Clockwork Orange Vs Fight Club

A Clockwork Orange is a film about violence but also about being a voyeur to violence and our responses to it. The excitement in the film is initially watching the violence of Alex, and then the violence of the State (ie us) against Alex. Are we excited by the rape scene, are we excited by the conditioning against him Is this what happens when we punish someone, is this why society punishes / rehabilitates via aversion therapy.

FIght Club by its very narrative and the tricks inherent in the films is a dialogue between audience and viewer into whether or not our society lacks something. Its a perfect film for the G8 protesters as it grabs the psycholanalytical need for unhappy people to protest - gives thema framework and then it follows it to its logical and ridiculous conclusion. The actual twist in the film involves us more, though I fear may have led people to trivialise some of the rather well made points in the film.

I like 'em both - though prefer Fight Club as there is more meat to it.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/397140_3053312262350_1549594031_32829046_1013450295_n.jpg

very C Aubrey Smith

it blew my mind to find out that he was the narrator on the "Great Expectations" episode of South Park. one of the best "truly evil" character portrayals I've ever seen

A new, low budget adaptation/homage on its way.

ALEX
In the near future the society of a megalopolis is divided into two fractions: on one side a super-rich minority, led by the ruthless dictator Lucius (Werner Daehn), living a life of debauchery and decadence.
On the other side the vast majority, dwelling in different degrees of nearly unbearable poverty.
When the young Frederick (Nikolai Kinski) comes in possession of the partial copy of a long forbidden Stanley Kubrick movie, it sparks a growing movement amongst the city's formerly aimless youths, developing fast into serious opposition to the ruling system, which retaliates with rapidly increasing brutality.
Frederick becomes Alex, his friends the new droogs. But are they even aware of the consequences of their actions?

Trailer

lol @ the idea of Fight Club being "about" something

http://images.fandango.com/MDCsite/images/featured/201303/clockworkredo.jpg

you're too young to remember the mid-late '90s, right silby? I'll give you a pass.

What the mid-late '90s were actually about:

http://www.thelostogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/the-craft.jpg

lol @ the idea of Fight Club being "about" something

iirc the first 95% is about how women are terrible and ~modern life~ is terrible bcz women and lol macho fighting awesome, and the last 5% might be about "and if you actually believe that, you might be crazy" but is probably just about "whoa lol mental illness and explosions are kool" (the only interpretation anyone who likes the film is interested in)

hope that helps, I am of course widely noted as an expert film buff and critical thinker

i'm sure Palahniuk's misogyny is real, i'm not sure that Fincher's not taking the piss out of it. fanboys are grotesque and we can discount their opinions about everything.

Alex looks v. purty.

what a terrible thread today

fuck off

fuck Fight Club.

both great films

Or neither are, if you prefer

first rule of hating Fight Club is you don't stop talking about hating Fight Club

anybody hating on Clockwork Orange is just a case tho

Clockwork Orange is likely Kubrick's worst film and Fight Club is likely Fincher's best, so.

i like both i just don't really get the visceral outrage people seem to have bout FC.

I like C. Orange but it's not great. Fight Club is kinda OK, no strong feelings either way.

Clockwork Orange lacks that crucial chocolate sandwich scene

Yeah, but it has them butter curls.

the most interesting aspect of kubrick's ACO (can't remember much about the novel) seems to me to be its defense of art as autonomous from ethics/morality/justice. (not for nothing is alex subdued through the equivalent of bad movies.)

i think that's probably straight from Burgess, it's a very faithful filming of the novel iirc

ah ok. except for the ill advised ending burgess added later (after the film, I presume).

The book has three parts, each with seven chapters. Burgess has stated that the total of 21 chapters was an intentional nod to the age of 21 being recognised as a milestone in human maturation. The 21st chapter was omitted from the editions published in the United States prior to 1986.[4] In the introduction to the updated American text (these newer editions include the missing 21st chapter), Burgess explains that when he first brought the book to an American publisher, he was told that U.S. audiences would never go for the final chapter, in which Alex sees the error of his ways, decides he has lost all energy for and thrill from violence and resolves to turn his life around (a slow-ripening but classic moment of metanoia—the moment at which one's protagonist realises that everything he thought he knew was wrong).

At the American publisher's insistence, Burgess allowed their editors to cut the redeeming final chapter from the U.S. version, so that the tale would end on a darker note, with Alex succumbing to his violent, reckless nature—an ending which the publisher insisted would be 'more realistic' and appealing to a U.S. audience. The film adaptation, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is based on the American edition of the book (which Burgess considered to be "badly flawed"). Kubrick called Chapter 21 "an extra chapter" and claimed[5] that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, and that he had never given serious consideration to using it. In Kubrick's opinion, the final chapter was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book.

did not know this. been a v. long time since i read the book but my copy was British

i guess alex and tyler are sorta kindred personalities. i had never considered them together before this thread. tyler has a vision through--he's essentially really a fascist (and the appeal of fascism seems to be at the heart of FC for me) while Alex is an old-school Sadean aesthete.

