Rightwing film geek

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (Mel Gibson, USA, 2004, 9)

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through a Christ without a cross.”
-- Richard Niebuhr, “The Kingdom of God in America”

Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is not a movie made according to the kind of Christian creed Niebuhr mockingly describes and that has become the dominant religion in this corner of Christendom. Hallelujah.

In fact, between this film and Lars Von Trier’s upcoming DOGVILLE, every one of those four “withouts” gets put through the wringer. Both my two favorite films of the year to date are religious movies that play up these "negative" countercultural features of the Christian faith that have been watered down in this era of Nice Jesus Who Affirms Us In Our Okayness. Gibson’s film is a film about man’s sin and Christ’s cross -- viewed unsparingly and without sugar coating. If we recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday, “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried,” then THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is about what we really mean by that sentence. Nothing else.

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST isn’t flawless, in fact I was frankly surprised I was moved by the film as much as I was. But I was. The shivers went up and down my spine from the first appearance of Satan in Gethsemane and the tears flowed on several occasions (usually in concert with Mary's IIRC ... this is a very Marian Passion play). But my response was not preprogrammed. Jesus movies generally haven’t fared well with me -- I really liked Pasolini’s GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW and had a restrained admiration for THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. But Nicholas Ray, Franco Zeffirelli and George Stevens left me tepid or downright cold, and let’s not even talk about the “Junk for Jesus”/straight-to-video schlock that some of us were exposed to in school. And Gibson’s previous directorial work (primarily BRAVEHEART) I found pompously overblown, overwrought, telegraphed and repetitive. Some of those flaws find their way into his latest work. And though I think Gibson’s flaws as a director mostly work for him, I will go to my grave thinking he could been more discriminate in his use of slo-mo and didn’t need quite so much music score mixed quite so loudly. Their overuse, like all forms of promiscuity, eventually dissipates some of their power when most needed and most-deeply intended.

But Gibson’s limitations, which produces movies that come across as self-important and grandiose on other projects, become strengths when applied to a Passion film, as if he’s found his project and his niche (think a modern-day Cecil B. DeMille). THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST isn’t a drama with a plot (it lacks the usual narrative hooks and assumes you know the basic story already), rather it's more like a ritual -- a real-time Stations of the Cross. If the Roman soldiers doing the scourging behave in a flamboyantly evil style, like the rednecks in DELIVERANCE, it serves to underline that this isn't a story about some arrogant, privileged yuppies learning a lesson about intruding on nature. Nor are the Romans beating up some thieves. Or the English executing some foreign rebel. To act in a realistic, human register *in this story* would be false to the profanity of what the soldiers are doing. This is why the complaints about how the film is too violent are so utterly misguided. This is the Son of God atoning for all the world's sins, dammit. If any event deserves to be portrayed as Big, over-important, it's this one. We’re seeing, at a certain level, an act of evil beyond comprehension and so cranking up the whipping to the infinitieth degree is the only way to make the scale of the point, given that Gibson is restricted to making a film featuring a mere man. Look at the contrast between Jesus' body by the time He is crucified and those of the two thieves. If Jesus looks like the two thieves, the brutality is merely equal and thus the uniqueness of this suffering and death, what makes it the Atonement, is not shown.

*As works of art* (the only meaningful way to compare the Gospels to a movie that will be dust one day like everything else) the Gospels offer a different experience, though they have the bonus of a unique-for-all-time guarantee of infallibility. They’re very direct, unembroidered accounts (especially the first three), with minimal description -- "Jesus was scourged" is about as detailed as it gets. But since the Passion is such a familiar story and has been done so many times, it’s reasonable to demand that an artist bring something new to it, some of the kind of embroidery absent from the Gospels, and that’s where film’s immediacy comes in. Movies are concrete, particular, and veristic; while words tend to abstractify and conceptualize (which is a good thing, I hasten to add; it's just a matter of how the different media operate). Gibson's style, overblown as it is, produced for me something even the Gospels themselves don't -- being overwhelmed emotionally by the sensation that something extraordinary and world-historic is happening before my very eyes. And that’s the bell to try to ring if you’re gonna make a *film* of the Passion. A film can show the utter ruination of Christ's body, something other media can only suggest. The Suffering Servant parable of Isaiah, which Gibson alludes to in the opening title card though not this particular verse, says that the Servant had “no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him” (Isaiah 53:2). We see what such a body looks like, what “the stripes by which we are healed” (the part he does quote, 53:5) look like.

