Counter-Currents
1,503 words
For years now, readers have been urging me to review Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which adapts Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel of the same name. I have resisted, because although A Clockwork Orange is often hailed as a classic, I thought it was dumb, distasteful, and highly overrated, so I didn’t want to watch it again. But I had first watched it decades ago. So I thought I might see it differently if I gave it another chance. I approached it with an open mind. But I was right the first time.
A Clockwork Orange is set in Great Britain in a not-too-distant future. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his three buddies are violent hooligans who engage in rape, assault, robbery, and wanton destruction. The movie opens with an amphetamine-fueled crime spree. They beat up an old drunk, brawl with another gang, run people off the road while joyriding, then use a confidence trick (“There’s been a terrible accident. Can I come in and use your phone?”) to invade a couple’s home, whereupon they beat the man, rape his wife, and trash the place. The whole sequence is deeply distasteful. Violent sociopaths like Alex and his friends should simply be killed.
Alex is high-handed and cruel to his buddies as well, using treachery and violence to assert dominance over them. This merely breeds resentment. One night they decide to rob a wealthy woman’s house. The old accident trick does not work, so Alex breaks in. There is a struggle. She attacks him with a bust of Beethoven, so he kills her with a sculpture of a penis. Hearing sirens, he exits, whereupon his ex-friends clobber him with a bottle and leave him for the police.
Let that be a lesson to you.
Alex is imprisoned for murder. He seeks to ingratiate himself with the authorities by feigning Christian piety. (As a violent sociopath, he finds the Old Testament more to his liking.)
When a new Left-wing government comes into power, they want to free up prison space for political prisoners, so they introduce an experimental cure for his violent sociopathy: the Ludovico technique, which is basically a form of Pavlovian conditioning. Alex is the test subject. He is injected with a nausea-producing drug then forced to watch films of violence, including sexual violence. Eventually, he can’t even think of violence without becoming violently ill. Pronounced cured, he is released into society.
Newly paroled, Alex bumps into the bum that he assaulted, who recognizes him and wants revenge. He calls together his fellow bums to beat Alex, whose Ludovico conditioning makes it impossible for him to fight back.
Ironic, huh?
Let that be a lesson to you.
When the mob of hobos is broken up by two cops, they turn out to be two of Alex’s old gang, the very ones he humiliated. Eager to exact further revenge, they beat him mercilessly and abandon him in the countryside. Alex is helpless to resist.
Ironic, huh?
Let that be a lesson to you.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Part Four of the Trilogy here.
Alex wanders through the countryside until he takes refuge at the home of the very couple he and his gang brutalized. Ironic, huh? The husband was crippled by the beating. The wife has died and been replaced with a gigantic muscular dork named Julian. The husband figures out who Alex is and drugs him. Then he and some of his friends, who oppose the government that introduced the Ludovico technique, try to drive Alex to commit suicide, hoping to create a scandal that will embarrass the government. Alex throws himself from a window and is severely injured but does not die.
To contain the scandal, the Justice Minister throws the cripple in prison and tries to win Alex’s favor by tending to his wounds. While unconscious, he is also given brain surgery to reverse the Ludovico technique. The happy ending is that Alex returns to being a violent sociopath, but this time he will enjoy the patronage and protection of the state. Thus the tale veers from pat moralism to pure cynicism in the end. Apparently, the book’s final chapter was “redemptive,” but this was omitted as being contrived — as if that weren’t true of the whole story.
But isn’t this all redeemed by a “deep message” about human freedom? No, not really, because the moral psychology of A Clockwork Orange is remarkably crude.
The Ludovico technique is based on the observation that normal people have a distaste for violence and cruelty directed at the innocent. Then it simply ignores the fact that normal people don’t necessarily have a distaste for violence, even cruelty, directed at bad people. It also reverses cause and effect, reasoning that since normal people feel distaste at violence, if they can create a mechanical association between violence and sickness, that will somehow make Alex a morally normal person, curing him of his violent sociopathy.
Of course, this whole theory completely ignores the element of empathy. Normal people feel disgust with violence and cruelty because they can empathize with the victims. Sociopaths lack empathy, and the Ludovico technique does not change that. Alex does not feel sick with empathy for victims, he just feels sick. And his physiological response makes no moral distinctions between violence meted out to the deserving and the undeserving. When he is attacked, he can’t defend himself, because even violence in self-defense makes him sick.
