the fourth clockwork experiment

This post contains A Clockwork Orange spoilers.

What’s disturbing in this film, aside from Alex’s deep corruption of the soul, is the scientists’s twisted method of “cure”. Not exactly the pavlovian agony it causes in itself but the “unavoidable punishment”… How cruel! to take something pure and heavenly like Music and make it dreadful and lethal…!

Alex loves Ludwig Van, as he calls him, and said about the Ninth Symphony:

Oh, bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!

I know exactly what he’s feeling, for I love Kate’s music and it loves me back, in the very same way.

Isn’t Music the greatest of Arts? Greater than the Seventh, even though Alex is quite right when he says that “the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”

How could a process be so terrible as to cure Alex of his perversions while perverting the one unpolluted pleasure in his life? Alex later said, of the same Ninth he loved:

The pain and sickness all over me like an animal. Then I realized what it was. The music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig Van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony. Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it.

It is sin,

(No. No! NO! Stop it! Stop it, please! I beg you! This is sin! This is sin! This is sin! It’s a sin, it’s a sin, it’s a sin! )

and it’s a mistake (in the making)… a true Experiment IV!

And the public are warned to stay off.