The Ninth Symphony

Someone told me once that A Clockwork Orange had a particularly disturbing rape scene, and I think I've been reluctant to watch it because of that. But just like Bad Education, it took deciding for myself. Also like Bad Education, I ended up liking the film. A few days ago, I thought I could watch it while doing chores. But the ironing and dishwashing never got done.

Turns out there were actually several gang rape scenes -- unsure if it's Kubrick the filmmaker or Burgess the author that favored so many images of naked women being shoved around by laughing men. But the whole film is so stylized that everything is presented as fairly unrealistic. (The music, costumes, and almost dance-like choreography accomplish this .)

The too-trite summary: Alex, who comes from a nice two-parent family, skips school, picks up girls, and runs around committing a host of crimes with his gang. Alex gets double-crossed and sent to jail, where he volunteers for an experimental treatment that will release him. The treatment turns out to be brainwashing, and upon his release when Alex summarily encounters every person he's wronged, he's been so programmed against violence that he can't even defend himself. His rehabilitation becomes politicized.

Naturally, I liked the latter half of the film because it raised controversial, debatable topics of conversation. It also brought back flashbacks to college units on the sociology of "deviance" (defined simply as social non-conformity). What is "evil"? What is nature/nurture? How does rehabilitation work? Crimes break laws, but what else can be considered a crime? I appreciated the progression of the storyline from an individual's crimes to the ethics of different sorts of institutionalized crime. Deeply ironic. Nobody is excused, and at either the micro or macro level, everybody is somehow responsible.

It reminded me of both The Incident and The Manchurian Candidate. (Mainly because the former is about urban "hoodlums," and the latter is also about brainwashing. )