Of course, utter stupidity is no objection to most progressive social uplift schemes, so it doesn’t exactly make such a “cure” for crime implausible.
Burgess’ “deep” objection to the Ludovico technique is equally crude and dumb, but in a different way. The prison chaplain argues that the Ludovico technique is evil because it takes away Alex’s freedom, which takes away his humanity. Alex, being a sociopath, takes pleasure in hurting innocent people. The Ludovico treatment conditions him to feel disgust at violence, which denies him the freedom to do evil, thus it is dehumanizing.
But if this is a dehumanizing assault on freedom, what are we to make of our own disgust with Alex’s behavior? Is that also a dehumanizing form of unfreedom? Presumably so.
Does this mean that when Alex becomes a violent sociopath again his humanity has been restored? Presumably so.
Since Alex the sociopath can contemplate violence without any feelings of disgust, whereas normal people cannot, does this mean that Alex is both more free and more human than normally constituted people? If so, this is a pretty good example of a reductio ad absurdum.
The Ludovico technique and Burgess’ alternative both depend on a pat dualism between body and mind, which leaves no place for what the ancients called virtues and the moderns called moral sentiments. For the ancients, virtue is rooted in habit. For moral sentiments theorists, our ability to perceive the good is caught up in feelings like empathy and disgust. But to the Ludovico technique, virtue is indistinguishable from Pavlovian conditioning, and moral sentiments are indistinguishable from a sour stomach. From the chaplain’s point of view, the freedom of the mind is so separate from the body, habit, and feeling that a sociopath’s lack of virtue or moral sentiment actually makes him freer and thus more human than morally healthy people.
But isn’t Kubrick’s treatment of this material brilliant? No, not really. Kubrick’s treatment of sex and violence veers between the pornographic and cartoonish. The entire movie is crude and cynical parody, with an ugly cast, grotesque costumes, hideous sets, and dreadful over-acting. The whole production reminded me of the comics of R. Crumb, who puts his prodigious talent to work churning out pornography, grotesquerie, and world-destroying cynicism. Crumb obviously hates America. He especially hates women. Likewise, the director of A Clockwork Orange obviously hates everything about Great Britain. He also takes particular pleasure in the mockery and degradation of women. Handling such material with technical skill does not redeem it. Indeed, by making it seductive, Kubrick actually makes it worse.
A Clockwork Orange is violence-porn and porn-porn combined with a middle-brow, moralistic “message” and some classical music. But these function merely as an alibi, like the interviews in Playboy. A Clockwork Orange is obscene in the literal sense of the word: it should not be watched.
The Unz Review, April 1, 2021
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21 comments
By removing the book’s ending, Kubrick transformed it. With the ending, where Alex’s passions cool down and he starts thinking about marriage and children, we see that we’ve just seen a classic Catholic trope – the banality of evil – play out in front of us. Without the ending, it’s just wanton violence for violence’s sake and possibly a message on the inhumanity of liberal punishment. Hanging Alex would have been more humane than brainwashing him.
No, the Kubrick ending aims for a much more pessimist and sarcastic point by uniting the hypocrite government and the thug against liberal press pressure, stRiki-Eiking up a mutually beneficial deal.
A Clockwork Orange is an excellent fictional metaphor for the leftist domination of politics today, the “treatment” and release of real violent criminals to make way and make room for evil white supremacist patriots who say out loud that Puppet Biden is a fake president “elected” in a fake election orchestrated to perpetuate CCP Regime Change on the REAL PRESIDENT DONALD JOHN TRUMP!
I have nothing but respect for Stanley Kubrick since I started reading reviews of his films on this site. “A Clockwork Orange” is about how violence in the movies, and on television is used to desensitize humans to violence in real life, and atomize society. “Full Metal Jacket” is about an incident of intensive conditioning to dehumanize marine trainees. But, Kubrick’s masterpiece is “Eyes Wide Shut;” he kept trying to warn us about the jews, and they killed him for that movie.
I disagree completely.
I think the review misses two things:
1. This is foremost a Swiftian satire, hence the deliberately grotesque exaggerations and caricatures. The “bad taste” shown throughout is clearly a sign of dystopian decline. I cannot see any “hatred of Britain” here. Also, Robert Crumb has nothing to do with this.