Even the John and Matthew films I favorably cited are Gospel films, not Passion films. Gibson's movie owes more to the tradition of Passion plays, a centuries-old genre that cinema has generally shied away from but *is* the genre of one of the greatest movies of all time -- Carl Theodor Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, which I deliberately watched again the day before seeing THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. While Dreyer, who is ten times the director Gibson is (that isn’t an insult ... Dreyer is ten times the director pretty much anyone is), doesn't amp up the violence like Gibson does, he certainly went for the same effect -- a single-minded, compressed appeal to the viewer’s emotions. Dreyer just amped up the feeling in other ways. JOAN is one of the most aggressively eccentric films ever made -- shot almost entirely in closeup against white backgrounds, with odd angles and compositions, strange camera movements and montages, chosen for subjective involvement above even logical sense. Much of Dreyer's drama is contained in the actors’ makeup-free faces, shot like bas reliefs on a wall, and those faces are usually something less than serene. Even when they are serene, the film's out-of-scale close-ups greatly magnify small details like the path of a tear and a blizzard of sputtered spit.

The entire genre of the Passion play was never intended as a "life of Christ" primer any more than one week's Mass is the whole liturgical year or one TV episode the whole season. Dreyer tells us nothing about the Hundred Years War and we never see the Dauphin. The genre simply assumes you know something about the Bible (and it once could) in order to get more out of it than the bald events, which aren't on the surface very interesting otherwise. There are only a few short moments presented as the import of it all -- but they’re there. One of the earliest lines of dialog is Satan taunting Jesus at Gethsemane that no man could bear the burden of all the sins of all men. It's too much. Jesus shrinks from the prospect, but then crushes a serpent, the symbol of Satan’s reign in the world, and proceeds to do just that -- to take on, according to the Father's will, the sins of the whole world. Q: How can a mere man tolerate this? A: He was no mere man -- both again justifying the hyperviolent quality of the film, but also giving us a Jesus worth following to the ends of the Earth and dying to self for, rather than just a teacher whose homilies we can take or leave at will as they suit us. This extremity also plays with our identification. Jesus’ superhuman endurance, along with His lack of speech, make it hard to "identify with" Him in the usual sense. Instead, Gibson cuts away from Jesus (far more than he’s given credit for) to give us plenty of shots of the people who see Jesus -- Mary primarily, with subsidiary roles for Peter, Judas, Pilate and Simon of Cyrene. The dominant identification, I think, is to associate with how they react to Him, to see the meaning of His suffering and how they do or do not contribute to it, more than to Christ’s suffering itself. This is Gibson's (and the Church’s) point about how we all crucified Christ. If we identify too closely with Jesus and see ourself in Him, then we'd kinda miss the point. Everybody but Mary contributes in some way to Jesus' fate: Judas’ betrayal; the Temple Jews’ accusation; the disciples’ abandonment; Peter’s denials; Herod’s insouciance; Pilate’s condemnation; the crowd’s mockery; and finally the soldiers’ executing Him. And Satan remains behind the whole action -- floating above and through it, and motivating the people.

When watching THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, the first time I remember the tears flowing over my eyes came with Peter's denials -- something I've read, referred to or seen represented a thousand times, but in terms of making that denial convincing as something *you* might do, there's just no substitute for actually *seeing* a threatening, angry mob constructed as Other (and constructing you as Other). Just words on a page, or just a few people milling about, or a Hyde Park soapbox crowd instead of a lynch mob, just won't do. Since we live in basically a risk-free environment today, it's easy for us to say "I'd never deny a friend" and so look down on Peter. Well, no. That's part of the reason I had such scorn for the ADL's whining that the Jerusalem mob was threatening ... well, duh. How could it have made a man deny his rabbi three times if it weren't? There was also an uncanny event that I’ll remember forever. The church I had gone to for Ash Wednesday Mass had some nails set up in the vestibule and you were encouraged to take one as you left for keeping with you during Lent and nailing it into a cross on Good Friday. I kept that nail in my pocket and it began to lie against my thigh a little uncomfortably just at the point of the film where they arrive at Calvary. So I fished the nail out of my pocket and held it in my hand, fingering it and fiddling with it, for the rest of the film. Partly for comfort’s sake obviously, but holding a nail during the last 30 minutes conspicuously underlined and, as a sacramental, reminded me of the role I played in the crucifixion being depicted.

