Clockwork Orange

This semester I've been trying to watch on the films that I've been chastised for not watching yet. It's been a great ride so far and a lot of the classics I thought were over hyped actually turned out to be pretty great! However every once and awhile there come a time when I flick on a film that really grips me. And this time dear friends and trusted readers, that film was Stanley Kubrick's a Clockwork Orange.

Spoilers Y'all

I really didn't know what I was expecting coming into the film. For years I'd heard that it set the bar for ruthless onscreen violence, and for the most part it lived up to the hype. Sure we may see more Ultraviolence nowadays, but I'm sure that back then this film really was a real horror show. Overall I loved the film, I loved the character of Alex as a self aggrandizing psychopathic narcissist, I loved the sets seen below:

And I loved how the change the main character goes through. I feel as though most of what I loved about this film can be summed up in the following clip, which I don't suggest you watch if you haven't seen the film. It's wacky, weird, and works wonderfully to frame the psychological instability of the main character.

Clockwork Orange

I watched Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange for the first time a couple of days ago. To say the least the movie was intense. I could tell from the very beginning that Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell, had some pretty deep psychological problems.

Never trust a man in with eyeliner.

That was only the beginning though. The treatment that he went through was just disturbing.

Then when he finished with the treatment everything that could go wrong went wrong. His parents replaced him with another guy. When he left he got beat up by a bunch of homeless guys. Then he was picked up by the police... who beat him more and almost drowned him. He manages to stumble to a nearby house. But he raped the late wife of the person who lives there. The man tortures him by playing the former favorite song of Eric. This leads to Eric attempting to commit suicide.

There are many different lessons to be learned from this. Don't trust people. The government can be worse for people than free will. What goes around comes around.

The scariest part about this movie is that Eric was such a vile and violent person that showed no remorse, but by the end of the movie we sympathized with him and so did the rest of the people in the movie.