2. Kubrick was heavily influenced by Robert Ardrey at that time and the movie is all about “anthropological pessimism”. So when the reviewer asks: “Does this mean that when Alex becomes a violent sociopath again his humanity has been restored? Presumably so.” – Well yes, but Kubrick/Burgess don’t mean this in a humanistic or sentimental, but in a rather disturbing, deeply anti-Rousseauian way. Kubrick’s view of human nature at that time and the role of society was pure Joseph de Maistre (hence right wing in a way). But there is no easy way out here for both the Rousseauists and Anti-Rousseauists. That is what makes this movie so deeply disturbing for any viewer, either liberal or conservative.
In Burgess’ and Kubrick’s view, any attempt to radically erase the destructive sides of human nature for good would also erase the creative sides. Erase Alex, and you will erase Beethoven also. The notorious Camille Paglia quote “There is no female Mozart, because there is no female Jack the Ripper” follows the same thought.
Now this is very relevant in an age when transhumanist utopian ideas abound and there are plans around to f.e. erase “racism” and “hate” through genetics, medication oder brainwashing. The behaviourist “therapies” in C.O. maybe crude and primitive, but they foreshadow much worse and much more effective attempts of manipulating and altering human nature for good.
It also seems as if the author of this review does applaud the Ludovico treatment, because it is practical on sadists and sociopaths (I agree that execution would be the best way). But this is not about Alex as an individual, It is about the very idea that human behaviour can and should be programmed and conditioned like a clockwork to erase evil for good. The proponents of the Ludovico therapy claim explicitely that this is a MORAL progress for the human race, while the priest (not Burgess or Kubrick, though we can assume that they would agree) rightfully objects that there can be no moral where there is no choice. Alex remains a domesticated animal, following the pleasure principle. Both things are true: Alex becomes a circus animal in a disgusting, self-congratulating technocrat government show, AND the priests humanistic impulse to forge a true, morally capable “christian” human being of Alex, who seems totally instinct and desire driven, may be naive and in vain.
So there is no progress here, but a new and disquieting way for the state to treat human beings like machines that can be tampered with. The movie rightfully hints that this is potentially just as evil as Alex’s deeds.
I certainly don’t applaud the Ludovico technique. It is based on a crude understanding of human psychology.
I don’t agree that there can be no morality where there is no choice. For classical virtue ethics or modern moral sentiments theory, good character means being less free. There are things that people with good character will not do. There are things that people with good taste will not look at.
The main reason I hate this movie, beyond its intrinsic ugliness and mean-spiritedness, is that the moral fig leaf of claiming “It’s about freedom. You can’t be moral or even human without being free” is just as false as Ludovico’s behaviorism. Basically, they are two sides of a pat mind-body dualism: Ludovico thinks we are just hunks of conditioned meat and can’t distinguish taste or moral sentiment from a bellyache. The priest, by contrast, would have to maintain that a man with good character and good taste — and thus no real freedom to embrace the bad or the ugly — is less free than the untreated Alex, which makes Alex superior as a man and as a moral agent. For me, that stands as a reductio ad absurdum.
I very much enjoyed your thoughts on this film. And I think the link between creation and destruction that you mentioned must have very much been on Kubrick’s mind given how that was a theme with 2001: ASO.
“The proponents of the Ludovico therapy claim explicitely that this is a MORAL progress for the human race, while the priest (not Burgess or Kubrick, though we can assume that they would agree) rightfully objects that there can be no moral where there is no choice.”
I remember the priest making that point in the film. And that’s probably a point a lot of Christian moralists/Catholics would likely make (though perhaps not all of them).
I actually think the whole “choice” factor is kind of a red herring, though. To me the issue introduced by the film isn’t so much over “getting rid of choice” for the individual as much as it is civilization trying to fundamentally rebel against nature by eliminating evil in some crude, mechanistic fashion. It actually serves to further compound evil as it goes about distorting reality.
When justice is viewed more as a Rubik’s cube and less as an end in itself, you perhaps unwittingly compound injustice and harm. This is in a way illustrated by how the victim (the author) in the film is turned into a monster at seeing his perpetrator de-fanged right in front of him. Despite being a victim, him getting off to the torture of another creature (even an evil one) clearly wasn’t good for his own soul. And it’s also illustrated by even the abuse that the de-fanged Alex suffers at the hands of his old friends. And of course, it’s finally illustrated by Alex getting ahead at the end of the film as the regime attempts to ‘smooth’ things over.
I really wish that the whole notion of “you have to be free to choose” was never introduced as point of consideration in the story because to me it is problematic for the reasons Greg outlined. And I think there’s enough to sink your teeth into without introducing that conceptual cul de sac over ‘free will’.
