This is the seventh letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography of the filmmaker by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey.
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange — The Restored Edition, Edited with an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, Foreword by Martin Amis. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2012 [1962].
During World War II, Anthony Burgess’s pregnant wife was horrifically attacked by a group of American army deserters. She lost the baby, and became suicidal. For his ninth novel, Burgess cast a story from the point of view of the perpetrator of this kind of “ultraviolence.”
Burgess is one of those writers your host has not gotten around to reading fast enough, but that should change because A Clockwork Orange is a great novel. It deserves the reviewer cliches that are reserved for airport thrillers: page-turner, thrilling from start to finish.
It is a grotesque, satirical, dystopian science-fiction world. The core of London is hollowed out, neglected, roving with gangs dressed in “the heighth of fashion.” And they speak in Nadsat, a strange mixture of Russian vocabulary with cockney rhyming slang.
In the early 70s, Kubrick was trying and failing to develop a motion picture on the life of Napoleon. Instead, he adapted Burgess’s novel into an infamous film adaptation starring Malcolm McDowell. It caps off the director’s own sci-fi trilogy that began with Strangelove.
The book gets off to a splendid aggressive start. You’re thrown not only into Alex’s language and worldview, but also into the trappings of a transgressive mid-century book describing drug use. The “milk-plus” these lads are drinking is laced with synthetic mescaline and speed.
This extended passage by Alex simply describing a high does well to indicate the book’s reading experience.
You’d lay there after you’d drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all round you was sort of in the past. You could viddy it all right, all of it, very clear – tables, the stereo, the lights, the sharps and the malchicks – but it was like some veshch that used to be there but was not there not no more. And you were sort of hypnotised by your boot or shoe or a finger-nail as it might be, and at the same time you were sort of picked up by the old scruff and shook like it might be a cat. You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn’t care, and you waited till your boot or your finger-nail got yellow, then yellower and yellower all the time. Then the lights started cracking like atomics and the boot or finger-nail or, as it might be, a bit of dirt on your trouser-bottom turned into a big big big mesto, bigger than the whole world, and you were just going to get introduced to old Bog or God when it was all over. You came back to here and now whimpering sort of, with your rot all squaring up for a boohoohoo. Now, that’s very nice but very cowardly.
It definitely helps to have even a little Russian vocabulary under the belt, but even so readers can probably surmise that moloko=milk, messel=thought, viddy=see/watch, and so on.
In this language Alex takes us through a degenerate night, beating up a tramp, an intellectual, beating up a rival gang, assaulting a writer in his home and raping his wife — it’s there that the novel’s title appears as the heading of the writer’s own manuscript: “That’s a fair gloopy [i.e. stupid] title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?”
After these 40 pages of youth wreaking utmost havoc on adults and culture itself, we get a scene of Alex at home listening to classical music on his stereo. These lines are ecstatic in music appreciation, with Joycean neologisms and a rapid flow of images.
Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.
But then Alex, as “Your Humble Narrator,” gives us tableaus of how this legacy music of western culture stimulates his imagination. These lines might be the most forthcoming disclosure of not only sadism but a more fundamental solipsism.
As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against the walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them, and indeed when the music, which was one movement only, rose to the top of its big highest tower, then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.
By solipsism I partially mean how everyone else is fodder for the self’s will (“But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self”). Sound is by far Alex’s favorite sensory input: it’s as if music were liquid (“slooshied the sluices”), and his prose is stamped with the open vowels and gutteral cries from people in pain.
The classical music motif resonates with the postwar cultural and intellectual climate, which was obsessed with the ramifications of great, noble, high serious music originating from the same place in Europe as fascism — and Kubrick was plugged into this question as well. His film adaptation follows the novel’s plotting to a T, and even accentuates this theme by using Beethoven for these moments: in particular the militant interpretation under Karajan’s baton.
