A Clockwork Orange starts in a futuristic city governed by a totalitarian government. In this society, everyday people live in fear of the rebellious youth culture, and allow themselves to be “controlled” by the government. The main character of the story is Alex, a fifteen-year-old boy who tells the story in a teenage slang he invented called nadsat. He leads a small gang of teenage criminals; Dim, Pete, and Georgie. Everyday is an adventure for these teens as Alex leads the gang through the streets; robbing, beating men and raping women.
One day, Alex takes his gang, in a stolen car, to a random house to raid and see what lies within it. They come across a home with a rich, innocent, old man F. Alexander and his wife. Seeing the the beauty of the home, they barge in, trash the place, cripple the old man and rape his wife in front of his own eyes. They leave, escape the police and get away cleanly. When the police arrive at the house, the wife dies of shock from being raped and the old man becomes paralyzed from the waist down. He DEMANDS that the rascals pay for what they have done but, the police do nothing about it. He is broken.
Another day that same week, Pete and Georgie grow weary and upset at Alex’s leadership and decide to revolt against him. Alex sees this coming, fights them, wins, and puts them back in their place. Unrelenting to be led by him, Pete and Georgie devise a retaliation on Alex. On their next “mission”, they raid a house with a “Catlady” living there. Trying to protect herself, she calls the police. Out of his desperation to leave, Alex kills her on accident. As Alex sprints out of the house, Dim grabs his chain, hits Alex in the eyes, and “the groobs” run away as their ex-leader, shrieks in pain. The police finally arrest Alex and he is sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Entering prison, Alex determines the quickest way to get out of captivity is to be a suck-up and do whatever the Chaplain (Prison Priest) and Prison Governor say. One day he fights and kills his cellmate, so plan failed. However this unexpectedly works to his advantage as he captures the Minister of the Interior’s attention. The M.I. believes Alex is the perfect example for his special program called the “Ludovico’s Technique” that turns criminals into blue-collar, good-doing people.
The next day, he is met by Doctors Brodsky and Branom who will be conducting the experiment. They inject a serum into Alex that causes a person to feel extreme nausea. The Doctors ask Alex simple questions on what he enjoys most. He answers Ludwig Van Beethoven, his favorite composer of all time. They take Alex into a movie theater where he is strapped down to his chair in a strait jacket, and pin his eyelids open so that he cannot close them. They play violent films such as Hitler’s concentration camps and a man raping a woman. This doesn’t bother Alex at all. So, they begin to play Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and in Alex’s screams to stop, he becomes sickened to the point where everything he used to do for “fun” is now morally wrong to him. After months of experimentation, Alex becomes transformed into this helpless, incapable lab experiment. When he thinks of fighting, he throws up. When he wants to have sex, he can’t because it sickens him. Anything associated “morally wrong” or any classical music (Beethoven) now sickens Alex and there’s