I always thought the sort of ‘libertarian’ (for lack of a better word) obsession over “free will” was pretty asinine, myself. There is no ‘free will’ the way many of those people qualify it and want it to exist.
This is from a comment at Unz:
“The point of Clockwork Orange is the urban dysfunctional and corrupt hell which the described Britain of the future becomes, with social cohesion and morals falling so low that society can’t even deal with gangs of high-school psychopaths, without resorting to direct brainwashing conditioning. And only does this, finally stopping pretending that the gangs aren’t a problem, in order to free up space in prison for dissidents.”
Another important point, I think.
As for the aesthetics of the movie, I find them original, compelling and fascinating. The use of music is legendary.
Alex is clearly not really a realistic figure, but a conceptual one, exemplifying the “duality of man”, as adressed in a scene in FULL METAL JACKET. The terrible and the glorious things of Western civilisation, are united in the Beethoven lover Alex, and in the concept of the movie as whole. There is also a lot of Nietzsche in here.
Also note how Kubrick ridicules liberal intellectuals as hypocritical buffoons with the Patrick Magee character.
I also find it puzzling how Kubrick links civilisation and human creativity to violence, just as he did when he famously cut from the weaponised prehistoric bone to the bone-like futuristic space ship in “2001”. He is very, very close to Spengler in “Man and Technics” here. In Kubrick’s view, violence permeates much of civilisation and its instutions needs to be rather “tended” than eliminated, as you would tend a fire and watch out so it does not burn everything.
And so, he has always stressed that FULL METAL JACKET is NOT an “anti-war movie”, even though he depiction of the military drill is scathing (nonetheless, Sgt. Hartman remains the most memorable figure of the movie). The soldiers in that movie are not Alexes, but they get sort of trained to awaken their “inner Alex” and put him into service of the army and its aims by becoming “killer machines”.
Kubrick famously was obsessed with Napoleon and thought of him as the greatest man that ever lived. Now Napoleon was a genius, who was a unique creator and reformer of civilisation and state power and organisation, a perfect example of a “Faustian man”, but who also flooded practically all of Europe with two decades of war, an art he was VERY good at.
Overall, C. O. is a sardonic monster of a movie that has no easy answers and tries to be as nasty as possible for all sides of the political spectrum. Easily among my Top Ten movies.
“A Clockwork Orange” is the type of movie that many people seem to think is much deeper than it really is. It works better as a moderately surreal comedy-suspense. The “moral message” is basically the kind of stuff college students philosophize about and doesn’t really go anywhere, but it’s worth seeing as long as it is not taken really seriously.
Hey Trevor – Bollocks to your review! Great big, bouncing bollocks! Clockwork is one of the greatest movies ever made by perhaps the greatest director ever born. The movie is all the more relevant in the past 12 months as the hooliganism and degeneracy become mainstream. Just like in CO, Western governments have become weak, flaccid shells of their former selves, permitting and even encouraging widespread violence. And the fact that the government tried to cover up this violence at the Ludavinka center makes it all the more relevant with today’s mediocre mendacious Western governments. If you can’t see that then again, Bollocks!
Well this is fun, I have to say. I’ve seen this film about 30 times, including twice the first weekend it opened (when it was still X-rated and uncut!).
The news that winter (’71-’72) wasn’t the screen action, or whether Malcolm McDowell and his droogies weren’t just a bit old to be playing teenage juvenile delinquents—or the brilliant soundtrack with Moog Synthesizer renditions of Henry Purcell and Beethoven.
No, it was the pop and critical commentary itself, e.g., Pauline Kael calling it a “fascist work of art” in The New Yorker, while meanwhile comparing McDowell to “a young Cagney.”
Anthony Burgess was dragged onto every talkshow—American talkshows; he’d already been on the Brit telly circuit for years—to discuss the meaning of ultraviolence. He was like a weighing-machine: you put your coins in and you got some tasty soundbites. Suddenly he was the most famous writer in the Whole Wide World. Burgess even wrote a huge piece on the front of the Arts & Leisure section of the NYTimes, about all the controversy the film had supposedly caused.
There was never quite enough time or space for Burgess to point out that the Kubrick film departed considerably from the Burgess novel. Still it was a huge bonanza for Burgess, and McDowell, and even Kubrick, who soon had the film cut and then withdrawn from distribution in the UK, for public-relations purposes.
