[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
“Course not. So here’s what we’re a-gonna do. We’ll just stand around a bit and gaze into the sunset and think about morality and the potential for human redemption and such. Maybe deputize a couple of Alex’s boys. It’s kinda rough on the preacher and the schoolmarm and such, but it’s the human condition. We can’t be expected to actually do anything about it.”
[/QUOTE]
That’s part of the satire, actually. Alex’s old chums are policemen by the time he’s done with his brainwashing. They’re ostensibly good upstanding members of society, who are just as much thugs now as then. They haven’t changed inside, they’ve just taken a role that allows them to exercise their proclivities in a socially acceptable way. What was done to Alex by the psychiatrists was in the name of “making him into a productive member of society” and was thus intially above reproach, despite the fact that it was possibly even more disturbing than most of what we’d seen to that point. Even in the movie, it was eventually acknowledged by Alex’s society that this mental rape was worse than anything he and his gang had ever done.
The casual approach to violence, like the beating of the bum, or the rape of the girl by the rival gang that the droogs interrupt, just illustrates how much of a non-issue this kind of thing is for them. It’s a way to pass the time. Bored? Let’s go find some chick to rape and maybe beat up a homeless guy. It illustrates not only the degeneration of this future society’s youth, but it’s telling that the authority figures don’t say much of anything about how reprehensible Alex’s actions were, only about how he’s not fitting in.
Violence by authority figures toward reprobates is apparently tacitly acceptable. Not only are we treated to several instances of state-sanctioned mistreatment and torture, but even in non-punishment settings violence of the high against the low seems to be the norm, though couched in language that obscures what’s actually going on. His parole officer deliberately hits Alex in the crotch during his visit, becoming visibly excited and seeming inclined to further violence, but confines himself mostly to mental assertions of power and control, seeming unwilling to give in to what would probably be a more honest expression of his aggression. The sexual undertones to this scene are disturbing, considering the position of power that the parole officer has over the much younger, and almost unclothed Alex. What does it say about that society that this man is considered in the right, while Alex, whose open and acknowledged violence could even be seen as a reaction against the observed violence and hypocrisy of his supposed superiors, is considered to be a waste of time and resources?
The contrast in how violence is shown, the aggressor’s interpretation of his own actions, and other people’s reactions to it is a big part of the theme of the movie. It is, obviously, more rooted in the time of its making. It was made in a time when students protesters were shot by soldiers, when the government was manufacturing a war and trying to sell it to the public as not only necessary but right when it was obviously neither, when hippies who wanted to drop out of what they saw as an unnecessarily violent, exploitative, and repressive society were the objects of violence, exploitation, and repression by people in positions of power.
I think that the movie doesn’t avoid the question of violence, it just refuses to morally shade things too much one way or the other, letting the viewer draw his own conclusions about the import of it. It’s a lot more subtle than putting white hats on the “good guys” and giving the “bad guys” dirty clothes and stubble you could strike a match on. It doesn’t assign roles, it makes you do it.
The US version of the book originally omitted a final chapter in which Alex comes to the conclusion on his own that a violent lifestyle is ultimately pointless and self-limiting. He could not be forced to that realization, but had to come to it by himself, in his own time. Being preached to, tortured, forced or coerced made him naturally opposed to the authority figures who used covertly violent means in an attempt to force Alex to give up his violent ways. Maybe it says something about our society that this epiphany was seen as unbelievable and unpalatable, and was dropped from all but recent publications of the book.
