something about “A Clockwork Orange”

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). 

 

about Richard Yates’ “Disturbing the Peace”

Richard Yates debuted in 1961 with Revolutionary Road. Critics would say that was his peak, although his short stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and his fourth novel, The Easter Parade (1976), both drew high praise—much of it posthumously.

I first read The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2004), then The Easter Parade, and then Revolutionary Road. I loved it all and thought some of his short stories equaled Revolutionary Road. But I had been wanting more, so I started with Disturbing the Peace, published in 1975.

Disturbing the Peace dramatizes a suburban middle-class man’s breakdown.

John Wilder works in advertising sales for a magazine. He drinks a lot—too much—and early in the novel finds himself locked in a psychiatric ward over the long Labor Day weekend—a traumatizing experience. He tries to resume life after his release while also regularly visiting a psychiatrist and attending AA meetings. But alcohol abuse soon resumes its place in his life, and AA meetings become cover for frequent rendezvous with his mistress and escapes from his wife and son. He continues drinking even while on powerful prescription medication.

Critics did not care for the novel, and I had my doubts in the first quarter of it or so, but I read on and was rewarded. (I read the rest of Yates's works after this.)

My favorite excerpt from Disturbing the Peace comes after Wilder has reestablished his life but starts spending most evenings drinking and sleeping with his mistress across town. After some months, Wilder’s neglected wife forces him to spend an evening with her in a coffee shop, where she breaks the news that the school guidance counselor has singled out their son.

“He said—oh, John, he said Tommy’s emotionally disturbed and he thinks we ought to have him see a psychiatrist. Right away.”

Wilder had learned once, in some elementary science course either at Grace Church or at Yale, that the reason for a retractable scrotum in all male mammals is to protect the reproductory organs in hazardous or distressful situations: sharp blades of jungle grass, say, will brush against a running animal’s thighs, and the testicles will automatically withdraw to the base of the trunk. He wasn’t sure if he had it right—did he have anything right that he’d ever learned in school?—but the basic idea seemed sound, and in any case it was happening to him now: his balls were rising, right there in the coffee shop.

Note: I read a Delta trade paperback reissue I bought on Amazon. It had a couple of minor typos and flaws but was fine.

something about the mentor

You could say there was something pitiful about her. And, superficially, you wouldn't be wrong. She had these big, scared eyes (the right one maybe popped in a little lower than the left). Under different circumstances, you might have wondered if she was in shock—those eyes always wide, reflective, lacking presence, suggesting vulnerability. She spoke aimlessly, ceaselessly. In groups, she ticked her head like a chicken and registered each person's face, seeking approval there.

something about psychology, in general

All psychology is armchair psychology.

Psychology for clicks

This Vanity Fair article, "The Lonely Guy," makes the case that President Obama's strong inward-directedness underpins his political failures. The diagnosis:

Self-containment is not simply Obama’s political default mode. Self-possession is the core of his being, and a central part of the secret of his success. It is Obama’s unwavering discipline to keep his cool when others are losing theirs, and it seems likely that no black man who behaved otherwise could ever have won the presidency.

But this quality, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength in gaining office, is his greatest weakness in conducting it.

Obama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him?

The author would have us believe that Obama's self is the issue here. The matter is not poor leadership, carelessness, incompetence, bad delegation practices, or the simple fact that every presidency has some major failures. No, in Obama's case we find a complication of self.

The article then relates a few quotes from Obama's peers who say the man is aloof. Gradually the author shifts his thesis away from Obama's selfhood and toward his character, essentially saying the President is not a team player. "He has quietly purged from his inner circle those most likely to stand up to him." The fix? "Obama has always insisted that he is playing a long game. The problem is that when everyone else in Washington is still playing a short game, the president sometimes has to play on their board." This unsupported claim applies to the reader, too. The article's author renders a judgment that time can't bear out and the reader is supposed to click through.

The age of your friends' anxiety

The author of the New York magazine piece "Listening to Xanax" declares this the age of anxiety and, therefore, of anti-anxiety medication: "If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath." How did an editor at a major, reputable publication think something was being said here?

