Clockwork Orange, perpetrator and prey

If not mentioned its release year, 1971, Clockwork Orange could be mistaken for a modern documentary on gangs. The subject here is not the violence itself, which caused the ban on the movie in several countries, but it is about politics, which appears all the time in the plot as a mechanism (clockwork?) for the maintenance of the status quo.

Thus, protagonist Alex DeLarge leads his group of droogies ("friends" in the dialect Nadsat in which the film is narrated, and also in the book by Anthony Burgess), organizing the inherent activities of the youths of that dystopian society: beating beggars, rapes, robberies and depredations in general.

Alex's post-correctional counselor, the bizarre Fr. R. Deltoid, just waits for the time when his ward to commit some crime to hand him over to (equally violent) police. The opportunity does not delay, as the boy ends up killing a cheeky cat breeder and is sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Already in prison, and now a devoted chaplain's associate, Alex volunteers for a government-sponsored behavior change experiment. Called Ludovico's treatment, the experience consisted of implanting an aversive response to visual stimuli of violent scenes. By accident, the soundtrack to a film about Nazi atrocities is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Alex's most beloved song that will thereafter be equally painful for the "regenerate" prisoner.

No longer the perpetrator, Alex becomes a victim. Not only of the state but also of all its ancient objects of torment. One of its victims, a leader of the opposition to the government, puts the protagonist in a limit situation, so that, when seeking to kill himself, he invalidates the official chemical treatment.

By force of destiny, Alex leaves alive, although with many fractures, of the opposition attempt. Realizing his importance as a media pawn in the power game, Alex finally discovers the place where he can exercise his psychopathy in an institutionalized and liberating way: politics.

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