Clockwork Orange
It's a disturbing movie, to say the least. Eric Scheske's older brother exposed him to it when Eric was about 17. It's been etched into his mind since. We present this excerpt from a Lew Rockwell article because we purport to be a literary and pop culture blog (laced with religion), and CO dances in both arenas.
For you droogies, here's what Anthony Burgess wrote:
.".. a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange ”“ meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
"...I don't think I have to remind readers what the title means. Clockwork oranges don't exist, except in the speech of old Londoners. The image was a bizarre one always used for a bizarre thing. 'He is as queer as a clockwork orange' meant he was queer to the limit of queerness. It did not primarily denote homosexuality, though a queer, before restrictive legislature came in, was the term used for a member of the inverted fraternity. Europeans who translated the title as Arancia a Orologeria or Orange Mecanique could not understand its Cockney resonance and they assumed that it meant a hand grenade, a cheaper kind of explosive pineapple. I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness."
The first time I ever saw Clockwork Orange was when I was a college student and I walked into another class and they were watching this movie. I thought, "What the heck is going on here?" I sat and watched for a little while. Later, when the film finished, I decided to skip all of my classes for the rest of that day and I sat and watched this timelessly frightening ”“ and sometimes comical ”“ movie at least four times in a row. It still stands as one of my favorite films of all time.
