Alex— " You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!"
I was cured alright. — Anthony Burgess
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him? A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic.
In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange
is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. After his youthful adventures of raping and pillaging,
Alex finds himself in prison.
When Alex volunteers for an experiment, his sentence is commuted to two weeks. The experiment leaves him physically incapable of doing wrong and releases him back into the world. When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem" him—the novel asks, "At what cost?"
The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked"
Alex's stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title, dissecting the nature of violence in this darkly ironic, near-future satire.
Alex undergoes the Ludovico behavior modification technique to earn his freedom; he's conditioned to abhor violence through watching gory movies, and even his adored Beethoven is turned against him. Returned to the world defenseless, Alex becomes the victim of his prior victims, with Mr. Alexander using Beethoven's "Ninth" to inflict the greatest pain of all.
When society sees what the state has done to Alex, however, the politically expedient move is made. Casting a coldly pessimistic view on the then-future of the late '70s-early '80s, Kubrick and production designer John Barry created a world of high-tech cultural decay, mixing old details like bowler hats with bizarrely alienating "new" environments like the Milkbar. Alex's violence is horrific, yet it is an aesthetically calculated fact of his existence; his charisma makes the icily clinical Ludovico treatment seem more negatively abusive than positively therapeutic.
Alex may be a sadist, but the state's autocratic control is another violent act, rather than a solution. Released in late 1971 within weeks of Sam Peckinpah's brutally violent Straw Dogs, the film sparked considerable controversy in the U.S. with its X-rated violence; after copycat crimes in England, Kubrick withdrew the film from British distribution until after his death.
Opinion was divided on the meaning of Kubrick's detached view of this shocking future, but, whether the discord drew the curious or Kubrick's scathing diagnosis spoke to the chaotic cultural moment, A Clockwork Orange became a hit. On the heels of New York Film Critics Circle awards as Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, Kubrick received Oscar nominations in all three categories.
"The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the wide-angle lens almost all the time when he is showing events from Alex's point of view; this encourages us to see the world as Alex does, as a crazy-house of weird people out to get him."—Roger Ebert
“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed. ― A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper. ― The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have. ― One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.” ― Stanley Kubrick
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