Book vs. Movie: A Clockwork Orange

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review! So, a while back, I caught the vague whiff of a fascinating phrase: A Clockwork Orange. Was it a novel? A movie? I did not know. But this paradoxical semantic marriage of something as simple as a fruit that trivially dwells in the common dining table fruit-basket with the mechanics of a clockwork truly had something fascinating, thought-provoking and even distantly foreshadowing a certain dark humor. Months passed, and then I saw, innocently sitting in the corner of my eye on a Barnes & Noble bookshelf the phrase that had been buried in the depths of my mind: A Clockwork Orange. Drawn to it by some unknown literary force, I picked it up, not knowing that one of the darkest gems of English literature was now opening its doors, inviting me with a false smile to a gloomy and perverted world. Alas, once having finished this book, I was very far from escaping from its grip since one of the most influential minds of cinema decided to put his interpretation of A Clockwork Orange on the big screen. The novel was banned, the movie was banned. The novel forever changed literature, the movie forever changed cinema. Therefore, today, I will not only be reviewing A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, but I will also be comparing it to Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic interpretation 1971). Enjoy and… do not get too comfortable.

If you’ve seen the movie, you can most probably remember the spine-tingling, infamous opening shot of A Clockwork Orange. The way Alex’s eyes just look right into yours on that extreme close-up. You’re uncomfortable and the movie hasn’t even begun yet. The plotlines of the book and the movie are essentially the same. For those who have never heard of A Clockwork Orange or for those who don’t quite remember what it is about, let me introduce you to Alex Delarge, a vicious fifteen-year-old English young man who is part of a gang that, after the consumption of a drugged milk called “molokko plus” that is provided at a bar called the “Korova Milk Bar”, assaults innocent people and, as incongruous as it sounds, has an unwavering adoration (even “adoration” is a euphemism) for Ludwig Van Beethoven. The novel is told in the intradiegetic first-person narrative, therefore the story is recounted by the unreliable narrator Alex Delarge and tinted by his psychopathic views. He lives in a corrupted society where gangs reign by the use of terror. We usually assume this fictitious world to be futuristic but Burgess himself preferred to use the term “undefined in time” (I will elaborate later). Long story short, one day, Alex’s violence goes a little too far and he accidentally murders a woman. His “droogs” (gang members) are able to escape but Alex is caught by the police and is given a prison sentence. Yet, there is a way to elude from this punishment: the eerie-sounding Ludovico technique. He of course accepts, not knowing that this term is synonymous to Pavlovian conditioning: he will be conditioned into feeling sick and nauseous in not only response to violent situations, but also in response to music and, more specifically, Ludwig Van Beethoven. A very important question already arises from this plotline: will this sort of treatment be able to “cure” Alex? 

First and foremost, one of the most intriguing elements of the novel is the language. A Clockwork Orange is not in fact written in our English: it is written in an invented argotic teen language named “Nadsat” (meaning “teen” in Russian), an interesting mélange of Russian and English. There is a passage in the novel where this language is described as being “Odd bits of rhyming slang. A bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal Penetration”. We could also eventually ask ourselves if the England of this book corresponds to an England that lost the Cold War, which could eventually explain the societal degeneracy and general feeling of defeat that are present in this novel (this defeat having led to a society that got out of hand).  The choice of Russian is of course not arbitrary (nothing is ex nihilo in literature): Burgess stated that he had visited Russia during the Cold War and, noticing how much the conventional English teenager resembled its Russian counterpart, he decided to create a fictitious “universal” slang. Moreover, he realized that if he used an English teenage jargon, the book’s language would already be dated by the time it was published. Therefore, A Clockwork Orange, devoid of any additional temporal indications, is not situated in time: the novel will consequently never age. The idea of an obscure language that captures a society and isolates it from time, this linguistic flexibility, is also shown by a much subtler element in Burgess’s novel: the repetition of the phrase “What’s it going to be, eh?”. This question is repeated multiple times throughout the entirety of the novel (yet only once in the film) and never exactly adopts the same meaning. It is used for the first time preceding the telling of a night of “ultra-violence”, a situation in which Alex can choose between doing good or evil. Then again, it is for example used in a more rhetorical manner following Alex’s conviction for manslaughter. This time, Alex pronounces these words in uncertainty, knowing that he cannot determine his fate any longer. Therefore, Burgess, showing that an identical sentence can adapt to so many different contexts, reinforces this theme of linguistic power and versatility that he already strives to emphasize by his use of Nadsat. I have to admit that the first couple of chapters can be extremely difficult to fully grasp due to this unknown language. Nevertheless, do not be daunted by the linguistic barrier:  my droog, do not let it get you all like fashed and bezoomy and razdrazzed it’s a chest for sure but you’ll skvat it skorry. 

