The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [352]
When Alex finally returns home to the dismal tower-block council flat where he lives with his bemused parents, we are treated to his hallucinogenic dreams, including one showing four crucified and bleeding Jesus-figures tap-dancing, another showing men leering at a woman in a white dress dropping through a trapdoor as she is hanged. Alex is visited by his middle-aged male social worker who warns him he risks being arrested by the police, before trying to pull Alex into a homosexual act. To produce a further frisson in violating the values of the Self, the film's more lurid scenes are accompanied by classical music, particularly the `Ode To Joy' final movement of Beethoven's Ninth, which is implausibly described as exciting Alex like nothing else. He picks up two little teenage nymphets, takes them back to his room to show off his hi-fi system and engages with them in a frenzied sexual orgy, to the sound of the William Tell overture. Alex's gang are getting restive that he does not organise sufficiently lucrative robberies for them, so he leads them off to rob a health farm, run by a rich woman surrounded by gigantic works of pornographic art. Having seen them coming, she rings the police, but when the gang enters Alex bludgeons her to death with a giant sculpted phallus. Police cars arrive and, as the gang flee, one of them deliberately hits Alex in the face with a bottle so that he is caught by the police.
The second half of the film shows Alex in prison, where he is chosen as an ideal subject to test an experimental new rehabilitation technique. This is a drug-based form of aversion therapy which provides an excuse to show yet more filmed images of extreme violence, including the inevitable gang-rape; the idea being that, whenever Alex is tempted to commit sex and violence, the drugs will cause him to vomit in revulsion. When newsreel shots of Nazi violence are accompanied by Beethoven's Ninth, this also inadvertently induces in him a horror of his favourite music. Finally, when it seems he is `cured, he is returned to society as a kind of brainwashed zombie ('a clockwork orange') where he is subjected to a succession of beatings and humilations by his previous victims. These include the now crippled old writer, who plays Beethoven at him very loudly, prompting Alex to attempt suicide by jumping out of a window.
When he recovers in hospital, he finds the aversion therapy has worn off. But by now he has become famous as an example of the government's new method for treating violent criminals. The film ends with him doing a deal whereby, in return for a well-paid job, he agrees that the government can use him for propaganda purposes, to show what a success its new policy has been. But of course nothing has been resolved since, behind his new persona, he is completely unchanged. He is still the psychopath he always was.7
This glossily-packaged commercial for sex and violence coincided in 1971 with Sam Peckinpah s Straw Dogs, also set by a well-known American director in Britain. The hero David, played by Dustin Hoffman, is an American mathematician who has brought his mini-skirted young English wife Amy back home for a year's sabbatical in a lonely farm house, set in a desolate, treeless Cornish landscape. An air of brooding menace centres on the primitive, dirty village nearby, dominated by Tom Venner, a drunken, bullying