Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE
Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick
and A Clockwork
Orange
Edited by
Matthew Melia
Georgina Orgill
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Editors
Julie Grossman, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer, Atlanta, GA, USA
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus
on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision
to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expan-
sive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a
larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are
not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive
plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appro-
priations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially
welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adap-
tation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals
that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of
adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.
Matthew Melia · Georgina Orgill
Editors
Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick
and A Clockwork
Orange
Editors
Matthew Melia Georgina Orgill
Arts, Culture and Communication University Archives and Special
Kingston University Collections Centre
Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK University of the Arts London
London, UK
ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-05598-0 ISBN 978-3-031-05599-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7
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Acknowledgements
The editors of this book would like to thank the following for their
support: the staff of the University of Arts London: London College
of Communication, Special Collections and Archives, Stanley Kubrick
Archive especially manager Sarah Mahurter; the staff of the International
Anthony Burgess Archive especially director Professor Andrew Biswell and
archivist Anna Edwards; Professor Julian Rodriguez at Kingston Univer-
sity; the Higher Educational Funding Council for England (HEFKE)
whose funding allowed the conference out of which this book emerges to
take place; Mr. Jan Harlan; James Fenwick for being a sounding board;
and our families Jamie, Nikki and Charlotte for the time given to put
this book together. We would especially like to thank all those who have
contributed to the book for the timeliness, cooperation and especially
their chapter contributions!
v
Contents
Introduction 1
Matthew Melia and Georgina Orgill
Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

Dangerous Arts: The Clash Between Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, and the World 25
Filippo Ulivieri
“A Major Statement on the Contemporary Human
Condition”: Anthony Burgess and the Aftermath
of A Clockwork Orange 47
Andrew Biswell
Language and Adaptation

Scripting A Clockwork Orange 69
Matthew Melia
‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem Really Real
When You Viddy Them on the Screen’: The Adaptation
of Nadsat in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange 95
Benet Vincent and Jim Clarke
vii
viii CONTENTS
“Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’

in Time for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange 117
Julian Preece
20th Century Contexts: Architectural, Art Historical and

Theoretical Approaches
Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art
in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange 133
Dijana Metlić
Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange 155
Joseph Darlington
Glazzies Wide Open: Spectral Torture, Kubrick,
and A Clockwork Orange (A Brainie by Fifteen Thinks) 183
Murray Pomerance
20th Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange and the Cold

War
When Burgess Met the Stilyagi on a White Night:
Subcultures, Hegemony and Resistance in the Soviet Roots
of A Clockwork Orange’s Droogs 205
Cristian Pasotti
Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, Sinny
and Cold War Brainwashing Scares 221
Joy McEntee
A Clockwork Orange in 21st Century

A Thing Living, and Not Growing 245
Ajay Hothi
A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual
Violence as Torture: Stanley Kubrick and Francis Bacon 265
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
CONTENTS ix
Music and A Clockwork Orange

Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel, Film,
and Play A Clockwork Orange 285
Christine Lee Gengaro
David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides
of the Same Golly 303
Sean Redmond
Afterword 319
Index 323
Notes on Contributors
Biswell Andrew is a professor of Modern Literature at Manchester

Metropolitan University and director of the International Anthony
Burgess Foundation. Publications include The Real Life of Anthony
Burgess (Picador), A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition (Penguin
Modern Classics), Obscenity and the Arts (Pariah Press) and No End
to Enderby (Lux). He has edited Burgess’s first novel, A Vision of Battle-
ments, for the Irwell Edition, published by Manchester University Press.
He is currently editing the letters and short stories of Anthony Burgess.
Clarke Jim is an assistant professor of English Literature at the
University of Cappadocia, and has previously taught at universities in
Ireland, Britain and Belarus. He is the author of three monographs,
including The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess (2017), Science Fiction and
Catholicism (2018) and the forthcoming Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange. He is also the co-director of the Ponying the Slovos project,
which examines invented languages, especially in translation.
Darlington Joseph is a programme leader for B.A.(Hons) Digital
Animation with Illustration at Futureworks Media School. His most
recent academic books are Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Litera-
ture (Palgrave, 2020) and The Experimentalists (Bloomsbury, 2021). He
is the co-editor of The Manchester Review of Books and is on Twitter at
@Joe_Darlo.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dr. Gengaro Christine Lee has taught in the music department at

Los Angeles City College for nearly twenty years. An avid writer and
researcher, she often gravitates towards topics that address music and
popular media or music and literature. She has published two books:
Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films (Scarecrow Press,
2013) and Experiencing: Chopin (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), and
has recently edited the Irwell Edition of Anthony Burgess’s This Man and
Music (Manchester University Press, 2020). She has presented papers in
the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and her published work
appears in numerous journals and books, including The Encyclopedia
of Hip Hop and The Worlds of Back to the Future. She has been the
program annotator for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra since 2007.
Hothi Ajay is a writer and film-maker. He is a senior lecturer in Crit-
ical Studies at Kingston University and London Metropolitan University.
His writing appears in publications including Artfoum, Art in America,
Frieze and Art Monthly; he has made documentaries for broadcast and
exhibition, including for Serpentine Gallery, e-flux and BBC Radio 2 and
Radio 4. He is the author of THIS IS ART WRITING (2018), editor of
A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015).
McEntee Joy SFHEA is a senior lecturer in the Department of English,
Creative Writing and Film at the University of Adelaide. Her work focuses
on American film, especially Stanley Kubrick, and literature-to-film adap-
tation. It has appeared in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick,
Camera Obscura, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Film Criticism,
Adaptation, Literature/Film Quarterly and the Journal of Adaptation in
Film and Performance.
Melia Matthew is a senior lecturer in Literature, Film and Media at
Kingston University. His doctorate was on The Theatre of the Absurd,
Architecture and Cruelty and his current research interest includes the
work of both Ken Russell and Stanley Kubrick. He is the co-editor of The
Jaws Book (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is an editor of the forthcoming The
Films of Ken Russell (EUP, 2021) and is working on a monograph on
Russell’s Gothic (LUP/Auteur, 2023). Matt has contributed to a variety
of publications including Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production
Contexts of Unmade Films (Fenwick, Foster and Eldridge, eds. 2021), The
Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Hunter and Abrams, eds.
2021) and Reframing Cult Westerns (Broughton, ed. 2020). In 2017,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
he convened the conference Ken Russell: Perspectives, Reception and

Legacy (Kingston University) and in 2018, he co-convened the confer-
ence A Clockwork Symposium: A Clockwork Orange—New Perspectives.
Metlić Dijana is an associate professor of Art History at the Academy
of Arts, University of Novi Sad. As of 2021, she has written four books in
which she explored connections between fine arts, photography and film,
and among them Stanley Kubrick between Painting and Film (Belgrade:
Film Centre Serbia, 2013). Her papers have been published in many
Serbian and international academic journals and companions. Among
others, she has authored the following papers: “Unmasking the Society:
Use of Masks in Kubrick’s Films” (Cinergie: Il Cinema e le altre Arti,
no. 12, 2017), “Stanley Kubrick and Hieronymus Bosch: In the Garden
of Earthly Delights” (Essais, Hors-série 4, 2018), “Zenitist Cinema:
Influences of Marinetti and Mayakovsky” (In: Gunter Berghaus, Oleh
S. Ilnytzkyj, Gabriella Elina Imposti and Christina Lodder. Interna-
tional Yearbook of Futurism Studies, vol. 9, De Gruyter, 2019) and
“Stanley Kubrick and Art” (In: Nathan Abrams and IQ Hunter. Blooms-
bury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
She took part in a number of national and international conferences.
Her primary areas of research are modern art and historical avant-gardes,
with a particular focus on the interrelations between film, photography
and painting.
Orgill Georgina is the Stanley Kubrick Archivist at University of the
Arts London. She has appeared in radio and television documentaries
on Stanley Kubrick and his archive. She is a series editor for the
Stanley Kubrick series at Liverpool University Press and has contributed
to the Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Pasotti Cristian graduated in English literature, Italian Languages and
Film Studies. He works for the SRG-SSr (the public Swiss radio-
television) and he is currently completing his PhD at the University of
Luzern about the representation of youth rebellion between the 1950s
and the 1960s, and the roles of music and style in both literature and
films.
Pomerance Murray is an independent scholar living in Toronto
and adjunct professor in the School of Media and Communications
at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of A Voyage with
Hitchcock (SUNY, 2021), The Film Cheat: Film Artifice and Viewing
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020), Grammatical Dreams (Green Integer,

2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (Bloomsbury,
2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY, 2019), and other volumes. Color It
True: Impressions of Cinema is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2022.
Preece Julian is a professor of German at Swansea University.
He has published mainly on twentieth-century authors such as Elias
and Veza Canetti, Günter Grass and Kafka. His contribution to the BFI
Classics series on the film The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (dirs. von
Trotta and Schlöndorff) is forthcoming in 2022. The current chapter
belongs to an AHRC funded project entitled “Bilingual British Novel-
ists: Language Ambassadors or Mental Migrants?” which was carried out
through the Open World Research Initiative.
Redmond Sean is a professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University.
He is the author of Celebrity (Routledge, 2019), Liquid Space: Science
Fiction Film and Television in the Digital Age (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and The
Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (Columbia, 2013). He is the
founding editor of Celebrity Studies, short-listed for best new academic
journal in 2011.
Dr. Ritzenhoff Karen A. is a professor in the Department of
Communication at Central Connecticut State University where she is
also affiliated with the cinema studies and honours programmes. She
teaches classes in visual communication, film, documentary and media
studies, as well as women and film. Ritzenhoff is co-Chair of the
Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Programme. She has published
several co-edited volumes on war films and is collaborating on a new
anthology on Gender, Power and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick
with Jeremi Szaniawski and Dijana Metlić. Ritzenhoff’s most recent publi-
cations are Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2021)
with Elena Caoduro and Karen Randell as well as Afrofuturism in Black
Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2021) with Renée T. White.
Ulivieri Filippo is an independent scholar and writer. The leading
expert in Kubrick’s cinema in Italy, he is the author of Stanley Kubrick
And Me: Thirty Years at His Side (2016), a biography of Kubrick’s
personal assistant Emilio D’Alessandro and 2001 Between Kubrick and
Clarke: The Genesis, Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece (2019). His
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
research on Kubrick has been presented in several international confer-

ences and published in books, journals, magazines and newspapers. He is
co-scenarist of the documentary S Is For Stanley (2015), winner of the
David di Donatello award for best documentary feature.
Vincent Benet works at Coventry University where he lectures in applied
linguistics. His research interests revolve around applications of corpus
linguistics in a range of areas including English for academic purposes,
stylistics, pragmatics and translation. He is the co-founder of A Clockwork
Orange Parallel Translation Corpus Project.
List of Figures
Scripting A Clockwork Orange

Fig. 1 Alex attacks his Droogs (I) 79
Fig. 2 Alex attacks his Droogs (II) 80
Fig. 3 Alex attacks his Droogs (III): ‘Russian dancing’ 80
Fig. 4 Alex and the Droogs by the Thamesmead Boating Lake,
still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick 1971 81
Fig. 5 Location photography (Stanley Kubrick Archive).
With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros,
and University of the Arts London 84
Fig. 6 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (1) Alex and his Droogs enter
the Underpass 85
Fig. 7 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (II): Alex as Gothic Monster 85
Fig. 8 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (III): Entering F. Alexander’s
‘Home’ 86
‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem Really Real

When You Viddy Them on the Screen’: The Adaptation of
Nadsat in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Fig. 1 Number of words (types) per category in book and film 106
Fig. 2 Frequencies (per 10,000 words) of categories of Nadsat 106
Fig. 3 Comparison of relative frequencies (per 10,000 words)
of Core Nadsat vs. all other categories of Nadsat in book
and film 109
xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 4 Instances of droog(ie) taken from the film in order

of appearance 110
Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art in

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Fig. 1 Alex’s room, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 136
Fig. 2 The Cat lady’s phallic sculpture, still from A Clockwork
Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 140
Fig. 3 The Korova Milk-Bar set, still from A Clockwork Orange,
Stanley Kubrick, 1971 143
Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange

Fig. 1 Illustration from Newman’s study demonstrating
the concept of “natural surveillance” 158
Fig. 2 Establishing shot from the gang-fight scene, still
from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick 1971 159
Fig. 3 Interior of Flatblock 18A featuring Alex and Droogs.
Mural visible on the right. Stills from A Clockwork Orange,
Stanley Kubrick, 1971 160
Fig. 4 Close-up of Dim with vandalised mural in background, still
from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 161
Fig. 5 The Ludovico treatment centre with approaching guards,
still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 162
Fig. 6 Exterior establishing shot of HOME. Still from A Clockwork
Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 163
Fig. 7 Interior shot of HOME with occupants relaxing as doorbell
rings. Still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 163
Fig. 8 Interior shot of HOME, the writer’s wife approaching
the front door. Still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 164
Fig. 9 Hume Crescents as shown on World in Action (1978),
Moss Side redevelopments to the top and top-left. Still
from still from ITV show The World in Action, episode
“There’s No Place Like Hulme” 1978 166
Fig. 10 Norton US paperback edition 1963, featuring Teddy Boys 167
Fig. 11 Ballantine paperback edition 1965, featuring Beatniks 168
Fig. 12 Ballantine paperback edition 1969, featuring a hippy 169
LIST OF FIGURES xix
Fig. 13 Location research slides from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley

Kubrick Archive. With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC,
Warner Bros. And University of the Arts London 175
Fig. 14 Location research slides, Stanley Kubrick Archive.
With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros.
And University of the Arts London 175
A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual

Violence as Torture: Stanley Kubrick and Francis Bacon
Fig. 1 The Catlady scream, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 276
Fig. 2 Alex’s scream, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 278
David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides of the

Same Golly
Fig. 1 It’s in his Icy Hands: Valentine’s Day meets A Clockwork
Orange (A still from Valentine’s Day, dir. Indrani
Pal-Chaudhuri and Markus Klinko) 311
Introduction
Matthew Melia and Georgina Orgill
1 This Book
At the time of writing, it is nearly sixty years since the publication of
Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), and it is fifty years
since Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was released in the US (1971). By
the time of publication and by the time you read this, it will be 50 years
since the film’s release in the UK in 1972, hence this is a landmark period.
Burgess’s book stands as a key moment of change in the landscape of
post-war English literature. It’s the dystopian tale of young Alex (played
memorably by Malcolm McDowell in the film adaptation), an intelligent
teenage thug and leader of a gang of “Droogs” who spend their evenings
M. Melia (B)
Department of Humanities; Department of Journalism, Publishing and Media,
Kingston School of Art School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Kingston
University, Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK
e-mail: m.melia@kingston.ac.uk
G. Orgill
University Archives and Special Collections Centre, University of the Arts
London, London, UK
e-mail: g.orgill@arts.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Melia and G. Orgill (eds.), Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A
Clockwork Orange, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_1
2 M. MELIA AND G. ORGILL
indulging in mindless, opportunistic “Ultraviolence”. Written in a fabri-

cated teen language, “Nadsat,” a mix of Russian, Malayan, army and
working-class slang and other linguistic components, A Clockwork Orange
was radical and experimental and its impact (whatever its author’s inten-
tions) would ricochet through the post-war youth culture of the early
1960s and beyond to the present day. Its themes of violence, choice, free
will and the rights of the individual, as Alex is forced to undergo the
tortuous “Ludovico Technique” by the state to alter his behaviour, are
as resonant today as they were in 1962. As the International Anthony
Burgess Foundation reminds us:
Its impact on literary, musical, and visual culture has been extensive. The
novel is concerned with the conflict between the individual and the state,
the punishment of young criminals and the possibility or otherwise of
redemption. The linguistic originality of the book and the moral questions
it raises are as relevant now as they everywhere.1
The anniversaries of Stanley Kubrick’s film also form part of a cele-

bratory moment in Kubrick studies. They follow hard on the heels of
the fiftieth anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in 2018 and
the twentieth anniversary of Kubrick’s death and his final film Eyes Wide
Shut (1999) in 2019. Furthermore, fifty years of A Clockwork Orange
also serves as a reminder that is half a century since a dramatic shift
took place in the landscape, tone and style of British cinema: from the
counter-cultural pop stylings of the 1960s to the nihilism and dystopian
sensibilities and aesthetics of the early 1970s. As Peter Kramer also
reminds us:
In the late 1960s, the dramatic liberalisation of film-industry self-regulation

and official censorship of films in the US and Britain led to the production
of a large number of films featuring previously unseen levels of sexual
explicitness and graphically depicted violence. In the UK, the release of
such films gave rise to dire warnings about their likely Impact on British
society.2
Alongside Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), A Clockwork Orange

embodies more than any other film, this moment. It is, one might argue
(somewhat contentiously given Burgess’s increasingly complex attitude to
both his own novel and Kubrick’s film) a text that has two authors, and
while both film and novel have been the subject of various and many
INTRODUCTION 3
independent studies, up to now there has been no single study or collec-

tion in print form dedicated to looking at both together and how they
intersect. This book aims to bring together a body of contemporary
critical writing which considers such issues as their shared history; ques-
tions of authorship and adaptation; the Burgess/Kubrick relationship;
the extended afterlife of book and film and their cultural impact; their
position in relation to the cold war and cold war fiction; art historical
influences and contexts; theoretical and philosophical investigation; and
their position in relation to contemporary movements such as #MeToo.
Other publications dedicated to either Burgess or Kubrick have necessarily
drawn one up on the other, however it is the intention of this collection
to provide equal weight to both, to consider A Clockwork Orange not
simply as a Burgess text or a Kubrick text but as a cultural phenomenon
and artefact whose authorship is simultaneously complex, contested and
shared.
2 A Clockwork Symposium:
A Clockwork Orange---New Perspectives
In November 2018, more than 50 academics, scholars and practitioners
from across a variety of disciplines (film and filmmaking, literature, fine
art and design, etc.) gathered for a major international conference, A
Clockwork Symposium: A Clockwork Orange—New Perspectives, at Univer-
sity of the Arts London (UAL), home of the Stanley Kubrick Archive.
This was the third time such a gathering had occurred. In 2017, the
International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester held a similar
event marking Burgess’s centenary which engaged more broadly with the
author’s canon of work. Earlier, in 2012, the Burgess foundation hosted
the event Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange dedicated to the novel’s
half century. The 2018 event was the second major international event to
deal specifically with A Clockwork Orange and the relationship between
Burgess and Kubrick, film, and novel. Several of the chapters included
in this collection are developed from papers given at this conference.
However, this book should not be classed as ‘conference proceedings’;
the writing within has been evolved and developed and is augmented
with a variety of chapters which were not presented at the event. The
book does, however, also offer a few “firsts” including a study by leading
Burgess scholar, author and director of the International Anthony Burgess
Foundation, Andrew Biswell. At the 2018 conference, Biswell discussed
Burgess’s lost “sequel” to A Clockwork Orange: The Clockwork Condition.

In the intervening three years, the full manuscript (although, as Biswell
indicates, it exists in fragments and in note form) has been uncovered in
the archive of the Burgess Foundation. Biswell’s chapter is the first major
study to deal in depth with it, and to consider it as part of the strange
“afterlife” of the novel (which not only included the film but also a “play
with music” written by Burgess in 1987).
Much of the research for the book has been carried out, where
possible, across two key sites: the Stanley Kubrick Archive at University of
the Arts London and the Archive of the International Anthony Burgess
Foundation, Manchester, which opened in 2007 and 2003, respectively.
These two repositories have been crucial in the advancement of both
Burgess and Kubrick studies and are the first ports of call for anyone
with a professional or personal interest in both writer and director. Both
archives are an invaluable resource for researchers and have provided
primary source material for a range of existing cutting-edge, contempo-
rary, critical studies of both author and film maker, not least Jim Clarke’s
The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess—Fire of Words 3 and more recently James
Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces.4 Peter Kramer’s book: A Clockwork
Orange (part of the ongoing Palgrave “Controversies” series) makes full
use of the Stanley Kubrick archive in detailing the film’s marketing, recep-
tion, mythologies, position within the changing culture of British cinema
and the British film industry, censorship issues and Kubrick’s withdrawal
of it. Kramer’s book is the most comprehensive text on this aspect of the
film, and while across its chapters, this book recognises and draws upon
these issues, it recognises also that they have been covered extensively
elsewhere.
Despite the increasingly ambivalent feelings of both Burgess and
Kubrick towards A Clockwork Orange and its position within the canon
of their works, it became a lasting legacy for both. And in the year 2018–
2019, A Clockwork Orange was the most requested film at the Stanley
Kubrick Archives as well as being in the top three most requested sections
for other years prior and since. Here, in this volume, many of the authors
have drawn across both archives to offer critical studies of A Clockwork
Orange, through its two authors. In Matt Melia’s chapter for instance, the
author draws in detail upon a range of archived script material and Filippo
Ulivieri in his chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Kubrick/Burgess
relationship drawing across material housed at both sites.
INTRODUCTION 5
3 Novel and Film

Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange on his return to the UK
in 1959 from Malaya where he had lived since 1954 (with a year in
Brunei from 1958). He had worked as a teacher with the British colo-
nial service, at a privileged private school in Kuala Kangsar. Here he was
exposed to a diversity of cultures and languages (which would contribute
to patchwork composition of the novel’s teen slang, “Nadsat”). In Malaya
he witnessed, first-hand, the British retreat from Empire, the Commu-
nist Guerrilla uprisings, and the transition to an independent government
in 1957 (a period dramatised in his three novels which comprise The
Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Long Day Wanes, between 1956
and 1959—later discussed in this book by Julian Preece). A Clockwork
Orange was, in part a reaction to the unfamiliar and culturally changed
Britain he returned to and which both appalled and fascinated him. The
Britain suffering the privations of war and rationing was gone, replaced
by a Britain of youth tribes (an era of Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers),
new forms of popular culture and consumerism. This was, as he saw it, “A
place on the edge of cultural annihilation, where even literature seemed
powerless to halt the rising tide of vulgarity and degeneration”.5
Certain mythologies have also developed over the years surrounding
the genesis of the novel—perpetuated to some extent by the author
himself. Firstly, that it was, in parts, influenced by the assault on Burgess’s
first wife Llewella “Lynne” Wilson in 1944 by a group of American
soldiers during the London black-out. This is perhaps most evident
in Alex and the Droogs’ assault on the writer F. Alexander’s wife (in
Burgess’s own 1969 unmade film script, the writer is even renamed
“Burgess”). He would later qualify the assumption that he had used his
wife’s trauma, and challenge what he saw as assumptions in the media
over the relationship between art and life and the responsibility of the
artist:
In 1971 Stanley Kubrick made a film of this book. The title, admittedly
a fascinating one, made two appearances in Evening news headlines last
week: “Clockwork Oranges and Ticking Bombs” and “Clockwork Orange
gang killed my wife”. The second was an alleged statement of my own,
which I here and now refute. My first wife was indeed assaulted in blacked
out London by a group of American deserters, and it is conceivable that
the shock and injury she suffered led to her death 24 years later. The subtle
implication of the headline seems to be that by inventing certain characters
and a certain book title, I in a sense willed her injury and death and those
of victims assaulted as she was. In other words, the artist has a sort of
mystical responsibility for those events of the real world which he merely
transcribes in his art.6
Much has also been made regarding Burgess’s alleged misdiagnosis

with a brain tumour on his return to the UK and that the book was
written amid a flurry of work to provide for his family in the case of the
worst. As John Banville has pointed out however, Burgess gave several
different accounts of this but there is no hard medical evidence for it.7
Andrew Biswell told Banville that:
In the years after 1959, the events which he referred to as his "medical
death-sentence" and "terminal year" became part of the performance that
he could be relied on to deploy for the benefit of interviewers - but the
details of what he said on these subjects are far from consistent. The
disappearing tumour was simply absorbed into Burgess’s extensive series
of half-reliable anecdotes, and the process of its fictionalization would bear
comparison with the wildly conflicting accounts that he gave of his family
history.8
Filippo Ulivieri discusses this further in the second chapter of this

book (as well as Burgess’s changing relationship with the film) and as
he notes, Burgess was not averse to misdirection in interviews, deliberate
obfuscation and sometimes dramatic self-contradiction.
Initially, Kubrick rejected adapting the novel in the 1960s when it was
optioned to him (from a script by writer Terry Southern and photogra-
pher Michael Cooper), but he would later return to it after completing
his science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and after the aban-
donment of his pet project and labour of love Napoleon in 1970. Perhaps,
more than Napoleon (which would have rivalled 2001 in terms of scale and
vision), his choice to engage with this much smaller production was all
the more appropriate. There are numerous continuities with 2001: from
its design led mise-en-scene to its science fiction aesthetic and narrative
framework. Numerous scholars have commented upon the intertextuality
and continuity between the two texts. Peter Kramer has suggested that
the Starchild’s final gaze into the camera of a hope for humanity at the
end of 2001 is challenged by Alex’s malevolent star into the camera at the
beginning of A Clockwork Orange. Rod Munday has noted the restaging
INTRODUCTION 7
of 2001’s opening hominid fight in the fight between the Droogs and
Billy Boy’s gang (on a floor which resembles a lunar landscape).9
A Clockwork Orange stands out in both the Burgess and Kubrick
canons for a variety of reasons. It is somewhat atypical of Burgess’s
writing. In over 30 novels, he only wrote two other outwardly dystopian
novels, The Wanting Seed (1962) and 1985 (1978) of which half is an
extended rumination on George Orwell’s 1984 and the other is a short
dystopian novella. If one buys the Burgess misdiagnosis story, one might
argue even that both novel and film were made as stopgaps in their author
and director’s body of work. Burgess would later say he wrote the novel
for the money, as well as calling it a “Christian sermon” (an example of
his habit of contradicting himself). Of all Kubrick’s films, it’s the one that
took him the least time to film (made in a year) and the only one not to
use the studio to film in.
Peter Kramer writes in detail about the events leading to its produc-
tion, reminding us that on 3rd February 1970, the New York Times had
reported that Kubrick would begin shooting in London in the summer
of that year and was “writing the screenplay himself” and that this film
was a “stop-gap measure caused by the delay of a much weightier film
project: Once A Clockwork Orange is completed, Mr Kubrick plans to
return to Napoleon, an epic scale treatment on which he had been working
since July 1968”.10 Kramer contends that rather than being a “stop-
gap” project, A Clockwork Orange was a project that had run parallel
to Napoleon and had been in the back of his mind since Terry Southern
had given him a version of the script during the filming of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. If it were not for the horde of pre-production research mate-
rial in the Stanley Kubrick Archive which services the finest detail in the
film, it would be tempting also to consider Kubrick’s film also as some-
thing of a stopgap, an in-between project, a film he had initially passed on
making in the 1960s and which he only returned to post 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and after the failure of his Napoleon project. Kubrick produced
the film in about a year from start to finish. The wealth of detailed pre-
production material at the Stanley Kubrick Archive dates from 1970 the
phenomenal rate at which both pre-productions, shooting and postpro-
duction was carried out—between 1970 and 1971. Reviewing the detail
and minutiae of the production, location, costume and design research
material at the Stanley Kubrick archive, the breadth of this achievement,
of getting the film together in such a small time, becomes clear—but it
also gives credence to the possibility that Kubrick was researching it at

the same time as he was working on Napoleon.
It is interesting to note from the very start how both film and novel,
despite their notoriety, fame and popularity, occupy something of a liminal
position within the respective canon of works of their creators: Burgess
would go on to have a complex relationship with his novel (as Ulivieri
discusses in the chapter “Dangerous arts: The clash between Anthony
Burgess, Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange and the World” of this
collection) and would latterly dismiss it. Correspondences housed in the
archive of the Burgess Foundation indicate an irascible author who, over
time, fell dramatically out of love with both his own text, its film adapta-
tion and its director. Burgess’s reasons for his changing attitude towards
his book are many and varied (and form part of the content of this study)
and in one letter he complains (blaming Kubrick’s films!) that all anyone
wants to talk about is A Clockwork Orange—and that he had written 30
other books since then!
However, an article for the New Yorker in 1973 in which Burgess
offers insight into the development of the novel, provides some useful
initial insight. The title, he claimed, derives from pub slang overheard in
a London drinking establishment.
I first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London

pub before the Second World War. It is an old Cockney slang phrase,
implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature, since
could any notion be more bizarre than that of a clockwork orange? The
image appealed to me as something not just fantastic but obscurely mean-
ingful, surrealistic but also obscenely real. The forced marriage of an
organism to a mechanism, of a thing living, growing, sweet, juicy, to a
cold dead artifact—is that solely a concept of nightmare?11
The name of the central character, Alex was a comic derivation, so he

claimed of Alexander the Great.
The hero of both the book and the film is a young thug called Alex. I
gave him that name because of its international character (you could not
have a British or Russian boy called Chuck or Butch), and also because
of its ironic connotations. Alex is a comic reduction of Alexander the
Great, slashing his way through the world and conquering it. But he is
changed into the conquered—impotent, wordless. He was a law (a lex)
unto himself; he becomes a creature without a lex or lexicon. The hidden
INTRODUCTION 9
puns, of course, have nothing to do with the real meaning of the name
Alexander, which is “defender of men.”12
Kubrick displayed if not the same, then a similar disenchantment with

his film. While the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of A Clock-
work Orange has been covered in detail elsewhere especially in Peter
Kramer’s book (which is unparalleled in its forensic study of the situation),
it’s worth noting here that in the recent (as yet uncatalogued) deposit
of new material in the Kubrick archive, correspondence with Warner
Brothers show that a European re-release of the film was being consid-
ered in 1977, everywhere except the UK (see below). While Kubrick had
legitimate concerns regarding the safety of his family (see below), it is
interesting to note that in 1977, he was also locked in a dispute over the
Labour Finance Act of 1974 which was coming into effect and would
ensure the removal of tax breaks for workers from outside of the UK who
had been in the country longer than 9 years. Archived material shows
that he lobbied Chancellor of the exchequer Dennis Healey and (more
politely) conservative shadow chancellor Geoffrey Howe and made threats
that he and his US ex pats working in the British Film industry would
take their money and talent and move to Europe.13 It’s hard not to see
his refusal to re-release A Clockwork Orange as a bargaining chip in this
debacle. If Kubrick saw the opportunity to use his film as an asset, despite
his feelings about its media coverage, as Andrew Biswell indicates later
in this book, Burgess, despite later trying to distance himself from his
novel and Kubrick’s film, also saw several opportunities to capitalise on
it (and its notoriety), with both a philosophical non-fiction “sequel” and
the musical stage version.
4 Novel and Film: Reception

One of the other myths that has developed around the film is that Kubrick
suddenly withdrew his film from release. This is both true and untrue. He
did not pull it from general release during its initial run but did block its
re-release in 1976. As Kramer reminds us, it ran in cinemas until 1974
when it was eventually pulled by Kubrick, allegedly on account of threats
to his family. In fact, it had a longer than usual theatrical run, and as
Kramer notes:
Under the headline ‘Clockwork Orange, London Perennial, now in its third
year’ an article in the American trade press reported in January 1974 that
the film was still playing in the capital, having generated ‘phenomenal box
office revenues during its extraordinarily long run’ (Daily Variety, 1974)14
He also notes that by 1974, it had played out, but its after-effects rico-
cheted across the British Press with reports of copycat violence, “about
young criminals, the BBFC and censorship, about the state of cinema, and
indeed about the state of the nation”. 15 Warner Brothers had planned a
re-release in 1976, but this was scotched by Kubrick himself. As Kramer
indicates, there was no archival evidence as to why this was, it was widely
assumed that:
In the wake of the controversy surrounding the film in the UK, in partic-
ular accusations that it – and thus its maker – was responsible for a series
of copycat crimes, Kubrick and his family received death threats and that
Kubrick had therefore ‘banned’ the film in this country.16
The film, like the novel before it, had gathered several very favourable
reviews as well as some that were less than favourable (it famously drew
the ire in the press of Christian conservative media campaigner Mary
Whitehouse). However (as Filippo Ulivieri covers in his chapter), one of
the reasons for Burgess’s turning against the film was that his novel from
10 years earlier was drawn into the slipstream of the film’s controversy.
The film drew a range of positive critical reviews, especially from Evening
Standard film critic Alexander Walker, a staunch defender of Kubrick’s
who the director had courted and invited onto the set of 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. Walker would later write an open letter
to the director in the press in support of the film, begging him to re-
release it and praising its urgency and contemporaneity.17 Walker also
wrote in support of Kubrick and begging him and his fellow American
directors not to leave the country (with their money) on account of the
then Labour government’s proposal to withdraw their tax exemptions.18
The film dominated public conversation. Peter Kramer has noted,
“I would be surprised to find any other film in recent decades which
managed to become as central to public discourse as A Clockwork Orange
did in the UK in 1972 and 1973”. Kramer notes that the increase in
press articles during this time were linked to an already existing growing
anxiety over youth violence and new youth subcultures, with these already
INTRODUCTION 11
present anxieties and growing conservative concerns over the film and its
effect on impressionable youth feeding into each other. Among the head-
lines praising the film where others which condemned it, implicating it
as a cause of copycat crimes.19 The Kubrick archive holds a wide variety
of press cuttings relating to the polarised reaction to the film. The more
reactionary and antagonistic reviews emerged from the more conserva-
tive provinces areas of North Wales20 or Doncaster for instance.21 In one
notable article, Mrs Cripps writes in the Evening News “The Last Film I
saw was Love Story: It couldn’t have been more different than this one”.
Given the tabloid media concerns surrounding the film, we must argue
that A Clockwork Orange not only pre-dates but also anticipates the
“Video Nasties” scare of the early 1980s—with media campaigner Mary
Whitehouse a catalyst in the fervour surrounding both. Kramer writes,
“That concerns about the negative impact A Clockwork Orange might
have on its audience gained prominence in the UK had a lot to do with
the perception that the film held up a mirror to British society”.22 In the
UK, it was released uncut with an “X” rating, however in the US Kubrick
conceded to minor cuts for an “R” release, leading to criticisms of him
compromising his vision. After Kubrick’s withdrawal of the film in the
UK, it would not see an official re-release until 2000, the year after his
death when it played again in cinemas with an “18” certificate. That is not
to say, of course, that it did not enjoy the occasional, secretive midnight
screening—especially at the Scala cinema, in London, which helped to
ensure its cult identity.
On its initial release however, the film did find a large audience among
young people on both sides of the Atlantic. The Stanley Kubrick Archive
contains an abundance of fan letters from the US regarding the film,23
as we well as press cuttings kept by Kubrick detailing its effect on youth
style and the emergence of Clockwork Orange Clubs—evidence of the way
the film became almost immediately part of the fabric of youth culture.24
The cultural legacy of both film and novel is explored later in this book
by Sean Redmond as he discusses its impact on the created personas of
singer David Bowie.
When the novel was released in 1962, Time Magazine wrote of it:
Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty shocker but is really
that rare thing in English letters-a philosophical novel. The point may be
overlooked because the teenage monster, tells all about things in Nadsat,
a weird argot that seems to be all his own. Nadsat is neither gibberish nor
a Joycean exercise. It serves to put Alex where he belongs, half in and half
out of the human race25
Writing in The Observer in 1962, novelist Kingsley Amis also praised

the novel, saying:
I acclaim Anthony Burgess’s new novel as the curiosity of the day […] Mr
Burgess has written a fine farrago of outrageousness one which incidentally
suggest a view of juvenile violence I have never met before: that its greatest
appeal is that it’s a big laugh in which what we ordinarily think of sadism
plays little part […] There’s a science fiction interest here too, to do with
a machine that makes you good.26
However, John Garrett’s review in the Times Literary Supplement, was

less favourable, writing that:
The publishers promise an “easily digestible feats of picaresque villainy

and social satire, but satire implies hatred and of any viewpoint this book
appears to be sadly lacking. “What sort of a world is it at all? Men on
the Moon and Men spinning round the earth…” is a question legitimately
asked of our times, but it gets no clear answer here. The author seems
content to use a serious social challenge for frivolous purposes, but himself
to stay neutral.27
In the second part of his biography, You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess
notes that in fact “No British reviewer liked it, but the producers of
the BBC television programme Tonight were interested enough to invite
me to be interviewed by Dennis Hart. They did more. The dramatized
much of the first chapter of my book very effectively and made more
of the language than the theme”.28 In response to the Times Literary
Supplement review which had criticised the use of “Nadsat” in the novel,
Burgess reflected somewhat hubristically (and pioneering the modern
art of the humblebrag), “I was considered an accomplished writer who
had set out deliberately to murder the language. It was comforting to
remember that the same thing had been said about Joyce”.29
5 This Book: Structure and Organisation

In recent years, there has been a wave of scholarly interest in Kubrick
and his collaborators; how Kubrick used and capitalised on collaborative
INTRODUCTION 13
relationship; and his relationships with the (living) authors he adapted.

Scholar and filmmaker Manca Perko’s recent doctoral research30 has
broken new ground in understanding the director’s collaborative relation-
ships especially with below the line workers. Filippo Ulivieri and Simone
Odino’s 2019 book 2001: Between Kubrick and Clarke: The Genesis,
Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece considered the complex rela-
tionship between Kubrick and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and
the creation of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Recent work by James Fenwick has
dealt not only with Kubrick as a producer but also with the relationship
with his former business partner James Harris. Fenwick’s work has led
him to open up debates around Kubrick’s working practices and issues
around casting women within the context of #MeToo.31
This book hopes to contribute to these ongoing critical inquiries by
offering a range of chapters that foreground and consider the complex
and increasingly difficult relationship between Burgess and Kubrick, as
well as the historical, aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical intersections
between novel and film. The book is conceptualised around 5 main inter-
secting sections covering a broad range of the key crucial aspects of film
and novel: authorship; language and adaptation; twentieth century art
historical, architectural, theoretical and design contexts; twentieth century
Cold War contexts; reading A Clockwork Orange in the twenty-first
century; and music and A Clockwork Orange.
5.1 Part 1: Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

The book opens with two chapters which deal historically and theoreti-
cally with the Burgess/Kubrick relationship and between Burgess, the film
and his novel. In “Dangerous Arts: The Clash Between Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange and the World”, Filippo Ulivieri
gives a historical account of the disintegrating relationship between
Anthony Burgess, Kubrick and his film, and ultimately his own novel.
Ulivieri paints Burgess as a man of (often deliberate) self-contradictions
and explores the reasons Burgess gradually turned against his own work.
The chapter deals with the media fall-out from the film, and how this
impacted on the author. The chapter draws heavily on a range of archival
materials, press interviews and other critical material to understand the
authorial complexities of A Clockwork Orange.
In ““A Major Statement on the Contemporary Human Condition”:
Anthony Burgess and the Aftermath of A Clockwork Orange”, Andrew
Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony

Burgess Foundation, opens out the novel’s philosophical inquiries and
discusses in detail the recently discovered draft of Burgess’s non-fiction
sequel to the novel, The Clockwork Condition written between 1972 and
1973. Existing in fragments, this non-fiction manuscript is a philosophical
response to both the original novel and the film. With recourse to other
archival materials, Biswell “reconstructs” the manuscript. Through this
“speculative reconstruction”, Biswell sheds light on the ways it connects
with Kubrick’s film making and the culture of the 1970s as well as
Burgess’s engagement with writers and theorists such as B.F Skinner,
Aldous Huxley and Marshall McLuhan. This is the first time that an
investigation into The Clockwork Condition has been carried out in print.
5.2 Part 2: Language and Adaptation

Part 2 of this book turns its focus to the issues of adaptation and
language. In “Scripting A Clockwork Orange”, Matthew Melia considers
the scripting of A Clockwork Orange, drawing on a body of archived
script material by Kubrick, author Terry Southern and photographer
Michael Cooper and Anthony Burgess himself. Melia offers a detailed
critical survey of the variances and intersections between these scripted
approaches to the same novel. Taken together, they are independently
authored texts, but they offer a set of variations on a theme. The chapter
deals with the issues of authorship and adaptation, and it offers an inter-
rogation of some of the mythologies which have developed around the
various (supposed) attempts to bring the text to the screen. Popularly
held wisdom is that Kubrick ignored Burgess’s own scripted approach to
the novel and went straight to the source novel in developing his film. In
this chapter, Melia shows that Burgess (and the Southern/Cooper) script
may have, in fact, influenced the visual and cinematographic choices made
by Kubrick in the final film.
Jim Clarke, Benet Vincent and Julian Preece turn to an exploration of
“Nadsat” Burgess’s created teen language across both film and novel. In
the jointly written chapter ““The Colours of the Real World Only Seem
Really Real When You Viddy them on the Screen”: The Adaptation of
Nadsat in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, linguists and Burgess
scholars Clarke and Vincent take a comparative look at the use of Nadsat
across both novel and film. They consider the adaptation process of novel
to film and discuss how Kubrick approached Burgess’s created language,
INTRODUCTION 15
and the omissions and changes that ensued. Again, issues of authorship
as well as language and adaptation are central here, and the authors take
a forensically scientific and linguistic approach in their investigation.
In ““Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’ in Time
for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange” Julian Preece, focusing predomi-
nantly on Burgess’s text, contextualises the novel and its modes of speech
against the earlier Malayan Trilogy. Preece connects the “language poli-
tics” of A Clockwork Orange to these three novels and more broadly to
Burgess’s knowledge and understanding of other languages. He sets out
to discuss how Alex’s uses of Nadsat are dictated by, and establish, a set
of power relations. Suggesting that the novel belongs to the picaresque
tradition, Preece argues that Alex adjusts his modes of speech and voice,
his “goloss” in order to place himself in a position of power and control.
He notes how Kubrick’s film gives Alex a Lancashire accent and, again
through voice, intonation and speech patterns, emphasises the story’s
class-based British setting, thus in some instances undermining the novel’s
“reactionary agenda”.
5.3 Part 3: Twentieth-Century Contexts: Architectural, Art

Historical and Theoretical Approaches.
A Clockwork Orange is a text that is situated firmly with a twentieth-
century historical context. This is dealt with directly on the chapters which
make up Parts 3 and 4 of this book. They consider novel and film together
through a range of historical and theoretical approaches.
In, “Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art in Stanley
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, Dijana Metlić, applying a theoretical
approach, considers how Stanley Kubrick visualised and adapted Anthony
Burgess’s novel, and his central character Alex, through an art historical
lens. Drawing from across a range of archived materials, Metlić argues that
while contemporary art has little relevance to Burgess’s novel, Kubrick
applies an understanding of twentieth-century art theory and modes
(including Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art) within the film’s design and
mise-en-scene, as a framework for relating art, violence, propaganda and
pornography. In doing so, he “upgrades” the novel, conferring upon it a
set of visual entrance points to its central themes of violence, power and
free will. Drawing critically and comparatively on Burgess’s novel, Metlić
engages with another aspect of the adaptation process: design and staging.
“Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange”, sees Joe

Darlington turn to the constructed world of A Clockwork Orange
and considers it against the backdrop of real-life post-war architectural
design. Drawing from materials across both Burgess and Kubrick archives,
Darlington considers the role of architectural space in both novel and film
as a metonym for contemporary social structures: the novel depicting
a world of crumbling slums where overcrowding and decay reflect a
corresponding degeneration of the social fabric and the film employing
a vandalised brutalist landscape to show a society living in the shadow
of failed social engineering. The chapter reads both novel and film
against a corresponding set of real-life historical, social and architec-
tural changes, drawing on and applying theoretically Bruce Neumann’s
Defensible Space (1971). Drawing comparatively across novel and film,
Darlington considers the world of the novel against the decaying world
of Burgess’s childhood home of Moss Side, Manchester, the post-war
slum clearances and social engineering. He also proposes (with recourse to
the wealth of pre-production materials at the Kubrick Archive) that film’s
futurist design and “inorganic” shapes and “inhuman” brutalist aesthetic
reflects Neumann’s theories and further embodies wider notions of social
engineering.
Murray Pomerance turns to a theoretical and philosophical consid-
eration of the “Ludovico Technique” in “Glazzies Wide Open: Spec-
tral Torture, Kubrick, and A Clockwork Orange (A Brainie by Fifteen
Thinks)”. Pomerance considers the position of the Eye, in A Clockwork
Orange, as a receptor for pain. He asks, is looking for itself a form
of torture? Is the eye a portal from trauma and torment? Pomerance’s
investigation is purely theoretical and draws on a range of philosophical,
psychoanalytic and literary theories, referencing among others, Georges
Bataille and Antonin Artaud.
5.4 Part 4: Twentieth-Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange

and the Cold War
Both “When Burgess Met the Stilyagi on a White Night: Subcultures,
Hegemony and Resistance in the Soviet Roots of A Clockwork Orange’s
Droogs” and “Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, Sinny and
Cold War Brainwashing Scares” turn to a reading of both film and novel
against the backdrop of the Cold War. In Chapter 10 “When Burgess Met
the Stilyagi on a White Night: Subcultures, Hegemony and Resistance
in the Soviet Roots of A Clockwork Orange’s Droogs” Cristian Pasotti
INTRODUCTION 17
considers Anthony Burgess’s formative trip to Leningrad in 1961 and

the previously undocumented influence of the Russian subculture of the
“Stilyagi” (a rebel youth subculture preoccupied with Western fashion)
on the composition and stylisation of Burgess’s Droogs. In this chapter,
Pasotti considers the Soviet roots of A Clockwork Orange (novel and
film) and considers affinities between the world of the Droogs and the
Cold War world of the “Stilyagi”. The chapter draws on a range of mate-
rial across both archives as well as including Juliane Furste’s Stalin’s Last
Generation: Soviet Post War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism;
Burgess’s 1963 novel Honey for The Bears, and his 1961 article for The
Listener, “The Human Russians”.
In “Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, Sinny and Cold War
Brainwashing Scares” Joy McEntee turns to a reading of A Clockwork
Orange against the context of the “brainwashing” scares of the early Cold
War, noting affinities between Burgess novel and John Frankenheimer’s
1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. It explores Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange in the light of trans-Atlantic brainwashing scares that emerged in
the 1950s and 1960 and considers in detail Kubrick’s adaptation of the
novel noting how the film also delivers a meta-cinematic commentary on
the mind-altering powers of cinema itself. McEntee considers how Alex
is both a victim of brainwashing and a perpetrator of it via his judicious
employment of “Nadsat”. The chapter challenges Burgess’s claim that
Soviet modes of mind control did not feature in his novel and considers
the potential contemporary impact of the repatriation of Korean POWs
from Communist re-education camps.
5.5 Part 5: A Clockwork Orange in Twenty-First Century

