Malcolm McDowell does a good job as the main character, especially the particular look of his smile makes him look quite deviant, kind of like the Joker. Everyone else is more or less forgettable, although the Hitler-looking prison warden did a decent job. The score was quite good. The film somewhat held my attention but not fully; the best parts were the early criminal scenes and the scenes with McDowell being brainwashed.

I would give it...I don't know, I guess a 6/10.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183101)

he overcomes the predictive programming (is that the socialism, the destruction of free will?) by the political opposition torturing him into trying to kill himself (is that good or bad? it seemed like they wanted him to try to kill himself even before the wheelchair guy realized mcdowell killed his wife) and at the end he goes back to a life of crime and goes on the government dole for helping a corrupt government stay in power (is that the socialism?)

the message is really muddled

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183105)

ebert thought it had no message as well: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-clockwork-orange-1972

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183109)

"all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex"

per the catholic note below, the book makes it much more clear that the possibility of redemption is motivating the overall message. but in the film they nailed the deviant look so exactly and didn't give the viewer any inkling that the character is someone who can possibly be expected to achieve redemption. as a result, it's a flawed film despite technical mastery

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183518)

I like Pauline Kael, too, but she's sometimes just a bit too arch or misses the point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183554)

Author was very Catholic, and the fact that he was an atheist for most of his life (maybe all? I forget) doesn’t really get in the way of his enunciation of the Catholic ethos of the need for free will and the dignity of the human person, even when it throws up hard problems like the evil of Alex.

The movie gets some of this across but there the point seems more to be that the Ludovico Technique and associated apparatus is evil because it’s the same sort of reveling in cruelty that Alex does, except under the aegis of the state and morality. The movie just gives you the sort of grim choice between cruelty dispersed to the level of the individual and then meted out upon society at large (droog violence) or concentrated at the level of the collective and meted out upon individuals (Ludovico etc).

The book doesn’t escape this problem but leans into the idea that ultimately the latter is more evil because it takes away the ability of the individual to make a moral change (I know they do say this pretty explicitly in the movie but the book is more didactic on this point). This is why it’s impermissible to rewire Alex—it denies the possibility of his own salvation. Much of Catholic opposition to the death penalty comes from the same place.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183275)

the book the fictional author is writing at the time is called clockwork orange fwiw

also fwiw btw Burgess was known to be a pathological liar so who knows how many of these details are actually true

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183484)

a genuinely unique and creative attempt to show youth slang and how its simultaneously (1) internally coherent and comprehensible and (2) total nonsense to adults

using russian style words was brilliant and prevents (imo) it from sounding dated. imagine if the characters in the book were saying things like "say, mac daddy, that's a foxy chick" - which would more accurately reflect the actual slang of the time

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183507)

if the protagonist was a nigger instead of white, everyone here would be talking about what the (unintended) "message" of the movie really is: that some people are evil psychopaths, they can't be "redeemed" or changed, and you just have to eliminate them because they're intrinsically evil and will always harm other people and society

it really goes to show you just how naive/clueless/retarded/wrong/useless christian moralization really is. imagine thinking that whether or not a murderous, violent psychopath has "free will" is meaningful, relevant, interesting, or "morally significant." imagine thinking that spending any time or effort trying to "rehabilitate" intrinsically evil people makes any sense whatsoever or will lead to a better world in the aggregate

there's also something revolting and pathetic going on with the dynamic of The Weak and The Oversocialized and The Christian instinctively being drawn to and being fascinated by evil for the sake of evil. AJIP's comment about about how the author was a victim of similar violent crimes as in the book/movie doesn't surprise me. reminds me of a comment i made yesterday about how people who like "horror" movies are fundamentally psychologically defective in this same way. the legacy of christianity and the softness of the modern world and its disconnection from the state of nature has created this bizarre creature who instinctively worships evil because it is The Thing Beyond Their Understanding, and its instincts to "rehabilitate" it rather than to punish it or stamp it out are just a reflection of their reverence for it, rather than any kind of deeper moral understanding or questioning

this same dysfunctional, defective psychological structure is behind every white lib, too. and individuals like this are no more redeemable than intrinsically evil psychopaths themselves: they're just broken. there's a similar condemnation of women as a group, and of the recent enfranchisement of women in history, but i'm not even going to bother going there