But all this commentary was meta-meta-criticism at the extreme, and it lost the plot when it came to the central intended thesis, which was that we were at “the thin end of the wedge” of a police-state enforcing political correctness. I don’t know how Burgess intuited all this in the early 60s, but certainly by 1970 when Kubrick was making the film, the dangers of things like Race Relations Acts and black-ops from Special Branch should have been widely apparent, at least in Great Britain. The random violence of Alex and his Droogs is just a proxy of what we saw in GB in the 1970s and in America today: race-conscious patriots are redefined as “criminals,” “thugs,” violent people in need of imprisonment and brainwashing.
Yes, the movie is a cartoon; that is the only way it could have gone down, just as Doctor Strangelove was palatable only as a comedy. But behind all the flash and filigree there is a core parable.
“It should not be watched”–there’s more than a faint echo of the woke totalitarian left in that phrase. Ironic, huh?, given that the film is about what society would be like if the Soviet Union won the cold war. Which, as we know, it did.
Modern locked-down Britain becomes more similar by the day to A Clockwork Orange’s Soviet future (hence the droogs’ Russian-inspired slang). The current prime minister is even named Boris.
Time to watch this beautiful, brilliant film again, for probably the 50th time since I saw it in theatres in the summer of ’71, in celebration of its 50th anniversary.
Interesting that you don’t differentiate standards of taste and morality from totalitarianism.
Interesting that you don’t distinguish between “I wouldn’t recommend watching this” and “It should not be watched.”
Odd that you have an aversion to “shoulds.”
I saw the movie (most of it, at least), about 30 years ago as a teenager. My original take was “this is fucking stupid.”
Many times I have revisited movies that I saw as a teen or child. In every case, they were dumber than I remembered.
Ah yes, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Now that brings back some childhood memories. Of course as a small furry creature back then I did not experience the actual motion picture. Going to the cinema for Silent Running and the 1st time on television excitement of Yellow Submarine and Planet of the Apes was more the thing for the junior hippy kid wannabees. Clockwork Orange was just another one of those things that was floating around in the culture with the rest of the burgeoning decadence and depravity of the era. Great stuff for a small child to marinate in. And ORANGE! Optimistic orange! The color of the era. Orange kitchens, orange carpets, orange paisley, orange shopping malls, orange mini skirts to stare up at. It was all rather fun. The bright new modular plastickiness of everything, the avalanche of toys on Xmas and birthdays. The vapid, nihilistic fun-gasmic shallowness of it all. Remember Shaker Makers? Sigh … And now just look at us.
BTW Nice new layout for the Webzine. Not sure about the whole paywall thing. No doubt many in the Counter Currents constituency will be waiting to find out if C-C cold turkey to kicks in.
Far from perfect and seriously dated (though sometimes in a charming way), I never looked at the film in quite this harsh of a light as this review does.
It’s definitely unclear to most people what this film is driving at; and that’s not because it’s super super deep or anything; so it is flawed by virtue of its murkiness alone. But at the same time, I do think there is substance within this film to be salvaged and appreciated nonetheless.
I always saw ACO as chiefly a sort of an examination of the problem of evil from the perspective of ‘evil’; and how the wrong approach to something or an idealistic approach beyond human limitations — even with the best of intentions — leads to more inhumane outcomes and further compounds evil in the world as opposed to simply recognizing the nature of good and evil and seeing morality for what it is and what it is not. So morality is NOT, contra these ultra modern bureaucrats, a trifling problem or puzzle to be ‘solved’ by technocrats or ‘science’. Trying to eliminate evil is a perversion of morality and mankind itself.
Trying to ‘solve’ this issue of ‘bad people’ turned a genuine victim (the author) into a monster himself (while also later punishing him) and it seemed to further empower Alex in the long run who will no doubt reek more havoc than he would have done if the bureaucrats were simply worried about punishing the guilty as opposed to ‘fixing’ them. We shouldn’t try to outsmart or shortcut the matter of justice.
Again, it’s not the smartest treatment of this philosophical issue by a film or novel that I’ve seen (not by a long shot) if that’s what it’s getting at. But it’s fairly worthwhile especially considering how memorable the soundtrack, aesthetics, and overall style of this film are.