On the other hand, we have the movie that also adopts this language, but, while watching the film, Nadsat will probably not hinder your understanding of the progression of the plot due to the visual and musical support. This of course is because cinematography is ampler in informational richness- a richness that is a double-bladed sword: as we can tell for example in this particular scene, A Clockwork Orange will inevitably correspond to a futuristic viewpoint of the world seen from the 70s. Unfortunately, many of the items from the set (specifically items that are linked to technology) will be anchored in a certain period in time and will, as a result, be quickly considered as outdated.  Yet, in both arts, Nadsat distances the viewer or the reader from the very shocking violence that is described and shown and is one of the factors that, as we will see, will lead us into the trap of unconsciously accepting this abnormal behavior. In the movie, this is accentuated by the use of music. During scenes of extreme violence or during very sexually explicit scenes, classical music is extensively used. There is for example a scene where Alex’s “droogs” encounter another gang who is sexually assaulting a woman on an abandoned casino’s stage. They are enemy gangs, so they begin fighting. In this brutal scene, Rossini’s Thieving Magpie (La Gazza Ladra) Ouverture plays in the background, the playfulness and joyful tone of the composition not only paralleling Alex Delarge’s excitement, but also radically changing our perception of the fight scene. This humorous light that is cast upon Alex makes the movie become morally complicit. Interestingly enough, the movie depicts less violent scenes than in the novel and yet, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange seems to always be associated with the term “violent”. Perhaps we are more prone to being perturbed by visual representations since we see humans, more specifically the actors, suffering in a realistic manner. 

Kubrick also adds an element that is not present in the novel: an eerie tone that he manages to create through the use of amalgam of cinematic techniques. For example, in the opening scene, in an unorthodox manner, we start by looking directly into Alex’s eyes in an extreme close-up and then zoom-out, de-magnifying the center of the image (Alex) and gradually revealing his surroundings (the Korova Milk Bar). 

In the following scene, where Alex and his droogs assault a drunken homeless man, Kubrick skillfully manipulates the lighting in the scene: the light comes from behind the young men who are advancing towards us, creating an uncanny silhouette that already lets us feel the darkness of the movie that we have just begun to watch. 

We always say that the best way to understand a culture is to learn its language, its intricacies revealing this culture’s past and even eventually, its mentality. Well, while reading A Clockwork Orange I noticed some notable linguistic patterns in Nadsat that, I believe strongly underlies and parallels A Clockwork Orange’s society’s many unexplained problems. The inhabitants of this futuristic England have been so exposed to behavior that we would assume to be not only violent, but also lacking any sort of empathy that they have become accustomed to it, and in a way, numbed by it. We can for example see this passive response in the recurring use of grammatical expressions that nuance and soften other words’ meaning such as “sort of” and “kind of”, and also in the use of the adverb “really” which makes an utterance less direct. Furthermore, Burgess directly incorporates onomatopoeic expressions to the narrative such as “kashl kashl kashl” when describing a car in Alex’s words. These sudden iterations might imitate the impulsive and raw nature of this society.

One of the most important themes, if not the most important theme of the novel and movie is, in a general sense, art. Music, literature and even paintings and sculptures are key notions in A Clockwork Orange. As I said beforehand, music has a preponderant place in this novel and, in the movie, the paintings and sculptures also help us understand how degenerate the society is: in the Korova Milk Bar, milk flows out of the breasts of sculptured women, erotic paintings are omnipresent… This blatantly shows that, in this society, women have been objectified into purely sexual beings. But, if this sort of art is ubiquitous, this means that Alex’s behavior and his consideration of women as being sexual objects are accepted: art, society, have set the example. So, as disturbed as this may sound, can we really blame him?  And, we arrive at the core of the novel: is Alex, the product of this environment, the one who is supposed to endure the torture of the Ludovico technique, is he the one who is supposed to be corrected, or should the entire society itself be reformed? 

