind they are not subliminal. I have always seen the pictures very clearly and thought nothing of them (they take up, I think, 4 frames on film).

Talking about "filthy old soomka", the word "soomka [su:mka]" in Russian means "bag, case or pouch". Just another Russian word in the movie.

Those images are paintings that are on the walls of the room where the scene takes place.

Actually, if any of you have read the book "A Clockwork Orange", Burgess created an entire futuristic language, loosely based on a combination of Russian and British slang. The book also goes into more depth about the title and symbolism of the "clockwork orange", rather than focusing on the shocking "ultraviolence" as the movie does. Really an amazing work of genius.

The language of the book and the movie is Nadstat. Burgess invented it to increase the psychopathology of his characters. Nadstat is made up of "old Cockney school boy talk, English, Russian, and bits of Communist subliminal penetration."

Indeed those are not subliminal images, and indeed those are (parts of) paintings on the walls of the Catlady's room. "Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange", Ballantine Books, New York 1972, by Stanley Kubrick, Andros Epaminondas and Margaret Adams, is a complete graphic representation of the film, cut by cut. In this book you can see that there are 13 images, but there are only 5 different ones, each of them appearing several times.

Actually, Alex calls his victim "sooka", meaning b**ch in Russian. Makes a lot more sense than calling her "purse", don't you think?

1. Alex says "soomka", not "sooka" - I both hear it and see it in closed captions. "You filthy old bag" makes perfect sense. The original book by Burges contains a dictionary of Nadsat, and it says "soomaka - bag". There is nothing about "sooka" there. 2. The Russian words were introduced with the idea that the dominant culture penetrates other languages with its own words. Just like "weekend" in French. The point was that Communist propaganda is way more successful in this version of the nearest future. 3. The mouth inside of a mouth is a close-up of a picture on the wall, where a naked woman is drawn.

Here's an interesting section from an article entitled Clockwork Orange and the Aestheticization of Violence One will notice that the room abounds in modern art which depict scenes of sexual intensity and bondage. The Cat Women is the only real force of resistance to Alex, and the scene presents us with a struggle between high-culture which has aestheticized violence and sex into a form of autonomous art, and the very image of post-modern mastery, Alex, who understands all to well the meaning which is obscured from the Cat Women. She inhabits a private sphere, the image of enlightenment individuality (cat women are always introverts who are obsessively non-social) in a sort of delusional satellite from the city where it is all hoodlums. (Note the inversion of the polis...Alex brings the horror of the cities into the suburbs--Cyberbia). Denied the historical context of Art (the ninth is 'misunderstood') he actually understands the meaning of modern art very well indeed as violence, in fact he turns it literally into the tools of violence, she is killed, as it were by her own instruments of aesthetic decontextualization. The sculpture phallus (a "very important piece of art," ritualized and de-politicized) is made into a weapon, and the scene of her death is a nearly subliminal orgy of modern-art. --If you have downloaded the QuickTime clip, (http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/AlexCohen/ClockworkOrange/art_death.mov) try single framing through the end of the clip, you will see that Kubrick has spliced in one to two frame images of parts of the paintings in the room which depict bondage and dismembered body parts.