Ahkenaten's signature has hastened my bringing up this topic. I had already planned it with the release of Stanley Kubrick's movies on HD this week. It is:


It's a line from the movie A Clockwork Orange, a film which unfortunately inspired so many violent copycat acts that Kubrick disowned it. This movie is the main reason that young boys go out and attack homeless men.

Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers has also inspired acts of violence. And my guess is that David Fincher's Fight Club has, as well, the way I always hear people talk about it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the movies, I just think that young people filled with testosterone and little brain power take from them the most entirely wrong messages. I think it's important to have a dialogue about that to hopefully spread the messages behind the movies so that some other young person does not go around ruining their lives and the lives of others over copying what they saw in a cool movie.

If a person does ANYTHING just because they saw it in a movie, there should be a bounty on their head, as they should be removed from the gene pool ASAP.

I have to admit I've always hated how Clockwork Orange goes out of it's way to make a hero out of Alex and then further seals the message by having everything work out for him in the end.

The book is not exactly like that. This is much more a 'world-gone-wrong' with Alex being the oldest of his Drugies at 15, the rapes are of 10-year old virgins and the whole scene is much uglier than the rock&roll approach in the film. Naturally he couldnt use especially young people in the roles.

Further, at the end of the film Alex is 'cured' of the treatment that stopped his violent impulses, by a return of his violent impulses, but in the book while he does suffer physical attacks if these thoughts happen, he also sincerely experiences an epiphany of how he has hurt others and how his former drugies are damned around him. The book ends with him willfully changing and sticking with it, looking forward to bringing a child into the world and 'raising it right'.

The message of the movie is you can't stop people's nature and what's so bad about Alex anyways?

The message of the book is how cruel and inhuman society is becoming on every level from the ground to the state ( - the drugies also end up as police? the doctors and politicians don't care about victims or criminals they care about their careers - ), that and, also as above, that you can't force a true change in a persons nature BUT all can be redeemed if willing, and if willing all can change their own nature.

I see a big difference in those messages. So consider how many have seen the film and how many have read the book....


Ahk

John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were heroes among people who never saw a movie and attended church regularly...So was Jessie James.

Kubrick and Stone are (and were) artists.
Natural Born Killers was a great work of art examining society, the media, the individual W2P, and our fascination with blood and circuses.
Watch it on mushrooms like Stone intended and then rate it as a work of art. One of the most brilliant movies ever made, IMHO.

Clockwork Orange is Kubrick's socio/political commentary of our graceless modern age through the nihilism of young men as a focal point of society's ills. (It's also a treatise on Master vs Slave morality, but that's more subjective...)


The Fight Club is another testosterone based look at the urge to destroy the self while recovering a Freudian Self Image stolen by society. "Our fathers were our first models for God" "The IKEA Nesting Instinct"


In all these movies, the violence is the subject, or at least part of the subject. In all these movies, the violence is highly stylized and adds to the message of the art. In all three films, the audience is brought into the picture as taxpayer, random victim, media consumer, fellow fighter...Both works lay some of the blame for the violence at the audience's (Society's) feet. They are all cautionary morality tales....

This movie is the main reason that young boys go out and attack homeless men.

Why did they do it before the movie was made?

The will toward violence that these movies describe is not some new thought these movies created. It's been with us as long as young men. Most large societies have historically channeled a lot of that energy into military, construction, or other state service, but it's a natural human trait.


Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, and NBK all make very strong artistic statements about violence and nihilism in modern society through the eyes of young men.
Just like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, they are loaded with illuminating messages against the violence they portray.