Beethoven's Scherzo is never quite the same

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2015)

I should probably be upset at this film. Beethoven's Scherzo (never mind Freude, schöner Götterfunken) is one of my favorites, and now almost every time I hear it, I think at least fleetingly of brutal sexual assault because the film immediately comes to mind. At least in 2001: A Space Odyssey the images that come to mind are of rotating space stations and trans-warp distortions.
Although its Russo-British the-world-has-gone-down-the-tubes is a bit dated, Clockwork is a compelling alternate universe. In the film, gangs of high school hoodlums whose parents barely pay attention to them kill, rape, and intimidate one another at night. The narrator, who's a smart and charismatic kid and might have turned out OK, is scary in his matter-of-fact narration of the story, which swiftly takes him into the hands of unscrupulous politicians as a guinea pig for a Pavlov-like conditioning to rehabilitate criminals on the double.
The film has many themes, but the theme of choice is inherent in all of them. Take away a person's ability to choose, and you cannot have true good or evil.
As a dystopia, the film fails to find any good in anyone, except perhaps its main character, and in the priest who calls out the question of choice. The parents are whining, inattentive cowards; the politicians are ... politicians; the nurses care more about sex than patients; the doctors are cold-blooded beasts; the police are as brutal as the criminals; even the liberal, whose wife died as a result of our anti-hero's rampages, yet who wants to help him find choice again, rejoices at the pain when he applies Beethoven saturation-training to undo the governmental conditioning.
Kubrick never made a bad film, or even a merely good film. This one is no exception. Perhaps I am giving it only an 8 because I'm ticked off a little every time I hear the Scherzo.