Not everything has to have some huge ideal or point they are trying to across. Some filmmakers just choose to tell a compelling story and leave it at that…
McDowell came to prominence in a film called “If” about a revolt in a British boarding school. I haven’t seen it, but he got very good critical notice at the time.
Some filmmakers do - and then there is Kubrick.
I know this is a whoosh, but likewise, I thought Ryan O’Neal was even better in What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon than he was in Barry Lyndon.
Here in the UK it was out of circulation until the DVD age - along with Straw Dogs, which also came out in 1971. Obviously a rape-tastic year, 1971. I remember sitting down with some friends circa the turn of the millennium to watch this forbidden sci-fi rape classic that we had all read about but never seen. This arty video nasty; the missing link between 2001 and Barry Lyndon. The reason we had been praying for Stanley Kubrick to die. One more crack in the wall of censorship that was crashing down at the time, on account of the internet and cheap DVDs making it almost impossible for James Ferman’s heirs to do their job.
And it was a massive disappointment that hadn’t aged well. “Erm”, was the reaction, “yers”. On a purely superficial level it was more 70s than parkas and The Sweeney. Its vision of the future was basically fag-end of the 60s, prefab university buildings and sped-up film and more white people than Triumph of the Will. Yes, Stanley Kubrick had an eye and things to say about the folly of man, but A Clockwork Orange was an oddly narrow canvas on which to say them. As a drama it got off to a dynamic start and then ground to a halt once the moralising took over. I’m not the first person to point that out; but it’s true. As a satire it was confused and broken.
And the chaps delivered the dialogue so slowly. I read the book before I saw the film - I imagined the droogs spitting out their patois at a rate of knots, but in the film they carefully pronounced each word, no doubt because the producers were worried that the film would be impossible to follow otherwise.
Thing is, I could imagine transplanting the story to the modern day. A kind of La Haine-type setting; like in the video for “Stress” by Justice, which is basically the first fifteen minutes of A Clockwork Orange but French and without any rape. Imagine that, followed by the tale of how the thugs are given electronic tags and ordered to write letters of apology to their victims, and plant flower beds. It would be hilarious, blackly comic, much better than A Clockwork Orange. Very different theme, though. I’m willing to accept that in the absence of guidance, kids can’t be blamed for their actions - they’re stupid beyond belief - but A Clockwork Orange throws up a ridiculous sci-fi brainwashing counterpoint to this and then gives up before providing any kind of closure. Barry Lyndon presented a world where the rage and anger was kept pent-up inside by convention, and perhaps you could argue that the emotional violence inherent in 18th Century European society was far worse than Alex’s outbursts, and of course they had actual wars then, which are violent, but… no, this is university dissertation territory.
And, I dunno. I get the impression that rape wasn’t taken seriously when Burgess wrote the book, and even in 1971 it was something that randy young boys did to dirty women, or tough men did to ungrateful, disobedient tarts. And teachers did it to their pupils, but you had to keep quiet about it. That aspect of Alex’s character hasn’t aged well; it makes it very hard to care what happens to him. So what if it loves Beethoven? How much and how hard and what kind of music do you have to love in order to outweigh two murders and a rape (or three murders; in the book he kills someone in prison) awkward sentence construction question mark?
“Sequel” is a bit much. The final scene of OLM refers to the beginning (the casting of MacDowell) in “If.”
This is one of my favorite movies.
I honestly don’t think the viewer is supposed to care about Alex - he’s an obvious psychopath and master manipulator. He’s just a pawn being used by the government and the left-wing opposition.
The message to come away with is: the ends do not justify the means. It’s not OK to “reprogram” people who are evil, and it’s not OK to use them to further your political goals.
The story contrasts the evil bad guys with the evil good guys.
There’s the parole officer who grabs Alex’s crotch, the smug and nasty prison guard, the people who “cure” Alex, lie to him and don’t care about his love of music or the consequences of their action. The writer and his friends who use Alex for political gain to the point of nearly killing him. And then the politician at the end who uses Alex for his gain as well.
Most telling are his ex-droogs who have become policemen and beat the crap out of him. The two sides are the same side. A smart guy like Alex would naturally fit into both worlds.