The last century demonstrated that under capitalism, wage-exploitation and destructive imperialist war become inevitable. Artistic and cultural pursuits are likewise revealed to be resting on these ugly things as a foundation. Perhaps it’s fitting that the state-sponsored mural near Alex’s home, with “vecks and ptitsas very well-developed, stern in the dignity of labour, at workbench and machine with not one stitch of platties on their well-developed plotts,” has been vandalized “with handy pencil and ballpoint, adding hair and stiff rods and dirty ballooning slovos out of the dignified rots of these nagoy (bare, that is) cheenas and vecks.”
Interestingly, Alex shoots down a gang member’s proposition to expand their activities into organized crime and “big big big deng or money.” “If you need an auto you pluck it from the trees. If you need pretty polly you take it. Yes? Why this sudden shilarny for being the big bloated capitalist?” Anarchism and the punk style are not beating the petty-bourgeois allegations here!
In the second act of the novel, Alex is imprisoned after murdering a cat lady. He goes from a name to a number, 6655321. Here he has a conversation with the prison “charlie” or chaplain, regarding the experimental “Ludovico technique.” This chaplain imparts some wise love, in the same manner as the priest near the end of Graham Greene’s End of the Affair (Greene was a Catholic like Burgess). “Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”
Alex indeed goes through the reconditioning treatment, in a sequence immortalized by the Kubrick film. Straightjacketed and with his eyes clamped open, he’s forced to watch exploitative footage while suffering from a drug injection. (It’s even more effective if you get to watch it in a cinema, and you have the unnerving effect of looking at a mirror, and watching a person watch the first half of the movie you’re watching.)
While the reconditioning takes away Alex’s violent propensities, it also takes away the possibility to enjoy classical music. It’s a suicide-inducing prospect.
It was that these doctor bratchnies had so fixed things that any music that was like for the emotions would make me sick just like viddying or wanting to do violence. It was because all those violence films had music with them. And I remembered especially that horrible Nazi film with the Beethoven Fifth, last movement. And now here was lovely Mozart made horrible.
The novel’s three-act structure, plus the fussily arranged repetition and comeuppances gives ACO the tone of a theological fable. Except the trinity here is of blood, vomit, and song: the three things that be expelled from the body in Alex’s world. “What’s it going to be then, eh?”
Adapting Clockwork Orange was a relatively fast and smooth process for Kubrick compared to what had come before and what will come after. He signed onto Warner Brothers with a three-picture deal, and immense creative control of the entire process from development to marketing.
If 2001 was a lavish spectacle with SuperPanavision, Kubrick consciously went the opposite way to create a grungy, rancid student-film look. I like to think the movie’s aesthetic alone merited the X rating.
Most striking (not for any particular reason) from the Kolker-Abrams book is Kubrick’s praise for the source material. Here he is quoted from an interview for Rolling Stone.
It has everything: great ideas, a great plot, external action, interesting side characters and one of the most unique leading characters I’ve ever encountered in fiction — Alex. The only character comparable to Alex is Richard III and I think they both work on your imagination in much the same way.
Another great stroke in this great film is the use of “Singin’ in the Rain,” a feel good number almost ruined forever by appearing in this feel sick-to-your-stomach movie.
‘Singin’ in the Rain’, sung by Alex as he commits ‘ultraviolence’ on the writer and his wife, and again as a means of Mr. Alexander [the writer’s name, revealed in the third act] recognizing Alex when he returns to the writer’s house in the second half of the film. ‘Certainly the idea appealed to my cruel and bizarre sense of humor,’ Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis. ‘Instead of a fellow jumping up and kicking lamp posts and clicking his heels together, it would seem like a very funny idea of doing that sort of a routine kicking and beating somebody.’ […] Whoever came up with it, Kubrick bought the rights to use the song, much to Gene Kelly’s displeasure — though years later, Kelly’s widow claimed his anger was over not getting paid for its usage.
And to have the original recording come back over the end titles — brutal.
And perhaps, considering this was Kubrick’s first number for Warner Bros., a certain kind of meta statement?
This report on the biography is very short, but that is going to change with the next letter on Barry Lyndon. Since it’s both a long novel and a long film shoot, we’ll have to see when that will appear on the Sub.