“My friend Dennis had a copy of A Clockwork Orange and he’d already seen it once, and he was like ‘we need to watch this.’ I was sleeping over his house — and I think we were literally 15 — and we watched it. I remember my first reaction to that film was very similar to my reaction to Taxi Driver or my first reaction to Watchmen, where you just immediately gravitate toward Rorschach in Watchmen or Alex from Clockwork. And then you start to get older and realize that character wasn’t a hero at all; they’re really bad people who didn’t do anything heroic. When you’re exposed to that as a youth, you misconstrue stuff. Sometimes you literally only take it on the surface, and you see any strong action that’s done with conviction as the right action, and you start to realize later on in life that just because you felt strongly about it, it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. And that’s one of my feelings that I tried to inject into The Killjoys, especially with the characters of The Ultra-Vs. (Shaun and I said) ‘let’s literally make these characters 15-year-olds watching A Clockwork Orange, just pulling all the wrong shit from it.’”
— Gerard Way in an interview with Paste (June 12th, 2013)
I watched that film at the same age. And I was the same kind of kid drawing the wrong lessons from Rorschach or Tyler Durham. I did not love Alex from clockwork orange. It literally opens with him violently raping someone. The inciting incident is him violently raping someone else (to death I might add). There's no moral ambiguity to Alex, there's no, 'well maybe he's right' in that film. There's some ambiguity on did he deserve what he got, but none at all on if he's a good person.
