About the film and the book “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess.
When I watched this film, I couldn’t understand its point: is it that you shouldn’t take drugs because they will make you aggressive and you will be forcibly treated? Or that aggression is normal for some people, like the fascist idea of liquidating “the chimera of conscience”?
But it turns out this is what it’s about:
There is a terrible autobiographical detail in the book. In an interview with the Village Voice, the author said: “That damned book is a work full of pain… I was trying to rid myself of the memories of my first wife, who was brutally beaten by four deserters from the American army during World War II. She was pregnant and lost the child as a result. After everything that happened, she fell into a depression and even tried to commit suicide. Later, she quietly drank herself to death.”
And the book begins with the main character and his friends raping the writer’s wife (a character in the book). And it seems to me that the entire book is a meditation, the author’s attempt to perhaps get inside the mind of a rapist, to understand the reason for such aggression, the cause of violence, and perhaps an attempt to figure out what to do with such (non-)people. Or perhaps it’s an attempt to forgive.
Based on a dialogue with David Azof