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183615)

MPA your response?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183620)

But you'd have to distinguish that from the fact that millions of people enjoy scary movies for the same reason they enjoy roller coaster rides--the pleasure of tension and release. It's not much different from comedy, that way (good horror and good comedy both rely on elements of things like anticipation and mounting discomfort/uncertainty leading to a moment of release, often with an accompanying physical response).

I think what the poaster is more worried about is the reveling in the gruesome and the evil, and maybe there is something fundamentally broken there, especially if you turn into some sort of limit-experience junkie like Peter Sotos (fascinating, great in small doses, but who would actually want to be him? my word!).

Even if it is a psychological defect, I genuinely do not think it's a socially harmful one--at worst it (like most obsessions) might lead you to isolate yourself in your nerd cave with your fake snuff movies and so on, but that's about it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183820)

if you showed our ancestors from even 100 years ago present-day horror movies, or our current political, sociological, and religious reverence for the criminal and the psychopathic, they would recoil in disgust and think that we as a society and a people have become demonically possessed. it is so self-evidently unnatural, unhealthy, anti-social, evil, really, it's just so ridiculously over the top that it's silly to even try to describe it with words

the attraction to and worship of fear and victimization and evil for the sake of evil is an extremely recent phenomenon in our history, and is only enabled by the perversions of modernity acting upon the christianity-selected genetic legacy of europeans. fear and suffering are things to be overcome, to be conquered, to be eliminated. every healthy man throughout human history has instinctively felt and known this. there is nothing noble or beautiful or healthy about fear or suffering or the empty and meaningless infliction of harm on others. but we've ended up in a situation where a very significant % of the population have come to worship and revere these things because these people are now so disconnected from the natural world that these sentiments and phenomena take on mystical, awe-inspiring qualities

the scene of an overweight, low-T, hormonally deficient eloi freak sitting in its living room voyeuristically watching graphic sadistic violence on a screen and cheering it on as inspiring and beautiful while paying homage in its daily life to subhuman psychopathic criminals and foreign invaders animalistically preying upon high-trust civilized society is one that inspires a deep revulsion and disgust and contempt in me. enough: there cannot be any tolerance or mercy whatsoever for this, in the same way that there cannot be any tolerance or mercy whatsoever for the intrinsically evil psychopath worshiped by this kind

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183920)

look i'm all for an "all art should be illegal" argument if that's where the muse takes you but we should be clear that is where this ultimately ends up. (actors in republican rome were not eligible to vote)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48186755)

you lawyers and your systemized "principles." the principles, goy. we can't just selectively ban or discourage stuff that's bad. pornography? that's speech. gruesome scenes of people being tortured to death? that's art. you're not against the "counter-culture," are you goy? think of the "freedom" of "expression" we'd lose if we stopped broadcasting for profit netflix programming glorifying serial killers so women can indulge their unleashed sexual fantasies about sadism and cruelty

free yourself from this nonsense and follow your instincts that tell you that these things are obviously wrong and harmful

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48186812)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48187110)

You can make a separate point that you personally, mpa, should be allowed to watch gruesome gore snuff films because you’re such an otherwise virtuous person that the consequences of you doing so are irrelevant to the good. Yeah, that may be true, kind of like how I wrote most of this post while driving even though permitting texting and driving is obviously Bad for society. I’m a better driver than almost everyone else and I don’t make mistakes. But that’s a separate discussion

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48187195)

My main point being made in this thread is the broader cultural and political orientation and egregore in our current society being perverted in this way. Specifics like this are easy tbh and barely even require careful consideration

