Rites of Passage {Stanley Kubrick}

Rating: Null/10 (10 June 2011)

In the early 60's, when Burgess wrote the novel, one of the controversies in the realm of psychology was the popularity among academics of the Behaviourist approach of B. F. Skinner. Skinner had evolved his scientific approach directly from Pavlov and his demonstration of how dogs could be made to repeat responses to stimuli in a predictable manner {"classical conditioning"}. Skinner developed this theory applying it to human behaviour as "conditioned response". Skinner was so confident that his approach was the way of the future that he wrote an utopian novel called "Walden 2", as a riposte to Thoureau's transcendalist novel, {"Walden"}, of a life of bucolic fulfillment. In Skinner's novel society would be in the morally superior hands of apparatchiks that he termed "planner-managers" Behaviour would thus be regulated by the state by the use of conditioning technique. Anthony Burgess was obviously well aware of the threat to human freedom that Psychiatry and psychology posed and set out to write a novel where the absurdities of control obsession/mania would be exposed.
Kubrick made a highly coloured rendition of the life of the young miscreant Alex, {magnetically portrayed by Malcolm McDowell} and his band of teenage rebels who dress in a group fashion, speak in a personal argot, get juiced on drug-laden milk and whisky, steal cars, use weapons and engage in anti-social behaviour which includes rape, burglary, and grievous bodily harm. In Burgess's fictional world , you have here a supreme character for behavioral modification.
Alex is eventually betrayed by his comrades-in-arms and is convicted for murder and enters the State Prison for a period of nine years. There, because of the overcrowding, and the need to make space for the more threatening category of "political prisoner" - Alex is offered the satirical option of a 14 day quick non-surgical lobotomy, termed "aversion therapy". It is important, at this point, to point out the one unexpected anomaly of this young rebel, Alex. Although Alex is revealed to have no respect for pedantry and culture {in the novel he destroys books with the utmost contempt}, in any shape or form, he has an abiding worship and love for the abstractions of classical music {a form of higher culture}, This characteristic is something he shares with his creator, Anthony Burgess and also the auteur, Stanley Kubrick. Why it is plausible, that such a rabid prole and anti-elitist as Alex surely is, - would be disarmed by the abstract formulations and precious classism of Ludwig von Beethoven, {while also displaying a total disdain for popular music}, is one of those mysterious elements of good fiction and good cinema. Alex, then becomes a pawn in the political game of the "politics of the Future" eventually pronouncing himself "cured" and according to the film {though not according to the original novel}, ready to continue with a life of mayhem and ultra-violence.
That this movie tells a yarn which is both entertaining and challenging, is without question, the result of a collaboration of a great writer and a great movie maker. It is rare to see a novel so precisely realized as this screen adaptation. Voila!!