Alex the Antichrist

As this is Good Friday, I thought I would give you film suggestion for the day: A Clockwork Orange, my favourite. I'm not kidding. It is fitting for Easter, if only for this scene (warning: there is not only violence but also nudity in it). Is A Clockwork Orange a Christian film you may ask? Well, the YouTube video below makes a pretty good argument for it. I found I don't agree with everything the YouTuber says (and he falls for too many myths about both Anthony Burgess and the genesis of A Clockwork Orange, mostly invented by Burgess himself), but I do agree that Alex is an Antichrist figure. Quite literally, in fact. You can read my own opinion on the subject in 2016. Anyway, so there you have it: it does not take much to add A Clockwork Orange to your list of Easter movies.

Of Christ and Antichrist

Easter is tomorrow and I thought I would share an anecdote about it. I often identified Easter with Jesus of Nazareth, which script was written by Anthony Burgess, my favourite writer. He also wrote in parallel Man of Nazareth, his own and more personal take on the story of Jesus. But Burgess is of course most famous for writing the dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, which was adapted into a famous (and sometimes infamous) dystopian movie about youth, violence and free will. The connection may surprise you, but both novels/movies do share similar themes and if you pay attention to the dialogues you can see both works have the same spirit. When I told of Burgess' involvement with the Biblical movie years ago to a fellow uni student, who really enjoyed A Clockwork Orange, book and movie, he could not believe it. "Anthony Burgess wrote the script of Jesus of Nazareth? But he's the Antichrist!"

It is not quite true, but that deserves to be a great unknown line. Burgess was not the Antichrist, or even an Antichrist, although he was a lapsed Catholic and had no issue in his writing delving in blasphemous thoughts. You can read more about it in this post and that one. In A Clockwork Orange raise moral and ethical issues which cannot be answered through the narrow views of any catechism or credo. You also have a main character, Alex who is not only an antihero of another type, pure and innocent, nevertheless he could be considered a sort of Antichrist, not so much because he opposes Christian teaching as he completely disregards them. In jail, he loves reading the Bible, not as a holy work inspiring religious devotion, but as a source of sadistic fantasies. As one can see in the scene below. It is a scene like this one, which was also in the novel, that prompted by fellow student to say that Anthony Burgess was the Antichrist. He was only partially right: Burgess' character was an Antichrist. Then he wrote a character that was Christ. You tell me which one was more believable.

Holy and Blasphemous fiction

First, an announcement for my readers who live in or near Manchester, if there are any: there is a film festival organized with the collaboration of the Anthony Burgess Foundation: Christianity, Controversy, Cinema. I learned it from their blog. I don't like the title much, I think it should have been called Holy and Blasphemous Cinema, or something of the sort. When one speaks about religion and gathers controversy, it is either because it is devout or blasphemous. The first movie is of course Jesus of Nazareth. Not a controversial cinematic account of the Gospels in any way, but a beautiful movie all the same, and with plenty of Burgess' witticism. That said, I tend to put my favorite writer among the iconoclasts and the blasphemers. Because his Jesus was more Zeffirelli's Jesus, for one, and because what I would call his "Biblical trilogy" (the three novels and films he wrote about the Exodus, the life of Jesus and the early days of Christianity) question, of not completely challenges, the claims at the heart of Christianity. In Man of Nazareth, the novel he wrote alongside the movie, the sacred mixes with profane details and Rabelaisian vulgarity. I recently rewatched Moses the Lawgiver, a brilliant, underrated movie, far superior to the bombastic but far more famous Cecil B de Mille's movie. While the latter was a devout Biblical spectacle, Moses is a complete deconstruction/demythification of the Exodus, where God could merely be a manifestation of Moses' madness. Read a full review on this blog. It surprised me to read online devout Christians praising it: the movie is everything but a piece of Christian propaganda. But Burgess was blasphemous in other ways. Literature, as it is said at the beginning of The Kingdom of the Wicked for instance, has no interest in moral. It does, however, has interest in truth, and in this novel, Christian claims to truth, whether it is historical or spiritual, are smashed to pieces. The promises of eternal life is crushed by the certainty of death. Fiction has little value if it is not blasphemous.