A Clockwork Orange
The movie starts out with the boys sitting around drinking in the bar. When Alex and his gang leave the bar, they go on a crime spree that involves mugging, robbery, a gang fight, auto theft, breaking and entering, and rape. The boys travel to the countryside with their stolen car, break into a cottage and beat up the man inside before raping his wife while making him watch. They then head back to the Korova, where they fight with each other. Alex, who loves classical music, becomes angry at Dim when Dim ridicules an opera that Alex likes. Alex punches Dim in the face, which encourages the others to turn against their arrogant leader. The next time they go out, they break into an old woman’s house. She calls the police, and before Alex can get away, Dim hits him in the eye with a chain and runs away with the others. The police apprehend Alex and take him to the station, where he later learns that the woman he beat and raped during the earlier robbery has died.
Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. At first, prison is difficult for him. The guards are heartless and cruel, and several of the other prisoners want to rape him. After a few years, though, prison life becomes easier. He befriends the prison chaplain, who notices Alex’s interest in the Bible. The chaplain lets Alex read in the chapel while listening to classical music, and Alex pores over the Old Testament, delighting in the sex, drinking, and fighting he finds in its pages.
Alex is selected as the first candidate for an experimental treatment called Ludovico’s Technique, a form of brainwashing. After being injected with a substance that makes him dreadfully sick, the doctors force him to watch exceedingly violent movies. Alex comes to associate violence with the nausea and headaches he experiences from the shot. The process takes two weeks to complete, after which the mere thought of violence has the power to make him ill. He can no longer enjoy classical music, which he has always associated with violence. Alex’s successful treatment a victory for law and order and plans to instrument it on a large scale.
After two years in prison, Alex is released, a harmless human being incapable of vicious acts. His old friend Dim and an old enemy named Billy boy are both police officers now, and they take the opportunity to settle old scores. They drive him to a field in the country, beat him, and leave him in the rain. Alex wanders to a nearby cottage and knocks on the door, begging for help. The man living there lets him in and gives him food and a room for the night. He recognizes him from two years ago as the man whose wife he raped, but the man does not recognize Alex, who wore a mask that night. Alex learns later in the night that the man’s wife died of shock shortly after being raped.
This man, F. Alexander, is a political nonconformist. When he hears Alex’s story, he thinks he can use him to provoke public outrage against the State. He and three of his colleagues develop a plan for Alex to make several public appearances. Alex is tired of being exploited for other people’s schemes. He rebukes the men in nadsat, which arouses the suspicion of F. Alexander, who still remembers the strange language spoken by the teenagers who raped his wife. Based on F. Alexander’s suspicion, the men change their plans. They lock Alex in an apartment and blast classical music through the wall, hoping to drive Alex to suicide so they can blame the government.
Alex jumps out of the attic window, but the fall doesn’t kill him. While he lies in the hospital, unconscious, a political struggle arises, but the current administration survives. State doctors undo Ludovico’s Technique and restore Alex’s old vicious self in exchange for Alex’s endorsement. Back to normal, Alex assembles a new gang and engages in the same behavior as he did before prison, but he soon begins to tire of a life of violence. After running into his old friend Pete, who is now married and living a normal life, Alex decides that such a life is what he wants for himself. His final thoughts are of his future son.
The freedom to choose is the big human attribute, meaning that the presence of moral choice ultimately distinguishes human beings from machines or lower animals. This belief provides the central argument of A Clockwork Orange, where Alex asserts his free will by choosing a course of wickedness, only to be subsequently robbed of his self-determination by the government. Alex—a criminal guilty of violence, rape, and theft—the hero of the novel. Humanity must, at all costs, insist that individuals be allowed to make their own moral choices, even if that freedom results in depravity. When the State removes Alex’s power to choose his own moral course of action, Alex becomes nothing more than a thing. A human being’s legitimacy as a moral agent is predicated on the notion that good and evil exist as separate, equally valid choices. Without evil as a valid option, the choice to be good becomes nothing more than an empty, meaningless gesture
The presentation of a Christian conception of morality. The chaplain, the novel’s clearest advocate for Christian morals, addresses the dangers of Alex’s “Reclamation Treatment” when he tells Alex that goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” F. Alexander echoes this sentiment, albeit from a different philosophical standpoint, when he tells Alex that the treatment has turned him into something other a human being. He has no power of choice any longer. This movie ultimately supports this conception of morality as a matter of choice and determination and argues that good behavior is meaningless if one does not actively choose goodness. Overall, I really enjoyed this movie because Alex got what he deserved during his experiment you reap what you sow. The government should have kept him under this experiment because he was a very cruel individual and his actions was very detrimental.