With the passing of more than fifty years, this book aims to also engage
with the twenty-first-century perspectives on A Clockwork Orange. Ajay
Hothi returns to the “Ludovico Treatment” in “A Thing Living, and
Not Growing”. Using the Ludovico Technique as a way of understanding
contemporary anxieties over “behaviour-altering technologies writ real”
this chapter proposes that the technique, as depicted in both novel and
film, anticipates a twenty-first-century global phenomenon: the applica-
tion of artificial intelligence into biotechnology, the transition from the
Anthropocene to the Technocene. Hothi proposes that, like Alex, we
are increasingly subject to technologies the primary aim of which is to
adapt and condition habitual behavior and curb our free will. Drawing on
such writers as Freeman Dyson and Francis Fukuyama, Hothi asks what
we can learn in the twenty-first century from A Clockwork Orange as a
“cautionary tale in a moment of crisis”.
In Chapter 13, “A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual
Violence as Torture: Stanley Kubrick and Francis Bacon”, Karen Ritzen-
hoff, like Dijana Metlić, takes an art historical as well as a feminist
approach, considering the presence of the scream in the film. She not only
draws parallels with the twentieth-century British artist Francis Bacon but
considers the prescient contemporary issue of violence against women
and how we might view the film against the context of the #MeToo
movement. The chapter focuses on the Catlady sequence and considers
the representation of sexual violence, the use of artwork within the film
and the representation of the ageing and violated female body. The
chapter considers the strategies Kubrick uses to adapt the treatment of
sexual violence in Burgess’s novel, considering such representations from
a contemporary twenty-first-century perspective.
5.6 Part 6: Music and a Clockwork Orange

Music is central to A Clockwork Orange and it plays a dominant role in
both novel and film. Both Burgess and Kubrick, like Alex in the novel
and film, were keen aficionados of music, Burgess also working as a
composer (he had little time for the fripperies of pop music) and even-
tually readapting the source novel as a “play with music” 15 years after
Kubrick’s film.
In “Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel, Film, and Play A
Clockwork Orange”, Christine Lee Gengaro considers Burgess’s novel, his
stage adaptation and Kubrick’s film. She analyses how music functions
differently within each: symbolically as part of the narrative in the novel;
how the use of music in the film engages “conventions of film music”; and
the music of the play “transcends” these “traditional roles” by allowing all
characters to take part in the music-making therefore diffusing the power
of the music. Gengaro discusses the “genre-specific” functions of music
within A Clockwork Orange and within the contexts of both Burgess and
Kubrick’s wider work and more broadly within the use of classical music
in film and literature.
In “David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides of the Same
Golly”, Sean Redmond looks to the wider cultural influence and legacy
of A Clockwork Orange, drawing an extended analysis of the influence of
INTRODUCTION 19
novel and film across the work of singer, musician and actor David Bowie.
Few musical artists can claim to have been as influenced by A Clockwork
Orange as Bowie (by both film and novel which finds a place along with
Earthly Powers in his posthumously published list of top 100 books).
Redmond offers a detailed discussion of Bowie’s extensive (inter) textual
referencing and quotation (in lyrics, style and performance) of A Clock-
work Orange between 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars and his final album, Blackstar, released days prior to
his death in 2016. Drawing upon a wide range of media interviews, song
lyrics, music videos, commentaries and performances, Redmond considers
the importance of A Clockwork Orange to the construction and composi-
tion of the many Bowie personas and suggest that “A Clockwork Orange
provides Bowie with the fashion and behaviour codes to be a rebel poseur,
resistant to heteronormativity”.
5.7 Afterword
Finally, renowned and leading Kubrick scholar Nathan Abrams, author
of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual; co-author of Eyes Wide
Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of his Final Film and co-editor of
The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, has contributed a reflec-
tive afterword to conclude the book. He draws together the strands of
inquiry and contemplates how Kubrick adapted Burgess’s novel as a film
musical. Abrams locates the film within the lineage of studio film musicals,
adopting the visual language of the form.
Notes
1. International Anthony Burgess Foundation Website, https://www.anthon
yburgess.org/a-clockwork-orange/, Last viewed: 30/08/2021.
2. Kramer, P. (2011) Controversies: A Clockwork Orange, London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 102.
3. Clarke, J. (2017) The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess: Fire of Words, London:
Palgrave MacMillan.
4. Fenwick, J. (2021) Stanley Kubrick Produces, New Jersey: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press.
5. Biswell, A. (2006) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 226.
6. Burgess, A (1972) Copy-typed script by Burgess on the relationship

between art and anti-social behaviour for an article in the Evening news.
Stanley Kubrick Archive. Archive Ref: SK/13/8/3/7.
7. Banville, J. (2005) ‘The Clockwork Author Anthony”, The Irish Times,
December 24. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-clockwork-author-
anthony-1.1288243. Last Viewed: 30/08/2021.
8. Ibid.
9. Rod Munday, The Kubrick Cinematic UniverseMethod, Essais [Online],
Hors-série 4 | 2018, Online since 01 December 2019, connection on 16
December 2019. http://journals.openedition.org/essais/728; https://
doi.org/10.4000/essais.728
10. Kramer, P. (2011) 76–77.
11. Burgess, A. (1973) “The Clockwork Condition”, The New Yorker,
republished June 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/
06/04/the-clockwork-condition. Last viewed: 30/08/2021.
12. Ibid.
13. Stanley Kubrick Archive, “Future of the British film Industry File”. As yet
uncatalogued.
14. Kramer P. (2011), 117.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Walker, A. (1976) “Why We Must See This Terrifying Vision Again,”
Evening Standard, March 19.
18. Walker, A. (1975) “Who Gains if the Moguls Go?”, Evening Standard,
March 13.
19. Laxton, E. (1973) “The Copycat Killer: Horror Story of Teenager who
Battered Old Tramp” Daily Mirror, July 4.
20. Anon. (1974) “Attack Followed Showing of A Clockwork Orange—
Vicar”, North Wales Weekly News, March 1.
21. Southworth, J (1972) “Cinema Violence Renews Yon’s Faith in Bovver
Power” Doncaster Gazette and Chronicle, January 27.
22. Kramer, p. (2011) 102.
23. Stanley Kubrick Archive, A Clockwork Orange Fan Letters, Archive Ref:
Sk/13/8/6.
24. Stanley Kubrick Archive, ‘Articles on Bowie and Teenage Culture’ Archive
Ref: Sk/13/6/29/64.
25. Anon. (1963) “The Ultimate beatnik” Time Magazine.
26. Amis, K. (1962) “Out of your Depth” The Observer, May 13.
27. Garret, J. (1962) “Other New Novels” Times Literary Supplement, May
25.
28. Burgess, A. (1991) You’ve Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the
Confessions of Anthony Burgess, London: Penguin Books, 99.
29. Ibid.
INTRODUCTION 21
30. Perko, M. (2019) Voices and Noises: Collaborative Authorship in Stanley

Kubrick’s Films, Doctoral Thesis, University of East Anglia, UK.
31. Fenwick, J. (2021) “Stanley Kubrick and #MeToo” New Review of
Film and Television Stories, https://nrftsjournal.org/stanley-kubrick-and-
metoo/ Last viewed 16/12/2021.
Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick
Dangerous Arts: The Clash Between
Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick,
A Clockwork Orange, and the World
Filippo Ulivieri
1 Introduction
A Clockwork Orange is the ninth novel by Anthony Burgess. Upon its
publication in 1962, it didn’t enjoy particular success: it sold poorly and
met with mixed reviews in England, though it was received better in the
United States.1 Things would change dramatically in 1970, when Kubrick
selected it as the basis for the follow-up to his grand opus 2001: A Space
Odyssey. When the news reached Burgess, he took it with a mixture of
indifference, because other film-makers had tried (and failed) to bring
the book to the screen; mild satisfaction, because Kubrick was a better
choice than Ken Russell, whom Burgess detested; and mild dissatisfaction,
because he knew he wouldn’t get any money from the affair—he had sold
the rights a few years earlier for a few hundred dollars and, when they
changed hands to Warner Bros., his share was not considered.2
The writer left for Australia, where he was expected for a lecture tour
that would eventually take him to New Zealand. There, he was told
F. Ulivieri (B)
Independent, Plymouth, UK
e-mail: filippo.ulivieri@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_2
26 F. ULIVIERI
that Kubrick had been sending him urgent cables to arrange a meeting
in London over some scriptwriting issue. Burgess embarked on his trip
back home, flying to Fiji, Hawaii, San Francisco, New York, and London,
where he dutifully appeared at Kubrick’s restaurant of choice. Kubrick,
however, did not turn up.3 He phoned Burgess a few days later—not to
apologise, but to ask him about the lyrics of a song that is used in the
book. Being the complete opposite of Kubrick in his relationship with
the media, Burgess vented his anger to a reporter and said the director
was “a terrible man. Just shocking.”4
Whatever the reason for the failed rendezvous, when the two finally
met for a preview screening of the film a year later, Burgess discov-
ered that Kubrick was in fact quite cordial. At the director’s home for
an ensuing dinner invitation, they discussed literature, music, and the
possibility of collaborating on a new project: a film about Napoleon
Bonaparte.5
The film of A Clockwork Orange was set to open in the United States
in December 1971. Since Kubrick had no desire to travel, Warner Bros.
asked Burgess to join Malcolm McDowell for a promotional round of
interviews on both coasts. Burgess, who enjoyed attention and exposure
very much, gladly accepted.
2 Here Beginneth Twenty Years of Tribulations

Meeting hordes of reporters, Burgess spoke highly of Kubrick’s work: “I
am very pleased with the way Kubrick handled my book,”6 he said; “I
have nothing but praise for the way he’s found cinematic equivalents for
my literary conceptions.”7 Actually, he felt “that it was no impertinence
to blazon [the film] ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange’.”8 Burgess
acknowledged it had “a classic quality” and “remarkable integrity.”9 He
said:
I had fears about anyone filming the novel. I didn’t want it transformed
so radically that I became ‘known’ by the film rather than the book […]
But I needn’t have worried. Kubrick has hit the whole theological tone
exactly – very rare to find theology in a film – and kept 75 per cent of
Nadsat.10
Naturally, some journalists asked him about the violence in the film.
“The point of the film is not the violence,” Burgess retorted, “the
DANGEROUS ARTS: THE CLASH BETWEEN ANTHONY BURGESS … 27
violence is secondary. The point is that man must have the power to
choose or he ceases to be a man.”11 “The book is a kind of religious
sermon,”12 he explained, and Kubrick’s film worked on the same level.
“It is the best adaptation of a book we’ve ever had,”13 Burgess concluded,
deeming Kubrick “a truly European director, more in the mould of
Antonioni or Truffaut than any of his fellow Americans.”14
The promotional activities kept Burgess busy for almost two months,
and he had a great time in the spotlight, delighting audiences as the
consummate raconteur that he was. Besides, by no means among those
artists who think their works should speak for themselves, Burgess happily
clarified the allegoric nature of his novel and engaged in philosoph-
ical discussions about good and evil, free will, morality, religion, and
contemporary society. The best example is given by a one-hour long
round table on A Clockwork Orange which Burgess attended, together
with McDowell, Robert Hughes, an art critic of Time magazine, Nat
Hentoff, a Village Voice columnist, and Norman Kagan, author of a
Kubrick monograph. Burgess explained to them:
Alex is potentially a human being. He is violent, which human beings are.

He is concerned with language, which human beings are, […] and he is
concerned with beauty, as is shown by his devotion to Beethoven. But he
is not quite a human being, because he lives on milk, and he has to fall
before he can become fully human.15
Such an “odyssey of an embryonic human being” was perfectly

captured by Kubrick on the screen, Burgess said:
One has to be thankful that an intelligent director took it over. It might

have been someone […] who merely would have gone to town on the
pornographic possibilities of the film. [With] Kubrick’s interpretation […]
the message does come through.16
Following a widespread view on Kubrick’s cinema, one of the critics

objected that the film was too cold and intellectual. Burgess countered
that this was precisely the right approach to the subject matter, the film
is:
Meant to appeal to the ratiocinative part of us. It’s meant to make shine-
out in big letters a very simplistic and obvious moral maxim, and to
associate this with strong emotions aroused by particular incidents, I think,
28 F. ULIVIERI
would have been out of place. I’m delighted, and I think that it is a
mark of great genius on Kubrick’s part, that he managed to achieve a film
which dealt with large moral issues without involving the viewer. […] The
whole point of art is to achieve an image which shall inspire a purely static
emotion. I think that art is diminished when one becomes moved to such
an extent that one wants to do something about it, [when] you’re inspired
to a kind-of kinetic emotion which makes you want to act in the real world.
You should begin and end in the aesthetic world. And Kubrick’s film strikes
me as the nearest approach we’ve yet had in the world of cinema […] to
a purely static work of art. This is quite an astonishing achievement.17
It was precisely in this sense that he was convinced that “the film
version is preferable to the book,” which Burgess didn’t particularly like,
he admitted, because he felt it was:
Too didactic, it thrusts home the lesson too hard, [while] it is the aim
of the artist to be as amoral… as static… as unmoved, as it were, as
possible. […] I’m glad in a sense that Kubrick has made the film,” Burgess
concluded, “because I needn’t worry about the book anymore.18
Anything but.
Upon his return home, Burgess found an unwelcoming climate. The
United Kingdom was in a period of extreme social tensions, with the
I.R.A. bombing campaign on the mainland Britain and the Miners’ strikes
causing severe power cuts. There were concerns of violent youth subcul-
tures and alleged crime waves were being reported in the media. Visual
culture was under attack, too: in 1971, Ken Russell’s The Devils and Sam
Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs had shocked audiences and challenged the British
Board of Film Censors (BBFC) with their depictions of sex, violence, and
alleged blasphemy (in the case of The Devils ).19 With the U.K. release
date of A Clockwork Orange approaching, incendiary articles began to
appear in the press, particularly in tabloids which ran special issues on the
“rising violence in Britain.” One piece in The Sun for example was rhetor-
ically directed towards the same audience they believed to have been the
target of Kubrick’s “obscene parable.”
That is – to the skinhead heroes of ultra violence; those kids with steel
toecaps who are denied a hero. If you are young, regularly put the boot in
and run with rape gangs, this film is your meat. […] the acting is so true
that it will convince you that you can do your own thing. Psychologists
disagree. Films, they say, cannot influence people and have no effect on the
moral fibre. Oh yeah! They can tell that to Dr. Goebbels’s old propaganda
machine – can’t they, kids?20
Maurice Edelman, a Labour MP who proudly coined the catchy phrase

“pornography of violence,” thought likewise and wrote an editorial to
alert people to the dangers of screening Kubrick’s film, headlined “Clock-
work Oranges are ticking bombs.” Edelman conceded that the story of
A Clockwork Orange was “a masterly fable of a vicious and violent soci-
ety” with the aim of curing our world, but once screened it “will lead to
a clockwork cult which will magnify teenage violence.” The “glamoriza-
tion of violence on the screen,” Edelman maintained, will “encourage the
sadistic impulses” of the teenagers, who “will, no doubt” dress like the
droogies and, therefore, soon act like them.21
Burgess called this line of reasoning “Rubbish”22 and “nonsense.”23
He questioned Edelman’s air of fatalism which equated man to a naked
ape who can’t help but copy what it sees: “If it were so,” Burgess
observed, “it would be impossible to show Hamlet […] for fear that
youthful watchers would kill their own uncles.”24 “Man is basically evil,”
he concluded:
and if anybody is so perverted as to take away a wrong sentiment it’s not

my fault. […] I don’t think anyone will go out and beat up little old ladies
after seeing [the film] unless they are going to do so, anyway.25
Appearing on the BBC, Burgess further elaborated:
If you write a book, if you make a film […] you are merely copying what
is already there. […] if I see violence in the world around me […] then
it was my job in writing this particular kind of book […] and Kubrick, in
making the film, has done the same thing in his terms that I did in my
terms.26
The public debate was so heated that even Kubrick, who usually never
replied to anything written about his films, felt the need to speak up. He
said:
By directing a lot of media attention to whether films and television

contribute to violence, politicians conveniently escape looking at the real
causes of violence in society which could be listed as: 1. Original sin: the
30 F. ULIVIERI
theological view; 2. Unjust economic exploitation: the Marxist view; 3.

Emotional frustrations and pressures: the psychological view; 4. Genetic
factors based on the Y chromosome theory: the biological view.27
Kubrick added,
Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds

with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis, in a
posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds
with their natures.28
Burgess expressed a more elaborate view in a lengthy piece for the Los
Angeles Times. “What my, and Kubrick’s, parable tries to state,” he wrote,
“is that it is preferable to have a world of violence undertaken in full
awareness—violence chosen as an act of will—than a world conditioned
to be good or harmless.” As proof, he offered an origin story for his
novel: “my own wife was the subject of vicious and mindless violence
in blacked-out London in 1942, when she was robbed and beaten by
three GI deserters.”29 She was carrying a child at the time, and miscarried
as a result of the attack; she fell ill shortly thereafter, and Burgess was
convinced that the incident contributed to her eventual death.30 “Books
stem out of some great personal agony,” he revealed, and A Clockwork
Orange was “an attempt to exorcize” such feelings.31 He stated:
What hurts me, as also Kubrick, is the allegation made by some viewers
and readers of A Clockwork Orange that there is a gratuitous indulgence
in violence […] the depiction of violence was intended as both an act of
catharsis and an act of charity […] if we are going to love mankind, we
will have to love Alex as a not unrepresentative member of it.32
Following that dreadful incident, Burgess wrote, “I had to re-learn

charity even towards the most debased of human beings, I had to show
that revenge does not pay.”33 And that “If Orange, like 1984, takes its
place as one of the salutary literary warnings—or cinematic warnings—
against flabbiness, sloppy thinking, and overmuch trust in the state, then
it will have done something of value.”34
The article was also intended as a refutation of Pauline Kael’s scathing
review of the film,35 which according to Burgess greatly upset Kubrick.
“After all,” Burgess said, “it was a question of defending myself.”36
Whenever Burgess spoke or wrote about A Clockwork Orange, the

book and the film perfectly coincided in his view. It was as if A Clock-
work Orange were an entity that had manifested itself with a literary and
a cinematic version. The book and the film appeared as two close artistic
siblings, stemmed from similar concerns and sharing the same aspirations.
Burgess seemed to feel that he and Kubrick were twin artists.
It is therefore very surprising to discover that, just three months later,
Burgess had completely changed his mind. At the Cannes Film Festival,
where he was again sent for promotional duties in connection with the
French release of the film, he said “with stunning candor,” as a reporter
put it, that the film was “a reversal of his intention.” Burgess was being
questioned by a film critic who thought that, by making Alex so charming
and his victims so stupid, Kubrick had somehow made the violence seem
justified. Burgess conceded:
I agree, this is a fault. Let’s get one thing straight. The film is an inter-
pretation of the book. I think it’s a masterly interpretation and I’m not
trying to denigrate Kubrick, but you must realize that whereas Truffaut
or Fellini produce pure film, Kubrick is only interpreting. Fellini’s Roma
is not made out of a book, it’s made out of Rome. Kubrick’s film is not
made out of any future or present world, it’s made out of my book.37
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Burgess quipped, was “the fruit

of my tree.”38
With the film approaching worldwide distribution, Burgess started to
be acutely aware of the power of the filmic medium, of “the gap between
a literary impact and a cinematic one […] I fear, like any writer in my
position, that the film may supersede the novel.”39 If he had had hopes
that his genius would be promoted and his auctorial authority preserved
by such a faithful film, those hopes were now crumbling. More and more
he realised that the book “became known as the raw material for a film”40
and that he was “regarded by some people as […] a mere helper to Stanley
Kubrick; the secondary creator who is feeding a primary creator who’s a
great film director. This I naturally resent.”41
That July, Burgess received another blow. Kubrick published his screen
adaptation as a paperback volume with Ballantine Books. It featured stills
from the film juxtaposed with lines of dialogue often lifted from the novel.
It was an exploitative move aimed at further promoting Kubrick’s name
and at cashing in as much as possible on the film’s success. Burgess took
32 F. ULIVIERI
it as both a direct invasion on the part of a film-maker into his writing

domain, and an evidence of being ripped off over the film rights. He
reviewed the paperback in persona as Alex, using Nadsat vocabulary:
The Great Purpose in his jeezny for this veck Kubrick or Zubrick […] was
to have a Book. And now he has a Book. A Book he doth have, O my
malenky brothers, verily he doth. […] Kubrick or Zubrick the Bookmaker.
But, brothers, what makes me smeck like bezoomny is that this like Book
will tolchock out into the dark-mans the book what there like previously
was, the one by F. Alexander or Sturgess or some such eemya, because
who would have slovos when he could viddy real jeezhny with his nagoy
glazzies? And so it is like that. […] And lashings of deng for the carmans
of Zubrick. And for your malenky droog not none no more. So gromky
shooms of lip-music brrrrrr to thee and thine. And all that cal.42
The reason why Kubrick is repeatedly called Zubrick is just Burgess

being Burgess: Zubrick is an Arabic word for penis.43
Even if A Clockwork Orange had “sold more than a million copies
in America, thanks to dear Stanley,”44 as he readily admitted, Burgess
initiated a lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to defraud him over the book’s
rights.45 The whole Clockwork affair began to tire Burgess. He further
devalued his novel saying that it:
Has been popular for all the wrong reasons because it’s full of violence,
because it seems to be like a Christian sermon. The violence is only there
as part of the pattern. If the book’s like a sermon, it’s only by accident.
And this probably makes it a bad book. Most people expect a book to tell
them what to do. To enforce action of some kind.46
Burgess also revisited the book’s origin story: he said he wrote it

hastily after being diagnosed with a brain tumour,47 and left the positive
elements of compassion and forgiveness completely out. He said he was
“very drunk” throughout the writing because that was the only way he
could cope with the violence. “I can’t stand violence. I… I loathe it!” he
cried. “And one feels so responsible putting an act of violence on paper.
[…] why you’ve created the act! You might as well have done it!” Staring
at the void, he muttered: “I detest that damn book now.”48 On another
occasion, he even said he wished he could have it “expunged from [his]
literary record.”49
Burgess’s bitterness touched Kubrick’s film, too: “Nothing to do with

