Portrait of a miscreant . . .

Rating: Null/10 (8 December 2014)

Alex DeLarge is a Beethoven-loving lad of about twenty who lives with his parents. He spends his days picking up young girls and bringing them home for sex and spends his nights as a street thug. Roaming the streets of Britain with his band of "droogies" and fueled on a substance called Milk Plus, which they acquire from the local milk bar, he is nothing less than a thug who beats innocent citizens to a bloody pulp, rapes, robs and pillages whenever he isn't in a bloody street fight with other gangs.
The Droogs random acts of violence bring them to the home of Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee) whom they beat senseless while raping his wife. We never see the act itself, but Alex prepares for this violation with a song and dance rendition of "Singin' in the Rain." Later they invade the home of an artist whom Alex accidentally kills with a sculpture. The Droogies, tired of Alex constantly beating and berating them, double-cross him and leave him at the scene of the crime. He goes to jail.
Alex becomes a test subject in an experiment in mind control whereby he is injected with a drug, then strapped to a chair with his eyes forced open while he watches a film footage of the exact kinds of crimes that he commits. But the drug alters his mind and he becomes violently ill. Afterwards, the effects linger and he is overwhelmed by nausea at the very thought of rape or murder or even the strains of Beethoven.
Cast out into the world once again, he learns that what goes around comes around. He runs into his old Droogie buddies who have now become cops and they beat him unmercifully. Through an odd bout of karma, he ends up back in the home of Mr. Alexander. The man doesn't recognize him at first until he hears him singing, so he locks him in a room and plays Beethoven very loudly until Alex attempts suicide by jumping out the window. Waking up in the hospital, he is visited by several officials and is informed that the experiments were deemed unethical and so they begin a treatment to break him of his conditioning.
What makes Alex so fascinating is how specifically Kubrick presents him. He is a nasty little man, hell-bent on violence and mayhem. What is so unsettling is his pure joy. He isn't one of those angry youths who is striking back at society. He loves what he is doing. He is a man who loves life, loves to get out of bed in the morning and lives for every carnal lust he can propagate. He carries the demeanor and the curled smile of an unapologetic pervert (which he is) and we in the audience become conditioned to want to like him, to like his laughing demeanor, his bold song and dance even when he's committing unspeakable acts. His lust for life is infectious.
In the second half of the film, we are pulled in the other direction. We, as the viewer, are rational enough to know that he is committing acts of pure evil and so when he goes through experiments that make him sickened by his actions, we can't disagree. What makes Alex so interesting are his quirks: his cain and smoking jacket, his lust for Beethoven, his lust for young girls and his joy at beating his droogie underlings senseless. The film is unapologetically misogynistic, Kubrick surrounds him with phallic imagery from his codpiece to his pet snake to his cain, seemingly driven by his own testosterone. What I appreciate most is that Kubrick never gives Alex a reason for doing what he does. In most films like this, the villain is supplied with a childhood trauma, but Alex does what he does because he likes doing it.