Gibson personalizes the Passion both through that kind of visceral concreteness, the sacramental quality of his images, and through the liturgical points made in the flashbacks. They don't really fill in backstory as much as tell us what all this gore is the implicit culmination of. The Passion is what the Gospels had been leading up to. For example, the late Last Supper flashbacks are rhymed with the spearing of Jesus' side and the resulting contemporary-Hollywood arterial spray. So when Jesus picks up the wine and says "this is my blood ... it will be shed for you," the same words the priest says every Sunday, THIS is what "shedding blood" means. Similar flashbacks take us from Calvary to the breaking of bread. It’s as if Jesus "remembers" the Last Supper even as he enacts the eucharistic sacrifice it both establishes and memorializes. Unlike most of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, the Sermon on the Mount "love your enemies" admonition is shot in the usual Biblical Epic style, but it occurs as they arrive at Calvary, and after we're already been through the streets and the scourging. It's a way of saying THIS is what this admonition means, His command is neither abstract nor easy and no man could be exactly faulted for not wanting to live up to it or failing to do so. As I say, the brutality's very unendurability and relentlessness, taken in human terms, is pretty much the point. And it's what gives force to the Sermon on the Mount ... what makes it Commandments from a God rather than admonitions from a man. THIS was your ransom, a ransom only a God could or would pay. There’s also a raindrop effect that I don’t want to spoil beyond saying it puts God’s sovereignty and the universe itself in His tears, like in John 3:16. The resurrection itself is just one quick shot that’s barely long enough to qualify as an afterthought. The words "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" come right after Caiaphas is shown at the Cross. A critic coming to the movie looking for anti-Semitism would notice Caiaphas’ appearance but somehow ignore what Jesus says.

Which is a longwinded way of saying that I believe THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST really works only if the viewer at least provisionally believes that Christianity is true -- suspends disbelief in the same way viewers of comic-book movies allow for the purposes of the film that the sun's yellow rays can give an alien super strength, x-ray vision and all that. Now this is obviously easier for those of us who do believe it's all true, and my own Catholicism obviously predisposed me to liking this movie. But what infuriates me about many of the negative reviews THE PASSION is getting is that they are coming from a stance that is at least implicitly anti-Christian (certainly non-Christian) but usually doesn’t acknowledge itself as such (or even as a point-of-view). These critics simply would not or could not suspend disbelief -- citations coming in the next couple of days.

There's been a lot of talk in churches and the Catholic blogosphere and other Christian sites about THE PASSION being a great "teachable moment" in evangelizing a world that has turned away from Christ. And quickie books and pamphlets on the Passion are being published and whatnot. I have my doubts (actually, I have more than mere doubts) of this film's effectiveness in terms of converting hardcore or convicted non-Christians. I think its impact will be much stronger with genially, uncritically lapsed Christians and in deepening the conversion of those of us who, while practiicing, affirming and following Him, are not doing so as well as we should strive to do. Lord knows that's a great achievement in itself and it doesn't affect my emotional experience of the film. But I persist in believing this not-exactly-but-almost "preaching to the choir" aspect of THE PASSION to be an imperfection.

Maia Morgenstern as Mary gives by far the movie’s best performance. In fact most of the film’s best moments, as cinema, are scenes she dominates -- this is a movie that only a mackerel-snapper like Gibson could have made. For starters, there’s the film’s second-last shot, not just a Pieta, but one that has Mary looking right at the viewer as if to say "look what you did to my son." It frankly overshadows the rather rote and low-key Resurrection that follows it. There’s also a scene that combines the 3rd and 4th Stations of the Cross, where Jesus stumbles under the weight of the cross and a lying-in-wait Mary runs up an alley to see Jesus. It flashes back to Jesus as a boy and Mary saying something banal in the earlier context and heartbreaking when she says it in the current one. Then there’s a few short shots of Mary following Jesus by walking down one side of the street while Satan walks down the other. It’s like a kind of pas-de-deux, pairing the two black-hooded women in opposition.