me. How can I say? I don’t know. […] It was a very slow and dull
film; very beautiful, but very dull and slow.”50 He said that “From an
artistic point of view, it is indeed quite poor, very far from the masterpiece
described by the publicity machine.”51
Burgess would have much preferred to move on and focus on his other
literary ventures, but in 1973 A Clockwork Orange was brought to the
British public attention with a vengeance. Following Kubrick’s restrictive
distribution plan, the film had only just opened outside London. Like
the previous year, it met with a backlash in local newspapers, incensed by
religious groups who protested against the decline of moral standards in
society.52 As a result, a number of councils in England refused to give
permission for the film to be screened, deeming it “offensive to public
feeling, against good taste or decency,” and “likely to encourage or incite
to crime or lead to disorder.”53
In such a climate, at the widely covered trial of a teenager who attacked
and murdered a tramp, the defence counsel shamelessly stated that “the
only possible explanation for what this boy did” was that the violence was
put into his subconscious by Burgess’s novel.54 Then a priest jumped at
the opportunity and wrote an open letter in which he accused Burgess and
Kubrick of being directly accountable: “Few books or films to date can
compare with the mindless brutality of A Clockwork Orange,” a “celluloid
cesspool” featuring “the same ingredient which marked the growth of the
jackboot and stormtrooper in Nazi Germany.” The priest was “utterly
convinced” that Burgess and Kubrick “helped to fashion the blueprint of
the crime. […] Perhaps it’s too much to hope that you will have remorse
in your bones,” he thundered; “Men today will judge you guilty… and
so will God.”55
During the summer, a second teenager attacked another boy while
wearing white overalls, a bowler hat, and heavy boots. The judge accepted
the view that the “dastardly” and “wretched film” was the instigator of
the violent behaviour and called for “the return as quickly as possible of
some form of censorship.”56
This incensed Burgess: “These bloody judges [are] playing around on
the fringes of a very difficult subject. […] Let them tell us what we may or
may not write about. I just want to see what the ideas of the average legal
or religious mind are about art.”57 “Magistrates and judges have always
hated works of art and blamed them for society’s evils,” Burgess elabo-
rated. When the infamous Acid Bath Murderer claimed his killings were
34 F. ULIVIERI
inspired by the Eucharist, “Does that mean we should ban the Bible?” he
asked rhetorically. And when a young man in Denmark killed his uncle
and blamed Sir Laurence Olivier whom he had just seen in Hamlet,
“should we ban Shakespeare as well?”58
Although it contradicted his own feelings, by this stage Burgess must
have been afraid that Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange could in fact
produce that cheap “kinetic emotion” he had criticised, that the film was
not that purely static work of art he had praised. Surely, it had grown
so much in the public psyche that it was turning the book into “a kind
of invisible primer of evil,”59 and caused Burgess himself to be seen as
“the target for official and public abuse [that he felt were] related more
directly to [Kubrick’s] film than to his book.”60
The fact that Kubrick never said anything publicly doesn’t mean he
didn’t suffer from the controversy. Quite the opposite: he received nasty
phone calls, hate mail, lunatics at his house, and plain death threats. His
family was truly scared.61 The police told Kubrick it was indeed a serious
affair, so he decided the film should never be distributed again in the
United Kingdom once it had concluded its original run. Warner Bros.
complied.62
Burgess was not informed of the decision and felt he was left alone to
defend himself: “Kubrick filed the nails of [his] hand in Borehamwood
and left me to be the target of vile accusation,”63 he wrote. He certainly
didn’t want to defend the film anymore. “My book was about the ulti-
mate absurdity of violence,” he said; “somehow the film doesn’t convey
that.”64 He was now convinced that Kubrick had projected violence for
its own sake, and that was “damnable.”65
Such an explicit, and potentially harmful divorce couldn’t pass unno-
ticed. Warner Bros. had Burgess write a statement to deny what appeared
in the press and confirm that he hadn’t changed his mind about the film,
which he still regarded as a truthful interpretation of his book. “But,”
Burgess added: “I am becoming increasingly exasperated by the assump-
tion of guilt that it is my duty to defend the film against its attackers and
not merely my book. It is surely the duty of the maker of the film to speak
out for his own work.”66
Perhaps it is, but Kubrick again said nothing.
So Burgess kept speaking. “For three years I have had to go around
the world on Stanley Kubrick’s behalf,” he said in 1975, “telling people
that A Clockwork Orange is not a pornographic film, not an obscene film.
My ultimate crucifixion is that I have to talk about his film, and this book,
because it’s the only book of mine that a generality of people know.”67
Even if the number of references to A Clockwork Orange declined in
the media, it was still very much alive in the public interest. The film
had turned the novel into an international bestseller and Burgess into
a much sought-after celebrity, engrossed by a non-stop world tour of
lectures, piano concertos, courses on Joyce, Shakespeare, pornography.
Burgess became a regular TV talk-show guest, and also a commodity
for the cinema industry, commissioned to write film scripts.68 He was
finally in the coveted spotlight but had to confront the fact that his fame
was brought by a poisonous fruit: a flawed novel that yet “had a myth-
ical impact of some kind”69 thanks to a film that was accused of inciting
violence.
The fracture between his novel and Kubrick’s film never healed.
Though Burgess had to concede that the film was “very good” per se,
in terms of adaptation he could not hold back that it had “many, many
faults. It misses many of the main points of the book.”70 “When a film is
made of a book, the book’s ruined,” he said once, not without self-pity
“I’m the victim of visual heresy.”71
The main area of contention was the ending. Burgess had devised the
book in three parts of seven chapters each, totalling at 21, the symbol
of human maturity; the narrative arc had to end with Alex’s growth as
a well-integrated citizen who put violence aside as a childish toy. This
final chapter had been excised at the request of Burgess’s American editor
who considered it too soft. Burgess, in too weak a position to dispute
and in need of money, had accepted.72 According to Burgess, Kubrick
based his script on the American version of the book and only discov-
ered the existence of the final chapter when it was too late, halfway
through the shooting.73 Even if he had previously praised Kubrick’s
ending because it focused on the joy of freedom restored to Alex,74
Burgess now thought that without his own ending, there was no moral
transformation for his anti-hero: Alex remains “a clockwork figure who’s
just impelled towards evil by some deterministic force.”75 Because most
people became aware of the book via Kubrick’s film, it’s a truncated,
incomplete version they know, a version that conveys what is basically
a different message. Burgess’s intentions were misunderstood because of
Kubrick’s interpretation.76
The gulf separating the novel and the film was now at its widest point.
Henceforth, it would remain open and unbridged. Having renounced
Kubrick for good, A Clockwork Orange was still unfinished business for
36 F. ULIVIERI
Burgess. “I wrote it twenty-eight years ago and I am not sure if I still

understand it,” he admitted a few times over the years.77 In 1985, he
revealed that he was imagining a future for Alex, even beyond the 21st
chapter, as a great musician.78 A Clockwork Orange always remained alive
for Burgess—despite his will: one senses the burden of it when, at the end
of that 1972 round table, Burgess said he wished Kubrick’s film might
help him stop worrying about the novel.
In 1987, he decided to visit it again, perhaps to regain possession,
perhaps to clarify his position further, and wrote a stage version which he
hoped would be “the last word on the subject.” Again appearing tired
and annoyed by the legacy of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess stated that
he wrote the adaptation only unwillingly, “because I’ve had enough of
people ringing me up, literally twice a week, asking if they can put it on
the stage.”79 The play was complemented by a fictional dialogue between
the character Alex and an author named AB, written for newspaper publi-
cation. Contrary to what Burgess had imagined recently, here Alex is a
frozen-in-time youngster of the past—cannot grow, cannot change—who
lectures the youngsters of the present about morality and violence. “To
be young is to be nothing. […] Grow up is what they must do, ah yes,”
Alex says, basically summing up the content of the 21st chapter. A feeling
of longing for old times soon creeps into the text, as Alex looks back at
his old ultraviolence and deems it a better, less dangerous expression than
the present-day one.80
Burgess seemed to find some solace in taunting Kubrick. Alex calls him
“the gloopy shoot that put me in the sinny”—that is, the foolish joke
who put him in the cinema—and playfully distorts his name as “Lubric
or Pubic.”81 At the end of the theatre adaptation, Burgess included a
striking stage direction:
A man bearded like Stanley Kubrick comes on playing Singin’ in the Rain
on a trumpet. He is kicked off the stage.82
With the film long outside the distribution circuit, there was no need
for Warners to call the writer to order, but Kubrick admitted in an
interview he “wish[ed Burgess] would stop being bitchy about it.”83
But Burgess never stopped and even increased his resentment to the
point that, in the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your
Time, published in 1990, he offered nothing less than a revisionist view
of his entire relationship with Kubrick and his film, rendered as an annoy-
ance which evolved into a sickening, wounding experience. According
to his new rendition of events, left alone to face attacks by judges,
MPs, reporters, opinion leaders, priests, and various self-righteous people,
Burgess was scarred for life.84
3 Challenging Burgess’s View

By analysing twenty years of interviews and written texts, a different
story emerges. From 1972 on, Burgess got irritated as soon as he was
asked about A Clockwork Orange. He said it was “a great bore”85 and
“a damn nuisance”86 to be associated so much with the novel, that it
“rankle[d him] damnably,”87 that he was “fed up,”88 and “sick to death
of it”89 ; yet he was willing to speak about it at great length, explaining ad
nauseam his motives for the book, its ideology and meaning, the context
of its creation, his feelings about Kubrick’s film, his frustrations over the
missing chapter, and so on and so forth. His reluctance appears artificial.
Burgess never gave a short answer, never refrained from disputing or clar-
ifying, never used a simple “no comment.” Kubrick, who bore the brunt
of much worse reactions and truly felt his family was in danger, went to
the police, not to the media. Burgess claimed that he wished he hadn’t
written the book,90 but his extensive replies belie him. “I’ve been drawn
out of the world of writing into the world of showbiz,” he said once,
“and this does get in the way of writing. I was probably happiest when
I was least known […] I was never besieged by editors or telephoned
by anybody, and I just got on with the job of writing.”91 Nothing, in
his behaviour, supports this claim. In fact, it appears clear how Burgess
nurtured the debate surrounding A Clockwork Orange and relaunched it
constantly.
Comparing this with Kubrick is striking. In his interviews, there is
no mention of the controversy after 1972. Kubrick’s silence paid off:
he was never questioned on the link between films and violence, and A
Clockwork Orange was not even mentioned when the topic of the depic-
tion of violence resurged when he made Full Metal Jacket. Burgess, on
the contrary, remained embroiled in the controversy and became a sort
of go-to-expert on the influence of film and TV as soon as a violent
crime was committed. Not that he wished differently. First, he accepted
to write The Clockwork Condition, a non-fiction sequel to the novel, he
intended to be a “major philosophical statement on the contemporary
38 F. ULIVIERI
human condition,” in which he would develop ideas from his original

novel, address the controversy surrounding Kubrick’s film, and further
elaborate on the dangers of technology and visual culture.92 When this
project vanished, he decided to push his literary alter-ego, the poet F. X.
Enderby, towards the Clockwork phenomenon by creating a third book
in the Enderby canon in which the poet has to deal with the misinterpre-
tation of a script he wrote by a film director. Despite having nothing to
do with his infamous novel or Kubrick’s film, Burgess titled this book The
Clockwork Testament .
I suspect Burgess loved to be in the position in which A Clockwork
Orange put him. He got the chance to play his favourite character over
and over again: the bulwark artist, the alerting moralist who fights against
the fallacies of society, who quarrels energetically against every opponent,
be it a moralising judge, a bigoted priest, or a film-maker who misrep-
resented his work. I can easily picture him as Alex uttering “gromsky
shooms of lip-music lip-music brrrrrr to thee and thine.”
Returning to look at Burgess’s first move in the controversy—his reply
to Maurice Edelman, MP—we see how he is reacting to a charge that
was made to the film by someone who was exempting the novel. Burgess
entered the ring when he didn’t really need to. And then never left it.
The endless outrage about A Clockwork Orange shows how Burgess was
most comfortable in the public eye when he could react to something,
indeed anything or anyone. To keep the debate going, he was willing to
go against his own opinions, too. In fact, he never stopped contradicting
himself: in February 1990, he said he finally felt “clean” about A Clock-
work Orange and that he remained convinced it “was a necessary book
to write.”93 In November, he called it “a squib, a jeu d’esprit, it’s not a
book to take seriously.”94 Sometimes it appears he only wanted to have a
contrarian idea which he could express vehemently.
Burgess died in November 1993. A few months earlier, in what is the
last and most surprising twist in this tale, he admitted he had changed his
mind once more, and radically so: at 76, he had to “abandon a conviction
that was part of [his] blood and bone: that the arts were sacrosanct […]
that they could never be accused of exerting either a moral or an immoral
influence.” That conviction was, in fact, nothing but a way to defend his
beloved Shakespeare and justify the corrupt elements that can be found in
the Elizabethan writers. Burgess even became reconciled with Kubrick’s
ban on the film, which he previously had condemned as a cowardly act of
self-censorship95 : with his decision, Kubrick “has admitted to the world
that art can be harmful.” Burgess saw now how “a work of art has a
magisterial quality about it, a justifying élan which grants virtue to imita-
tion.” He still believed that youth didn’t learn violence from the film of A
Clockwork Orange, but did learn “a style of aggression, a mode of dressing
violence up in a new way.” Perhaps, A Clockwork Orange was not the only
possible explanation for youngsters’ aggressiveness, as the defence coun-
sels had said, but certainly it didn’t help solve the problem. At the end
of his life, Burgess came to agree with the thesis he had fought against
for twenty years: that “art is dangerous. […] I begin to accept that, as a
novelist, I belong to the ranks of the menacing.”96
The extent of Burgess’s recantation becomes clear if we get back to a
1972 article of his in which he made fun of such cheap vision of the arts:
All works of art are dangerous. My little son tried to fly after seeing
Disney’s Peter Pan. I grabbed his legs just as he was about to take off
from a fourth story window. […] all art should be banned. Hitler would
never have dreamed of world conquest if he hadn’t read Nietzsche in the
Reader’s Digest.97
In a 1973 essay, he wrote explicitly:
I have […] to come out on the side of total permissiveness […] and state
my belief that writers and film makers must be free to do what they will.
[…] It is the purpose of all art to shock – that is, to impel the viewer, reader
or auditor to see with new eyes what he has previously taken for granted
[…] Art that merely soothes is not art at all; it may even be thought of as
anti-art.98
Whether the 1993 article was just another volte-face of his is unclear—
death prevented Burgess from saying anything more. However, given the
moralising tone of his late texts, it is possible that Burgess had simply
become old.
Usually, to try and find the truth behind an artist’s public persona,
one can research his or her papers. But in this case, the documents in
possession of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation complicate
matters even further.
First of all, the origin story for A Clockwork Orange was in fact just
that: a story. Andrew Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the
Foundation, has investigated the alleged brain tumour and found no
evidence that it was diagnosed. What he found was again a network of
40 F. ULIVIERI
intricate and contradicting statements.99 Moreover, the first draft of A

Clockwork Orange was typed at least a year after this supposed event.
Above all, there is no clear evidence in the papers that the novel was
written as a response to what happened to Burgess’s wife. The incident
took place fifteen years prior to the novel’s inception and again the actual
fact is buried under so many variations that it has become unknowable: a
generic assault, a rape, a miscarriage, a pregnancy resulting from the rape,
and an arranged abortion.100
Of course it is not possible to ascertain the source of inspiration for
any work of art, and this may be particularly true for a writer like Burgess
who produced a strongly autobiographical body of work. But there is
at least one area of contention where we can definitely prove Burgess’s
public statements wrong, namely the truncation of the 21st chapter. Type-
scripts and letters to and from his editors show that Burgess himself
was unsure where to end the novel: he concluded its 20 chapters with
“an optional epilogue” which his English publisher decided to include;
when the American one raised the question, Burgess replied he would
have been pleased if it had been dropped.101 Accordingly, the screen-
play he wrote for an early film adaptation ends without Alex’s coming
of age,102 and so does the 1972 English reprint of the book.103 Also, it
is not true that Kubrick became aware of the original, extended edition
only during shooting: other letters reveal that Kubrick inquired about
Burgess’s opinion on the 21st chapter while writing the screenplay.104
In fact, in that round table, Burgess said that he “soothed [Kubrick]
by saying, ‘This is it; you’ve got the book’.”105 Only later did the 21st
chapter become important to Burgess. Perhaps, the controversy pushed
him towards the need for less ambiguity, to stress how violence was but
a mere phase in the development of a human being; perhaps he used the
different ending as a quick way to dissociate himself from Kubrick’s film.
The story about how Burgess was ripped off over the film rights
does not fully survive investigation either. He kept saying that the film
earned him “the laughable sum of five hundred dollars,” but actually his
lawsuit was successful and by 1985 Warner Bros. had paid him more than
$700,000.106 Burgess wasn’t even telling the truth about the novel’s title.
He always said it came from an old cockney expression— “He’s as queer
as a clockwork orange”107 —while in fact the phrase was a well-known
Scouse saying from the Liverpool of the 1950s and ‘60s.108
4 Conclusion
On closer examination, Burgess appears as someone who took the concept
of the unreliable narrator to new levels. He made it impossible to under-
stand what he truly thought or felt about A Clockwork Orange and its
unending troubles. It is not a question of an artist changing his mind, or
repudiating one of his works, or being dissatisfied with a cinematic adap-
tation. The case of A Clockwork Orange may be emblematic, or the most
extreme example, but it is not unique. Burgess’s life story, as told in thou-
sands of interviews, articles, and two volumes of autobiography, contains a
great deal of fantasy, with “elements of published fictions [bleeding] into
his memoirs, distorting the actual into recognizably novelistic shapes.”109
It is difficult to establish where the truth stands in relation to his fictions,”

confirmed Debora Rogers, Burgess’s literary agent; “I think an awful lot
of himself was self-invented. If you have that sort of fertile mind, maybe
self-invention is the most satisfactory way of being.110
Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Peter Krämer,

Michele Pavan Deana, and Ian Roscow for their invaluable feedback on earlier
drafts of this essay.
Notes
1. Biswell, A. (2005) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, London: Picador,
258–60; Peter Krämer, P. (2011) A Clockwork Orange, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 59–61.
2. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve Had Your Time: The Second Part
of the Confession, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 210; Crit-
ics’ Prize: Burgess’s Acceptance Speech for Kubrick’s A Clock-
work Orange, The Anthony Burgess Center, accessed May 12,
2021, http://www.masterbibangers.net/ABC/index.php?option=com_
content&view=article&id=78&Itemid=129.
3. Burgess, A. (1990) 218.
4. Hilts, P.J. (1971) The Nightmare of the Clockwork Orange, Chicago
Tribune, 7 November, 64.
5. Burgess, A. (1990) 245-46.
6. McKinnon, G. (1972) ‘Clockwork Orange’ Elation or Disgust?, Boston
Globe, 6 February, 85.
42 F. ULIVIERI
7. Musilli, J., director (1972) An Examination of A Clockwork Orange,

CBS Camera Three, aired 16 January, https://vimeo.com/83681624.
8. Burgess, A. (1972) “Author Has His Say on ‘Clockwork’ Film”, Los
Angeles Times, 13 February. This view is confirmed by a letter Burgess
sent to Kubrick in March 1972: he wrote that “ACO is a great film and
I don’t use ‘great’ in the colloquial American sense.” The International
Anthony Burgess Foundation, AB/ARCH/H.
9. A.W.E. (1972) “PW Interviews: Anthony Burgess”, Publishers Weekly,
January 31.
10. Unknown clipping, Evening Standard, December 17, 1971.
11. McKinnon, G. (1972), 85.
12. Bell, A. (1972) A Pain in the Gullivar, Village Voice, 20 January.
13. A.W.E. (1972).
14. Unknown clipping, Evening Standard.
15. What’s it going to be then, eh? A Look at Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange, Sound on Film #17, April 1972, 33 rpm.
16. What’s it going to be then, eh?, Sound on Film.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Cfr. Krämer, P. (2013) “The Ugly Tide of Today’s Teenage Violence’: Revis-
iting the Clockwork Orange controversy in the UK, in Nicholas, S. and
O’Malley, (2013) T. (eds.), Moral Panics, Social Fears and the Media:
Historical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2013; Dalton, S. (2000)
“Symphony for the devil”, in Uncut, April issue, 64.
20. Cashin, F. (1972) “Yeah, Reggie, you must see this”, in The Sun, 11
January.
21. Edelman, M. (1972) “Clockwork Oranges Are Ticking Bombs”, Evening
News, 27 January.
22. Hall, W. (1972) “Clockwork Orange Gang Killed My Wife”, in Evening
News, 28 January.
23. Burgess, A. (1972) “My Clockwork Orange is a Christian sermon”, in
Evening News, 31 January.
24. Ibid.
25. Hall, W. (1972).
26. Speak-Easy, BBC, January 30, 1972, transcription available at the Stanley
Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts London, London College of
Communication, SK/13/6/30, Volume 2 of 6.
27. Siskel, G. (1972) Movie-Making with a Moral, Chicago Tribune, 13
February.
28. Strick, P. and Houston, P. (1972) “An Interview with Stanley Kubrick”,
Sight and Sound, Spring issue.
29. Burgess, A. (1972a).
30. Burgess stated this a few times, for example cfr. Malko, G. (1972)
Penthouse Interview: Anthony Burgess, Penthouse, June.
31. “What’s it going to be then, eh?”, Sound on Film.
32. Burgess, A. (1972a).
33. Burgess, A. (1972b).
34. Burgess, A. (1972a).
35. Cfr. Kael, P. (1972) “Stanley Strangelove”, The New Yorker Vol 47:46,
1 January, 50-53.
36. A.W.E. (1972).
37. Kneiman, M. (1972) The sly digs of Anthony Burgess, 15.
38. Clarke, S. (1972) “Fruit of Burgess’ Tree”, CinemaTV Today, 27 May.
39. Burgess, A. (1972) “Juice from A Clockwork Orange” in Rolling Stone
issue 110, 8 June 8, 52-53.
40. Burgess, A. (1985) Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H.
Lawrence, London: Arbor House, 267.
41. “Anthony Burgess interview for the Italian media, 1970s”, in “Anthony
Burgess on Tape”, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation,
accessed May 12, 2021, https://www.anthonyburgess.org/tape/ant
hony-burgess-on-a-clockwork-orange/.
42. Burgess on Kubrick and Clockwork, Library Journal, 1 May 1, 1973,
1506; reprinted in Biswell, A. (2012) “Introduction”, in Burgess, A.
(2012) A Clockwork Orange. The Restored Edition, London: William
Heinemann.
43. Biswell, A. (2005) 313-14.
44. Cullinan, J. (1973) Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction No. 48, The Paris
Review 56.
45. Anon. (1973) “Fraud claim by Clockwork Orange author”, in Daily
Telegraph, 30 April, 19.
46. Pritchard, K. (1973) “You the reader”, in Seventeen, 16 May, retrieved
as a draft in IABF, AB/ARCH/C.
47. Jennings, C.R. (1974) “Playboy interview: Anthony Burgess”, Playboy,
September issue.
48. Weller, S. (1972) “A ‘Clockwork’ Burgess: No Time Like The Past”, in
The Village Voice, 31 August, 57.
49. Power, M. (1972) “Author Would Expunge ‘Clockwork’ from Record”,
in Portsmouth Herald (N.H.), 6 October, 3.
50. Bunting, C.T. (1973) “An Interview in New York with Anthony
Burgess”, in Studies in the Novel, Vol 5:4, Winter, 526.
51. C.C., (1972) “Guerra per l’Arancia fra Burgess e Kubrick”, Il Messaggero,
18 September, 13, author’s translation from Italian.
52. Trevelyan, J. (1973) What the Censor Saw,London: Michael Joseph, 215-
17. cfr. Krämer, P. (2013) The ugly tide.
44 F. ULIVIERI
53. Biswell, A. (2019) “The Banning of A Clockwork Orange”, The

