User blog:AustinDR/PE Removal: Alex (A Clockwork Orange)

Yeah, I know that this one was already voted up despite my initial reasons, but I feel that aside from him liking his snake (which does assist in him being 99% PE but not wholly PE), I feel that there was one thing that was initially left out in the initial discussion of the film.

Who is he?
You know who he is. The leader of a gang of misfits he refers to as "droogs," and who is mainly motivated by his desires to incite violence often with another rival gang. On one infamous night, Alex and the gang go on an ultraviolent spree after drinking drug-laden milk plus, they go to the house of an esteemed writer named F. Alexander where they claim that they were wanting in to use his phone. They are let in, and they beat Alexander severely which cripples him for life and then in the most controversial scene, Alex and his cronies rape the writer's wife while singing "Singin' in the Rain."

He also had the habit of beating his cronies. They later decide to rob the home of a wealthy cat lady. He then bludgeons her to death with a phallic statue and he is left behind to be arrested by the fuzz. Alex gets sentenced to fourteen years.

Why he doesn't Count
Beholder already mentioned the snake argument which I could potentially see as a disqualifier for the category, but I believe the bigger picture has to do with the system. When Alex is sentenced, the Minister of the Interior saw Alex as the perfect guinea pig to try out what he called the "Ludvico technique." Said technique was implemented to rehabilitate criminals within two weeks. So, Alex is strapped to a chair, his eyes forcibly held open, and he is forced into watching endless scenes of extreme sex and violence the intention being to instill an aversion to violence within him.

Things get progressively worse for Alex after the experiment. He goes home to find that all of his possessions had been sold; he reunites with his former cronies who were now police officers. They go as far as to drown him. When Alexander recognizes him as the one who beat him up and raped his wife years ago, he locks Alex in a room and plays Beethoven's Ninth Sympathy. This causes the trauma that he had endured from the treatment to pain Alex and he jumps out the window to kill himself.

Verdict
In short, from this, do you see what the issue here is? While Alex was a terrible, terrible excuse for a human being, the system is otherwise more heinous than him. The film (and the book to an extent) makes it a point that the system was the absolute worst thing in the setting but no one in particular stands out enough.

It's kind of like with 1984 by Orwell. The true antagonistic force that causes mass suffering is the government.