A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Gerren
English 312
October 7, 2009


An Analysis on Clockwork Orange

“While the past was littered with the corpses of colonialism, slavery, and genocide and the present offers endless toil, the future was a time apart.”
--Randy Martin
Alex is a son of working-class parents, educated and completely disillusioned by society, too intelligent for his own good, but lacking a moral compass – an extension of a violent dystopia society. His dreams in early youth, forgotten and ignored, his daydreams are even more violent than actual events, such as seeing a little girl hung, rocks fallen on people, and explosions – the product of early inculcation of media. He is the charismatic and unapologetic narrator who navigates us through his violent and seductive futuristic world of easy money and easy sex. As the movie plays out, it is obvious Alex and his gang-mates are a Cultural Ideological State Apparatus in that they propagate views and beliefs on to the public-at-large. Ideology is the combined unconscious and conscious beliefs we hold; we cannot exist outside of ideology. The Cultural ISA justifies the Repressive State Apparatus, e.g. the police, by violent crimes committed. We need basic law and order, which the alcoholic tramp lamented is absent for the dispossessed. Alex makes the error of going too far; he kills a woman in the ruling class, an unforgivable sin, and gets fourteen years in the state prison.
Alex got the education which he needed to enjoy life: he learned how to fight; Alex learned to appreciate fine music, e.g. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; he was erudite and well-mannered – cultured; and he developed organization skills, but Alex still lacked vision. He was a random, violent accident waiting to happen on an unsuspecting victim. He could have chosen any field and excelled in it, but Alex took what he wanted and abandoned the rest. “When wealth is stripped of any specific application and aggregated as a disposable mass…, liberated from an obligatory history, very different futures are brought to the present,” according to Randy Martin in his article: Where did the Future Go. Alex had no rudder, i.e. no purpose and accumulated minor wealth which had no importance to him. He was not the “good” consumer. He bought out of necessity. Milk plus and vinyl records was the only thing he bought for pleasure.
Family ISA was an experiment to keep down delinquency and unrest by the powers-that-be. It is not rooted in love, but in convenience for Alex and his parents. “No longer divided between labor and capital, society’s central cleavage would be played out along the lines of risk – the prospect of a return in excess of expectation,” also according to Martin. Alex was a member of a class-at-risk: a working-class family. He had no allegiance to his family and his family has no allegiance to him. The Religious ISA had little, if any effect on Alex. He committed violent acts without compunction or thoughts to consequence. He was part of the ethnicity and background of the prevailing ruling class and, thus, allowing him to commit crimes against people who are similarly at risk. Once Alex killed a woman from a higher class, he was slapped down and locked up. Randy Martin states: “It has been long observed on the left that the consumptionist cornucopia was not all it was cracked up to be.”