GREATEST FICTIONAL BAD GUYS
#10. ALEX BURGESS/DeLARGE from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
I read the novel once, which personally was quite a feat at the time. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the language (something called Nadsat, a mixture of Cockney slang, English, and Russian). I kept flipping to the back glossary to figure out what the words meant. It’s a clever technique, but it kept me from becoming fully engrossed in the story. I wish I had been born smarter.
However, the film grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and wouldn’t let go. Kubrick has that effect as a filmmaker: there’s something in the music and imagery and pace that’s literally hypnotic. His frames contain mystery, and mystery is catnip to the brain.
Alex is a shit. Roaming a dystopian London in some unspecified year; raping, stealing, beating and murdering. Anthony Burgess wrote the novel tapping into the memory of his wife’s miscarriage at the hands of wandering American G.I.’s during World War II, probably drunk out of their skulls and yielding to their barbaric nature. It’s no surprise the cynical view of mankind is so apparent in Burgess’ work. Surprisingly enough, Kubrick’s Alex is slightly more palpable than the original author’s creation: in the book, Alex rapes two ten-year-olds instead of the consensual threeway with the record shop girls.
At its core is the question of free will and our natural rights as human beings. I love its themes of societal, religious and political hypocrisy, and how it forces me to contend with my own duplicity. For the most part, I’m very left leaning (I logically agree with one of Alex’s victims to crusade against the government’s Frankenstein experiments). On the other hand, I have a low tolerance for crime and criminals. So, like the victim above, I can sit on my high horse and point fingers at the oligarchy for dehumanizing us, but I have to admit I hold no sympathy for Alex’s (much deserved) torture when he falls into the hands of those he’s wronged. I guess that makes me a bit of a sadist as well. Time to fire up the film strip and sign me up for the Ludovico Technique.
Alex: “And the first thing that flashed into my gulliver was that I’d like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out, real savage.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJRt3xYs20
