Welcome to a new series, where I encourage you to root for the bad guys of film.
Feel confused about that animal attraction you have to the sociopathic rapist? Shh… shhh. Don’t try to fight it. I can help you understand why cinema psychos are your bread and butter. And speaking of dairy food, we’ll start with the milk-drinking droog of Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange.
It’s hard to hate Alex Delarge.
Between his wide eyes and smirk, inquisitive manner, and that almost infantile lexicon of the Cockney genre, his character is positively magnetic in its irony. How could someone so alluring be so dark? I always get sucked in every time I watch. Should I flip through the channels and come across Clockwork playing on IFC, it’s like the old days of fatty binges – even when I started to feel a bit sick inside, I couldn’t stop what I’d begun.
As with all Kubrik’s stuff, I can’t change the channel, either.
When I try to excommunicate Alex from my brain’s church of affability, he goes and says “eggy weggs” or we see him slurping down a glass of milk. Even though we all know it’s laced with drugs, there’s something about the imagery that makes him seem like a wholesome high school boy enjoying the end of a homecooked meal. Or when he’s marching along with his homies like the kid play-pretending in full regalia that he’s a king in “Where The Wild Things Are”. What’s more, the character surprises us with his taste in music. A badboy who loves Beethoven? The childlike and sometimes unexpected qualities accompanying a boundless effervescence and interest in everyone and everything feels like a car crash of clashed emotions. Whether he’s pillaging a couple while whistling “Singing in the Rain” or staring through a a bloody face with such penetrating blue eyes that we forget everything about him including his busted mug right in front of us, the irony entices and beguiles.
By now, we’ve already been drawn in.
We can’t look away.
And we don’t want to.
Much like everyone still loved Joe Dimaggio as an all American affable baseball icon even after he gave Marilyn Monroe the old Chris Brown special, I couldn’t break the trance of captivation with this character and his “ultra-violence” (even the first time I watched it and had no effing clue what he was saying). Because his immediate manner is so sociopathic that it can be mistaken for playful and free spirited, he doesn’t come off like your typical cold-blooded killer.
So we wanna know what’s ticking behind that grin.
We want to relate because part of us hears our inner Dumbledore see that thing about darkness having light if you flip the switch and we just know our favey droogy woog has it somewhere in there. Indeed, we get a chance to identify when a therapeutic transformation shifts his consciousness for the better by reclaiming old associations with sex or music or anger – to intolerable nausea and pain. That way he can’t be bad anymore. Naturally, not everyone he’s victimized is so willing to forgive his prior violent prickery. So everyone wants revenge on him by the time he’s been rehabb’d and he gets his ass kicked a lot. Since he’s reformed, we sympathize with him and are full on Alex-allies by the end, when the psychological makeover wears off.
So, do we like Alex because we like characters who seem confident and fearless and love life? Even if they’re taking it away from other people?
Yes. Yes, we do.
In fact, I still get a little pang in my “gutty wuts” every time I hear Beethoven.
Yep. Feels just like that.