Yet, “there is only one catch and that is Catch-22”: Burgess obviously wrote this novel to prove multiple points, despite the fact that he needed to portray violent behavior in order to serve his purpose. But, following Kubrick’s cinematic interpretation arose many copycats who thought that the movie was just pure violence, which is the complete opposite of the statement that Burgess was trying to make. This also makes us think about the essence of the term immoral. The aesthetics, such as Oscar Wilde (<3) proclaimed that, in art, there is no morality: Théophile Gautier called this “art for art’s sake”. But, how can we label oeuvres as being “good” or “bad” if they inspire people such as these copycats or Alex Delarge to commit crimes? You might be wondering why I am writing about nineteenth century authors. Well, while Alex is enduring the Ludovico technique, in the novel, which is specifically watching violent films with his eyes forced open with Beethoven playing in the background, he screams that the doctors must stop, that it is a sin to use Beethoven this way even though he did no harm, and the doctor in charge of the treatment responds “Each man kills the thing he loves”. 

This sentence might ring a bell: it is a sentence repeated multiple times in Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (which is itself a reference to William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: Bassanio says to Shylock “Do all men kill the things they do not love?”). This quote, being from Oscar Wilde, points towards the aesthetic point of view. Alex is alas wrong to think that music can be “sin”: but he is also consequently wrong to think that it is good.  But the concept of “killing the thing you love” seems, of course, violent and strange. Before, Alex naively and falsely always associated Beethoven with a certain goodness and purity not knowing that, after the Ludovico technique (please note that “Ludovico” and “Ludwig” are the same name), Beethoven’s symphonies would bring him great pain and… could be used against him. He therefore will in some way “kill” the thing he loves by forever annihilating the pleasure associated with it. In the movie, for example, this is foreshadowed when the “cat lady” (the woman he kills) tries to attack him with a bust of Ludwig Van Beethoven. But if art cannot be “good” or “evil”, what is good? What is evil? Do they and can they objectively exist? And if they don’t, do these vague concepts mean anything at all? These questions are difficult to answer, and even more so since pure “goodness” is not symbolized in the movie: we’d think that if Alex is bad, the State would represent the good, but we quickly realize that they don’t. The State doesn’t want to innovate the entire society and decides instead to tackle “easy targets”, such as young and naïve criminals like Alex. Furthermore, Alex, apropos the movies shown during the Ludovico technique comments that he finds it strange that the State could fake such graphic violence on screen. This lets us question whether the films were staged or not due to the extremity of the violence that could not have been superficial. Yet, during the Ludovico technique, in the movie and the book, we can notice a very important breakthrough with Alex’s quote: “It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen”. This means that Alex has realized the power of art and how, in some paradoxical way, the fruit of imagination can be “more real” than real life. The society that he has grown up in has attributed “goodness” to a distorted vision of art which has falsely lead Alex into trying to mirror this behavior surrounding him. 

Nevertheless, not everybody in A Clockwork Orange has the same violent tendencies as Alex. In both the movie and the book, PR Deltoid, Alex’s probation officer comes to visit Alex and says “You've got a good home here, good loving parents. You've got not too bad of a brain! Is it some devil that crawls inside of you?”. This quote makes a very important question arise: Where does in fact Alex’s behavior come from? His parents are represented as being quite “normal” and are completely oblivious to Alex’s nights of “ultra-violence”, thinking that he has a night job. Yet, in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange there are no signs of any abuse that Alex could have suffered, which could have explained his brutality. This means that not only the psychological notion of “Nurture” is ruled out as being a cause of this violence but, since his parents seem to be sane, he doesn’t have seem to have any apparent hereditary disposition prone to this type of behavior. Therefore, if we cannot blame “Nurture”, this leaves the concept of “Nature”. Interestingly enough, we can find many words linked to the lexical field of animal imagery in the novel: Alex calls the prison officers many times “animals”, “animal vecks” (“animal things”), he compares prison to a “human zoo”… Despite the horrifying crimes that he committed, Alex is disgusted by the “perverts” who are surrounding him and, in a degrading manner, compares them to creatures. This might mean that this futuristic society has yielded to animal impulses, some being stronger than others. Nonetheless, there is a major difference in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange: in the interpretation, when PR Deltoid comes to visit Alex at home, PR Deltoid sexually touches Alex against his will. This has strong connotations of sexual abuse which would channel back to the theory that Alex could have been influenced by his entourage into tolerating this comportment.

