Comparison and Contrast Essay on A Clockwork Orange (“Immorality in Burgess’s novel vs. Kubrick’s film”) PDF

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Comparison and Contrast Essay on A Clockwork Orange
(“Immorality in Burgess’s novel vs. Kubrick’s film”)
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Aurélien Salas: Comparison and Contrast Essay on A Clockwork Orange (“Immorality in Burgess’s novel vs. Kubrick’s film”)

At the beginning of the 60s, a doctor diagnoses Anthony Burgess, composer, teacher and author, a cerebral tumour. He still has a year of life. To leave something to his future widow, he decides to write to a pace of seven pages a day. Throughout this year, supposedly the last one, he will write five books, all of them, publishable and forgetful. But one of them will not be forgotten. In 1972, Stanley Kubrick, one of the most famous directors of the 20th century, already consolidated as a worldwide star after the successes of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Paths of Glory, decides to adapt one of these five books to the cinema. It is the history of Alex, an ultra-violent teenager in a dystopian future. He makes, with his group of three “droogs”, vandalism acts during the night, for pure pleasure. But the tensions tied to the leadership of the group lead his friends to betray him, and he ends up in jail. To get out quickly, he agrees to undergo treatment called Ludovico. The goal of this treatment is of brainwash the prisoner in order that he do not realize more violent acts. But for Burgess, this conditioning is not possible, and that is why Alex returns to the normality. When Anthony Burgess saw the reception of Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange based on his book, he “realized […] how little impact even a shocking book can make in comparison with a film.”.1 This book that had gone unnoticed in the moment of its publication, ten years before, turned to become the main spot of all the critiques when the movie went out in 1972. Burgess is then in a situation in which he must defend both his book and Stanley Kubrick's movie. Nonetheless, the book and the movie have notable differences. First, it is important to stand out that the movie, to avoid the censorship, have changed some too violent scenes of the book. Also, we will see that the lack of the last chapter of the book changes the general sense of the work. All this to come to the conclusion that, in spite of being less explicit, Kubrick's adaptation is more immoral, since his work forgets the principal point of Burgess's work: the free will.

We can start by comparing the violence and the explicitness of both works. We can easily see that Burgess's work is much more explicit, and more shocking for the reader. Indeed, to avoid the censorship that existed in this moment in the United States, by the hand of the MPAA, as well as in the UK, by the hand of the BBFC, some of the most shocking scenes have been cut in the movie. The most impressive scene is the rape of both ten-year-old girls that Alex finds in the disc shop. Kubrick has decided to transform a rape of two minors whom Alex turn drunk to abuse them, in a scene of consented sex with two students whom seem to be twenty years-old. A scene that is shocking for the reader turns into an entertaining scene for the viewer. 1 Burgess, Anthony. You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. London: Heinemann, 1990.

But Kubrick's major challenge has been adapting a novel that bases a great part of its message on the style of writing. Kubrick will be remembered as a genius of the cinema, and one of the reasons is the adjustment that he managed to realize of this literary aesthetics. A movie will never be able to put the language in the first plane. But the equivalent of the literary style in a movie is the general aesthetics of this one. The Nadsat, slang used by the main character, that represents this decadent society, is little used in Kubrick's work. On the contrary, the decadence of the society is represented by the set. The presence of works of art with phallic forms, or the set of the Korova Milk Bar represents the sexual decadence of this dystopic future. Kubrick has taken the decadent and somehow immoral aesthetics from the novel to the movie. What is clear is that a sculpture with the shape of a penis is more explicit than a strange a vulgar way of speaking. We can conclude that Kubrick's work sacrifices a great part of the explicit violence to avoid the censors. Nevertheless, it is necessary to emphasize the adjustment he made of Burgess's literary style, using a more explicit set. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that for the violence, the paedophilia, the rapes that it presents, Burgess's work is more explicitly violent.

We have seen that Burgess's work is more explicit in the topic of violence that Stanley Kubrick’s. But what makes a work is moral or immoral is its purpose rather than its explicitness. Anyways, both works presents the violence as a central topic. The question is to know if they present it with a purely playful aim, or if there is an education, or an artistic value behind. We are going to see that Kubrick's work, using the omission, transforms Burgess's work it is an immoral story, when this one had a different intention. In the movie, almost the whole story is perfectly faithful to the book, word by word, but a great part of the story is not in use in the movie. At once, Kubrick's personal choice on what sections of the story are kept and which discard have the potential of totally distort the history and its meaning.

And one of these choices has totally changed the work and its meaning. In the novel that was published in USA, Burgess had to eliminate the twenty-first chapter. In this chapter, Alex matures. The history is constructed in such a way that between the chapter 1 and the chapter 20, the main character, despite having crossed all kinds of adventures, returns to the initial point. He forcedly goes on from a A point to a B point. However, it is impossible to turn someone into a “clockwork orange” it is impossible to force someone to change. Therefore, Alex returns to the initial point. But where the movie stops, the novel continues. In the chapter 21, omitted by Kubrick, Alex comes to a real point B,

not forced. And it changes two things: a part of the developed argumentation in the novel subtext gets lost, and so does the genre. The movie is a fable, a tale. A main character goes through adventures in which he does not change, and the history finishes in the same emotional and psychological situation it had begun. The book is a novel, the protagonist evolves, and does it naturally, not mechanically.

That is why we can say that Kubrick has totally changed the nature of the novel through this omission. Besides, he has also changed its principal intention. Burgess confessed in 1990, that " Kubrick's vision completely swallowed mine, and it was I who, nonetheless, I was accused of perverting the youth ".2 Kubrick's work is more immoral because the lack of evolution of the character makes us lose the message of the work. The message that Burgess tries to relay is that the human being has free will: the violence, the evilness, they are a choice, since the interventions of the chaplain demonstrate it. “The question is whether or not this technique really makes a man good. Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”.3 The movie loses the whole message by means of the omission of the last chapter, remaining in an apology of the violence. The idea that is received is that the violence is something innate to the human being: it is not possible to prevent for much it being from tried. To finish with this idea, it is necessary to frame that Kubrick was conscious that he was omitting the latter chapter. And what proves it is the difference in the number assigned to Alex at the State Jail. In the book, the number assigned to Alex has 7 digits, as well as the number of chapters in the third part of the novel. In the movie, it has 6. Too much to be a coincidence.

Along this work we have come to several conclusions. We have seen that both works explicitly present violence and sex, although Kubrick has had to eliminate several scenes to avoid censorship. Nonetheless, it has caught the vulgarity of Burgess's literary style in the set of the movie. Although both works are equal in their explicitness about violence and sex, I think that Kubrick's work is, and for much, more immoral. Kubrick does not understand, or decided not to understand, the importance that the last chapter within the meaning of the work. By means of his omission, he omits both the evolution of the personage and the principal message of Burgess's work. As Burgess himself said: “My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it.”.4 Works Cited List -

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. London: Heinemann, 1962.

2 Burgess, Anthony. You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. London: Heinemann, 1990. 3 Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. London: Heinemann, 1962. 4 Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange Resucked. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986.

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Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange Resucked. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986.

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Burgess, Anthony. You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. London: Heinemann, 1990....