Alex has no social consciousness (you could almost say he rejects it on principle), while Tyler has a specific social program.

one of the pleasures of FC for me is the way that self-exclusion from modernity and modern society into what you could call a withdrawn existentialism slowly but surely evolves into social violence and even oppression. so while Alex represents a kind of absolute freedom, Tyler shades more towards what Deleuze somewhere describes as our love and desire for oppression.

I wonder it breaks down to ACO being the incommensurability of art/freedom and social control--while FC demonstrates the organized and systematic violence that occurs when that incommensurability is collapsed together.

oh wow thanks for posting that--had no idea that was the "original" ending!

Alex is portrayed as an adolescent, in the book and the film it's quite clear that he isn't a fully developed adult, he's one of those scary teenagers that adults in 1962 were already othering. i guess in a way the book is about education, and Burgess is saying that dishonestly raising children to conform to societal mores kills their higher impulses as surely as their lower ones.

Tyler may be a manchild, but he is pretty clearly an adult, alienated by adult existence. for Fincher (i don't know the book) the guy is responding to the world he inhabits rather than "going thru a phase". for all Tyler's subversion amounts to self-destruction, i think his critique of that world is mostly meant to be taken as sincere and valid. in a way i'm not sure that the film has an answer to the problems it poses and it's quite possible to look at the ending as a cop-out, or a loser's fantasy of power in the mode of American Psycho.

incidentally i've never been sure whether Nadsat implies that Alex's world is a post-Soviet one. it's obviously a totalitarian society. in a way he's also the product of a reaction against a kind of Fascism, which makes his violence political even if that word never crosses his mind.

ah ok. except for the ill advised ending burgess added later (after the film, I presume).

Which is?

see the wiki quote upthread

in a way he's also the product of a reaction against a kind of Fascism, which makes his violence political even if that word never crosses his mind.

that's a great point.

i think Tyler's rhetoric is sorta valid (if in a rather vague and empty sense) but he basically rejects the freedom he preaches early on. freedom becomes a program for him.

Alex seems less compromised in that way. (until he is brought to heel--Tyler brings himself to heel).

see the wiki quote upthread

Right, I never knew an alternate ending existed

yeah i guess as an adult Tyler does recognise his politics as nihilistic in the end

but the nihilism succeeds, after a fashion, possibly in his head. and fascism is seductive.

absolutely. i think that FC acknowledges that is one of its greatest strengths.

the two narratives start in different places. Alex feels gloriously alive, but through assault, gang fights, rape etc. The protagonist in FC is so benumbed he hijacks 12-step groups so he can receive sympathy, embraces etc.

yeah Alex is undoubtedly living in Eden at the start of Clockwork Orange

in fact i'm trying to think if Burgess paints him as pre-lapsarian or if he revels in being bad

sorta interesting too to compare Burgess's ending with FC's ending in terms the "domestication" of a relationship with a woman--though FC's strikes me as much richer since it undercuts that with the immense irony of Tyler getting the last laugh.

the book's alex feels like a more rounded, complete and complex character than the one in the film -- you can buy the idea of burgess's alex reforming when he gets older, but malcolm mcdowell's alex will be rotten till the day he dies. i think burgess's intended ending works well in the novel, but i can't imagine it working in kubrick's film.

20 years

https://thequietus.com/articles/27232-fight-club-anniversary

wonder if this was intended to be book vs. book or film vs. film -- i wd hope even fight club fans would concede that chuck palahniuk is not a better writer than anthony burgess

i'm sure Palahniuk's misogyny is real

well, he's gay

new Marxist theory book

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/marxism-fight-club/

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/88363974_10157117303337742_150649804723060736_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_ohc=SKrvTx7vG00AX8GwO2y&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=da1a44031fdac3f0e898ba5f678e0167&oe=5E948884

i started w/ #5

caught this on cable recently. still mystified how controversial it remains. still very funny, now quite in some respects but that'll come around again.

now quite *dated*

I listened to a podcast episode about it lately. It was the Bechdel Cast, which critiques movies from a feminist perspective. And their reactions were all like "this is so fascist" etc. I was kinda shocked. I don't think that they touched on gender identity or sexuality at all.

can't imagine what problems a feminist perspective might detect with gay fascist fantasy

imo the thing that's funniest about fight club is that the narrator's internal monologue is dumber than his fascist imaginary friend's speeches

ed norton plays peak dilbert-era scott adams, brad pitt plays post-trump scott adams

ouch

also lol

ah idiotic takes live on, i see

mh and Οὖτις both OTM

go back to your antiquated bad movies

I really like this movie! maybe a little less than I did upon release

it was released within the first few weeks of my freshman year of college. saw it with some random guys from my dorm floor opening night, in a now-defunct theater that was both first-run and discount at the time, with crappy seats and passable projection and sound, right across the street from my residence. saw it again the next night after realizing the couple socially awkward dudes I'd only spoken to a few times were movie nerds. still in contact with the movie nerd guys

of course, being a college freshman, I'd also gone to a poster show at the union building and had an unlicensed clockwork orange poster on my dorm room wall of Alex just chilling with his droogs