Now, what does the title, a very peculiar title if I may add, “A Clockwork Orange” actually signify? No, there are no oranges involved and no clocks either but it is purely symbolic- let me explain. Apparently, Burgess said that the idiom “queer as a clockwork orange” was a current slang expression in East London. An orange represents what is organic, natural, in some way pure and its association with a “clockwork” seems nonsensical and inane. Alex would be the orange, a fruit of Nature who is compelled to fit into a system. However, you can already perceive the illogical nature of, specifically, the Ludovico technique in the title: you cannot make an “orange” into a “clockwork”. But, would it be better for us all to become “cogs in a machine”, condemned to a tepid life devoid of any emotion and happiness in order to avoid crime, or would it be better for us to live in a bleak, dystopian world reigned by constant fear? Also, can we truly be humans if we completely lose our free will? “After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?” as E.M. Forster writes in his novel Maurice.

In the book, the title is in fact made explicit when Alex breaks into a writer named F. Alexander’s house and notices that he, in a sort of mise en abyme, is himself writing a novel called A Clockwork Orange. Alex destroys the book, almost as if he were unconsciously denying the possibility of him having to yield to a system. Consequently, F. Alexander would represent Anthony Burgess himself. Meanwhile, in the cinematic adaptation, the name of the work that F. Alexander is working on is not mentioned but, Kubrick gives a nudge towards the title in a different way: in Alex’s apparel. I’ll give you a clue: we see it in the first scene and it is not his infamous bowling hat. Okay, it’s his long right eyelash, which strongly and undeniably resembles a clockwork. 

Let’s go back to Oscar Wilde for a second, but on a different matter. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, after Dorian Gray murders Sibyl Vane, he sleeps until 1:15 and, in a lazed manner, is awoken by his servant who has a message from Lord Henry. Lord Henry later arrives and they converse in an abnormally calm tone about the death of Sibyl Vane. Dorian Gray says, in an unregretful manner, that this act of manslaughter has taught him “how to know himself better”. Us, the reader, may not perceive the profundity of the matter that is discussed since we are inveigled by the relaxed Victorian aristocratic atmosphere in which we are completely submerged. The same phenomenon is put into place in A Clockwork Orange: by the end of the novel or movie, you cannot help but pity or even feel actual sympathy for Alex. An emotional Trojan Horse. Another famous literary example would be Nabokov’s Lolita : Humbert Humbert (yes, that is his name) is a pedophile and we know it from the first paragraph. Nevertheless, exactly like Alex Delarge, he is constantly excusing his conduct. Perhaps it is because the reader almost always becomes close to the first-person narrator, perhaps our human nature is allured by these not licet acts, but the reader becomes compassionate (to some extant) towards the protagonist. When I realized that Burgess had manipulated my mind, I suddenly felt somewhat closer to understanding the power of literature, the innate power it has to twist our perception against all of our principles, to make us question all of our previously established morals and to make us think about human nature.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are slowly edging towards the end of this review. Before leaving you for today, I must say a word, without spoiling, about the extremely controversial endings of these two masterpieces. Yes, you heard me, endings and not ending for there is a major difference between the two oeuvres on this level. The reason to why their endings differ is because the 21^st chapter of Burgess’s work was omitted from the American edition of the novel until 1986, meaning that Kubrick only read the novel’s “true ending” once the movie had already been made. The 21^st chapter, despite its symbolic importance since 21 years of age is often considered as being the age of maturity, was considered by editors as being anti-climatic. Personally, I could not agree more: it does not line up with the rest of the novel. We can even say that it completely changes the book’s meaning and makes you question whether Alex is truly cured or not, even though this is very strongly established in the 20th chapter. Nevertheless, if there is one thing that left me in complete awe is that, through the analysis of the last scenes of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange you realize that Kubrick’s ideas for Alex’s future are aligned with those of Burgess’s 21^st chapter. Therefore, Kubrick had the capacity of profoundly understanding Burgess’s mindset which for me, proves his genius. His bold interpretation of A Clockwork Orange was unlike anything the history of cinema had ever seen before, pushing the boundaries of the art. The movie has now made its way onto being regarded as a cult classic despite still being the object of controversy. It is true that the movie is a masterpiece, and that it is widely responsible for the novel’s success but, I believe that the book demonstrates an acute linguistic mastery and that it underlies probing questions that are still applicable to this very day. 

That is it for today’s review! I have been working on this for a very long time and despite the fact that this was an ambitious project, I could not resist the temptation of sharing my thoughts on the novel itself and its interpretation. The complexity, the genius, behind it all was just too fascinating. Don’t forget to share this review on social media, give it a like and to comment your ideas below whether that is on your opinion concerning A Clockwork Orange, this review or on the blog itself! See you soon! (◠‿◠✿)

© Margaux Emmanuel 2018