First we learn of a kind of situational (as opposed to compulsive) anxiety:

“Situational anxiety” today stems from threats that are both everywhere and nowhere at once. How will the debtor nations in the eurozone ever manage to pay back what they owe? How can Israel disarm Iran’s nuclear program without inciting the messiest international conflict since World War II? How can you be absolutely, 100 percent sure the cantaloupe you had for lunch wasn’t contaminated with listeria that will make you or your kids or one of your guests deathly sick?

Oh, anxiety can be scary, she confesses, but it also lives this "second life as a more general mind-set and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future." Nevermind that the future is always uncertain, flashing warning signs up ahead--more to the point, nobody in the society she's talking about has suffered an anxiety attack or even lost a wink of sleep worrying about the kind of macro political and economic issues she describes. Nobody thinks, "Oh, Lord, what's Iran gonna do? I need a Xanax!"

Because this one was so weak, she quickly switches to another intellectually weak premise, focusing now on what is called functional anxiety--something she acknowledges that everyone has and has always had:

But functional anxiety, which afflicts nearly everyone I know, is a murkier thing. Its sufferers gather in places like New York, where relentlessness and impatience are the highest values, and in industries built on unrelenting deadlines and tightrope deals.

This obliterates her initial premise--that there's something unique about this age in terms of anxiety. But she soldiers on. Her sample functionally anxious subject says,

“I use my anxiety to be better at what I do,” says an executive at a boutique PR firm. “A certain amount of anxiety makes me a better employee but a less happy person, and you have to constantly balance that. If I didn’t constantly fear I was about to be fired or outed as a loser, I’m afraid I might be lazy.”

So, her overly dramatic but otherwise mentally healthy, motivated, ambitious, and competitive friends she describes in the language of mental illness. Here, she extinguishes all hope of having made a point: "Not quite a disease, or even a pathology, low-grade anxiety is more like a habit." In other words, something so ordinary I shouldn't have brought it up at all.

And from much ado about nothing, she explores what to do about nothing. First, she briefly describes folks who resist the drug-first approach, completely misconstruing them as shooting to "cure" her successful friends of their healthy habits:

A cure isn’t what the PR executive with the occasional Klonopin habit wants. “My own personal experience is that there’s a healthy level of anxiety, and I don’t believe ‘healthy’ is the absence of anxiety,” she says. “I live in a world that puts unreasonable demands on me, and sometimes I need help. I wish I could do it without the pills, but I can’t.”

Exactly--you're already healthy, and not this imagined poster sufferer in an age of anxiety.

Besides, no one wants to cure you or your stupid friends.

Notes:

• In the meantime, she ignores obvious related issues: differences in drug use by class (and hers is an upper class, to be sure), the history of anxiety and its treatment (in and out of psychology), the rise of diagnoses, the increase in medications and prescriptions, the trend of first prescriptions causing need for a second, exterior sources of existential dread over time, and on and on.

• Worst anecdote she gives: "A friend of mine had dental surgery recently, a procedure she both hates and fears. So proud was she that she’d sworn off Klonopin that she decided to forgo the medication ahead of her dental appointment. “I thought, Don’t be a baby. That’s just weak. You should be able to handle things.” She had a panic attack in the chair and was “a total bitch,” she says, to the dentist. “Oh, wait a second,” she reminded herself as the drill whined and the tooth dust spattered, “there’s a medical reason for these things.” "

• "Its sufferers gather in places like New York"? In places like ... New York?

Billy Corgan at SXSW 2012

My sense is Billy Corgan can't say word without immediately being crapped on. This comment from SXSW, for example: "I was part of a generation that changed the world - and it was taken over by poseurs."

Corgan was discussing the Internet's effect on musical fame and artistry, and the obstacles that keep new artists from emerging. As the author of this Billboard post put it: "If there was an overarching theme, though, it's that both musicians and technology are feeding the mentality that fame is what should be hoped for, leaving artistry in its wake."