International Anthony Burgess Foundation, April 5, accessed May
12, 2021, https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/the-banning-
of-a-clockwork-orange/.
54. Laxton, E. (1973) “The Clockwork Killer”, Daily Mirror, 4 July. The
boy said he hadn’t seen the film. It was obviously the film which attracted
the larger concern about copycat behaviour in all other instances.
55. Lambert, J. (1973) “You Wound Up this Clockwork Murder, Mr
Burgess”, Evening News, 4 July.
56. Anon. (1973) “ Judge Attacks ‘Evil of Clockwork Orange”’, Daily
Telegraph, 24 July.
57. Anon. (1973) “‘Clockwork Orange’ Author Hits at Judges”, Daily
Telegraph, 6 August.
58. Mather, I. “Why People are So Wrong about ACO by the Man Who
Wrote it”, unidentified clipping in IABF, AB/ARCH/C, likely from
August 1973.
59. Burgess, A. (1990) 257.
60. Burgess, A. (1973) “Anthony Burgess Answers Back”, The Times, 6
August, 7.
61. Cfr. for example, Brooks, X. and Barnes, H. (2011) “Cannes 2011:
Re-Winding A Clockwork Orange with Malcolm McDowell”, The
Guardian, 20 May, accessed May 12, 2021, https://www.theguardian.
com/film/video/2011/may/20/cannes-2011-clockwork-orange-mal
colm-mcdowell-video.
62. Cfr. Krämer, A Clockwork Orange, p. 117;Krämer, P. (2015) “The
Case of A Clockwork Orange”, Pure Movies, 7 December, accessed
May 12, 2021,https://www.puremovies.co.uk/columns/the-case-of-a-
clockwork-orange/.
63. Burgess, A. (1993) 257.
64. Burgess, A. (1973b).
65. Anon. (1973).
66. Anon. (1973) “Burgess, Originator of ‘Clockwork,’ Says ‘Let Kubrick
Defend Film’”, Variety, 22 August, 2, 40.
67. Crinklaw, D. (1975) “Burgess’s Eccentric Odyssey”, St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, 4 May, 113.
68. Mantin, E. (1997) Anthony Burgess, 1917–1993: The Mechanic of the
Orange, Great Writers, ADR Productions; Hemesath, J.B. (1976)
Anthony Burgess, The Transatlantic Review 55–56.
69. Coale, S. (1981) “An Interview with Anthony Burgess”, Modern Fiction
Studies Vol 27:3, 448.
70. Jennings, C.R. (1974).
71. Dunlap, J. (1975) “Author Abhors Success Symbol”, unknown clipping,
March 6, 1975, IABF, AB/ARCH/C.
72. Burgess, A. (1986) A Clockwork Orange Resucked, in A Clockwork

Orange, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
73. Cullinan, J. (1973).
74. “What’s it going to be then, eh?”, Sound on Film.
75. Bunting, C.T. (1973).
76. Cfr. Burgess, A. (1985).
77. Anthony Burgess, “Letter to Holger”, February 9, 1989, IABF,
AB/ARCH/H; Cfr. Malko, “Penthouse Interview”: “I’m not sure
whether I understand it myself all that well.”.
78. Biswell, A. (2005), 262.
79. James Hanning, (1987) “Anthony Burgess”, London Portrait Magazine,
March issue.
80. Burgess, A. (1987) A Malenky Govoreet about the Molodoy, in A
Clockwork Orange. The Restored Edition, Burgess, A. (2012) London:
Penguin.
81. Ibid.
82. Burgess, A. A Clockwork Orange, a Play with Music, Hutchinson:
London, 48.
83. Scott J. (1987) “I’m always surprised by the reactions to my films”, The
Globe and Mail, 26 June.
84. Burgess, A. (1990) 210-278. In promotional interviews, Burgess also
said he was “appalled” when he first saw Kubrick’s film. Cfr. Anthony
Burgess on Seeing A Clockwork Orange, International Anthony Burgess
Foundation YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJt
eBy0EFRM
85. Bunting, C.T. (1973).
86. Coale, S. (1981).
87. Anon. (1990) “Novelist Feels Encroaching Age”, Los Angeles Times, 29
June.
88. Dunlap, J. (1975).
89. Anon. (1990).
90. Burgess, A. (1985).
91. Malko, G. (1972).
92. Anon. (2019) ‘The Clockwork Condition’: Lost sequel to A Clockwork
Orange discovered in Anthony Burgess archive, Manchester Metropolitan
University, 25 April, accessed May 12, 2021, https://www.mmu.ac.uk/
news-and-events/news/story/10185/.
93. Burn, G. (1990) “The Droogs are Back”, Daily Telegraph, 3 February.
94. Cropper, M. (1990) “A man of many words”, Evening Standard, 1
November.
95. Cfr. Anon. (1987) “‘Clockwork’ Author Lambastes Censors”, Variety
328.6, 2 September, 84: “If you start by suppressing a film, a play, a
book, you end up by abolishing art.” Burgess also never believed about
46 F. ULIVIERI
the death threats;“He’s had threats,” Burgess said. “So they say. But I
can’t believe it. He’s got all these bloody big dogs protecting his house,
bodyguards and Christ knows what.” Cfr. Burn, G. (1990).
96. Burgess, A. (1993) “Stop the Clock on Violence”, The Observer, 21
March, 25.
97. Burgess, A. (1972) 52-53.
98. Burgess, A. (1973) “Pornography: ‘The Moral Question is Nonsense”,
The New York Times, 1 July.
99. Biswell, A. (2005) 208–218.
100. Ibid., 107-108.
101. Ibid., 251-55.
102. Ibid., 338.
103. Ibid., 354.
104. Ibid., 354.
105. What’s it going to be then, eh?, Sound on Film.
106. Biswell, A. (2005), 353.
107. Burgess liked it because of a connotation in Malay where the word orang
means a human being. Cfr. Burgess, A. (1972) Juice from A Clockwork
Orange. He also elaborated a number of anagrams and other obscure
meaning to justify its choice, cfr. Anthony Burgess, “Letter to Miss
Brophy”, May 27, 1972, IABF, AB/ARCH/H.
108. Lowry, J. (1999) “Letters: Varieties of Orange”, The Independent, 7
December, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/letter-
varieties-of-orange-1130742.html. I am grateful to Martin M. Roberts
for the discovery and Andrew Biswell for the above source.
109. Biswell, A. (2005) 239.
110. Biswell, A. (2005) 107, 306.
“A Major Statement on the Contemporary
Human Condition”: Anthony Burgess
and the Aftermath of A Clockwork Orange
Andrew Biswell
In this chapter, I will aim to give an account of an unfinished non-fiction

book about A Clockwork Orange that Anthony Burgess worked on for a
period of about eighteen months in 1972 and 1973. The project even-
tually metamorphosed into a novel, published in 1974 as The Clockwork
Testament . Nevertheless, the extant material from the non-fiction book is
substantial enough for us to describe its major themes, and to position it
as a significant authorial response to the reception of the book and film
versions of A Clockwork Orange.1
“The Clockwork Condition” by Anthony Burgess survives in a draft of
325 pages of typewritten notes and fragments, along with a related collec-
tion of outlines, contracts and editorial correspondence. Working from
these unpublished documents, which survive in the archive of the Inter-
national Anthony Burgess Foundation, it is possible to make a speculative
reconstruction of Burgess’s “lost” non-fiction book; to clarify and amplify
the arguments he would have developed at greater length in a finished
A. Biswell (B)
English Department, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
e-mail: a.biswell@mmu.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_3
48 A. BISWELL
manuscript; and to outline Burgess’s proposals for how he intended this

material to be presented and packaged.
The genesis of the abandoned manuscript begins in January 1972, a
few weeks after the film version of A Clockwork Orange had been released.
Anthony Burgess and Malcolm McDowell had been summoned to New
York by Warner Brothers, and they undertook a series of newspaper,
radio and television interviews to promote the film. On the evening of
23 January Burgess attended an awards dinner at Sardi’s restaurant on
West 44th Street, where he collected the New York Critics’ Circle Prize
on behalf of Stanley Kubrick. Later that night, he had a meeting at the
Algonquin Hotel with a man named Thomas P. Collins.
Collins was not quite an agent, not quite a publisher, but a kind of
book packager who specialized in children’s books and illustrated coffee-
table volumes. According to a written account of this meeting, Collins
flattered Burgess with extravagant promises about money: he told him
that a writer of his calibre should be earning at least a thousand US dollars
per day, and that his company, Collins Associates, could help Burgess
to achieve this ambitious goal. There was large talk of a million-dollar
advance for a series of three novels which could be sold to publishers if
Burgess was willing to write short proposals.2 But the first collaboration
between Burgess and Collins was envisaged as a short book which would
be a kind of philosophical commentary on A Clockwork Orange.
Collins Associates, which should not be confused with the long-
established British publisher William Collins, already had a small profile
in American publishing by 1972. Writing with his long-term collaborator
Louis Savary under the pseudonym “Max Odorff”, and with illustrations
provided by Patricia Collins (his wife), Thomas P. Collins had co-authored
and packaged a series of books for children with titles such as The Boy
Who Listened to Fire and Teaching Your Child About God, published
in 1970. In the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your
Time, Burgess describes Collins as “a former Jesuit priest” who “offered
to make me rich”.3 Burgess is only half-right about the religious back-
ground. Louis Savary writes: “Tom Collins had been a Jesuit seminarian,
but left the order before ordination”.4
According to a publicity file in the Burgess Foundation’s archive,
Collins and Savary were working at this time on a range of other literary,
filmic and political projects, including photobooks, educational filmstrips
and intended feature films. A typewritten list of their activities from
December 1973 outlines a number of forthcoming projects which had
“A MAJOR STATEMENT ON THE CONTEMPORARY HUMAN CONDITION … 49
been co-created with well-known cultural figures of the day. These include
a “feature-film oratorio” to be directed by the Anglo-Irish documentarian
Patrick Carey; a film adaptation of Strumpet City, the 1963 Irish histor-
ical novel by James Plunkett; a “non-fiction novel” about the Watergate
affair by Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate; and a
film adaptation of the novel Max Jamison by Wilfrid Sheed.5 It is clear
from the list of project outlines that Collins regarded a book publica-
tion with Burgess as strong potential vehicle for film adaptation. Sadly,
none of the projects on the list appear to have borne fruit. As Robert
McCrum has observed, Collins’s pitching documents to publishers and
movie producers were characterized by strong elements of “opportunism
and hustle”.6
Writing from his New York office to Burgess in Rome, Collins provided
a detailed summary of their initial conversation at the Algonquin Hotel.
He was pleased by Burgess’s enthusiasm for the non-fiction book they had
outlined together. The title, either invented or approved by Burgess, was
“The Clockwork Condition”. The basic idea was to produce a commen-
tary on the themes of free will and individual choice, prominent in the
book and film versions of A Clockwork Orange.
In the early stages of his discussions with Collins, it seems that Burgess
was proposing to divide the book into three extended essays, taking its
overall structure from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Firstly, there was to be
the “Inferno”: “the experience of programmed man, who sees himself
as a cog in the machine, a creature of the culture […] subject to
the demands of unreality. Man here is no longer much like a natural
growth, not humanly organic”. The second section, following Dante,
would be the “Purgatorio”. This would deal with “the transitional man,
willing to assume responsibilities, to take risks, and sometimes to generate
conflicts”. Alex in A Clockwork Orange was claimed to be a transitional
character, “searching for an escape from the bland neutrality of the condi-
tion in which he finds himself. If there is nothing worth fighting for or
against, he can at least make waves”. Thirdly, there was to be the “Par-
adise” theme, “presenting an ideal of mythic man, his mind dominated
by a higher vision, and above all by a sense of God […] He has the inner
resources to recognize and participate actively in a building up of some
kind of new creation”.7
Working from the surviving manuscript materials, it is possible to make
a broad summary of “The Clockwork Condition”. The aims of the work
were both philosophical and autobiographical: Burgess planned to explain
50 A. BISWELL
the Catholic theology which underpins A Clockwork Orange, to connect

this thinking with recent developments in twentieth-century technology,
and to describe the cultural world out of which he had emerged. He
proposed to write in detail about a variety of significant life-events, to
justify his practice as a novelist: his childhood and background as a
Lancashire Catholic; enforced religion as a form of brainwashing which he
rejected; his cultural awakening through music and literature; early exper-
iments in fiction and poetry; his formation as a writer in wartime Gibraltar
and colonial Malaya; the meaning of tragedy in a secular world; his views
on the British class system; the idea of art as a form of self-assertion; and
his life as an artist who was in constant struggle against the “Clockwork
Condition” of mechanized conformity.
It later became clear that such a wide range of material could not
be contained within a structure borrowed from Dante, and this idea
was reluctantly discarded. Collins was probably unaware that Burgess
had been thinking for nearly ten years about redeploying elements taken
from The Divine Comedy in a novel. An unpublished notebook from
the Burgess Foundation’s archive tells us that he was planning a Dante
novel, provisionally titled “The Price of Fish”, as early as 1963. According
to his notes, the main character would be a Welsh man called Daniel
Tetlow (“DAN-iel TE-tlow” or “Dan Te”), whose brother would be a
fishmonger named Reginald Morrow, nicknamed “Vegetable Marrow”.
Reginald’s name is supposed to be a garbled form of “Vergilius Maro”,
who is better known to readers of Dante as Virgil.8 Seventeen years after
his encounter with Collins, Burgess went on to write his Dante novel,
published in 1989 in a heavily modified form as the historical saga Any
Old Iron.9
In practical terms, what Collins wanted from Burgess was an essay of
ten to fifteen thousand words, dealing with the three broad themes taken
from Dante. The text would be supplemented by 70 to 80 pages of “sur-
real photographs” and quotations from Dante “and many other authors”
on the subject of freedom and the individual. Collins undertook to supply
the additional text for the quotations and all design material. The writing
credit, along with any publishing advances and royalties, would be shared
between Collins and Burgess on a 50/50 basis. Collins promised that
Burgess would retain editorial control of the entire project, and that
Collins himself would be responsible for pitching and arranging contracts.
It is important to note that the standard rate of commission charged by
literary agents in the 1970s was ten per cent, so for a book packager to
take 50 per cent would have been very unusual.
Even before Burgess returned to Rome, he had already agreed with his
agents in London and New York that he would write a film script based
on his novel, The Doctor Is Sick; a stage musical based on Les Enfants
du Paradis; a non-musical stage adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities; and
the first half of Napoleon Symphony, a tragi-comic novel about the life of
the Corsican conqueror, intended as a text which Kubrick would adapt
as a major motion picture. When the Napoleon film project fell apart in
the Spring of 1972, Burgess sent a revised proposal for “The Clockwork
Condition” to Collins, who flew out to Rome for a meeting in May.
By early June, Collins was pitching a more ambitious version of the
book to Tom Maschler, Burgess’s long-standing publisher at Jonathan
Cape in London. Collins was now promising a book of 192 pages
with 70–80 pages of black-and-white photographs which, he said, would
“catch the human and also the nightmare quality of Burgess’s writ-
ing”. The three-part structure was still in place at this point, but the
Burgess contribution had risen from 10,000 words to 50,000 words—
according to Collins, “the right length in his [Burgess’s] view for this
major statement on the contemporary human condition”.10
Collins and his team had tape-recorded and transcribed a long inter-
view with Burgess during their meeting in Rome, and some of this taped
material was incorporated into a revised version of the book proposal,
dated 7 June 1972. Burgess was quoted as saying:
I am prepared to interpret human and religious realities from the angle

of an ordinary person. I feel I am qualified to say from the point of view
of my own life, and the lives of people I know, what I think about good
and evil. I must deal with concrete human experience, with people I have
known. What I will give you is a study of man enlightened by theology.
Even to the most optimistic eye, this may not have sounded like an
obvious mass-market publication. Tom Maschler and his colleagues at
Jonathan Cape said they were interested but would like to see the finished
book before making a decision. Undeterred by this minor setback, Collins
took a plane to Paris and began to work on Burgess’s French publisher
and co-translator, Georges Belmont at Editions Robert Laffont, who
eventually agreed to pay advances of $5000 US dollars on delivery of
each of the three unwritten historical novels.
52 A. BISWELL
By September 1972, “The Clockwork Condition” was under contract

to Alfred A. Knopf in New York, who had agreed to pay a hefty advance
of $60,000, the majority of which would become payable on delivery.
For a short time everyone was delighted, except Thomas Collins, who
didn’t yet have a book, and Anthony Burgess, who was by now so much
in demand with other projects that he didn’t have time to write it.
Towards the end of 1972, Burgess wrote twelve sample pages and
sent them to Collins. This is the piece of writing, marked “Clockwork
Condition: second draft” in the archive, which was eventually published
in the New Yorker in June 2012.11 There is no trace in the archive of any
material from the first draft, which is presumed to be lost. Collins read
Burgess’s twelve pages and wrote to express his disappointment. Burgess
agreed to go away and rewrite them.
One of the suggestions in the second version of the proposal document
is that Burgess would offer a response to Marshall McLuhan’s theories
about what he called “the electric media” of television, radio and cinema.
McLuhan had proposed, in his influential 1964 non-fiction book Under-
standing Media, that “the medium is the message”—in other words, that
the experience of cultural communication in the 1960s was no longer
determined by content but by form, or medium. Although these ideas
might seem commonplace to anyone born since the 1960s, in their day
they were thought to be a revolutionary new way of thinking about
culture and technology.
We know what Burgess thought about McLuhan because he had
already written two articles about his work. “The Modicum is the
Messuage” was originally published in the Spectator in 1967 and reprinted
in Urgent Copy, a collection of literary journalism.12 Responding to
Understanding Media and its successor volumes, Burgess wrote:
He [McLuhan] is very good and suggestive when he tells us of the influ-

ence of the typewriter on the art, not just the craft, of authorship. Henry
James became a new kind of writer when he began to dictate to a stenog-
rapher. The free verse and typographical tropes of E.E. Cummings owe
everything to the machine […] I myself, humbler still but an author, know
that my prose, such as it is, has been determined by a lifelong devotion to
the typewriter: coming to the end of a line, unwilling to split a word with
a hyphen, I will often use a shorter word than the one I intended. This is
utter slavery to the machine.13
Nevertheless, Burgess articulated reservations about McLuhan’s

tendency to value the medium itself above “the thing that is being
communicated”.14 He concluded his essay with a provocative point: “in
refusing to accept that ideas are stronger than media, that the influence of
media is marginal, McLuhan is perhaps guilty of a heresy worse than the
aesthetic one that thought the message was all”.15 Writing in the Amer-
ican Scholar in 1966, he had been more welcoming of McLuhan’s ideas,
even venturing the opinion that Understanding Media was “one of the
great seminal books of the age”.16 Nevertheless, a note of mild scepticism
crept in: “There is a lot of talk about media […] but not so much about
values. What are we trying to communicate about ?”.17
Burgess returned to the subject of McLuhan’s cultural criticism when
he wrote an obituary piece for the Observer in 1981. Recapitulating some
of the points he had originally put forward in the 1967 Spectator essay, he
summed up his uncertainty about McLuhan as a prophet of mass commu-
nications: “McLuhan perhaps went too far in his elevation of the medium
[television] to the rank of a demiurge. His admiration of pop groups,
which always seems to me to be an index of intellectual unsoundness, was
based presumably on their being inseparable from electronics”.18 Char-
acteristically, Burgess moves from a sober assessment of McLuhan to his
own preference for “serious” music—Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky—over
more popular musical forms.
Despite these grumblings, he concurred with the general view that
McLuhan’s theories were important, and it is likely that Burgess and
Collins were thinking of McLuhan when they described the proposed
“Clockwork Condition” book as a fusion of words and images. One
possible model for such a publication was offered by McLuhan and his
collaborator Quentin Fiore in their formally innovative pop-art book,
The Medium is the Massage.19 The title contains a deliberate pun on
“message” and “mass age”. This short book, dominated by full-page
black-and-white photographs and cartoons, uses short passages of text
by McLuhan and other notable writers (James Joyce, E.E.Cummings,
Carl Gustav Jung) as captions and commentaries on the images. The
effect is like watching a newsreel or a documentary film. It is likely
that the “Clockwork Condition” book was intended to bear a physical
resemblance to McLuhan’s best-selling visual argument about art and
technology.
The other critic and theorist whose work Burgess intended to comment
on was B.F. Skinner, whose best-selling popular psychology book, Beyond
54 A. BISWELL
Freedom and Dignity, published in 1971, was the subject of widespread

debate throughout the English-speaking world. Skinner’s influential book
is also frequently mentioned by Kubrick in his published interviews from
the 1970s and 1980s. Although he is almost forgotten now, it is clear that
he was widely discussed by liberal intellectuals in his day.20
Skinner was a behaviourist psychologist and a utopian thinker who
wanted to reform society through what he called “a technology of
behavior”. What he meant by this was social control through positive rein-
forcement—not the Pavlovian aversion therapy we find in A Clockwork
Orange, but trying to deal with the problems of aggression and sexual
violence by addressing the environments of society (schools, prisons,
housing projects). He was also, incidentally, quite interested in the idea
that criminals were genetically defective: that there was a criminal chro-
mosome that might be removed from the gene pool. “What must be
changed”, he wrote, “is not the responsibility of autonomous man but
the conditions, environmental or genetic, of which a person’s behavior is
a function”.21
The extent to which Skinner’s theories were in the air is demonstrated
by an article that Burgess had contributed to the Times Literary Supple-
ment on 12 January 1972: “We must believe we are free, in spite of
Professor Skinner. We must understand the nature of good and evil and
not confuse the dichotomy with mere right and wrong. […] Is canni-
balism evil (even though it may be wrong) and, if so, why? How many
meanings can we attach to the word good? […] We must counter the
effluvia of politicians, who are at the nadir of public trust, with some kind
of ethical solidity, however simple”.22
Skinner was also a creative writer who had published a utopia called
Walden Two. Taking the form of a didactic novel, Walden Two is a bold
attempt to describe what an ideal society might be. Within the fiction, the
protagonists are guided around the Walden Two experimental community
by one of its leaders, a character called Frazier, who is a self-projection of
Skinner. Attempting to create a better society, a group of idealistic men
and women have established a post-capitalist commune where happiness
is assured, there are no inequalities of wealth, and crime has been abol-
ished. There is no class system, fashion, advertising or alcohol in Skinner’s
utopia. Members of the community work only four hours a day, and
money has been replaced by “labor-credits”.23
The fundamental disagreement between Burgess and Skinner centres
on the idea of the “autonomous” being (man or woman). Skinner wrote
that he wanted to abolish the concept of autonomy, believing that people

