I’ve long been fascinated with A Clockwork Orange – both the book by Anthony Burgess (1962) and the film by Stanley Kubrick (1971). And this despite (or maybe because?) my parents were always quite vociferous in their strong opinions against the film; they hated it. For them it was an abominable work of nihilism stuffed with nothing but nasty and unlikeable characters.  I first became aware of Kubrick’s film as an eight-year-old kid reading David Annan’s Cinefantastic: Beyond the Dream Machine (1974) where he wrote:

Kubrick’s recognisable urban slum with its gang of sadistic clowns and its coffee-bars based on the erotic fantasies of Allen Jones and its electro-shock therapy in the service of morality was too near the possibility of a horrific future to sit easy on the stomachs of its audience. There is little question that Kubrick has pushed the unsettling powers of the cinema beyond the limits probed by Buñuel. For savagery of image dredged from the depths of the subconscious, Kubrick is the prince of darkness and the apostle of light.

Interesting that Annan should mention Luis Buñuel, as Buñuel is quoted in Vincent Lo Brutto’s Stanley Kubrick’s A Biography (1997) as saying that:

A Clockwork Orange is my current favorite. I was very predisposed against this film. After seeing it, I realized it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.

“Modern” is, of course, a relative term. For Burgess, writing in the sixties, his futuristic story was meant to take place sometime in the seventies. But Kubrick’s first completed draft of the screenplay was done on May 15, 1970, so what the director and his crew did was to fuse naturalistic and on-location settings with a hyper-stylized aesthetic that used ideas from both gallery artists whose work Kubrick had seen as well as ideas from his own team of movie artists who contributed to the look and feel of costumes, props, and music in such a way as to create a vision of the U.K. that still resonates today, despite its vinyl record stores and IBM Selectric typewriters, as somehow futuristic. (Terry Gilliam did something similar in Brazil – a film that conscientiously condensed the 20th century into its own futuristic impression, despite using nothing but real items from the 20th century.)

But I digress from my main point and Burgess’s source material, which was the result of tragic circumstances, ones clearly outlined in an essay by Michel Ciment in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, edited by Alison Castle:

No great critical stir had greeted the publication of A Clockwork Orange in 1962. A difficult work for Burgess to write, it had a hideous autobiographical basis: his wife had been raped by U.S. deserters in London during World War II. The book formed part of a series of five novels written in quick succession by Burgess during a creative frenzy triggered by the discovery that he was suffering from a fatal brain tumor and had less than a year to live. In fact, he lived another twenty-five years.

LoBrutto quotes Burgess directly:

“It was the most painful thing I’ve ever written, that damn book,” Anthony Burgess told Sheila Weller of the Village Voice about the writing of his novella A Clockwork Orange. “I was trying to exorcise the memory of what happened to my first wife, who was savagely attacked in London during the Second World War by four American deserters. She was pregnant at the time and lost our child. This led to a dreadful depression, and her suicide attempt. After that, I had to learn to start loving again. Writing that book – getting it all out – was a way of doing it. I was very drunk when I wrote it. It was the only way I could cope with the violence. I can’t stand violence. I… I loathe it! And one feels so responsible putting an act of violence down on paper. If one can put an act of violence down on paper, you’ve created the act! You might as well have done it! I detest that damn book now.”

The key word above is “exorcism,” and what Burgess did was write A Clockwork Orange with three sections of seven chapters, the last chapter (#21)  being symbolic of when one is supposedly a mature adult. In that last chapter Alex, our violent protagonist, softens with age,  settles down with a woman, gets her pregnant, and starts thinking about being a dad. In other words, he grows up. One could see how a pacifist author, grappling with his the demons of wanting to do harm to the violent men who destroyed so much, would try to regain his own humanity by looking at things from a radically different viewpoint that takes the long view. But when the book was released in England in May of 1962 it was panned and sold poorly. LoBrutto then notes that:

When A Clockwork Orange was purchased in the United States, Eric Swenson, a vice president of W.W. Norton, decided to drop the seventh chapter of the final section because he felt Burgess had softened his story in the concluding chapter. Against Burgess’s better judgement, Norton also added a Nadsat glossary as a reader’s guide… The book was a success in America.

The publishers were also reacting to the reality of the times; Manson, Vietnam, Watergate, Altamont, etc., and they figured an American audience wouldn’t buy the last chapter. Kubrick didn’t know about the 21st chapter until he’d already spent four months on his script, and also found the conciliatory tone of having Alex grow up to be too far off base from his own view of humanity to pursue further, telling Rolling Stone that it was “completely out of tone with the rest of the book.” The result was, and is, an amazing work of visual art. It is also so compelling that several copycat crimes and rapes were later attributed to it. These things struck Kubrick close to home, and in 1974 he pulled it from distribution in the U.K. (It would finally be re-released in England in 2000). Indeed, it is strange to think about how Arthur Bremmer, who shot Governor George Wallace, would cite A Clockwork Orange as an influence. And that act would then influence Paul Schrader to write Taxi Driver, which would then become a film that was then cited by John Hinckley as an influence for shooting Ronald Reagan. So what’s the answer? To limit all of our literature, cinema, and art to that which is soft and fuzzy enough so as to not be abused by the lowest common denominators among us? Or might we not just accept but also promote great art for the sustenance it provides those of us who are not already prone to acts of barbarity? After all, can we genuinely believe that Manson wouldn’t have gone off on a murder spree if only The Beatles hadn’t put out their White Album? I’ll let Stanley have the last say:

“It is necessary for man to have a choice to be good or evil, even if he chooses evil. To deprive him of this choice is to make him something less than human – a clockwork orange.”