The movie’s other outstanding performance was Hristo Shopov as Pilate, who’s played as the most-modern man in the movie -- a bureaucrat who acts from prudence in this to him confusing inter-Jewish quarrel in which he ain’t got no dog. Shopov plays him in the very opposite register from his flamboyantly evil droogs that do the whippings -- annoyed, well-meaning, but utterly ruthless in the end as long as he gets to wash his hands. The contrast of evils is brilliant -- he’s Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil presiding over some evil Snidely Whiplashes. The two biggest names in the cast do not quite so well. Monica Bellucci is mostly just wasted as Mary Magdelene. And then there’s Jim Caviezel as Jesus. To compare him to Falconetti in Dreyer’s JOAN movie is unfair (the films’ direction and what is demanded of them as actors is so different that you’d be better off comparing two athletes playing different sports). Caviezel plays this conception of Jesus as well as you can, but there isn’t much there for an actor to do but simply “be.” For the last 100 minutes of THE PASSION, he has to give his performance with one good eye. But his left eye is about the only body part he has in good working order from beginning to end, and it does give a fine performance, mixing defiance and serenity in its gaze.

Before we get overwhelmed by THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF MEL GIBSON ...

CRIMSON GOLD (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 8) -- I first saw this film last year at a film festival, and because I missed the first 5 minutes, I saw a fundamentally different picture from everyone else. Those early scenes include a flash-forward to the crime that ends the picture ... think the basic structure of SUNSET BOULEVARD, which this film resembles in no other respect. After a second viewing Saturday, in which I saw the whole film, I have to say I frankly prefer the CRIMSON GOLD I saw at Toronto. I stand by most of what I wrote in last year's capsule and I'm not reducing the grade because CRIMSON GOLD easily passed the existential test I put on a multiple viewing ("does it feel shorter than it did on first viewing?"). But second viewing was still a bit disappointing. It's not that the new material is bad on its own, exactly. In fact the first scene, the robbery-gone-wrong of a jewelry store, is a riveting single shot where, a subtle zoom aside, the camera sits and stares impassively at the door. Most of the action is conveyed by offscreen dialog and sound effects, though robber Hossein and the store owner move roughly through the darkly-lit frame. But starting with that robbery, and then having the second scene be a lengthy conversation with a criminal about ethics and prudence, made everything that followed seem a bit didactic and overdetermined. Part of what I enjoyed the first time was picking up in ignorance on the ways Panahi showed Hossein's smoldering class resentment and humiliation. It seemed like Days and Nights of Pizza Delivery Boy, with some dark currents that explode at the end. But without the first two scenes, it was subtextual and subtle; *with* them, it became overexplicit and Fated. And I'm an experienced enough filmgoer to know that my problem was not the inevitability of knowing the plot on second viewing -- it's closer to having a part of a painting unveiled and finding that it wrecks the overall balance and composition. Don't get me wrong; CRIMSON GOLD remains a fine, accessible, entertaining film that I'd recommend to people who maybe don't often go to subtitled Iranian movies. But just not the masterpiece I had hoped for last week.

CITY OF GOD (Fernando Meirelles, Brazil, 10) -- I don't really have anything new to say about this film critic-wise, except that it stands up beautifully to repeated viewing (this was my fourth). But I want to give a shoutout to people who have seen this great film in its three weeks of rerelease since the Oscar nominations were announced and it was picked in four categories, including the highly visible categories of director and script. I saw this film at a Sunday 930pm show (not exactly peak time) and there were 80-90 people in a theater that seats about 140. A whole year after the film was released. And this is not just Washington. The weekend of Feb. 8, CITY OF GOD played on more screens and made more money than it had in any of the weeks of its initial run. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it played on more screens and did even better the week of Feb. 15. The weekend of Feb. 22, it slipped some, but it was still the third-biggest week CITY OF GOD has had. In some ways, this is depressing -- that it takes the rare feat of four Oscar nominations to persuade many people to see a subtitled film that is about as accessible as it gets. Still, be grateful for small favors. *This* is why the Oscars matter to small movies -- they grant visibility and credibility to people other than hard-core filmgoers. I know it's unlikely, but the outcome I will be rooting for hardest Sunday night will be at least one CITY OF GOD victory (even if it's *just* cinematography or editing).