The ending too I always took to be ironic as Alex (‘evil’) being ‘cured’ is a nature’s own victory over the government’s ‘post-morality’ project/experiment. Alex’s restoration is nature’s restoration or nature’s own re-assertion of itself, as horrific as nature can be at times in the form of evil people like Alex. The sex and violence that is often accompanied by Beethoven’s 9th in several parts throughout the film I always took to represent the normal moral universe of good being in constant conflict with evil. They exist in side by side. The final scene to me kind of awkwardly invites the viewer and an evil serpent like Alex to affirm the same re-assertion of this ‘cured’ order (if for different reasons).
I kind of liked what I took to be some sort of tension there even if it didn’t ‘blow my mind’.
I always thought the final chapter in the novel was stupid and that Kubrick was right to cut it from the film.
I saw CO in 1972. It was a stunning, brilliant film, but I never wanted to see it again, and haven’t. I don’t care for the brutality. Sort of like Raging Bull. A masterful film, but seeing it once was enough.
It’s very true that Kubrick worked with the book sans the last chapter, because the American editors dropped it. As Burgess put it, ‘the tough tradition of American popular fiction ousted what was termed British blandness.’
Also, the book (more than the movie) uses Nadsat, a Russian/English youth language, which Burgess included a small guide at the end of the novel. English critics claimed Burgess was destroying and parodying the English language, which pleased him; it was what critics had said about James Joyce.
Of course today, the youth language is black ghetto. No pleasing there.
As Burgess put it: “Clockwork Orange is a satirical study of life as it was in 1960, when the tone of postwar England was socialistic, collectivist, and I was really trying to satirize that sort of world in which people had nothing to live for, had no energy-except for the young, who could do nothing with their energy but employ it in totally barbarous ends.’
Also, Burgess’s original book, with Alex being redeemed in his later years, was meant to be optimistic. Perhaps it reflected on his Catholic background, for, as he said, ‘Catholics are trained to be optimistic about man, because they accept at a very early age the great premise that man was born into a state of evil….Once we realize that, we can only go up…whereas liberals, religious or secular, believe man was born with an equal potentiality for good-so they become disappointed when men commit evil.’
Burgess also commented there was a personal side to the novel. In WWII, his wife worked at night job for the government, and going home one night, she was assaulted by several GI deserters. There were a lot of Americans on the loose, drunk and deserters. In Churchill’s War, David Irving notes how American deserters were becoming a problem, and a lot of them were black. His wife wasn’t raped, but was robbed, beaten, she lost a child she was carrying, and eventually became ill, took to drink, and died some years later in Malaya, where Burgess was a teacher. He admitted the novel was an attempt ‘to cleanse the whole thing out of my mind, by objectifying and fictionalizing it. Pre catharsis, a jeu de spleen.’
He took a lot of heat for the violence in the movie, as Kubrick disappeared, and Burgess was blamed for it. A novella Burgess wrote,
The Clockwork Testament, or, Enderby’s End, is a grotesque, funny look at this incident, as well as the barbarous life Burgess had in NYC when he taught at CCNY when all admission standards were dropped and he had to deal with a lot of savage blacks; also, a woman seeks him out to kill him for that awful disgusting film, and in reality, a woman was seized trying to get into an apartment with a loaded gun to ‘make him pay.’
Burgess felt much of the Ludovico Technique was taken from B.F. Skinner, and government compulsion to make people good might be examined when you read my essay of Burgess’s 1985, posted on Counter-Currents earlier.
Burgess admired Kubrick, enjoying Paths of Glory. He thought Dr. Strangelove over-valued the talent of Peter Sellers, his playing three different parts obscuring the satire. (I didn’t like the film; I prefer Fail-Safe). Kubrick was wanting to make a movie about Napoleon with Burgess writing the script, and Burgess’s novel Napoleon Symphony is what was intended, although it was too expensive to make. Kubrick settled for Barry Lyndon, which I dislike…Ryan O’Neal…ugh!
I think CO, while an intriguing book, isn’t Burgess’s best. I like Any Old Iron, Earthly Powers, and his autobiography You’ve had Your Time, but CO is the one thing most people remember.
Also, on Full Metal Jacket: they weren’t in the army, they were in the marines.
There were real experiments to “tame” violent persons with the brain surgery.
See The Mind Stealers: Psychosurgery and Mind Control, by Samuel Chavkin. The author is a Jewish leftist, but this old book is informative.
As a Brit, the film does not strike me as anti-British on Kubrick’s part; if anything it reflects Burgess’ own sentiments, which were shared by many writers and artists in the post-war period. Otherwise this review nails it. The only thing to be said in mitigation is that the rape scene is actually based on something which happened to Burgess and his wife, and from which she never recovered.
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