A Film Adaptation Review on Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
In discussion of controversial literature, A Clockwork Orange is infamous for its challenges to what is considered acceptable fictional violence. While the novel by Anthony Burgess is undoubtedly a terrifying exploration of human morality, it was after the film’s release in 1972 that the whole story was deemed poisonous to the mind. It is difficult to contest this given a string of similar crimes committed after the original release, including a group of 17-year-olds raping a young woman to “Singing in the Rain.” The film is exceptional in technique and certainly recounts the original story, but there are some fundamental differences in the portrayal of violence which make it, for lack of a better term, easier to behold and therefore discounts the true horror of Burgess’s original story.
Aside from the fact that movies are much more accessible to the general public in comparison to novels, especially in recent years, Kubrick paints a very colorful world upon which Alex wreaks his havoc, so to speak. Personally, while reading the novel, the setting was often reminiscent with Tim Burton’s version of Gotham City in his adaptation of Batman: a dark, gloomy place corrupt in law and teaming with crime. Yet, Kubrick designed for our “humble narrator” a glowing groovy landscape in which to play, (such as the milk bar and the record store) and dressed him in a luxurious purple coat and silk cravat, just before Alex has sex with two girls 30 minutes into the film. Though, you would not know it from the film, this was originally a rape scene. While Kubrick displays a blurry time lapse of Alex’s stylish bedroom, accompanied by Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Burgess takes more narrative time to describe the true cruelty of Alex. From pages 50 to 51, Burgess clearly describes how Alex gets the two girls drunk, then, “lept on these two young ptitsas. This time they thought 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 much.” (Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, p.51)
O, but I have almost forgotten to mention: “These two ptitsas couldn’t have been more than ten…” (p.47) While I agree with Kubrick’s decision to withhold on-screen child rape, the scene in the film does not even show the women leaving in distress. Thus, Alex is not properly displayed as a casual daytime child rapist, but simply a promiscuous teenage boy; and how many teenage boys don’t want to be promiscuous? Impossible to count.
Furthermore, Alex’s suffering in prison was also downplayed in the film. The audience never gets a clear image of how, in the novel, he is “kicked and tolchocked by brutal bully warders and meeting vonny leering criminals, some of them real perverts and ready to dribble all over a luscious young malchick like your story-teller.” (p.86) Stuffed six to a cell, it is a seventh cell mate’s beating and death on page 100, which incites Alex’s punishment and rehabilitation in the Ludovico treatment. The film replaces this violence with a lineup and selection process for which Alex cleverly speaks out in order to purposely get in trouble. I argue that in this instance, the lack of violence in the scene discredits the actual strife Alex faced in prison, and the true institutional consequences of his crimes.
This is not to say that the film is a direct cause for the crimes committed en suite. The very theme of the novel is on the autonomy of one’s morality and how the inhibition of the choice of morality is inherently wrong. The prison preacher makes this clear on page 141: “Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.” Where the literary audience would find proof of the theme is in the final chapter of the novel when Alex becomes bored of his criminality in favour for the possibility of human connection in the future. In his right mind and growing up, he chooses to move on. Our sympathies have paid off. The protagonist finally made the right choice.
In contrast to the novel, the film is missing the final chapter, following the original American publication of the book. While ending with Alex’s recovery does drive home the futility of government control on an individual’s morality, it lacks depth when discussing the individual’s choice in their own righteousness. It places morality into the individual’s own control and no one else’s.
What’s it going to be then, eh?
Readers and moviegoers might both find conflict in sympathizing with Alex one way or the other. How can we justify inherent sympathy for the character through whom we experience this story? To paraphrase some of my classmates, often times Alex seems like a friend, or at least someone we could see as a potential friend. He is certainly confident, interesting, and personable. Our own morality doesn’t end when we sympathize with Alex. He does face literal torture, after all. (I would be much quicker to judge a reader who takes malicious pleasure in reading the story a boy who is forced into intense nausea when listening to his favourite thing: classical music.) It ends when our understanding of his moral choice is abandoned for an idea that violence is involuntary, natural, and has little to no consequence. It alleviates not only Alex of his responsibility, but also the audience of theirs in recognizing Alex’s autonomy over his violent urges. It is integral to use the novel and the film as a tool with which we may observe the process by which an individual exercises their moral choice.
Works cited:
Burgess, Anthony. Clockwork orange. W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1962
Kubrick, Stanley, director. A Clockwork Orange. Warner Home Video, 1972, media3-criterionpic-com.library.sheridanc.on.ca/htbin/wwform/006?T=W72103&ALIAS=W72103_EN.KF&M=0_9hvhdzmh&DSTYLE=0#multimedia_resources_W72103.