Word: ludovico
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...band of pious mendicants. Legend has it that St. Thomas Aquinas' family locked him in a room with a whore to dissuade him from joining the Dominican order. But the deprogramming practiced by to day's soul snatchers seems suspiciously like a religious version of the Ludovico technique - that brain-blowing treatment administered to Alex, the anti-hero in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It was designed to make him acceptable to society by ridding him of his sado-sexual violence. In the process Alex also lost his free will...
Like its savage anti-hero Alex, A Clockwork Orange will soon be subjected to a tiny taste of the Ludovico Technique-that brain-blowing treatment that was to rid Alex of his sado-sexual violence. At the end of next month the Stanley Kubrick film will be temporarily withdrawn from theaters to allow the censors' scissors to transform it from an X- to an R-rated movie (children under 17 admitted with parent or guardian). After 60 days Clockwork will emerge from the Motion Picture Association of America's purification rite shorn of its scarlet letter...
...Alex stomps the author of an essay called "A Clockwork Orange," which protests the state's "attempt to impose...laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation"; in addition, he brutally rapes the writer's wife. Later, Alex is sent to prison on a murder charge and undergoes the Ludovico Treatment--which conditions him against violent, sexual or (ironically) musical action, leaving him helpless when he finally returns to the outside world. The writer initially pities Alex--whom he then discovers to be the mugger and rapist. The writer's motives become muddled--he attempts to kill Alex and discredit...
...fantasy is a plush animated cartoon, with extraordinary color consistency (credit John Alcott's lights), one acceptable action setpiece (a gang battle, not the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence), and a cast of characters in no way as interesting and varied as that of Fritz the Cat. The Ludovico Treatment, not as indispensable to the book's development as Burgess's language and characters, not only dominates the film's outlook, but the way in which it works...
...menaced on all sides, by the old bum, by his former droogs (now turned policemen), by the husband of the woman he raped. It is what Kubrick calls "an almost magical coincidence of retribution"-so magical, in fact, that it eventually brings Alex back full circle, recovered from the Ludovico Technique and ready to embark on a life of ultra-violence with the blessings of the Minister of the Interior himself...