Alex was the first true anti-hero. Despite his malice you get the feeling there is some sort of twisted good deep down inside him and you wind up preferring the unfettered anti-social Alex to the sanitized "safe" Alex.
shareLol. You never heard of Spaghetti Westerns?
shareI'm not sure I would consider him an anti-hero. While he is the protagonist and narrator, he doesn't possess any redeeming qualities that could make him something of a sympathetic character.
shareI agree, Sandman81. He doesn't really learn his lesson at all and just goes back to being a rapist at the end. He never really goes after anyone that is bad. Only goes after innocent people.
shareWhat is "twisted good?"
Is that your definition of an anti-hero? Maybe. But I see nothing that Alex does that in any way benefits society.
Alex is full of contradictions. He is anti-social to the point of malevolence yet appreciates Beethoven with the passion of a Beatles fan.
share"appreciates Beethoven with the passion of a Beatles fan."
His truly appalling actions however counteract whatever appreciation he might have for Beethoven and that alone doesn't make him "good".
It also isn't really that huge a contradiction if you think about it (for instance, Nazis often played classical music when they marched the Jews into the owens) and it totally doesn't diminish or excuse his wrongful deeds and certainly don't make up for it.
Plus, I bet loads of bad and guilty criminals in real life have taken appreciation and admiration to many great things in life be it music, books, films and other works of art and entertainment, certain people, animals etc etc etc, hardly any ground-breaking news, not all criminals are totally, you know, as much as some can be here and there.
I did not get that feeling from Alex at all.
He struck me as a pure psychopath and a sadist. He tortured and killed without remorse.
I never thought Clockwork Orange was good or even acceptable, and I hated the actor Malcolm McDowel almost to the present day. This was when movies turned to insanity, and since that time the American public and children have been driven insane by killing, rapes, war, crime, too much sex. Always though that was a shite movie.
share2 Brux - do you really think the film was RESPONSIBLE for all of THAT?
shareAlso, to a degree that we CAN agree, many or at least some films have also had anti-heroes before that.
Take for instance Norman Bates in "Psycho" (1960). OK, he is an antagonist and in many ways a villain technically but he is also in a way troubled and OK she didn't deserve it either but his victim was guilty of theft etc and the film did somewhat invite viewers to understand and emphasize with him as it also revealed he had a troubled childhood and he could appear charming at times also.
I just remembered the Clint Eastwood "man with no name" character in the spaghetti westerns.
shareGuys like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Robert Mitchum were playing anti-heroes as far back as the 1930s and 1940s.
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