![]() ![]() The look in Alex's eyes at the end tells us that he isn't just a mechanized, choiceness sadist but prefers sadism and knows he can get by with it. ![]() Despite what Alex does at the beginning, McDowell makes you root for his foxiness, for his crookedness.įor most of the movie, we see him tortured and beaten and humiliated, so when his bold, aggressive punk's nature is restored to him it seems not a joke on all of us but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. Alex, who gets kicks out of violence, is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with the power and slyness of a young Cagney. ![]() Alex is the only likable person we see - his cynical bravado suggests a broad-nosed, working-class Olivier - and the movie puts us on his side. The end is no longer the ironic triumph of a mechanized punk but a real triumph. Alex the sadist is as mechanized a creature as Alex the good.Stanley Kubrick's Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is not so much an expression of how this society has lost its soul as he is a force pitted against the society, and by making the victims of the thugs more repulsive and contemptible than the thugs Kubrick has learned to love the punk sadist. There seems to be no way in this boring, dehumanizing society for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime they do what they do as a matter of course. The ironies are protean, but Burgess is clearly a humanist his point of view is that of a Christian horrified by the possibilities of a society turned clockwork orange, in which life is so mechanized that men lose their capacity for moral choice. ![]()
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