This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comIn the free sample, Jean-François Gariépy, Richard, and Mark react in real time to the release of Donald Trump’s mugshot from his arrest in Fulton County, Georgia. Richard then launches into a reading of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972)—what is Kubrick really telling us through the character of “Alex DeLarge.” The gang then debates the reali…
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| Testing, testing. | |
| Hello. | |
| Hey, JF, how are you doing? | |
| Doing good. | |
| Thanks for jumping on. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| It's a pleasure. | |
| Do we have a mugshot yet of the man Donald Trump? | |
| Yes, we do. | |
| Now, hold on. | |
| I've seen a lot of false mugshots flying around. | |
| I believe I'm seeing a real one. | |
| It looks like the real ones that were published. | |
| Interesting. | |
| So this is, um, let me post a link into the chat so everyone can see this. | |
| Breaking, okay, this is from CNN. | |
| Wow. | |
| Um, I have to say, yeah, I have to say, um, I'll post this in the chat. | |
| Yeah, I've seen someone from on call. | |
| I almost want to just post all those photos from Trump history. | |
| You know, this AI account where he's making Trump part the Red Seas and teaching Tom Brady how to play football. | |
| But yeah, he looks a bit deranged. | |
| Yeah, I mean, this could be a photo before you get into the psychiatry hospital. | |
| Well, his eyes seem to be pointing in different directions. | |
| I think he was annoyed. | |
| Yeah, that's definitely the face. | |
| I was wondering, because someone like Trump you would expect to think through these things. | |
| He would have practiced before the mirror over and over of what it's going to look like. | |
| Do you want to be stern or defiant? | |
| Or do you want to smile? | |
| I think they don't allow you to smile, actually. | |
| So I've heard. | |
| But I think that he may be trying to do a look like The Apprentice type of look, like a decisive boss. | |
| But if you take it on a bad angle, these looks aren't as good as on TV. | |
| You know, if you have a good director on your side that's trying to make you look like a boss, you're gonna look like a boss. | |
| But if you make that same look in front of a Georgian bureaucrat, you're gonna look stupid. | |
| Correct. | |
| It's actually the classic Kubrick look, where he has his protagonist or antagonist with his... | |
| He's brow proud, you know what I'm saying? | |
| You see the whites above the iris and pupil, you know, when it's looking up. | |
| I mean, it's probably most pronounced in Clockwork Orange, but he also does it in The Shining, right? | |
| Jack Nicholson also has his forehead bowed, you know what I mean? | |
| So it has a kind of sinister appearance. | |
| Yeah, I mean, Trump kind of looks like Alex DeLarge and his droogs just broke into his apartment and are raping his wife before his very eyes. | |
| I mean, is that too much of an exaggeration? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Mark and I actually just watched A Clockwork Orange recently, so it's on our minds. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| What a weird movie. | |
| That movie lovers love it, but I'm annoyed by this movie. | |
| Why are you annoyed by it? | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's like a let's take over the boomer type of movie, but in a very failed way, in a very failed direction. | |
| I'm all for taking over society from the boomers, but not in the direction suggested by this movie. | |
| So you're suggesting that Alex's beating of the old homeless man and his just general reckless defiance is kind of taking... | |
| It's like the youth taking over the boomer world. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Okay. | |
| I think there's another reading. | |
| Oh, yeah? | |
| His name is Alex DeLarge, so I believe he's Alexander the Great. | |
| Okay. | |
| He's also a bit of a mirror image of, in the film, Frank Alexander, who's the writer who gets cuckolded in the most unimaginably bad way by the Droogs in one of the early scenes. | |
| And he also lives at home, which is, you know, there's a kind of Freudian element, Oedipal element to that. | |
| But I think... | |
| Mark and I were talking about this, and we don't have a definitive reading, but I think behavioralism is a kind of... | |
| I mean, I think Kubrick probably himself didn't like someone like Skinner, and I think Kubrick is a Freudian. | |
| He is interested in Nietzsche and all that. | |
| He's just a different type of person who would not respond to behavioralism and Skinnerism. | |
| So Skinner wrote a book called like Beyond Freedom. | |
| I mean, he wasn't suggesting exactly a Ludovico technique, but he was suggesting that you could, in effect, train people like dogs to, you know, if you sit, you get a treat. | |
| If you chew up my socks, you don't get dinner. | |
| You get disciplined in some way. | |
| And he took this as this almost all-encompassing way of understanding human behavior. | |
| And yeah, I think someone like Kubrick definitely is reacting against it. | |
| But my view of it is kind of twofold. | |
| There's this connection between Alex and Beethoven, obviously. | |
| And there's a connection between Frank Alexander, the writer, who's a kind of libertarian. | |
| He's kind of like you, basically, I think. | |
| I think he is you. | |
| Right-wing libertarian who hates the public. | |
| The people, they will sell the tradition of liberty. | |
| For a quiet life. | |
| They must be led. | |
| You're touching on something. | |
| You're touching on something. | |
| But I'm not sure if this movie is the revolution of the hippies or if it's a revolution against the hippies. | |
| That's what I'm wondering. | |
| Well, this is what... | |
| Okay, let me compete it. | |
| Frank Alexander is also connected to Beethoven. | |
| He looks like Beethoven. | |
| He's almost a human bust of Beethoven. | |
| And he... | |
| Also, his doorbell is the... | |
| I don't know if you caught this, but his doorbell is... | |
| So his doorbell is the opening line of the Fifth Symphony. | |
| So both of them are kind of like... | |
| And also, Beethoven's connected to Hitler. | |
| So, they start playing the Ninth Symphony in that very famous scene. | |
| I'm sorry if I'm leaving anyone behind here who hasn't seen the film, but I imagine most of you have seen it. | |
| The famous scene where they're playing the Ninth Symphony as a background score. | |
