A violent young hoodlum is caught, imprisoned, and
behaviorally conditioned to be sickened by violence. He changes from a living
thing into a machine—a clockwork orange.
I watched Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” in my teens. It stays with you: Kubrick’s striking scenery and artful shots, Malcolm McDowell’s boiling performance,
and the characters’ affected speech.
The story and the speech—supposedly
a mix of Russian-derived slang terms, cockney constructions, and archaic
English—are the creation of author Anthony Burgess. I read A Clockwork Orange after seeing the movie, though,
and now I have reread it. I love it.
The end of Kubrick’s movie, released in 1971, famously
differs from Burgess’s book, published in 1962. The movie ends
with Alex, the young hoodlum and protagonist, cured, so to speak, of his
behavioral conditioning and once again aspiring to violence and criminality. Kubrick’s
version follows the American edition of the book, which omitted the book's original final
chapter in which Alex begins to lose interest in the wanton violence he pursued
aggressively in youth, instead thinking more and more of relaxing and making
something—a family, maybe.
The rest of the world had that chapter,
yet Kubrick’s film is probably still the seminal version of the story.
Burgess explains his take on the omitted
ending in a new introduction he wrote in 1986:
When a fictional work fails to show a change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or word one is a novel.
One of several nice passages in the
book and not in the movie comes after P.R. Deltoid, the Post-Corrective Adviser
from Alex’s time in a reform school, leaves Alex’s house the morning after one
of Alex’s late nights of destruction. Alex is reflecting on society’s efforts to improve
the behavior of young people like him. He shrugs his shoulders at the
idea of getting arrested again and locked up in some jail or reform institution.
So if I get loveted and its three months in this mesto and another six in that, and then, as P.R. Deltoid so kindly warns, next time, in spite of the great tenderness of my summers, brothers, it’s the great unearthly zoo itself, well, I say: “Fair, but a pity, my lords, because I just cannot bear to be shut in. My endeavor shall be, in such future as stretches out its snowy and lilywhite arms to me before the nosh overtakes or the blood spatters its final chorus in twisted metal and shattered glass on the highroad, to not get loveted again.” Which is fair speeching. But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that’s because they like it, and I wouldn’t ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by Bog or God and in his great pride and rodasty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, bothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.
Notes:
"A Clockwork Orange" seems subversive even now, and in 1962 it must have been nuts.
In the same introduction mentioned above, Burgess suggests the term clockwork
orange was first Cockney slang for a gay.
I read this in the website The Ringer
(which is taking this part probably from the New York Post):
When McDowell improvised a version of “Singin’ in the Rain” on set during the scene in which Alex paralyzes the reclusive writer Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), he unlocked a contemporary, Hollywood-aimed variation on Burgess’s point, which Kubrick then wove brilliantly into the overall design of the film. Alex uses “Singin’ in the Rain” to express his joy at inflicting pain. In the process, Kubrick “taints” the music in a manner that foreshadows the methodology of the evil scientists’ brainwashing Ludovico Technique (not to mention the pale imitation of Quentin Tarantino, whose use of “Stuck in the Middle With You” in Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Blonde’s own private ode to joy is a tribute).