ROBOT STORIES (Greg Pak, USA, 5) -- At a Q-and-A after Saturday's Washington screening, director Pak cited Ray Bradbury, THE TWILIGHT ZONE and Kurt Vonnegut sci-fi among his influences, and that should give you an idea of the general style and tone of this anthology film of four short stories, all involving robots in one way or another. Ironically, this no-budget indie reminded me of some of the bloated $200 million Hollywoof craptaculars in one sense -- all premise, no execution. "My Baby Robot" has a yuppie couple getting a robot infant to test their worthiness for a human child. "The Robot Fixer" has the mother of a comatose young man complete and repair his boyhood toy robot collection. In "Machine Love," an office buys a computer that takes the form of a humanoid office boy (played by director Pak). Finally, in "Clay," a dying artist gets the chance to have a mind-scan done so his consciousness survives after his death. These all are great premises and they all work intermittently, but none is wholly satisfactory (so the "no execution" crack above is obviously a bit harsh) Some of the actors are quite good -- particularly Wai Ching Ho as the mother in the second story and Tamlyn Tomita as the adoptive mother in the first. But something about this film felt a bit half-done, primarily a lack of specific texture and background detail, as though the films were shot off a story rather than a screenplay. I was left scratching my head wondering whether the couple in the first story got a human baby, and I lamented all the missed opportunities for comedy ("Beavis and Butt-head" had a lot of fun with an episode in which the boys had to take care of a bag of sugar as a baby as part of sex ed). The third story ends just as it gets interesting. The two G9 iHumans find each other and have a snog on the floor. OK, so these machines-in-human-form have experienced a human emotion -- now the serious stuff starts, but Pak ends his story there. It was as if AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE had ended after the family abandons Haley Joel Osment or if 2001 had ended with HAL's act of murder.

TOUCHING THE VOID (Kevin Macdonald, Britain, 6) -- This film about a couple of mountain climbers and their unbelievable tale of conquering an Andean peak is quite gripping in many ways, but there's a fundamental and fatal conceptual flaw at its very heart. And it bugged me more and more as TOUCHING THE VOID went on because the film never even seemed to realize it. This film's cinematography and technical credits are incredible, enthralling, virtuoso ... but it was like watching Fred Astaire dance while a "Kick Me" signed is plastered on his butt. This well-known critic said he "sat there before the screen, enthralled, fascinated and terrified." And I, who consider a three-story flight of stairs as steep a climb as I want to face, might have too. Except ... The film's premise is to combine interviews with the real-life mountaineers and fictionalized re-enactments of the events of their climb and descent of Siula Grande. The descent goes horribly wrong and (you know this much just from the trailer) one is left with no apparent alternative but cutting the rope and letting the other drop who-knows-how-many-feet to his probable death. Note that 2nd-last word. "Probable." What sinks the void and had me mentally sputtering "but, but, but ..." throughout is the interview footage with the mountaineers. Oh, it's fine in its particulars. But doesn't the fact THAT IT EXISTS kind of give up the ghost -- that they both survived? They're being interviewed in the first person and the past tense? And I began to think less and less about the events being narrated and re-enacted and more and more about whether anybody told McDonald that he had ruined any narrative interest. By the end of the film, that was the only thing I cared about.

Stealing an idea from Barbara Nicolosi, these are Pope John Paul's quick reviews of my favorite films from last year, as revealed to me by inside Vatican sources. Who will lie and deny they say it if called on it.

