A Clockwork Orange

Amazing film.  “A Clockwork Orange” is an incredibly interesting and stylistically elite film. The sets, cinematography, angles and lighting are used to create such an enticing world that it alone makes for an interesting watch.The mix of Brutalist and Bauhaus inspired architecture in public and the deeply repressive and claustrophobic architecture of our various institutions evoke a strong sense of polarity between the two, the many corridors and rooms we are taken to are so deeply interesting in their design and often evoke the sense of a future that never was.  The film is set in a semi-futuristic Britain which is on the edges of becoming an authoritarian police state. Crime and extreme violence are rampant and perpetrated by a misdirected youth that our main character is a part of.  Alex is much like Nabokov’s narrator in “Lolita”, a morally corrupt but linguistically and personally charming individual. Although he is privy to extreme physical and sexual violence he is not a brute, he is intelligent and culturally sophisticated in many ways, as well as being linguistically subversive in how he speaks, combining English and Russian to express his own individual language.  Alex’s story is the vehicle through which we are presented a very interesting ethical question, is it better to have the free will to choose violence and sex or to be stripped of any such choice at all by the state.  The Ludavico technique aims to suppress any form of violence or transgression by creating a physical repulsion whenever a subject is faced with such a thing and it is clearly much worse than the traditional penal method which still allows Alex the comfort of his own thoughts and his cell.  The technique takes him through all the stages of the depths of violence, not stopping at immense atrocities such as the holocaust to force Alex into utter repulsion while his favourite music plays in the background.Once Alex is released from prison he rightfully faces the consequences of his actions from many of the people he has wronged as the film doesn’t seek to excuse his horrible violence but we also see how he becomes a political subject as a result of the state’s exertion on him. In the end he becomes a tool of the state and his urges are integrated into the system itself, despite its initial efforts to destroy them and one could see this as a triumph of the human spirit, a sick and twisted human spirit at that. This film was a very entertaining watch and though I wasn’t a big fan of the excessive nudity and sexual violence I understood its place within the story.