Should I Read or Watch a Clockwork Orange

Book vs. Film: A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess' dismissal of the Stanley Kubrick accommodation of his novel A Clockwork Orange is one for the ages. It wasn't the concluding fourth dimension ane of Kubrick'south notoriously devastating films pissed off the author of the source material – Stephen King once said that The Shining is the but ane of his book adaptations he tin can think hating – but Burgess' ire is certainly the well-nigh memorable, renouncing his own volume after having seen the motion-picture show it spawned:

Nosotros all endure from the popular desire to brand the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, ajeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a movie which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The movie made information technology easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

I certainly don't believe A Clockwork Orange the film is glorifying sexual violence, nor do I believe by a long shot that Kubrick's The Shining is the worst Stephen Male monarch accommodation. (It'southward clearly the best.) It seems as if Kubrick's deliberate contradictions and trend to fix the audience at unease brand those authors uncomfortable, as practice his liberal adaptations of their work. But here's what's interesting about Burgess' claim – in many means, A Clockwork Orangish the movie is more palatable than the book.

This is especially true in regards to the victims. In the book, Alex rapes two ten-twelvemonth-old girls he's gotten drunk on Scotch and soda in a horrifying chapter that escalates in coincidental bleakness.

…and then I felt the old tigers jump in me and and so I leapt on these two young ptitsas. This time they idea nothing fun and stopped creeching with high mirth, and had to submit to the strange and weird desires of Alexander the Large[…] But they were both very very drunken and could hardly feel very much[…] They were similar waking up to what was existence done to their malenky persons and maxim that they wanted to go home and similar I was a wild creature. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, equally indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And didactics they had had.

In the film, Alex has seemingly consensual sex with two teenage girls not much younger than he. Similarly, in the book, he attacks an innocent sometime man returning from the library. In the film, it'southward a drunken tramp.

Now, I'yard certainly non arguing that Burgess' novel glorifies sexual assault and Kubrick'due south flick does not, as both are clearly parables almost the damaging furnishings of ultraviolence. Just I observe it surprising that Burgess thinks the flick is more than indulgently depraved than his ain novel when the well-nigh agonizing scene in the book doesn't fifty-fifty announced in the picture. Is it simply that no words, however evocative, can ever pierce our comfort level the mode an effectively directed scene of violence can? Is there any thematically faithful version of A Clockwork Orangish that wouldn't be harder to sentinel than the book is to read?

There are many smaller particulars in which the film and book differ – Alex'due south weapon in the book is a razor, and in the film it's a knife hidden within his cane; in the book he's conditioned against all classical music, and in the film information technology's only Beethoven's Ninth; he volunteers for the Ludovico conditioning in the volume and it's assigned to him in the motion-picture show; in the volume he's fifteen and in the film he'southward a few years older; in that location is no mention of "Singin' in the Rain" in Burgess' novel. The title A Clockwork Orange is given no explanation in the moving picture, but in the book Alex finds a manuscript in the habitation of the couple he assaults:

Then I looked at its pinnacle sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK Orange – and I said: 'That'due south a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky scrap out loud in a sort of very high preaching goloss: '—The endeavour to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical cosmos, against this I raise my swordpen—'

But the virtually desperate disparity between A Clockwork Orange the film and the novel is that Kubrick's film omits a (sort of) happy ending epilogue written by Burgess for the volume. The original American publication of A Clockwork Orangish also excluded this chapter, in which Alex is growing out of his gustatory modality for violence and looking forward to a future with a married woman and son, whom he does non want to turn out like Alex himself. Without this epilogue, A Clockwork Orange ends on a truly black note. Kubrick'south film is based on the more dismal American version of the novel, and in a forward written by Burgess in a 1986 edition, he makes his displeasure known:

It is with a kind of shame that this growing youth looks back on his devastating by. He wants a unlike kind of hereafter.

There is no hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter. The boy is conditioned, then deconditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the operation of free and violent will. 'I was cured all right,' he says, and so the American book ends. And then the film ends besides. The twenty-starting time chapter gives the novel the quality of 18-carat fiction, an fine art founded on the principle that human beings alter. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers bear witness people changing. When a fictional piece of work fails to show alter, when it just indicates that human being character is set, stony, unregenerable, then yous are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the apologue. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.

[…] My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it.

So therein lies the root of Burgess' displeasure with Kubrick's adaptation. He's a Kennedy man and Kubrick's a Nixon human being. And so which are you?

Okay, if we're voting Kennedy or Nixon, there'southward a articulate answer there unless yous desire to sound like an asshole, but the truthful question is Burgess or Kubrick, and I don't desire to cull. These are two creative geniuses with ii different visions. Yep, Burgess created this story and in that fashion it belongs to him, but he also sold the rights to Hollywood, and in that style it does not. I don't want to live in a world where I take to cull between a brilliant author or a visionary manager, and thankfully, I don't have to. I love the book. I dear the movie. And that'southward that.

Exercise you come downwards on i side or another? Speak up in the comments!

Column by Meredith Borders

Meredith is a writer, editor and brewpub owner living in Houston, Texas. Her four most commonly used words are, "The volume was better."

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Source: https://litreactor.com/columns/book-vs-film-a-clockwork-orange

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