ACO is neither "irrational" nor "illogical"

Rating: Null/10 (10 December 2004)

First, only people can be characterized as being irrational or illogical, not inanimate objects like films. Second, ACO is neither of these but one of the greatest movies ever made. Third, Burgess was a satirist and so too were some of the greatest writers and thinkers who ever lived: Horace, Juvenal, Swift, Pope, Zola, Voltaire, Moliere, Orwell, Huxley, Cervantes, Erasmus, Byron and Waugh. Satire is defined as a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision or wit. It is the role and indeed the moral duty of the artist to critique, poke fun at and even attack if necessary the social milieu in which he or she lives and Burgess and Kubrick do this with a vengeance in ACO. This being said, the book/film is not a celebration of anarchy, carnality or any other iniquitous human endeavor or condition. Just because a piece of art depicts a certain thing does not mean that the artist endorses or advocates it. This is a simplistic analysis. As I have written previously, Burgess was satirizing the State's treatment of violent crime ie. its conditioning of Alex and his subsequent transformation into an empty shell of a human being incapable of moral choice. What the State did to Alex was equally as insidious and horrifying as the crimes he perpetrated in the first place and perhaps even more so. See my comments of Nov. 14th for a more complete treatment of this theme as well as the other difficult and complex issues addressed in the book and film.