Corgan's comment is mostly laughable because it's such a hyperbolic generalization. But one angle of it may be something: Corgan's generation created Alternative music. Although that label now is as meaningless as Indie is, Alternative* music originally meant that outcasts, i.e., Freaks and Geeks, now had their own community in which acceptance was a foregone conclusion. You like Jane's Addition? You're in. You like Dinosaur Jr.? You're in. The only ground rule: Don't judge based on appearances.

Now, jump ahead to the new generation: To make it today, bands are forced and encouraged to act out, to create online selves so as to be liked; to one-up the next guy to get passer-by traffic--the ultimate in disinterested attention paid on unequal terms--something not altogether unlike the stripper-customer relationship.

The Alternative scene of Corgan's day obviously wasn't the first to welcome outcasts and losers (so to speak), but it was the first to, arguably, make them the mainstream. If nothing else, I think Corgan said something worth considering rather than just venting the bitterness of a has-been or the histrionics of a megalomaniac.

*I mean Alternative music to the extent that such a thing is reducible.

Notes:

• You could also say the when an out-group becomes the in-group, they soon adopt and enforce social rules and prejudices like the previous in-group.

• Internet-wise, as part of Generation X, Corgan's generation could maybe claim to have pioneered the common usage of the public Internet and with having populated it with its earliest content, giving it shape and color, meaning and appeal, from early social networking to wiki-style content development. But, whatever the accomplishments of the next generations, they likely can't be called poseurs.

Inspiration

In this culture you often hear of at least two kinds of inspiration: (1) artistic inspiration and (2) personal inspiration.

Talk of artistic inspiration might sound like, "Beethoven's 5th and 9th Symphonies are his most inspired" or "Beethoven was inspired when he wrote his 9th Symphony". Talk of personal inspiration comes in two flavors: (a) Common personal inspiration and (b) uncommon personal inspiration.

Someone might use common personal inspiration when boosting a child who's performing poorly in school: "You know, Einstein failed classes in school when he was a kid". The inspirational message being driven is something like "You never know what you might be capable of achieving".

Uncommon inspiration stories often explicitly speak of overcoming adversity. For example, you might hear about a promising young athlete who after a car accident is left paralyzed from the waist down. This same young athlete then goes on to be an accomplished musician. Or, the inspiring person may grow up dirt poor or suffer from a mental or cosmetic handicap but accomplish great things nevertheless.

The subject or protagonist in uncommon inspiration stories rarely--maybe never--overcomes adversity because he was inspired by another uncommon inspirational story. Rather, his motivation and ability is unique to who he is. In other words, uncommon inspirational stories usually do not inspire. They serve as stories of interest. But they have a wider cultural effect: These stories create an archetype of a poor, disadvantaged, or disabled person from which we draw expectations about the poor, disadvantaged, or disabled.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Reading Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Early in the novel our freewheelin' protagonist McMurphy approaches the insecurely effeminate and possibly homosexual patient Harding following the latter's humiliation during group therapy. McMurphy aims to open Harding's eyes and expose the cruelty of Nurse Ratchet. Harding protests at first, defending the therapeutic methods of the clinic by asserting that its practitioners' expertise is too much for any layman to critique. In other words, the medical community's knowledge is their power. But McMurphy persists, using analogy and his gruff but down-home brand of empiricism to bring Harding to realize that Ratchet's clinic seeks to instill and maintain order through shame. Harding is won over, but then one-ups McMurphy by claiming that they are both peons, separated only by a few degrees.

I can't tell if, in Kesey's mind, Ratchet represents merely a bad apple within the system or if she is the system. Another observation: Having seen the movie many times, I'm surprised by how important a role gender plays in the original story.

It's all in your head

The Newsweek author responsible for the article "Stuck in a Post-Crisis Gloom" first attempts to summarize what "abetted" the Great Recession without mentioning banks, sub-prime lending, deregulation, over-leveraging, or credit default swaps. Instead he blames consumer overspending. As for the recovery, he says,

The greatest barrier to recovery now could be psychology—stubborn gloom—which conditions household and business spending decisions. There is a curious role reversal. Foolish optimism led to the financial crisis and recession by assuming things would work out for the best. Now, reflexive pessimism weakens growth by ignoring good news or believing it can’t last.

A startling hypothesis: The public caused the recession and now the public prevents recovery.