were simply results or “functions” of their environment. To Burgess,
who believed in the primacy of free will, this deterministic position was
revolting and intolerable. He replies directly to Skinner in his novel, The
Clockwork Testament, where he sets up a debate between Enderby the
poet and Professor Balaglas, a fictional behaviourist psychologist. Burgess
lifts various sentences from the text of Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and
Dignity and redeploys them in the context of a television chat show in
The Clockwork Testament. Skinner’s words are mocked, distorted, sworn
at and belched at by the poet Enderby, who attempts to refute them with
a semi-articulate defence of the principle of free will. Asked to declare his
beliefs by a hostile interrogator, Enderby says:
Human beings are defined by freedom of choice. Once you have them
doing what theyre told is good just because theyre going to get a lump of
sugar instead of a kick up the ahss (?!) then ethnics [sic] no longer exists.
The State could tell them it was good to go off and mug and rape and kill
some other nation.24
Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity had appeared in 1971, a few

months before the New York release of Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork
Orange. This was Skinner’s attempt to popularize his behaviourist theo-
ries in a short book aimed at the mass market. Declaring himself to be
against “the literature of freedom”, he wrote that the next step in social
evolution was “not to free men from control but to analyze and change
the kinds of control to which they are exposed”.25 Given the right envi-
ronment and a willingness to abandon traditional notions of freedom,
Skinner claims, utopia might become a reality for everyone.
The thematic connection with A Clockwork Orange was obvious to
many readers of Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Interviewed by Rolling
Stone magazine, Kubrick spelled this out directly: “I like to believe that
Skinner is wrong and that what is sinister is that this philosophy may
serve as the basis for some kind of scientifically oriented repressive govern-
ment”. He added: “I like to believe that there are certain aspects of the
human personality which are essentially unique and mysterious”.26
Another passage about behaviourism, taken from the Stanley Kubrick:
Interviews volume, is also worth considering: “The essential moral ques-
tion is whether or not a man can be good without having the option to be
evil, and whether such a creature is still human […] To restrain man is not
56 A. BISWELL
to redeem him”.27 This is partly a commentary on Burgess’s novel, but it

is also aimed at Skinner and his fellow psychologists. Kubrick’s commen-
tary here is consistent with Burgess’s strong insistence on the primacy of
free will. In context, Kubrick seems to be echoing a line from Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange (Part 2, Chapter 1), which also appears in the film.
The prison chaplain says to Alex: “When a man cannot choose he ceases
to be a man”.28
Reading the book proposals and the Burgess-Collins correspondence,
we can gain a clear impression of the intended literary form of the “Clock-
work Condition” book. According to the synopsis documents, the one of
the models Burgess and Collins had in mind was The Unquiet Grave by
Cyril Connolly, an eccentric publication described by its author as “A
Word Cycle”.29 The Unquiet Grave is an anthology of prose quotations
and aphorisms, punctuated by longer segments of reflective and auto-
biographical writing. Most of the entries occupy no more than a page,
and some of them consist of a short paragraph of around 100 words.
Connolly also uses a three-part structure, his sections being called “Initia-
tion”, “Descent Into Hell” and “Purification and Cure”. In formal terms,
it seems likely that “The Clockwork Condition” was intended as an imita-
tion of The Unquiet Grave, deploying the visual style of The Medium is
the Massage.
Burgess read Connolly’s book shortly after its first publication in 1944,
and although he never made any serious effort to imitate Connolly’s
rather mannered style, with its untranslated quotations in Latin and
French, the work remained in his library and was an important part of
his personal literary canon. The Unquiet Grave is mentioned along with
Animal Farm, Brideshead Revisited and Four Quartets , as one of the key
publications of the Second World War in Burgess’s first novel, A Vision
of Battlements.30 Reviewing Michael Shelden’s biography of Connolly
in 1989, he described The Unquiet Grave as a “masterful” book and
said of Connolly: “he presented at some length the tribulations of the
only character who appealed to him—himself—and summed up for other
intellectuals the complex of guilt, self-disgust, Angst and emotional depri-
vation with which the peace of 1945 had to be greeted. […] He was
a sensuous intellectual who found his aesthetic ideals across the Chan-
nel”.31 There seems to be an element of self-identification with Connolly
on Burgess’s part. Although The Unquiet Grave is the ostensible subject
of Burgess’s affirmation, the same comment might also have been made
about his own European career after he left England in 1968 and began
a series of migrations to Malta, Italy, Switzerland and France.
As 1972 approached its close, there was still no sign of a publishable
manuscript, although Burgess had been gathering material for the quota-
tions section, making preparatory notes, and identifying passages from
interviews which might find a place in the book. On 3 November, Collins
sent a long letter to Burgess in which he offered four possible solutions to
the problem of how to complete the still unwritten book. He complained
that Burgess, in his second draft, had been taking an autobiographical
approach which might be suitable for a publication titled “Essays on My
Condition”. This was the style and tone that Collins liked least.
A second approach would be to construct “a descriptive narrative from
the perspective of a traveler”. This version of the book would be about the
experience of living on the road in France, Malta, Princeton, Minneapolis,
New York and Italy, as Burgess had done in the four years since 1968.
Such a volume might be published under the title “Finding My Way” or
“Travels with my Wife”.
The third approach proposed by Collins returns to the original idea of
re-writing Dante’s Inferno. It would involve what Collins calls “heavily
descriptive but reasonably serious writing”, in the manner of the free-
wheeling pieces that Burgess had been contributing to the New York
Times. Collins proposed to call this book “Devouring Time” (from Shake-
speare’s Sonnet 19: “Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws”) or
“This Vesture of Decay”—a garbled line from Act 5 of The Merchant of
Venice.
The final suggestion is that Burgess should simply tell the story of
having his novel turned into a film, and describe how this experience has
“reshaped [his] public and private image”. Collins thinks this version of
the book, taking the form of a journal or personal reflection, could be
published as “The Year of the Orange”. With mounting excitement, he
outlines his vision for the project:
It would be the autobiographical piece you’ve been promising yourself

to write; and on the other side, the kind of book-on-the-book-and-film
that publishers were excited by whenever we first mentioned the title ‘The
Clockwork Condition’. Here you could mix media — pensée, narrative,
poetry, simple description — as much as you wanted. The thread, giving
consistency, would be the chronology.32
58 A. BISWELL
It is difficult to miss the rising note of anxiety as Collins, who stood

to make a large sum if the book was completed, tried to avoid the possi-
bility that his payout might be receding into the distance. He continued:
“There is room here for history, comedy, tragedy; for easy writing […] or
for intense, opaque writing, as the spirit moves you”. By presenting these
options to Burgess, he was no doubt trying to provide encouragement
and resolve the formal problems of the book.
From this point onwards, we can begin to see “The Clockwork Condi-
tion” falling apart as a non-fiction project. On 18 December 1972,
Collins wrote once again: “Our suggestion is that you could write the
material rapidly, like a diary, in short complete sections; or it could be
done through two long tape-recorded Q&A sessions. We could then
provide our edited transcript, minus the questions, for your final edit-
ing”. The idea that the book should be composed of “short complete
sections” takes us back to the form of Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave.
As Burgess went on not delivering his manuscript, Collins began
pitching three other books to prospective publishers. These were “The
True Patton Papers” (about General George S. Patton, commander of
the United States Seventh Army in the Second World War), “The Fifth
Gospel” (a novel about Jesus Christ) and “The Rhapsody Man” (a
biographical novel about George Gershwin). When Robert Gottlieb at
Alfred A. Knopf was unpersuaded by this proposal, Collins approached
the editor Michael Dempsey at Hutchinson in London, but he seems to
have left the company before terms could be agreed.
By January 1973, there was a change of tone in the correspondence.
Collins wrote to Burgess:
Your hesitancy and new attitude have embarrassed us both in our dealings
with these publishers and in our own organization. I suggest with respect
that any reservations you had should have been examined before telling us
to go ahead and approving our acceptance of these offers for you.33
Although he did not realize it, Collins had been frozen out of all future
publishing arrangements by Burgess’s London and New York agents, who
had both threatened to stop representing him if he went on making side-
deals with Collins Associates. This is confirmed by a letter about “the
Collins situation”, mailed to Burgess on 13 December 1972 by Robert
Lantz, his primary agent in New York: “I don’t know how to put it to
you more clearly than to say that if this is permitted to continue, there
will be a moment when, with all high respect for your ability and all the
desire to publish you, there will be an aura of uncertainty, confusion and
problems which will frighten everybody away from you”.34
The problem of how to get rid of Collins remained. Burgess decided
that he did not have time to complete the ambitious non-fiction work
he had outlined, but he was aware that he needed to deliver something
to satisfy the book contracts already negotiated on his behalf by Collins
with international publishers. So the book he wrote at great speed when
he returned to Rome in July 1973 was a novel, titled The Clockwork
Testament, or Enderby’s End. According to an interview published in the
Transatlantic Review, he assembled this book in the space of just ten days,
writing one chapter per day, with a further week required for final correc-
tions.35 The surviving typescript contains very few corrections, which
seems to confirm that it was written at great speed. The only major varia-
tion occurs on the title page: “Death in New York” appears as a possible
alternative title, but these words have been crossed out.
Burgess told the Transatlantic Review that he had written the novel as
a favour to his friend Thomas Collins, who was short of money. He did
not mention that he had worked with Collins to develop the project over
a period of nearly eighteen months. No doubt this was partly due to his
embarrassment at having to end the relationship with Collins so that he
could retain the services of his professional agents, Deborah Rogers and
Robert Lantz. It is also evident that the collaboration with Collins had
always been far from straightforward, partly because of the pressure of
other lucrative writing assignments which had been negotiated by Lantz,
including Burgess’s work on the Napoleon film project for Kubrick.
From one point of view, The Clockwork Testament is an oblique refrac-
tion of the events of Burgess’s own life since the release of Kubrick’s film.
The poet Enderby is teaching creative writing in New York. He has been
involved with the film business and his work—an unlikely sounding adap-
tation of a long poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins—has been travestied
by a Hollywood director. He is embroiled in a moral panic about the
corrupting effects of film and finds himself blamed for scenes of sex and
violence which have been introduced into the narrative by the director.
Reviewers were not slow to detect an element of critique, aimed not
directly at Kubrick but at the tabloid reputation of his film as a work
which might deprave and corrupt its audiences.
The Clockwork Testament is an imaginative synthesis of Burgess’s expe-
riences in the early 1970s. It is a kind of autobiographical satire, in
60 A. BISWELL
which the author within the text—a glutton and masturbator, belching
and farting, his false teeth constantly giving him trouble—is ultimately
presented to the reader as an unheroic figure who is more deserving of
ridicule than respect.
One of the significant elements of the novel is its examination of visual
culture, with particular reference to television. This aspect of the novel
arises from Burgess’s long-standing preoccupation with television as a
medium which was fundamentally different from film. The experience of
consuming film in the 1970s was similar to theatre: you bought a ticket
and sat in the theatre, then walked out at the end. His concern about tele-
vision was that there was a set in every home, and most people watched
it for at least six hours per day. While it was easy for Burgess to defend
A Clockwork Orange and other “X”-rated films against accusations that
young people were learning violence from them—because nobody under
18 was allowed into the cinema—he shared an anxiety about television
which was quite widespread in the early 1970s. Interviewed by George
Riemer in 1971, he said that he was worried about the effect of television
commercials on his seven-year-old son:
He’s indoctrinated with them. He knows all the ads, […] I think he was
disgusted – and so was I, heartily disgusted – on Easter Sunday, when they
put on a marvelous film about the Gospel according to St Matthew. The
thing was billed as a great, great movie. But it was consistently interrupted
by commercials, usually very tasteless.36
Even so, these hesitations about mass visual culture must be under-
stood in the context of Burgess’s own involvement in television, as a
presenter, an interviewee and a script-writer, which had begun with a
BBC programme titled Sex in Literature in 1963. He was well-known
to American viewers as a regular guest on The Dick Cavett Show from
1970, when his Shakespeare biography was published. There is a sense in
which the Enderby novel is interrogating a central pillar of Burgess’s own
cultural production when it mocks the medium of television.
As he had already done in A Clockwork Orange, Burgess places the
questions of free will and original sin firmly in the foreground of The
Clockwork Testament . While teaching creative writing at a fictional univer-
sity in New York, the poet Enderby is trying to write a long poem about
St Augustine. Later on, after the poem has been abandoned as an impos-
sible undertaking—rather like the “Clockwork Condition” manuscript in
real life—Augustine and the heretic Pelagius appear to Enderby in a hallu-

cinatory film script, which forms part of the novel’s penultimate chapter.
Burgess explains the significance of these figures in relation to the debate
on free will in an interview from October 1972:
On the one hand you have the Pelagian concept that man is basically good
and that he is capable of perfection if left alone and allowed to discover
his own way. On the other hand you have the Augustinian concept that
man is only capable of evil.37
Elsewhere, in essays and interviews, Burgess maps Augustine and

Pelagius onto the two possible endings of A Clockwork Orange: Alex
returning to evil at the end of Chapter 20 (Augustine); or Alex redeemed,
and exercising his free will by choosing to be a good citizen in Chapter 21
(Pelagius).
The Augustine-Pelagius section of The Clockwork Testament is
supposed to be taken as a commentary on the film version of A Clockwork
Orange and the public debates about violence and evil that it provoked.
Within the frame of a broadly comic dystopian novel, Burgess sets up a
dramatic dialogue between Augustine and Pelagius—rather implausibly,
because, as he was aware, they never met in real life. This short extract
provides a flavour of the exchange between them:
Augustine: You deny that man was born in evil and lives in evil. That he
needs God’s grace before he may be good. The very cornerstone of our
faith is original sin.
Pelagius: Man is neither good nor evil. Man is rational.
Augustine: Evil evil evil — the whole of history is written in blood […]
Man is bad bad bad, and is damned for his badness, unless God, in his
infinite mercy, grants him grace.
Pelagius: Man is free. Free to choose […] Free free free.38
What exactly do we have here? On the one hand, Burgess is presenting

a debate between two medieval theologians and giving the appearance
of not taking sides. But if we attend to the details of this exchange, it
appears that Augustine is given many of the best lines; and it might be
argued that the novel as a whole articulates an Augustinian pessimism
62 A. BISWELL
about the crime-infested streets of New York, which Burgess had previ-
ously described in a series of opinion articles published in the New York
Times.39
The Clockwork Testament, published in London in 1974 and New
York in 1975, was far from being Burgess’s last word on the question
of free will and original sin. He returns to this problem in another
dystopian novel titled 1985, a hybrid critical and creative response to
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which presents alternative predic-
tions for the year 1984—still a futuristic date in 1978, when the novel was
published.40 In an England dominated by the trade unions and renamed
Tucland, Bev Jones is the one true man who, after deciding that he
hates English socialism, tears up his union card and joins an underground
movement populated by teenagers who spend their spare time learning
Latin and Ancient Greek. The first half of the book, which offers a critical
commentary on Orwell, is more satisfactory than the undercooked polit-
ical gesturing of the novella which follows. Martin Amis spoke for many
readers when he summed up 1985 in a review for the New Statesman:
“Burgess’s 1985 is too chaotic to be a metaphor for anything but chaos—
but, then again, this does not quite ‘explain’ its inertness. Alas, the failure
is (vexingly, boringly, ineffably) a failure of language”.41
There may be other reasons why Burgess worked on “The Clockwork
Condition” but decided not to see it through to a publishable conclusion.
As we have seen, he was strongly in demand for other writing jobs in
1972 and 1973, which left him over-committed and disinclined to work
for Collins when many other promising offers were arriving from else-
where. In the summer of 1973, for example, he was looking forward to
working with Christopher Plummer on the Broadway musical Cyrano and
with Orson Welles on a stage musical about the life of Harry Houdini.
There was probably some distrust of Collins, who had made large finan-
cial promises but delivered very little actual money. It is also likely that
Burgess was not yet ready to examine the history of his life in the
ways proposed by Collins. Although he could turn out a thousand-word
opinion piece for the New York Times or the TLS at a single sitting, he
was doubtful about his ability to undertake the kind of sustained analytic
thinking that a full-length non-fiction book would require.
In retrospect, it appears that Burgess retreated back into the novel
form where he felt most at home because the “Clockwork Condition”
project was beyond his talent. He found that his creative intellect was
more stimulated by the making of new fictional structures. Like Kubrick,
Burgess emerged from the aftermath of A Clockwork Orange with a

renewed determination to go on telling resonant stories. The business
of commentary and analysis was best left to others.
Nevertheless, A Clockwork Orange continued to be a piece of unfin-
ished business for Burgess. He continued to write articles about it until
the end of his life, and his attempts to limit its meaning were always bound
to fail. Perhaps, it offers a paradigmatic case of an author’s inability to
resolve the puzzles and dilemmas which exist in their own work. There
is room for considerable doubt as to how far Burgess understood the
destructive energies within his story—what Kubrick called the “Jungian
shadow” of ultraviolent Alex, which exists potentially in everyone—or
indeed how far it lay within his power to arrive at any final conclusions
about the meaning of his novel.
Finally, what became of Thomas P. Collins and Collins Associates? The
end of the affair came in December 1974, by which time The Clockwork
Testament had been published in London and was awaiting publication
in New York and Paris. Collins sent a short letter to Burgess:
Since you make it impossible to discuss business matters in person or over

the phone, we will have to entrust this communication to the Italian mails
[…] We have attempted many times to arrange matters so that you could
work out your obligations to us in other ways, but you have broken your
word so often that it seems useless to pursue the efforts further.42
He enclosed an invoice for $47,825 US dollars, marked for imme-

diate payment, to cover his time and administrative expenses. There is no
indication that Burgess ever paid him.
Notes
1. For another book-length response, see Anthony Burgess, The Clockwork
Testament, or Enderby’s End (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974;
New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1975). The first American edition includes
a series of thirteen black and white illustrations by the Quay Brothers,
which have not been reprinted in any subsequent edition.
2. Thomas P. Collins, letter to Anthony Burgess, 9 February 1972. Uncat-
alogued correspondence file, International Anthony Burgess Foundation
(IABF).
3. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve Had Your Time, London: Heinemann, 255.
4. Louis Savary, email to Andrew Biswell, 17 June 2020.
64 A. BISWELL
5. Burgess met the American novelist Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) when

they were both teaching creative writing at Princeton University in the
academic year 1970–71. Burgess provided a publicity quote for Sheed’s
novel People Will Always Be Kind (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1973): “I have said before, though not publicly, that Wilfrid Sheed is
probably the best living American novelist. I say it again, publicly. His
new book shows an augmentation of his power that augments my own
confidence in my judgement of it” (dust jacket copy).
6. McCrum, R. (2017) “The Lost Novels That Anthony Burgess Hoped
Would Make Him Rich” in Observer, 19 March: https://www.thegua
rdian.com/books/2017/mar/19/anthony-burgess-lost-novels-clockw
ork-orange
7. Burgess, A. unpublished book proposal for “The Clockwork Condition”,
April 1972 (IABF).
8. Unpublished notebook, IABF, GB 3104 AB/ARCH/K/5.
9. Burgess, A. (1989) Any Old Iron, London: Hutchinson. Burgess explains
the Dante elements in a radio interview with Michael Schmidt. See Third
Ear, BBC Radio 3, broadcast 12 March 1989 (IABF audio cassette).
10. Thomas P. Collins, notes on “The Clockwork Condition”, dated 7 June
1972 (IABF).
11. Burgess, A. (2012) “The Clockwork Condition”, New Yorker, 4 June.
Online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/the-clo
ckwork-condition
12. Burgess, A. (1967) “The Modicum is the Messuage”, Spectator, 13
October, 427; reprinted in Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1968), 250–4.
13. Ibid., 251.
14. Ibid., 251.
15. Ibid., 253,254.
16. Burgess, A. (1966) “An Electric Grape”, American Scholar, vol. 35, no.
4, 719–20.
17. Ibid., 720.
18. Burgess, A. (1981) “The Hot Media Man with the Muddled Message”,
Observer, 4 January, 10.
19. McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage, New
York: Bantam, 1967.
20. See, for example, Kubrick’s comments on Skinner in Strick, P. and
Houston, P. (1972) ‘Interview with Stanley Kubrick’, Sight and Sound,
Spring Issue, 63.
21. Skinner, B.F. (1971) Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 75.
22. Burgess, A. (1972) “Viewpoint”, Times Literary Supplement, 12 January,
1458.
23. Skinner, B.F. (1948) Walden Two, New York: Macmillan.

