Singing in the Rain...Clockwork Orange

In the last couple of weeks I have been exposed to shocking and at the same time interesting pieces of art. I say art because I consider film to be an important branch of this abused word “Art”. I have to admit that I have not seen most of the films we have watched in class. I guess that in part it all can be justified by the fact that I am an international student. I also have to admit that some of them looked really fascinating and worth of watching, like Casablanca, The Women, and Singing in the Rain. ‘Singing in the rain’ was a movie made in 1949 that epitomized the story of very curious characters and how the movies evolved in the front of our own eyes. It was really funny how the audio was incorporated to the movies and how we take things like that for granted. My grandmother went to the movies without audio for instance! And sometimes we just take it so for granted, without realizing all the years and even decades of work and innovation it took to concretize the idea of audio in movies.

Who would have thought that only twenty years later the movies, especially the motifs and messages of movies would change so much? In 1969 Stanley Kubric did an adaptation of Jonny Burgess’s book “A Clockwork Orange”. I did not like what I saw. I was perturbed by the images and everything that was going on in the movie. It seems that things changed so much between the 50’s and 60’s that by the time this movie was made, the morals and portrayal of the happy American family and funny mild situations were completely distorted and varied upon the new generation of that era. We have to consider that this movie was made in a time of war, drugs, liberation of females, the invention of the pill and other anti-conceptive, drugs, hippies, the Beatles, Martin Luther King and the fight for Civil Rights, John F. Kennedy, and all over rebellion. In a sense this movie portrayed all of that. This movie is a depiction of a dystopia in its entire splendor; the questions of human nature, morality and the existence of good and evil were fundamental in the little chunks we saw in class. I thought that the part in which the guy sings ‘singing in the rain’ is nothing more than a parody of the new generation to the old, naïve, and innocent older generations when movies like ‘Singing in the Rain’ were made.