Reviewing A Clockwork Orange (the Movie) (Part I)

In this uber-long blog entry, I’ll be discussing A Clockwork Orange- the movie. The book came first, though, so I’ll start there. I’m sure most of us have read the book by now, but I’ll go over the story anyway. A Clockwork Orange tells the story of Alex, an unrepentant criminal teen that is subjected to an experimental rehabilitation program designed to “cure” his criminal tendencies. Already we can see that we have a lot of existentialist concepts to discuss.

First, we have the concept of identity. As Sartre puts it, “the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders” (Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism). In other words, man is responsible for shaping his own identity through his own actions. This concept is very important because existentialists consider it to be THE defining attribute of humanity. Alex is clearly an expert in this from the very start. His acts of ultraviolence against the innocent shape him as a criminal. Alex is very satisfied with this identity. When the state arrests Alex and attempts to “reform” him, they start making Alex’s life choices for him. They replace his name with a number and condition his body to reject violence (with classical music becoming a casualty). As the Chaplain explains, when Alex’s choices are no longer his own, he “ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice” (pg 141). If Alex cannot choose to be good freely, then the state has indeed robbed him of what makes him human. This reasoning also shows why the state’s conditioning has to fail. The state hasn’t “reformed” Alex; it has just reduced Alex to something inhuman, something that cannot be considered “good” or “bad” because it cannot choose between the two.

The state isn’t the only agent that wants to manipulate Alex. Once Alex is released from prison, he is unable to defend himself against the violence he once loved. He drags himself to the doorstep of a political activist, the writer whose wife he murdered years ago. The political activist/writer at first seems to want to help Alex, but when Alex’s grudge against the state isn’t as strong as he would like it to be, he provokes Alex until he attempts suicide. After that, the state again tries to manipulate Alex into granting forgiveness, which Alex does. Therefore, nobody actually wants to help Alex, they just want to manipulate him. We can think of this manipulation as an imposition of one person’s free will upon another’s. Consulting our good friend Sartre again, we know that the imposition of wills upon other wills means that “the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity” (Sartre).

The book ends with Alex a free agent again as the state de-“reforms” him. Alex actually makes the free choice to mature, become an adult, and perhaps raise a family. Once again, existentialism tells us that this time, Alex is exercising his human right to exercise free will.

To be continued....

Existentialism rocks,
~Alexa Semonche~