24. Burgess, A. (2010) The Complete Enderby, London: Vintage, p. 471.
Deliberate spelling errors in original.
25. Skinner, B.F. (1971), 43.
26. Cahill, T. (1987) ‘The Rolling Stone Interview: Stanley Kubrick’, Rolling
Stone, 27 August. Quoted in LoBrutto, V. (1998) Stanley Kubrick,
London: Faber, 341.
27. Quoted in (ed) Phillips, G.D. (2001) Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 156.
28. Burgess, A. (2013) A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, London:
Penguin, 93.
29. Connolly, C. (1967) The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus,
revised edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
30. Burgess, A. (2017) A Vision of Battlements, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 118.
31. Anthony Burgess “Friends of Promise”, uncatalogued journalism type-
script, dated February 1989 (IABF).
32. Thomas P. Collins, letter to Anthony Burgess, 3 November 1972 (IABF).
33. Letter from Collins Associates to Anthony Burgess, 2 January 1973
(IABF).
34. Robert Lantz, letter to Anthony Burgess, 13 December 1972 (IABF).
35. Hemesath, J. B. (1976) “Anthony Burgess Interviewed”, Transatlantic
Review, no. 55/56, 96–102.
36. Quoted in (ed.) Ingersoll, E.G. and M. C. (2008) Conversations with
Anthony Burgess, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll and Mary C. Ingersoll, Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 46.
37. Quoted in A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, 256.
38. Burgess A. The Clockwork Testament; reprinted in Burgess, A. (2010) The
Complete Enderby, London: Vintage, 505–6.
39. See, for example, Burgess, A. (1971) “Is America Falling Apart?”, New
York Times Magazine, 7 November, 99–104.
40. Burgess, A. (1978) 1985, London: Hutchinson, 1978. The US edition
was published by Little, Brown in Boston in 1978.
41. Amis, M. (2001) “A Stoked-Up 1976” in The War Against Cliché: Essays
and Reviews 1971–2000, London: Jonathan Cape, 119–20.
42. Thomas P. Collins, letter to Anthony Burgess, 6 December 1974 (IABF).
Language and Adaptation
Scripting A Clockwork Orange
Matthew Melia
1 Introduction
A Clockwork Orange has sustained itself in the public consciousness as
a cultural artefact not only through its importance as a postwar text
and the surrounding, subsequent controversies, but also via its complex
afterlife. This is an inter-textual matrix that includes not only Stanley
Kubrick’s film adaptation and Anthony Burgess’s novel, but also The
Clockwork Testament (the third of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby novels)1 ;
the recently discovered “sequel”, The Clockwork Condition (see Andrew
Biswell’s chapter in this collection); Anthony Burgess’s stage musical; as
well the dystopian DNA of several of his subsequent novels (including
The Wanting Seed [1962] and 1985 [1978]) and the resounding cultural
impact and legacy of both novel and film. Burgess’s relationship to
Kubrick’s film was increasingly contradictory, strained and complicated—
especially when it came to claims of authorship, Kubrick’s withdrawal of
M. Melia (B)
School of Creative and Cultural Industries Department of Humanities,
Department of Journalism, Publishing and Media, Kingston University,
Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK
e-mail: m.melia@kingston.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_4
70 M. MELIA
the film (or his refusal to allow its re-release in the UK) and the nega-
tive impact that Burgess perceived this to have on him and his novel. In
an Italian media interview c.1975 (archived at the International Burgess
Foundation), the author commented that:
The film has just been a damned nuisance. I am regarded by some people
as a mere boy, a mere helper to Stanley Kubrick, the secondary creator who
is feeding a primary creator, who is a great film director. This I naturally
resent. I resent also the fact I am frequently blamed for the various crimes
which are supposed to be instigated by the film.2
This chapter considers the issue of the film’s authorship and the
different authorial approaches to adapting the source material through a
detailed examination and survey of the (often overlooked) archived script
material in the archive of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation
and in the Stanley Kubrick Archive. While previous narratives surrounding
the film’s production and the relationship between author and director
have necessarily engaged with the journey of the text from page to screen,
there has been, to date, no detailed comparative analyses or reading of
the various script materials or any extended critical discussion of how the
various scripted approaches to the same text took shape.
There were three separately authored screenplays created by four
different authors (two of whom worked jointly on the same script) for
A Clockwork Orange. To confuse matters further, Kubrick’s scripts exist
in over 18 different annotated versions in the Stanley Kubrick Archive. To
give equal detailed attention to all of these would take much longer than
permitted here, so for expediency’s sake, this chapter chooses to focus
chiefly on Burgess’s script; Terry Southern and Michael Cooper’s script;
and Kubrick’s final annotated draft of his own screenplay, archived in the
Stanley Kubrick archive labelled “The Blue Pencil Script” (copyrighted
and dated 15 May 15 1970).3
The first script I deal with was written by Anthony Burgess himself.45
Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Founda-
tion, suggests that Burgess signed a contract with producers Si Litvinoff
and Max Raab in 1966 who invited him to write the screenplay adap-
tation of his own novel which he did in 1969. In his biography of the
author, Biswell states they offered him $25,000:
SCRIPTING A CLOCKWORK ORANGE 71
To write a script based on his own novel, to be directed by Nicholas

Roeg […] Burgess’s film script, which was rediscovered in 2004 is an elab-
orate reworking and reimagining of A Clockwork Orange rather than a
straightforward adaptation”6
He notes that by 1969 the time was right was for Burgess to self-adapt
his novel given that the ‘climate of censorship’7 was changing, allowing
him to deviate from his own novel and include ‘references to intravenous
drug-use and implied violence against children in his adaptation’.8 The
script was written when Burgess was living in Malta and is a ‘key docu-
ment for any researcher who wants to understand A Clockwork Orange
and its multiple adaptations for stage and screen’.9
The script10 written by American novelist Terry Southern and rock
‘n’ roll photographer Michael Cooper (according to the late writer,
broadcaster and film-maker Kevin Jackson, Southern had also anticipated
directing the film11 ) was rejected by the BBFC ‘on the grounds that
the scenes of cruelty, “obscenity” and violence would prevent the film
from being approved for exhibition in British cinemas’.12 In an email
correspondence with Nile Southern, the son of Terry Southern, he noted
that Michael Cooper’s cultural influence also cannot be understated and
that he ‘was also a singular force on the cultural scene of swinging
London—and was the primary influence and advisor, for instance, of
Robert Fraser—who owned the first gallery to showcase what became
known as “pop art” in London’.13 He noted that:
Cooper was the biggest and earliest promoter of A Clockwork Orange—

turning on the Beatles, Stones, and practically anyone, on to this novel—
which was essentially like a drug at the time—a new language, a door-
opener, and one that reflected the era and the tensions (mayhem, violence,
competing forces, the madness of Vietnam).14
Southern further commented that:
Cooper’s close relationship with the Stones (he was often called the‘court
photographer of The Rolling Stones’) and his keen observations of their
concerts and the growing scene convinced Cooper that Mick should play
the lead…While there are no Stones songs indicated in the script, it’s true
that the Stones music (and certainly the Stones’ energy) was thought to be
perfect energizer for the film—whether utilized on the track or not…”15
72 M. MELIA
Terry Southern was known, not just as a screenwriter but also a jour-
nalist, essayist and short story writer. He was ‘a man of wildly divergent
interests, tones, styles—all of them wildly successful (including his inven-
tion’ (as per Tom Wolfe) of’a new kind of journalism’)…” 16 He was a
prolific novelist, and
One of the few to successfully migrate to cinema, with an extensive

career ‘doctoring’ films including The Loved One (Tony Richardson, 1965),
Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968), The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison,
1965), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), and an adaptation of his own
novel, The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath, 1969)17
Written in 1966 and submitted to the BBFC in 1967, this is the

earliest script iteration of the novel, predating even Burgess’s. Southern
had, along with Peter George,18 previously contributed to the script for
Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1964). Nile Southern notes that ‘Peter George and Kubrick had created
their own drafts of Dr. Strangelove, but it was Southern’s input that
transformed the script into the “Kafkaesque nightmare comedy” with
razor-sharp dialogue which Kubrick envisioned.’19 It was while Kubrick
was making 2001: A Space Odyssey that Southern passed on to him
Burgess’s novel20 (after the BBFC rejection) which he would go on to
film only after the collapse of his next major project, Napoleon. Kubrick’s
archived scripts and attending material (annotated drafts, corrections,
copies, etc.) offer some insight into the cinematic imaginings of a text
that might have been. This chapter will ask: can we discern the imprint of
one upon the other?
In his article ‘Stanley Kubrick: Known and Unknown’ Kubrick and
popular cinema scholar Peter Kramer writes:
It is perhaps worth noting that Kubrick had access to a script for A Clock-
work Orange, written by Burgess (as well as another written by Terry
Southern and Michael Cooper). Burgess’s script departed significantly from
the novel, but Kubrick ignored its innovations, writing directly instead
from the novel.21
There are indeed significant differences, but Kubrick did not necessarily
ignore Burgess’s original screenplay. Biswell notes that Kubrick claimed to
have worked directly from Burgess’s novel (both scripts omitting mate-
rial from the final chapter of the book, Chapter 20) but that his script
‘may have informed his ideas about the structure of the story’.22 In fact,
copies of Burgess’s script exist across both Burgess and Kubrick archives,
and we may note how Kubrick went through Burgess’s script forensically,
highlighting and annotating—even utilising Burgess’s staging and camera
direction for one key sequence (discussed below). It is part of the aim
of this chapter to underline the importance of Burgess’s script, with its
detailed attention to cinematography, shot detail and camera placement,
to the visual as well as narrative structure of Kubrick’s film.
The archives contain a wealth of original script material pertaining to
all three as a well as annotated copies, draft scripts, shooting scripts, etc.
relating to Kubrick. The wider aim of this chapter is to examine the
evolution and development of the scripts over four short years and their
differently authored attempts. I aim to survey and chart some of their
major differences and consistencies. I will examine how these different
approaches to the text feed into and from each other despite remaining
separate entities. In doing so the chapter hopes to engage with debates
over the authorship of the film—something that was, of course, hotly
contested by Burgess in the fall-out from the publication of the Ballantine
‘book of the film’.23
2 History, Context and Myth

Burgess’s 1969 script was his first major attempt at reframing and
adapting one of his own novels as a screenplay, as well as the first
step in extending the life of the text outside of its literary origins. The
archived script material at the Burgess Foundation demonstrates Burgess
to have been a prolific writer of adapted screenplays and scripts, even if
few ever saw the light of day. While A Clockwork Orange and a script
outline for a film based on the life of Edward Lear (1968)24 are the
only two examples dating from the 1960s, Burgess turned to original
screenwriting and (self) adaptation in earnest from the early 1970s (even
penning a script for the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me in
1975).25 It wasn’t until 10 years after his script for A Clockwork Orange,
that he would turn to adapting his other major dystopian novel, The
Wanting Seed. Like Kubrick’s final screenplay for A Clockwork Orange,
his script for The Wanting Seed 26 would tone down some of the darker
elements of the book and would simplify and distil the complexities
of the novel’s presentation of the cycle of Augustinian and Pelagian
(authoritarian/conservative and liberal)27 states of power.
74 M. MELIA
In his memoir You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess locates 1966/1967

to be the point at which he begins to engage more directly, if at this
point peripherally, with film adaptation. He writes ‘I had so far a very
marginal connection with the film world’28 having rubbed shoulders at
social events with people in the industry. He goes on to note how,
A Cinema director, formerly small stage actor, named D’Arcy Conyers had
commissioned from me a hundred pounds [for] a script of The Doctor Is
Sick, which he wished to film though he could find no financial backing.29
The Archive catalogue entry for the script further indicates that in
1982 Nicolas Roeg was again being mooted as a potential director for
the project30 . Writing in 1990 Burgess noted how Conyer’s ‘Widow is
still trying, without success, to get the film made’.31
Several myths have evolved around the early script iterations of A
Clockwork Orange. A name that has frequently been mentioned as a
potential director for Burgess’s screenplay was British director Ken Russell
to whom the script was (allegedly) offered, although no solid evidence
for this has ever emerged. John Baxter, in the first major critical study of
Russell’s work (based on a series of phone interviews with the director)
Ken Russell: An Appalling Talent, suggests that Anthony Burgess had
started the rumour himself in 1972 after the screening of A Clockwork
Orange at Cannes by exclaiming ‘Anyone but Ken Russell!’ (when asked
if he’d have preferred another director).32 In Baxter’s study, Russell claims
no memory of ever being offered the script (although it is possible it was
sent only to his agent). Russell does claim that Burgess later approached
him with another (unnamed) adaptation of one of his novels: “[A Clock-
work Orange] was never mentioned to me. Though Burgess’s agent did
approach me to film another of his books, I turned him down flat. I don’t
think he ever forgave me””.33 In an email correspondence between myself
and author Jonathan Meades, Meades affirmed this assertion34 stating
that in fact Russell was in fact probably Burgess’s first choice:
Burgess’s wanting Russell to direct A Clockwork Orange is not hypoth-

esis. Having said which, I can’t recall my source. Burgess was no fan of
’cool’ or of Kubrick’s elegance. He admired gaudiness and energy. Russell
and [comedian] Benny Hill were near twins from Southampton and their
calculated vulgarity was typical of that city […] Burgess might have been
a northerner, but his cultural temperature is that of the sleazy south, Max
Miller, double-entendres, ’saucy’ postcards.35
Andrew Biswell revealed to me via email that the other script turned
down by Russell was likely to have been either Enderby or The Doctor is
Sick described by Biswell as a ‘a sort of thanatological comedy’.36
Another persistent rumour around early iterations of the screenplay is
the potential casting of The Rolling Stones, early in the Southern/Cooper
script Alex is described as ‘Young and beautiful (A Mick Jagger
type)’.37 . Here there are conflicting reports. According to producer Sandy
Lieberson ‘It almost happened’38 and, according to the writer Kevin
Jackson, ‘Burgess’s agent put Lieberson on to Si Litvinoff, who at that
time was Terry Southern’s lawyer, and who had optioned the book with
his partner Max Raab for just a few hundred dollars.’39 Lieberson claims
the film was to be set almost entirely in Soho because:
There was a rawness to Soho at that point that doesn’t exist today. It
certainly felt possible to re-create the atmosphere of the book in a much
more gritty, dirty way, more realistic than Kubrick’s approach... I also think
that our instinct was that the language had an importance as great as the
visual.40
This supports the Southern/Cooper script’s earthier approach to the

text (particularly in its opening—see below). It is also interesting to note
that the location research material in the Stanley Kubrick archive clearly
indicates that Kubrick had settled on Soho Jazz Club ‘Ronnie Scott’s’
as a location for the Korova Milk Bar and had gone so far as to enter
negotiations with the club prior to the arrangement falling through.41
Nevertheless, in a recent interview with this author, former Rolling
Stones manager (1963–1967) Andrew Loog Oldham addressed the
often-quoted rumours of the band’s potential involvement with an early
production of the film.42 Loog Oldham stated that he had also ‘dallied’
with the idea of producing a film version of A Clockwork Orange with
the Stones themselves as the Droogs, and Mick Jagger as Alex to a) fit
in with the vogue for pop bands making films and b) as a riposte to the
more family-oriented pop movies of The Beatles. He had had a ‘Fasci-
nation with A Clockwork Orange’ and had ‘patterned a lot of the sleeve
notes on the Anthony Burgess style.’ However, Oldham freely admits that
it was never seriously considered and he ‘made up’ that the Stones were
76 M. MELIA
making the film with photographer David Bailey as director, and that
he never actively pursued the rights to the film. Loog Oldham and the
Stones parted company in 1967, so it is entirely possible that the venture
was taken forward after that, without him. Loog Oldham, met Burgess
for dinner 10 years later, however, to discuss making a film version of The
Wanting Seed, which Burgess insisted on writing the script for, for fear
of not getting paid.43 Having briefly examined and considered some of
the myths surrounding the attempts to get a production of the film off
the ground using these scripts, I would like now to consider the script
material itself.
3 Surveying the Script Material

The three screenplays intersect and diverge in a variety of different ways
but nevertheless they do exist as separately authored units—Burgess’s
script was a not an attempt to ‘rework’ or correct the Southern/ Coop-
er’s script for instance. Similarly, Kubrick’s scripts and the attending script
materials (drafts, working copies corrections, etc.) stand also as a sepa-
rate unit. Burgess’s script is significantly different in tone, and at times
content, to both the Southern/Cooper script and Kubrick’s final drafts—
even to his own novel—but at the same time Kubrick does appear to have
used Burgess’s script as a point of reference. Burgess’s screenplay has a
socio-political edge too and includes a sequence, for instance, just after
Alex joins his Droogs for the first time in the script, in which he allows
Dim to give an arthritic old woman a beating after she complains of their
destruction of the elevator. It’s an interesting sequence pointing to a class
schism within the dystopian world of the story. Alex only allows Dim to
give her a gentle ‘tolchok’ as she, like them, is one of the ‘deprivos’.44
The infamous tramp sequence (cause of an alleged real life copycat
crimes in the wake of Kubrick’s film) is absent in Burgess’s script (Burgess
seems to combine this into the sequence with the humiliation of the
old man leaving the library, who in this version is also drunk). Missing
too is the sequence from the novel in which Alex and his Droogs attack
the Slouse’s Tobacconist Shop (the tolchocking of the old lady in the
flats possibly standing in for this)—a sequence which concludes with
Alex contemplating raping the prone Mrs Slouse. Southern and Cooper
choose to open their script with this sequence. The first section of the
novel, a catalogue of the night’s misdeeds culminating with the murder
of the cat lady, provides a selection, or menu, of sequences which the
four script authors choose from or combine to use (or omit). There is
also an increased direct emphasis in the Southern/Cooper screenplay on
class politics and difference, where in the Kubrick script this is more by
implication. In Southern/Cooper’s script, Alex sardonically describes the
(affluent) cat lady’s house (here, as in the novel, the ‘Old Woman’—
distinct from the one in Alex’s flat block) observing how even the cats
live like royalty.45
Here, as throughout the Southern/Cooper script, the dialogue is
heavily anchored to that in Burgess’s novel. Similarly, Kubrick’s screen-
play is also heavily indebted to the novel raising the issue of authorship
and adaptation. They adopt and adapt Burgess’s dialogue while imposing
their own structure and visual approach. To borrow a musical motif, these
scripts represent variations on a theme and the inclusion and omission of
certain scenes, as well as changes in the sequential order and organisation
of scenes are intrinsic to the imposition of a new set of authorial voices.
4 Adaptation
The archived script material surrounding Kubrick’s screenplay shows his
reading, awareness and annotating of Burgess and Southern/Cooper’s
material. A side-by-side comparison of the scripts with the finished film
shows how Kubrick adapted and appropriated elements of staging and
cinematography from directions in the other two screenplays.
The copy of the Burgess script held in the Stanley Kubrick Archive46
shows that Kubrick had gone through and highlighted and marked the
dialogue. The archived Kubrick script material is much less self-contained
than either Burgess’s or Southern/Cooper’s scripts, existing in various
drafts and annotated script sections, in amendments to the dialogue
emerging out of the Daily continuity reports. Much of Kubrick’s visu-
alisation for the final film emerges out of the handwritten annotations
across the typed material, and several instances of the films dialogue
emerge out of handwritten corrections to the typed script. Hence, while
Kubrick’s script represents a comparatively paired down realisation of
the text (and one which relies more wholly on the original novel), the
script also becomes a base or palette for ‘mixing the colours’, for the
stylistic visualisation of his finished film. ‘The Blue Pencil’ script contains
a plethora of sections edited out by hand, rewritten dialogue and other
annotations. Other archived script material is also worth noting here.
Another ‘working copy’ of the script is heavily annotated with alterations
78 M. MELIA
and changes made in different coloured pen.47 One handwritten note

reveals a potential ‘renaming’ of Mr. Deltoid, Alex’s Post-Correctional
advisor as ‘Omar Bradley’, ‘Omar Deltoid’, ‘Omar Cohen’ and ‘Omar
Franco’. While these may not have been serious considerations, they do
still reveal how Kubrick was happy to play (and be playful) with Burgess’s
text. The scripts for Kubrick are the palette also for mixing the colours
of both Burgess’s novel and his own innovations. In the same scene, for
instance, where Deltoid is let into Alex’s room by the mother, he notes
how this should play like a Kafka-esque comedy.
This copy of the script also illuminates some of the choices made vis-
a-vis locations for the film. There are references to the plastic ducks in
Friar’s Square, Aylesbury, the location for the ultimately unused ‘Public
Biblio’ sequence; it notes The Apollo Pub in Harrow, London, as the
location of the Duke of New York pub. In one revealing (inter-textual)
direction, an apelike Dim looks up in wonder at the moon, a possible
reference to the hominid ‘Moonwatcher’ from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
The ‘Blue Pencil’ script pares down and distils aspects of the other two
scripts, and the final film adopts and adapts key moments of cinematog-
raphy and camera direction. In Kubrick’s film, during the sequence in
which Alex and the Droogs invade the Professor’s home, in the shot prior
to the (implied) rape of the wife, the camera is placed at floor level, from
the Professors point of view; Alex drops to the floor and talks directly
into the camera’s/ Professor’s /viewer’s POV, his masked face filling the
screen.
A similarly low-level POV shot is also used in the Southern/Cooper
script. Here, the POV is the wife’s rather than the prone professor’s with
Alex’s grotesque Beethoven mask then filling the screen.48 One might
also hypothesise here why the BBFC did not pass this version of the
script; it places the viewer not in the position of the prone professor as
in Kubrick’s film but in the position of the victim about to be raped.
Later in Southern and Cooper’s script, the Professor’s wife is depicted on
the point of madness because of her ordeal. The script directions indi-
cate that the wife sits naked at a table, aimlessly manoeuvring a small ball
bearing through a tilting toy maze. As she does she smiles with just a hint
of the onsetting madness.49 While the wife’s descent into madness (and
ultimately suicide) is relayed to Alex by the Professor in Kubrick’s final
screenplay, Kubrick repurposes this direction later in The Shining (1980)
for the sequence in which Danny and Wendy walk through the Over-
look Maze and the cut to Jack, on the verge of madness, staring down
(overlooking) intently at its model.
In the finished film, Kubrick also looks to the earlier scripts to influ-
ence or visualise his filmic world. The sequence in Kubrick’s film in which
Alex fights his Droogs next to the Thamesmead Boating Lake appears
to borrow and rearrange some of its staging from Burgess’s original
script. Kubrick’s annotations on his draft of Burgess’s script indicate his
highlighting of various camera directions. Burgess’s script pays detailed
attention to staging and shot, indicating how Burgess had fully visualised
his adaptation.
In Burgess’s script, the fight is ‘intense but brief’ and Alex begins by
wounding Georgie’s hand. In Kubrick’s film, one of the final sequences
of the shot is Alex crossing Dim’s hand with his knife (Fig. 1). Burgess
indicates that Dim responds to Alex’s attack on Georgie by ‘Roaring like
an animal, Dim unsnakes his chain from round his waist and comes out
swishing it’50 —this also correspondences to a key moment in the staging
of the filmed fight (Fig. 2). Burgess indicates that ‘Alex’s technique is to
keep low, as in Russian dancing’51 again corresponding to another iconic
shot of Alex during Kubrick’s staging of the fight sequence (Fig. 3).
Fig. 1 Alex attacks his Droogs (I)

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Fig. 2 Alex attacks his Droogs (II)
Fig. 3 Alex attacks his Droogs (III): ‘Russian dancing’
5 Openings and Endings