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48187845)

nice question begging bro, but don't make *too* many marks in the margins of that Introduction to Nietzsche if you want to sell it back to the campus bookstore at the end of the semester.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48183829)

and the ludovico technique is explicitly an attempt to impose slave morality on him via forcing him to feel empathy for (read self-identification with) the weak victims in the videos

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48184831)

recognizing the will to power as the default, healthy orientation of life forms does not mean that every life form and every individual's will to power is Good. this is because some things are just evil, with evil defined as the opposition to The Good. the covid virus's will to power to replicate itself as much as possible is bad (for us, The Good, the only people/life forms who matter). the psychopathic criminal's will to power to commit indiscriminate, empty, pointless violence and human suffering is bad

what is The Good? what does Good will to power look like? well, that's a good question, and a subjective one, but it's beyond this particular discussion because it requires a lot more typing and i have to finish work for the day

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48185315)

'evil' in any ontology is just 'that which opposes or harms the good'. what's important and meaningful is the subjective defining of The Good. nietzsche was of course not actually amoral (no one is) - he just opposed universalist objective morality, which is indeed dumb and fake and gay

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48185353)

agreed that nobody except for the truly psychopathic are actually amoral in any real sense; my question is more...where does he get off knowing what good and evil are in the sense of 'oh that person is obviously a psychopath?'

your answer might well be, stfu faggot, it's obvious what good and evil are, stop doing theology or whatever you horror movie homo, and okay, but my point is that surely whatever concepts of The Good exist have to be related in some way to this evil. . . are they really that discontiguous? In which case there does have to be a theory of this stuff, and in which case I do think it's fair to ask about the metaphysics.

Saying metaphysics doesn't matter doesn't make the question go away.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48185361)

i make that same claim, because i believe it's definitely cr. i'm adding the additional claim that The Good for us, in this case we'll call it 'western society,' is threatened by people who inflict pointless violence and suffering, as well as it is threatened by those who support and revere this kind of violence and suffering for the sake of violence and suffering

the question is never 'what is evil.' it's always 'what is good?' 'evil' is just that which opposes good. many people try to define 'good' as something abstract, because it makes us feel better about ourselves and the human condition, like we're somehow higher than animals and closer to god, who must be abstractly and perfectly good. but really, it's all about us, as individuals and groups of humans. 'beauty' as some platonic form is not what's good, it's what is beautiful *to us*. 'greatness' in the abstract is not what's good, it's *our own* greatness, our own essence, or an essence that we feel connected to, being great. etc

when i say that someone is 'intrinsically evil,' what i mean is that their intrinsic nature is incompatible with what i consider The Good. this is probably a better answer to your question without all the extra rambling

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48185432)

which i agree with from a visceral level (i know plenty of people i vehemently disagree with politically who i have no doubt would viscerally feel a certain way towards certain types of violence) although i suspect that in practice your western civilization will tend towards a censorious platonism (we'd better outlaw depictions of the evil so people don't revel in it) and eventually have a moral panic spiral due to fear of contagion.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48185443)

in practice, these webs of valuation overlap and oppose and intersect in complex ways. what is good for your kids might not be what is good for your parents. what's good for your church might not be what's good for your nation-state. etc. moral decision-making becomes a difficult question of gradients and trade offs and educated guesses. making moral judgments in practice is hard. that's why "morality" is so complex and interesting to thinking people

that being said, yes, there are some moral judgments we can make that are pretty clear and obvious. tolerating and celebrating wanton violence and the infliction of suffering within a reasonably well-defined in-group is one of them: it's bad, it's evil. whatever nebulous loss of "freedom" or "variety" that results from stamping it out is insignificant in comparison to the gain to The Good from getting rid of it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48185460)

has to be the unaltered ending UK version not the shitty one for USA and film completely different

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48184608)

Straight up poochy left to go to his home planet levels of being tacked on

which is also why I disagree with the above interpretation of the novels as being Catholic thematically. although Burgess did attempt to later define it as such, I think this is self-serving and not genuine

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5609479&forum_id=2#48187344)