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). 

 

"Society Must Be Defended", lectures by Michel Foucault

(longer post)

I've been reading this Michel Foucault lecture series. In them, he reminds the audience that his concept of power has changed since he debuted with his seminal works on madness and punishment. He sees power not so much as represented in instances of repression, but rather a flow or current between actors, a concept better represented as two actors engaged in battle. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explores the concept of war and its historical relation to the role of the nation state and its population's identity.

That Foucault adopts a new concept of power after having written his early works does not devalue them. Foucault's project has not changed: generally, he engages in an archaeological exploration of Western man's conceptual relation to himself and others; specifically, he analyzes how some people engineer and/or assume apparatuses of power used on other people, focusing on the post-Middle Ages emergence of kinds of knowledge and systems of disciplinary power.

In Society Must Be Defended, he begins by asserting that, circa 1600, Europeans began assessing their own history in terms of race and war, whereas previously they self-identified in the person and bloodline of the sovereign and spoke of the Roman history in which they lived. So, what were once mere hiccups within the Roman Empire now signified the coming of the Franks, Gauls, Celts, and so on. The key for Foucault here is not the races or inter-European racism to come, but the idea of (potential) revolution and the political historization of the peopled nation state that emerges and casts itself as the rightful inheritor of sovereignty and greatness, with the distressed and disenfranchised newly identifying themselves as people on the losing end of a historical injustice.

The change in historical perspective is initiated by a shift at the top: the nobility assume power over the education of the monarchy, a role previously held by judges and (accounting) clerks appointed by the sovereign. This education, which centers on history, organizes the past--and, therefore, the present--around "society" rather than royal lineages. And, so it goes, with the nation no longer identified in the body of the king, a new focus on society yields limited concepts of nationalism, race, and class. Of course, society was being narrowly defined around the culture of the previously distressed and disenfranchised nobles (the bourgeoisie, presumably).

Then, yet another shift occurs: a culture with arts, agriculture, trade, and industry becomes a precondition for nationhood. A nation's legitimization is complete once it has a legislature and law. Society no longer just constitutes the nation--it runs it (or, rather, the bourgeoisie runs it, presumably). Finally, with the recognition of society as the bellwether of the nation state, we find institutions of power concerning themselves with the biological phenomena of the social body, thereby giving birth to what Foucault famously calls biopower. Very nice.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault gives a history of Western Europe, recounting legends told from the Middle Ages on and narrating this shift in discourses on power, history, and the State. This narration does get bogged down in details (and more than a little confused), so this lecture series is a difficult read unless you're especially interested.

Notes:

• This shift to a politicized historical discourse coincides with a larger movement re-organizing and, eventually, licensing knowledges.

• Foucault's work usually involves describing some major shift in focus and narrative that followed the Middle Ages. When reading him, I'm often a little disappointed he doesn't spend more time describing the systems being displaced or forgotten. And, as a rule, I'm always a little skeptical when someone argues that something major has changed or some new age is dawning, etc., so this can make Foucault's work hard to square when I find myself needing more information.

about "Society Must Be Defended", lectures by Michel Foucault

I've been reading this Michel Foucault lecture series. In them, he reminds the audience that his concept of power has changed since he debuted with his seminal works on madness and punishment. Now he sees power not so much as represented in instances of repression, but rather as a flow or current between actors, a concept better represented as two actors engaged in battle. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explores this concept of battle, of war and its historical relation to the role of the nation State and its population's identity.

That Foucault adopts a new concept of power after having written his early works does not devalue them. Foucault's project has not changed: generally, he engages in an archaeological exploration of Western man's relation to himself; specifically, he analyzes how some people engineer and/or assume apparatuses of power used on other people.

About secularized religion

As the Church fell into crisis in the 17th century, an emerging secular governmentality assumed custodial rights over life and population issues previously managed by the Church. With this, the modern State evolved, giving rise to politics. Like medicine and science, politics grows and takes more and more things into its body of knowledge, even religion, which itself is now highly politicized (it has been before now, but in different ways). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was developed in the context of this politics, and has been linked to it since the beginning as evident in the religion's history, a story of battling for political contention.

Taking this story on a tangent, on June 30 this year, a modest group of Mormons gathered to renounce their membership in the LDS Church using methods that conflate the political with the religious: their gathering was personal ceremony and political protest; they waved a "Declaration of Independence from Mormonism" and offered letters of resignation, seeking "freedom" as they gathered at Ensign Peak like Brigham Young did with his followers in 1847; they sacrificed church-bound relationships with their community, yearning to receive those same relationships in return, renewed as social and business ties; their reasons for quitting included Church teachings that are "made up", that conflict with science, that conflict with history, that veil racism and promote intolerance, and that are inconsistent.

Anyway, this story sort of stuck out like this.