(Plus there are others. His parents, their boarder, etc.)
In a dysfunctional society where there are no truly good people in charge, you get people like Alex. Trying to “fix” bad people like Alex won’t fix society. You need to fix the so-called good people.
There’s still a lesson there regarding recent events in US society.
I’m honestly unsure whether the audience was intended to draw any particular conclusion. The movie sets up the moral dilemma (is it morally right to “program” someone and manipulate (or destroy, or make miserable) his life for some “higher” social purpose - when that person is a completely evil, clever, manipulative and charming psychopath who we know has raped and murdered?).
The movie does not make it easy for the viewer, or provide any ready answer. At the end of it all the psychopath is “cured” - that is, is ready to resume his manipulative, amoral ways.
In short, the movie asks the question, but does not I think provide a definitive answer.
I felt the same way as the OP about some of Spike Lee’s films, especially Bamboozled. I kept trying and failing to understand if there was supposed to be a particular message or lesson to be learned. The only message I could decipher is, “Life is a dark dark dark, bitterly dark, comedy.”
Ultimately I decided that if Lee was trying to teach me something, he was a poor teacher or I was a bad student. But that didn’t stop me from thinking it was a great movie, even though I can’t really say that I “enjoyed” it. I also decided that it was what it was, and to appreciate it or not on those terms.
That wasn’t the way I felt about the book (Burgess’s wife was brutally gang raped during WWII, so it’s not like he didn’t know such things could happen to “nice girls”), but I tend to agree about the way rape was portrayed in the movie. At the very least the extent of Alex’s crimes was toned way down for the movie, although I suppose that could be due in part to concern about getting the movie released.
Aside from the ending, the difference between book and movie that struck me most was the scene where Alex meets two girls at the music store and brings them back to his bedroom. In the movie, these are clearly pubescent girls – probably underage, but not that much younger than Alex – and they seem willing to have sex with him. In the book, they’re only 8 or 9 years old and are sobbing as he rapes them.
In the book, Alex is only 13!
He’s 15, but even if he were 13 that wouldn’t really make it any less disturbing that he raped two little girls.
You are forgetting that he not only raped that women, he also murdered her. I disagree that the scene was made light of - I thought it was extremely disturbing.
Not sure I see what you’re shooting for here.
Uh, we’re talking about two completely different scenes. In neither the movie nor the book does Alex murder the girls he meets at the music store, and in the movie it’s not depicted as rape but rather willing sex with two (possibly underage) girls.
I thought both the book and movie gave a perfectly clear answer - but to a different question.
The dilemma isn’t whether or not reprogramming someone is right. Instead it asks whether or not redemption can be coerced. And it answers with a very clear no. You might be able to force someone to change their behaviour, but what you get is not redemption.
Agreed completely. I enjoyed A Clockwork Orange (as much as you can enjoy a movie about thugs raping and pillaging their way across England), but it gives a whole new meaning to the word “dated.” It was a dark and unimaginable future! Except everything looked more stuck in time than any other 70s movie I’d watched up to that point.
Beyond that, it’s hard to find a point in a movie where everyone is such an irredeemably EVIL asshole. No future will ever devolve into that kind of chaos, which is actually a problem with most dystopian movies.
I loved the movie when it was first released, sat through it twice, had the book, had the record… My droo–uh, friends and I used to traipse through 1973 San Francisco declaring any trendy new stylistic fillip or fad (a neon-lined archway, a video bar) as “very Clockwork Orange.”
I can also attest that there was a more casual attitude toward rape then, which has rightly been addressed (though wrongly gone overboard with at times).
How you missed the point, though, I don’t know, because in one of my minor aesthetic objections to the movie, after the public demonstration of the effects of the brainwashing, the minister jumps up and tells it to us word-for-word: “If a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
I also have to admit that, though my aesthetic objections are minor cavils, my ethical objections are gigantic. Without Burgess’s redemptive ending, the film blasted out a message that Baby Boomers very much wanted to hear: If you have enough of a soul to be able to appreciate–not even create–art, you should be able to get away with anything, up to and including murder. And that I can’t condone.