| They're like, are you referring to the background score? | |
| They're playing it as a background score to what are kind of Linny Riefenstahl-esque. | |
| You know, images of Nazi rally and then actually like bombings of Poland. | |
| I think there might have been historical Holocaust imagery in there as well, but that's associated with Beethoven. | |
| So what I think Kubrick is suggesting as a sort of Freudian or Nietzschean is that in a way, there's no difference between Beethoven and Hitler. | |
| There's no essential difference. | |
| The only real difference is that Beethoven is a kind of sublimated, martial, domineering attitude. | |
| That you either write a symphony or you invade Poland. | |
| But there's some type of masculine force, life force, that is pumping through the veins of both Beethoven and Hitler. | |
| And obviously, one is preferable to the other. | |
| But they are the same thing. | |
| And that, you know, I think that Kubrick is probably pretty ambivalent about Alex. | |
| Alex LeGrand, Alexander the Great. | |
| He's a kind of force of Aryan energy. | |
| He's smart, but he's also naive. | |
| And he fundamentally is sociopathic. | |
| He doesn't give a shit. | |
| But he's also actually a good leader in a weird way. | |
| He kind of knows he needs to bring the droogs in line. | |
| Keep a good hierarchy. | |
| We don't want any rebellions on our hands or anything like that. | |
| My guess is that Kubrick is giving... | |
| The other thing that's connected is sex and violence. | |
| Not only is after Alex goes through the Ludovico technique and he is modified through behavioralism to hate violence, but he also can't lust after women. | |
| In one scene that you might remember, a naked woman just walks before him, and he's kind of reaching up to her breast, but then he cowers down because he's feeling all the sickness because he's associated in a behavioral-like method sex with nausea and death. | |
| And so he's kind of... | |
| I think in some way that Kubrick is... | |
| Very ambivalent about Aryan power, and it needs to be contained, and that can take different forms. | |
| I mean, it could take the form of becoming Beethoven, or it could take the form of being kind of modified and pacified through the modern welfare state or Christianity. | |
| And he becomes a Christian. | |
| That's actually said explicitly. | |
| He said he is a good Christian who will always turn the other cheek, it's said by a politician. | |
| So Kubrick is kind of suggesting that Christianity is a way of making the Aryan good. | |
| But I think there's also another aspect of a punishment where they say at one point, the behavioral scientist who's a kind of stand-in. | |
| For B.F. Skinner, he says, you know, well, he's associating Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Hitler, and he says, well, it can't be helped. | |
| Perhaps this is part of the penal aspect of this. | |
| He's like, I'm sorry, boy, there's nothing that can be done. | |
| And so what he's kind of telling you is maybe you might need to take away Beethoven. | |
| Like, you can't have your cake and eat it too. | |
| You can't, like, You know, there's that kind of thing of like, and many people said this, including like Jewish conductors or Israeli Jewish conductors like Berenboim or something of, you know, Richard Wagner, he was the worst man of all time. | |
| He was a rabid anti-Semite. | |
| He was a preface to Hitlerism in so many ways. | |
| But I still love his music, you know, but I think Kubrick might actually be suggesting that that's not possible. | |
| You can't have your cake and eat it too. | |
| Anyway, these are just kind of my initial thoughts on it. | |
| I think it's a good movie. | |
| The other interesting thing about it is that it's the immediate follow-up to 2001. | |
| And Kubrick was, after 2001, obviously huge budget. | |
| And Kubrick wanted to make a Napoleon movie. | |
| But they were having a huge cash crunch. | |
| In Hollywood, probably like what we're going to see in the coming years, where they just can't afford this stuff. | |
| And so they have this low budget. | |
| So I think, in a way, A Clockwork Orange is kind of his Napoleon film, and he was thinking through these issues. | |
| And I think he probably would have had a similar message if that Napoleon film had been made. | |
| Very interesting. | |
| I have to watch it again, because it's been probably 15 years that I haven't seen it. | |
| Yeah, that's the same with me. | |
| I had not seen it in a while, and I rewatched it, and then Mark and I rewatched it again last night, and it's an interesting one. | |
| It's not his best, but it's kind of fascinating, and it might tell you his thoughts about Aryans, basically. | |
| We're all basically Alexander DeLarge's... | |
| At heart. | |
| But it's a very sad message if he says we have to abandon the music, basically. | |
| Yeah, it is a sad message. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And maybe does Beethoven kind of inspire? | |
| You know, does listening to Beethoven, Alex really connects with Beethoven, and is that actually inspiring his violent mayhem? | |
| Because, you know, there is a lot of that in the music. | |
| I was talking about this with Mark the other night. | |
| I was like, there are a lot of classical composers who you could say the music is kind of background music or entertainment. | |
| I don't want to demean Mozart or something, but sure, at some level, it's a kind of nice music that you can have on. | |
| You can imagine it being performed in a court. | |
| You know, you could have it on while you're eating dinner or something. | |
| But Beethoven, he kind of grabs you by the ears and forces you to listen to him. | |
| I mean, it is a violent music. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I mean, he wrote a symphony about Napoleon. | |
| His third symphony is about Napoleon. | |
| And then Napoleon invaded the German lands and he scratched it off the score, as the legend goes. | |
| I mean, it's... | |
| But it's a kind of violent music. | |
| So you could even suggest, is it sublimation or does listening to Beethoven, if you're really able to listen to it, does it get you in touch with the life force and violence and pillaging and conquest and domination? | |
| We're all living in this horrible welfare state of modern Europe. | |
| And it's just stupid and dysfunctional and it makes everyone equal in the worst possible way. | |
| But can you listen to Beethoven and want to be Hitler effectively? |