By “violence” I meant the scenes like the one where the old bum is beaten to death, and the husband of the woman they rape is beaten, and the sculptress is beaten to death with her own sculpture, etc., etc., etc. None of that was rape, that I know of.
I think the fact that you don’t address my actual argument – that the cheap, ill-thought-out, strawmannish nature of the “reform” which in your mind is somehow elevated to some kind of deep examination of political and moral responsibilities – is what’s actually revealing.
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.
Evil Captor, I know that there are innumerable revenge movies that first invite us to leer over violence against the victim, then cheer as the victim violently gets revenge. And the violence is good, because it’s against bad people. The audience gets to revel in the violence and distance themselves from it at the same time. All the the grand tradition of movies showing us “degeneracy” so we can disapprove and be titallated at the same time. The best of both worlds.
A modern example of this is “Natural Born Killers”. Ooooh, violence is bad, m’kay? And empathizing with serial killers is sick, m’kay? So let’s empathize with serial killers! And the Robert Downey Junior character, who is supposed to represent the complicit audience I suppose, gets killed by Mickey and Mallory. Except we’re supposed to cheer!
Except I don’t think “A Clockwork Orange” can be dismissed this way. Are we supposed to leer and identify with Alex as he engages in the old ultraviolence? I don’t think so. Take a more mainstream revenge movie, “The Crow”. Guy’s girlfriend is raped, so he takes violent revenge against the bad guys while the audience cheers. Except the rape scenes in “The Crow” and “A Clockwork Orange” were responses by the authors to pretty similar real-life events. Do you really think Burgess meant us to identify with Alex in the rape scene? Or are we supposed to identify with the victims? Or are we supposed to identify with no one?
I contend that we aren’t invited to empathize with ANYONE in “A Clockwork Orange”, which makes it something different than the vast majority of movies. Alex IS a monster and a rapist, but he’s also a human being. Unlike most movie villains he isn’t a villain because someone stuck a “villain” label on him, he isn’t an inhuman monster but rather a human monster. And this is the lie that just about every movie ever made tries to teach us…that bad guys are bad because they’re bad, there’s no need to think any farther than that, and the appropriate response to the bad guys is to get a bunch of guns and start spraying bullets around.
