NOMADENKINO A Clockwork Orange 2.7.19, 21.30 About Blank

Paranoid dystopia. She is supposed to stir up fear of a dangerous police state exercising thought-control. Really? No. Above all, a vicious hero is being celebrated here: Alex. Alex is a child who makes snails crawl over a knife and tears the legs out of flies. A creepy mean guy. But Kubrick likes Alex. I don't. He is a sadistic rapist. Kubrick admits that Alex is the only positive quality that he likes Beethoven. Maybe just so he can put pathetic Beethoven music on the soundtrack. Alex spends his time in a white painted milk bar. Listen around; most people who want to open a bar sooner or later come up with the idea of opening just such a white bar. Otherwise we don't learn anything about Alex's inner life. His motivation to be the way he is. I would call it a "hipster" movie. Alex, the milk bar, his whole world aren't pop art. Abstraction. He and his world (including Beethoven soundtrack) are "cool". This is not a vision of the future. Just "cool" decor. Why is Alex the way he is? Not a pale glimmer. Because society is so cruel? Nonsense. Simply because it's "cool". It's entertaining and that's how Clockwerk Orange works. Of course Kubrick filmed Anthony Burgess' novel. But he took his world and turned it into "style". Empty inside. In it Alex - filmed from below - sometimes seems like someone who has a message. He seems more than just a sadistic rapist. But that's not true. Alex is pointless. And at the end? There he gets cured. By the police state. It is now no pervert, no rapist anymore. He is forced into anti-violence and anti-rape therapy. Should we be happy about this? Kubrick's film says yes.