Movie Comparison

To prepare for our final presentation, my group met to watch Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. The only things I had heard about the movie in advance were frightening. I’ve never been much for horror films, and this movie sounded like it would be just as gruesome as them. After all, it was, in fact, a movie, and the content of A Clockwork Orange is pretty traumatizing and controversial in nature.

During my readings, the one thing that I liked about nadsat was that, even though it immersed me in the culture, it also served to distance me from the reality of the content that it was describing. Rape and ultra-violence sound much less severe when half of the words used to narrate the acts are made up. For this reason, I figured that the movie would simply be representative of removing this veil, so to speak. The movie would portray all of the images without anything protecting me.

But I found that it simply wasn’t the case. Perhaps my opinions on the movie are a result of the 30 years that have passed since its production, but I found the movie no more controversial than the book. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the movie is less traumatizing because Kubrick, at the time, was afraid of making the film too controversial. The scenes with dialogue felt incredibly drawn out, while scenes such as the Ludovico technique felt far too short. At several points during the movie, I was aware of the fact that I was watching an abridged interpretation of what happened in the book, which is never a good thing.

Visually speaking, I loved what Kubrick did with some aspects of the world. The moloko bar and the fashion were particularly stylized and suited the world well. However, I didn’t feel like the world, as a whole, was much of a dystopia. Again, this is likely because the movie was made in the 1970s, but I just felt like it could have been any part of England in the 70s. But this disappointment to present one’s mental picture of a book is only natural, so I don’t blame Kubrick. I commend him for what he accomplished, taking into consideration the context and the limitations that come with it.

Chapter 21

On my group’s 2nd to last meeting, a couple of the members had already finished reading A Clockwork Orange. When I read the book’s introduction, it mentioned that this copy of the book included an illusive 21st chapter that wasn’t a part of the book’s original printing. The two members who read the last chapter warned me that it made the book worse. I decided to be my own judge.

That being said, the 21st chapter does make the book worse. It contradicts the entire idea of the dystopia. In contrast to 1984, where the most beautiful thing about the dystopia was that it was impossible to fix things, A Clockwork Orange’s final chapter shows hope for improvement. But not only that, it tells of hope for Alex’s improvement. One of the main things we learned this year in English about telling stories was that it’s always better to show what happened then to just tell it. Unfortunately, Burgess does just that, going on for several pages in a vivid explanation of how Alex changes inside.

I don’t fundamentally disagree with the idea of the chapter. The introduction provides some clever parallelism to the first chapter and gives the book a very hopeless, full-circle kind of feel. However, it is far too blatant in its explanation that Alex has changed. Had the book ended in a witty way after Alex found himself unable to take pleasure in his usual cruelties, the idea would be present, but not shoved in the readers face. The problem with this unmitigated presentation is that it contradicts how nuance-y the ideas of good and evil are. Throughout the book, the line between good and evil, positive and negative actions, is constantly being smudged, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to tell what falls into which category. The final chapter ruins this nuance, saying that hurting people is bad and getting married and starting families is good. And maybe they are, but the point when Burgess draws this line is the point when he removes the reader’s ability to choose for himself what the book means.

Clockwork Oranges

The most prominent and most obvious theme within A Clockwork Orange is the idea of morality and clockwork oranges. Which is better: to choose to be bad or to be forced to be good?

As I read the book, the question was always floating around in my mind. I still don’t necessarily know how I feel about it. As I said in one of my earlier blog entries, I don’t really like Alex before or after the Ludovico treatment. As what I would consider a good citizen, I have trouble liking how terrible Alex is at heart. At the same time, I live in America where free choice and democracy are constantly preached.

Now that I mention America, I begin to wonder if everyone is a clockwork orange. Are we all just a product of our society? Nothing more than a representation of the ideas and beliefs of people so high up on the social ladder that we can’t even see them anymore? Then what is morality? Am I justified in believing that Alex shouldn’t be hurting people, or is that a moral value that has been imposed on me? It is so difficult to tell, today, what thoughts are truly ours.

Another matter is the idea of the individual versus society. Even though I dislike who Alex became after the Ludovico treatment, it was benefiting the rest of society. Is it fair to say that his suffering is worth the salvation of many? I would agree that it probably is, but, in the end, everyone is a pawn to the system. Some people allow themselves to conform, and others don’t. Alex is one of he ones who doesn’t. The people he terrorizes are the ones who do conform. Are these people any better or worse than Alex? It is hard to tell. And what about the people at the top of the social ladder? Are they the only ones with actual free thought, or are they something else all together?

The idea of free choice is probably the most discussion-worthy idea within the book.

Alex

I am personally very torn on my opinion of Alex. I feel like he is always playing devil’s advocate with me. When Alex is being mean and hurting and raping people, I don’t like him. I can’t stand his corruption. However, when Alex goes through the Ludovico process and can’t defend himself, I found that I partly wanted to sympathize with him and partly didn’t. In particular, the scene where the man who Alex beat up and who’s wife Alex raped is taking care of Alex, I wanted Alex to suffer. He didn’t deserve the kindness of that man.

But, from an analytical standpoint, perhaps that was one of the messages of the book. It is impossible to appear as a real person when one is, in fact, a clockwork orange. Now, the person may be deceptively human, but there will always be something slightly off about that person, and if it is not something about the person, it is how that person reacts to the world. I am a believer that a lot of who we are as people is represented not in our own actions, but in the reactions we cause in the world. When Alex is “cured,” he isn’t allowed to react to the world’s reactions towards him, so he appears fake to me.

Another reason that disliking Alex may prove a point is that the book itself is supposed to represent a dystopia. If I was able to appreciate and enjoy the characters and world that they lived in, then it probably wouldn’t be much of a dystopia at all.

The idea of dystopias also reminds me of 1984. Both books have a similar “clockwork orange” feel in that the main characters are always pawns of the system, no matter what they think. Even as the protagonist of 1984 seems have uncovered a secret, underground rebel group, it is all just a scheme by the government to maintain power. After receiving the Ludovico treatment, Alex becomes a tool of both opposing governmental parties. In both cases, the characters are essentially negligible in the scheme of things. They represent the hopelessness of an entire society.

Nadsat

One of the most unique things that I’ve found in my reading of A Clockwork Orange, right off the bat, is nadsat, the language that the Alex and his droogs use. At first, I was nothing short of intimidated. On the first page, I read:

“They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencron or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.”

Needless to say, I was concerned that the entire book would make as little sense as this sentence. However, as I continued to read the book, I found the exact opposite. Rather than inhibiting my ability to understand the story and slow me down, the language made me read the book at a normal pace, perhaps even slightly faster. The reason, in my opinion, is that, in order to understand what words mean, I need to see them in various contexts. In combination with finding words that I did know, quicker reading produced a more thorough understanding of the content.

For example, the word “veshches” in this sense could mean any number of things, but when considering the two instances of “veshches” in this sentence that the fact that Alex says “some vesche” later on in the book, I was able to deduce that “veshche” means “thing.”

Another aspect of nadsat that I found fascinating was Alex’s use of onomatopoeia. I didn’t appreciate the simple fact that he used it, but the words that he used to represent sounds. One of my favorite examples was when Alex and his droogs drive a car into a lake, Alex describes the noise as “’a nice heavy loud plesk.” I love to use of the word “plesk” instead lf “splash.” While “splash” may be easier for the human mouth to imitate, when I imagine something heavy falling into a body of water, Alex’s choice of the word “plesk” seems spot on. In that sense, nadsat is both better at describing things and more confusing. Every word makes sense, either by knowing slang or Russian, but to a common reader, it may just seem troublesome.