Capturing the Friedmans -- “It is as it was. But it really wasn’t. A-ha, but then it really was.”
The Secret Lives of Dentists -- “Don’t tell me this is what it is.”
The Son -- “It is as it would have been 2,000 years later in Belgium.”
City of God -- “It was until someone killed it, and then that someone got killed, and then that killer got killed, and then ...”
Irreversible -- “?was it as is It”
Master and Commander -- “Do you want to be made to say ‘c’est comme c’etait’.”
The Shape of Things -- “It is what the artist says it is.”
Bus 174 -- “It is as it happens. Film at 11.”
Bubba Ho-Tep -- "It is as it really was, thankyouverymuch."
The Backyard -- "It is what I'm gonna pound it into and kick its ass!!!"
Girl with a Pearl Earring -- "It is what it used to be."
Down with Love -- "It is what Doris and Rock were; here's to it."
House of Sand and Fog -- "It is as real estate disputes shouldn't be."
Phone Booth -- "It is what your dreams fear."
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary -- "It is what your dreams fear. And kinda want."
Sweet Sixteen -- "It is whit ah wahnt it tae be."

I'm bringing this up here because the comment field in question will likely disappear within a couple of days.

A reader Hibernicus writes in the comment field for my IRREVERSIBLE capsule, where I mention that A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is my all-time favorite film, that "I don't see how A CLOCKWORK ORANGE can be taken seriously except by a radical antinomian or someone who thinks there is no moral difference between the Mafia and the police force of an elected government." And other comments basically to the effect that the film is nihilistic and immoral.

Well, precisely *because* the film is nihilistic and antinomian, but it doesn't sugarcoat them a la AMERICAN BEAUTY or PLEASANTVILLE. It gives us the real nauseating thing, not the "Nihilism with a happy ending" that Allan Bloom said we Americans want. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE shakes us out of our virtues ("perspectivism" and "subjectivity," primarily) by taking them to their end and asking us "like what you see?" (think Nietzsche's Zarathustra). So to some extent, my admiration is intellectual, a standing-outside afterward thinking about it. While watching it, the film is an apologia for a murderer, and I think it has to be to "work." So I would not criticize anyone for thinking the film is just plain morally unacceptable. That was part of the reason I made the IRREVERSIBLE comparison. If a lot of people hadn't come to *hate* the film and walk on it (like the townspeople did Zarathustra), they would have no bite. Only instead of giving the viewer a 97-minute taste of Hell as IRREVERSIBLE does, ACO gives the viewer a 138-minute soul transplant with Satan. And another reason for the comparison is that both films take nihilism to its hope-less end. (Actually that's not quite right. IRREVERSIBLE ends hope-less; ACO ends with hope that sticks in the craw).

ACO is the most radical attack on "perspective" and "subjectivity" ever made, because it relentlessly locks us into one, unpleasant point-of-view, Alex's. It shows what we (the viewer) can be made to like, simply through identification with the perpetrator. ACO never lets you step outside Alex's consciousness and so (it stands apart from every other film ever made about evil) it makes you like him and his evil. It has an omniscient first-person narrator, who speaks in retrospect. *Everything* in the film is filtered through Alex's consciousness -- not in the sense that the camera is always first-person, LADY-IN-THE-LAKE style -- but in the sense that we see the world and everything in it the way Alex does. That's why, as Hibernicus protests, the victims are varyingly caricatured and the soundtrack distances us from their sufferings (we hear Rossini through the attack on the Droogs; Singin in the Rain through the rape; the attack on the old drunk is like a shadow ballet, etc.). In contrast, when Alex gets it in the second act, the wails are played up to the Nth Degree. You enjoy what happens in the first act, along with Alex (a lot of frankly is quite funny); hate what happens in the second, along with Alex; and feel ambivalent relief in the coda, along with Alex. While watching ACO, you are Alex.

As for the issue of whether Alex is morally responsible, I don't really agree that ACO is contradicting itself. One of the things it is doing, in my opinion, is attacking liberal-Romantic virtues like "(negative) freedom" and the discourse that has surrounded them for 300 years. I'm a bit confused, frankly, by Hibernicus' (a) point. I don't think anything in the film portrays the Alex of the first act as "not being responsible for his actions" - quite the contrary. One of the keys to ACO's attack on "freedom," is that this is precisely when Alex is freest, in the sense of least constrained and with choices most open to him. *And* at his least morally acceptable. *But* most charming and cultured. Yes, the Ludovico technique is grotesque and tyrannical, but mind control, the preferred method for modern tyrannies, should be painted thus. We don't burn heretics at the stake any more, but we don't hesitate to sentence them to sensitivity training and psychological therapy. (This movie says everything Foucault does in DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, but does it in two "entertaining" hours.)