The three different scripts offer three very different openings and intro-
ductions to Alex and his Droogs. The opening to ‘The Blue Pencil Script’
establishes the design-led aesthetic of the film. We open on:
Cubicles recessed
into wall of
circular room
enclosing carpeted dimly lit area on which couples are making love
Chairs
Made of
Nude
Fibreglass figures
In various positions of
Lovemaking
Their limbs
And backs
Supporting
Thick slabs
Of glass
And cushions
Atmosphere
Quiet
Soothing
Hypnotic52
It is the only one of the three scripts to open, as in the novel, in the
Korova Milk Bar. In the Southern/Cooper Script, the opening lines of
the script presenting the Droogs as having already been in the Milk Bar
are read in voice over, over an image of the four walking abreast (as in
the later image in Kubrick’s finished film (Fig. 4)), wearing ‘Regency’
costume.
Burgess’s script opens with a (designed) animated title sequence. The
directions read
Fig. 4 Alex and the Droogs by the Thamesmead Boating Lake, still from A
Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick 1971
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Title and Credits
Perhaps Uniquely in the history of film, it is really not necessary to spell out
the title at all. On a misty but sunny blank screen, an orange trundles into
closeup rapidly from a central vanishing point. When it has come to rest it
splits open of its own accord and discloses a clockwork centre. At once a
musical rhythm is established – a ticking one. This provides the background
for a harsh mathematical music which symbolises the technological society
which is the true enemy of the story. As the credits appear we see an aspect
of this society53
This is a title sequence without any title. Burgess relies wholly on

the intersection of image (animation) and sound (the front page of the
script contains a sketch by Burgess of the animated orange). It positions
the screenplay in relation to a trend in mid-1960s British and American
cinema towards animated/designed title sequences. Burgess’s use of an
animated, title-less title sequence also places the script within the frame-
work of mid-1960 surrealism in British film (later in the script dream
sequences also play a narrative role). Burgess wrote in an article for the
New Yorker in 1973 that in conceptualising the image of the ‘Clockwork
Orange’ for the novel,
The image appealed to me as something not just fantastic but obscurely

meaningful, surrealistic but also obscenely real. The forced marriage of an
organism to a mechanism, of a thing living, growing, sweet, juicy, to a cold
dead artifact—is that solely a concept of nightmare?54
The application of animated imagery is able to facilitate that concept

more dramatically and surrealistically. The reference to ‘mathematical
music’ of course resonates with Kubrick’s final film and its use of Wendy
Carlos’s electronic interpretations of Purcell, Beethoven and Rossini.
The script then offers us a location unique to open Burgess’s screen-
play:
1. Centre: A StreetEvening
We see a metallic plaque saying STATE INSTITUTE OF
SOCIOTECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH. The camera pulls back grad-
ually to show workers of this institute leaving the building, going off duty.
They go off in groups, each protected by an armed man in uniform. As
they leave the building and walk out of shot, we hear them discussing the
day’s work55
Cristian Pasotti has noted and discussed the ‘Soviet roots’ of Burgess’s
novel.56 While this establishing shot renders a soviet-esque dystopian
environment, it also calls to mind (and draws a connection with) the
industrial landscape of Burgess’s Manchester with its L.S. Lowry-esque
imagery of workers outside the factory in the painting Going to Work
(1953).57 Burgess wrote ‘This city could be anywhere, but I visualized
it as a sort of compound of my native Manchester, Leningrad, and New
York.’58 Biswell further describes it ‘The action begins in the futuristic
State Institute of Socio-Technological Research, where scientists with
Germanic names are working on the chemical conditioning process that
Alex will undergo later in the story’.59
The other thing to note about this opening sequence is the emphasis
on musicality—especially the shift in tone as we are introduced to the
Droogs. In this script, we meet Georgie, Pete and Dim as they wait for
Alex in the stairwell of his flat block. In Kubrick’s final script and finished
film, this sequence occurs later, prior to their invasion of the cat lady’s
(Miriam Karlin) home. From the brutal rhythmic music of the opening,
we segue into a pop song:
The music is arid but complex. As the workers pass out of view, the basic
rhythm without losing its tempo, is taken over by pop music. The camera
abruptly pans to a group of three teenage thugs, very smartly dressed
in tights, built up shoulders, frothy cravats, scrotum protectors of fancy
design. They are coming down the street, and one of them has his tran-
sistor full on. His name is Georgie, and he is weak but intelligent. Pete
and Dim are the other two. Dim is brutal, perhaps near imbecilic, given
to vulgar guffaws. Pete is colourless and only comes to life in action. The
pop song goes like this:
Transistor Radio:
I dream of the gleam of your plott
And seem
To eat the sweet meat of your rot
And breed on your groodies
Only every other day.60
84 M. MELIA
Burgess segues from a ‘mathematical’ musical motif signifying the

mechanised technological society (‘Burgess gives us images of a metallic,
highly mechanised future’) to the vulgarity of the pop song, associated
with the Droogs. The juxtaposition and transition from one to the other
and tension between them connotes, signifies and ‘musicalises’ the power
relations between the power of the state (“The true enemy”) and the
young. Burgess’s own visualisation of the Droogs is markedly different
to Milena Canonero’s more minimal costume design for Kubrick’s film
(see below) and we may note here that Alex himself is missing from the
group. His introduction is delayed till shortly after, when we cut to Alex’s
looming tower block or ‘Skyscraper’, which, Burgess notes, is to be filmed
from ground up—in a similar way to the framing of the archived loca-
tion research photography of Thamesmead in the Stanley Kubrick archive
(Fig. 5).
We may hypothesise here that this is an initial example of Kubrick
looking to Burgess’s own visualisation of the film. The description of the
Fig. 5 Location photography (Stanley Kubrick Archive). With thanks to SK

Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros, and University of the Arts London
setting also plays on gothic tropes as Burgess describes a single light from
a window at the top of the looming, imposing tower where Alex the
monster is sequestered away. Kubrick’s finished film also presents Alex as
a Gothic monster61 —from the expressionist chiaroscuro of the sequence
in which the Droogs beat up the Drunk (Fig. 6) and the filming of Alex in
close up in the same scene (Fig. 7). In her doctoral thesis, Amy Cartwright
offers an analysis of the presence of the gothic in the dystopian novel
and notes Burgess’s framing of Alex as both Gothic monster and Gothic
‘victim’—especially during the Ludovico sequence and in his position in
relation to the unstable home (recognised in Kubrick’s film) (Fig. 8).62
Burgess’s introduction to Alex is no less Gothic (and Sadeian). He is
introduced lying in his room listening to a cacophony of music, alerted
to the Droogs call of ‘little Alex’ (again recalling the gothic trope of the
monstrous child). As Burgess describes him:
Alex is handsome bright and vicious, but curiously sympathetic. He appeals

to something in the darker reaches of our mind, our own frustrated ids.
Fig. 6 Kubrick’s
Gothic Imagery (1) Alex
and his Droogs enter
the Underpass
Fig. 7 Kubrick’s
Gothic Imagery (II):
Alex as Gothic Monster
86 M. MELIA
Fig. 8 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (III): Entering F. Alexander’s ‘Home’
He has finished dressing and now gets his weapons from the cupboard.
The cupboard contains frightening things – chemicals, syringes, a couple
of bones, a child’s skull.63
The script includes a variety of graphic and highly idiosyncratic visions

and dream sequences which depart from both his novel and the other two
screenplays. In this introduction to Alex, Burgess, from the start, connects
his violent impulses to the power of the music. The script presents
a more visceral graphic and violent body of imagery than the other
two. Fondling his chains and instruments of violence, while Beethoven’s
Ninths Symphony plays through his speakers, Alex has a of violent,
orgiastic vision which is:
Rapid and vague, but it shows a number of people torn and bleeding,
trying to get away from the swish of Alex’s chain.., he now has a gleaming
razor in his hand. To the music he makes stylish cuts at imaginary
enemies…A Rubber face disintegrates in a mess of flesh and teeth and
blood flows onto the camera lens..He stands triumphant, bowing as the
final chords of the music thud out.64
A comparison of each screenplay’s approach to the Ludovico tech-

nique’s sequence also supports this. Burgess’s descriptions of the images
which Alex endures are again more graphic and more akin to the violent
images he elsewhere experiences in dreams or visions: Goya-esque depic-
tions of Nazi and Japanese atrocities: girls being raped by syphilitic
dwarves, as well as, self-reflexively, images of youth gangs committing
the violent acts we recognise from earlier in the script—the attack on the
old man and the tobacconist’s shop. The increased presence of violent
dreams and visions in the Burgess’s script draws a clearer symmetry with
the bombardment of images during Alex’s experience during the treat-
ment, here these images are turned back on him. These images are by and
large absent from the novel and from the other scripts, and here Burgess
expands on and develops his own source material. The Southern/Cooper
and Kubrick ‘Blue Pencil’ scripts offer a distilled version of these scenes.
In the Blue Pencil script, Kubrick has, reviewing his screenplay, gone back
and scored out by hand some of the more graphic imagery (Japanese and
Nazi atrocities for instance).
The Southern/Cooper screenplay also includes other elements
included in Burgess’s screenplay that are not included in Kubrick’s final
draft. For instance, like Burgess, they include the sequence from the novel
in which Alex is thrown into a cell with Wall, Doctor, Jo-John and Zophar
and ‘Big Jew’ and duped into the killing of another inmate. In Burgess’s
script, this section also offers another vision / dream sequence absent
from the other screenplays. After Alex has violently evicted ‘Newchum’
from his cell bunk and has delivered the fatal ‘coup de gras’ encour-
aged by the Doctor, he slips into a reverie in which ‘There is a beautiful
flood of light’ and Beethoven is depicted conducting ‘the vast chorus and
orchestra’, turning to the audience Beethoven is revealed to be Alex in a
mask.
The applause turns to noises of fear and panic. Justly, for Alex now trains
his baton at the audience like a deathray, cracking out a spark that seems
from the groans and screams, to kill everyone present”65
As with Kubrick’s film and script, there is an interplay between the

narration of Burgess’s novel and the idiosyncratic visual imagery of the
screenwriter. The Southern/Cooper script opens with a production note
which deliberately establishes a dystopian framework and setting for the
film—London at an unspecified time in the future which is marked by
the conflict between youth and authority. The production note demands
that the film should reflect a future architecture as well as imposing secu-
rity measures against the youth revolution (it’s worth noting also here
that, historically speaking, this script also predates the May 1968 youth
revolution that were the Paris students’ uprisings).66
88 M. MELIA
While this is a production note (rather than an opening for the film),
it nevertheless recalls the opening legend of Roy Boulting’s 1948 adapta-
tion of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (an influence on Burgess’s novel)
which begins by describing the ‘poison of crime and violence’ and the
‘dark alleys and festering slums behind the Regency façade and jovial
seafront of post-war Brighton.’
Their script opens with a panning shot of four pairs of feet marching
down a rainy pavement. The Droog’s outfits combine tight, flared
brightly coloured trousers with extravagant, buckled, high-heeled shoes.
It notes how at first glance their gender is unclear. The titles appear
over the image of the feet which make a militaristic beat as they hit the
pavement.67
This is a script whose style and aesthetic engages the counter-cultural
aesthetics of the mid-1960s rather than brutalist modernism of the 1970s.
We then cut to a shot of the four Droogs walking four abreast with low-
cut ‘hipster’ trousers, ornamental belt buckles which cover their crotches
like ‘protective armour’; their ruffled shirts are reminiscent of regency
dress.68
As with Burgess’s script, the author includes establishing information
as to the style and dress of the Droogs—unlike in both ‘Blue Pencil’
and Kubrick’s other draft screenplays which begin in the Korova Milk
Bar and include no such establishing information. The foregrounding of
the moving feet here is echoed in the boating lake sequence in Kubrick’s
finished film, just prior to Alex’s sudden attack on the other Droogs. This
opening ‘Close Shot’ from the Southern/Cooper script is appropriated
into the fight sequence which occurs later in Kubrick’s film. Kubrick’s
film strips back the stylistic and decorative ornamentation of the Droog’s
costume. As I have noted elsewhere,69 the costuming of Kubrick’s film
and Milena Canonero’s costume design is synergistic with the Brutalist,
postmodern, architectural décor—not only stripped back but also, with
their codpieces fitted outside (in opposition to the under the trouser
codpiece of Burgess’s novel), adhering to the ‘pipes on the outside’
aesthetic of 1970s’ contemporary postmodern architecture.
Here, the titles play out over the first sequence of violence in the
film: the attack on the Slouse’s Tobacconist’s. Unlike other sequences
in Kubrick’s script (e.g. the beating of the old man at the ‘Public Biblio’
which did not make it into the final cut of the film), the Slouse Tobac-
conist sequence is not present in either the script or the archive Daily
progess production reports for the film. By comparison the beating and
humiliation of the old man leaving the library or ‘“Public Biblio”’ (with
his book The Miracle of the Snowflake) is present in this script. In the
final third of the script Alex is recognised by and beaten by a group of
other old men (acquainted with the first) at the public library as occurs in
Burgess’s novel, rather than the tramp and his associates in Kubrick’s film.
This is another divergence from the source material and Burgess’s script
(the tramp sequence exists only in the novel and in Kubrick’s treatment).
During the opening sequence, the script also calls for ‘The Camera-
work inside the [Tobacconists] shop should have a handheld quality and
show the violence more by suggestion’—this handheld, cinema-verité
approach add authenticity and realism to the sequence—anticipating the
more violent post A Clockwork Orange youth films of the 1970s (Alan
Clarke’s Scum [BBC, 1977/1979]).
There is also an emphasis on the scream in the Southern/Cooper
script which is carried through imagistically into Kubrick’s finished film
(and which Karen Ritzenhoff has detailed elsewhere in this book). At the
conclusion of the Slouse Tobacconist sequence, for instance the direc-
tions conclude ‘Well then she had to be tolchoked proper with one of
the weights for scales’ the Scream cuts off as he brings down the weight.
These directions are again adapted into the climax of the cat lady sequence
in the finished film when Alex brings the sculpted phallus down upon her
and we cut to a montage of painted scream imagery.
Finally, I would like to turn to the endings of the three scripts. Both the
Burgess’s and Kubrick’s scripts finish at Chapter 20, leaving out the final
chapter of the novel. Burgess’s script (like Kubrick’s final film) finishes
with a set of visions which Alex experience as a rush of euphoria on
hearing Beethoven again,
In ecstasy he listens to the swelling gorgeous music. He visualises himself in

various violent situations. One vision melts into another while the superb
music plays on. Alex’s dress varies, according to the vagaries of Nadsat
fashion but he is always lightly dancing through a world in which his razor
flashes or bicycle chain snakes. He knocks down his enemies, is violent to
women, leads gangs in raids on shops and houses and even mansions…70
Visions compound visions and the script concludes with an image of

Alex running towards the viewer, slashing.
It’s also particularly interesting to note here also how Southern and
Cooper approach the ending of the book. Their script goes on to present
90 M. MELIA
a ‘alternative’ ending—which segues with the final chapter of the novel,

and Alex’s rejection of violence and the Droog’s lifestyle. This addendum
is framed as a ‘surprise’ ending for the viewer after they have initially been
led to believe the film has ended.
6 Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to offer a survey of the three different scripted
approaches to Burgess’s novel, and while there has not been room to
chart and understand every variation, it has been the aim here to offer
a broad but detailed examination of the corroborations, similarities and
differences in approach. To date, there has been no considered and
comparative examination of the screenplays. As Andrew Biswell has noted
(see earlier), Burgess’s script is a ‘key document’71 for understanding
A Clockwork Orange, it represents a first instance of the writer taking
his text forward into another form—an extended project that would
culminate in his adapting it as a stage musical. Burgess’s script is more
visceral, visionary and surreal (from its animated beginning it has a clearer
emphasis on visions and dream imagery) than either Southern/Cooper
or Kubrick’s and from the archival research carried out it’s clear that,
contrary to previously held beliefs, Kubrick did not ignore Burgess’s
screenplay and incorporated several of its staging and camera directions
into his own finished film. He looked similarly, to the Southern/Cooper
script as a guide and sometimes template. What such a reading of the
script material reveals is the imposition of different authorial voices upon
a single text; these scripts offer divergent as well as overlapping approaches
to the text and competing idiosyncratic aesthetic approaches. This leads
us finally to the question of authorship, both Southern and Cooper and
Kubrick take an original source text and superimpose on top of it their
own authorial voices through variation in sequences, tone, aesthetics and
costuming. Certainly for Kubrick, the scripts are a material space for visual
experimentation with the look and style of the film and for the ‘remixing’
of Burgess’s original ideas with Southern’s. Kubrick is of course known
for his penchant for appropriating, magpie-like, from other texts and this,
I would like to conclude, is a prime example of this tendency.
Acknowledement With special thanks to Nile Southern, Andrew Loog Oldham,

the SK Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros. and University of the Arts London.
Notes
1. While it does not exist as part of a “Clockwork Orange narrative universe”,
it contains a familiar situation: an American Film director for whom
Enderby writes a screenplay based on Gerard Manley Hopkins The Wreck
of the Deutschland. The finished film which bears no resemblance to
Enderby’s script is nevertheless attributed to him, bringing Enderby
unwanted public scrutiny.
2. International Anthony Burgess Foundation, ‘The Clockwork Collection:
Burgess on Kubrick’s ‘damned nuisance movie’ https://www.anthonybu
rgess.org/blog-posts/the-clockwork-collection-burgess-and-kubricks-dam
ned-nuisance-movie/, Last viewed: 13/07/2021.
3. Kubrick, S, (1970) A Clockwork Orange Screenplay, (“The Blue Pencil
Script”) Stanley Kubrick Archive. Ref: SK/13/1/2.
4. (1) Burgess, A. (1969) A Clockwork Orange Screenplay, University of Arts
London: London College of Communication Special Collections, Stanley
Kubrick Archive. Ref: SK/13/1/5.
(2) Burgess A. (1969) Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives, Manch-
ester. Ref: GB 3104 AB/ARCH/A/CLO/1.
5. During the writing of this chapter Andrew Biswell’s blogpost “ The
Clockwork Collection: Burgess’s screenplay for A Clockwork Orange” was
published and offers a contextual framework for Burgess’s script.
6. Biswell, A. (2005) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. London: Picador.
337–338.
7. Biswell, A. (2021) The Clockwork Collection: Burgess’s Screenplay for a
Clockwork Orange, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, https://
www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/the-clockwork-collection-burgesss-
screenplay-for-a-clockwork-orange/, Last Viewed: 24/08/2021.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. (1) A Clockwork Orange screenplay by Terry Southern and Michael
Cooper, 1966 (c) Terry Southern and Michael Cooper; The Terry
Southern Literary Trust; The Michael Cooper Collection. All Rights
Reserved…, University of Arts London: London College of Communi-
cation Special Collections, Stanley Kubrick Archive. Ref: Sk/13/1/1.
(2) A Clockwork Orange screenplay by Terry Southern and Michael
Cooper, 1966 (c) Terry Southern and Michael Cooper; The Terry
Southern Literary Trust; The Michael Cooper Collection. All Rights
Reserved…, International Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives, Manch-
ester. Ref: GB 3104 AB/ARCH/A/CLO/3.
11. Jackson, Kevin. (1999) “Real Horrorshow: A Short History of Nadsat”,
Sight and Sound Vol 9, N.9, September. 26.
12. Biswell, A. (2021).
92 M. MELIA
13. Email correspondence with author, 14/10/2021.

14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Author of the novel Red Alert upon which the film was based.
19. Email correspondence with author, 14/10/2021.
20. McAvoy, C (2021) “Kubrick’s Reading and Research” in Abrams,
Nathan & Hunter, IQ (eds.) (2021). The Bloomsbury Companion to
Stanley Kubrick, New York: Bloomsbury. 324.
21. Krämer, P. (2017). “Stanley Kubrick: Known and Unknown”, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 37:3, 373–395, http://doi.org/
10.1080/01439685.2017.1342330.
22. Biswell, A (2021).
23. Fenwick, J “A Graphic Representation: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
and Ballantine Books”, paper given at the conference, A Clockwork Sympo-
sium: A Clockwork Orange, New Perspectives. University of Arts, London:
London College of Communication, November 2018.
24. Burgess, A. (1968) Draft Outline for a Script based on the Life of Edward
Lear, Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives, Manchester. Ref: GB 3104
AB/ARCH/A/LEA/2.
25. “Using a typewriter given to him by [Guy] Hamilton and [Albert ‘Cubby’
Broccoli in New York, Burgess remembered the stipulation was for ‘totally
original story’, but nevertheless resurrected characters from his 1966 novel
Tremor of Intent.” Field, M and Chowdury, A. (2015). Some Kind of
Hero, The Remarkable Story of the James Bond films, Gloucestershire: The
History Press. 292–3.
26. Burgess, A (1976) Draft film script, written by Burgess, based on his novel
The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives, Manchester.
Ref: GB 3104 AB/ARCH/A/WAN/1.
27. Clarke, J. (2017) The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess—Fire of Words,
London: Palgrave MacMillan, 40.
28. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve Had Your Time: being The Second Part of the
Confessions of Anthony Burgess, London: Penguin.141.
29. Ibid.
30. Burgess A (1982) The Doctor is Sick, Anthony Burgess Foundation
Archives Archive Ref: GB 3104 AB.
31. Burgess, A. (1990). 141.
32. Baxter, J (1973). Ken Russell, An Appalling Talent, London: Michael
Joseph Ltd. 28.
33. Ibid.
34. Meades, J. (2017) ‘Burgess Memories: Jonathan Meades’ Interna-

tional Anthony Burgess Foundation, https://www.anthonyburgess.org/
burgess-memories/burgess-memories-jonathan-meades/, Last viewed:
15/07/2021.
35. Email correspondence between myself and Jonathan Meades, December
14, 2020.
36. Email correspondence between myself and Andrew Biswell, August 6,
2018.
37. Southern, Terry & Cooper, Michael., 1967. A Clockwork Orange Archives
and Special Collections, Stanley Kubrick Archive, University of Arts,
London: London College of Communication. Ref: SK/13/1/1. 1.
38. Jackson, K. (1999) “Clockwork Orange” The Independent, Thursday
2 December 1999. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
clockwork-orange-1124980.html. Last Viewed: 05/01/2022.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Stanley Kubrick Archive. Ref: SK/13/2/2/117.
42. John Baxter references Burgess “being approached some years earlier with
a package comprising the Rolling Stones as the delinquent heroes of his
futuristic fable and Russell as director” (Ibid.) In our interview Loog
Oldham denied Russell was ever involved with the project (such as it
was).
43. Loog Oldham, A, Interview with the author, 30/04/21.
44. Burgess. A (1969). 6.
45. Southern T & Cooper M. (1966). 47.
46. Burgess, A (1969) A Clockwork Orange, Screenplay, Stanley Kubrick
Archive. Ref: SK/13/1/5.
47. Kubrick, Stanley (1970), Stanley Kubrick’s Working Copy—Final Version,
Stanley Kubrick Archive. Ref: SK/13/1/9.
48. Southern and Cooper. (1966). 18.
49. Ibid, 19.
50. Burgess, A. (1969). 25.
51. Ibid.
52. Kubrick, S. (1970) “The Blue Pencil Script. 1. Arrangement of text is
how it appears in the script.
53. Burgess, A. (1969). 1.
54. Burgess, A. (1973). “The Clockwork Condition”, New Yorker Maga-
zine, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/the-clockw
ork-condition, Last viewed: 24/08/2021.
55. Burgess, A. (1969). 1.
56. See Pasotti, C. (2021) “When Burgess met the Stilyagi on a white night:
Subcultures, hegemony and resistance in the soviet roots of A Clockwork
Orange ‘s Droogs.” (This volume).
94 M. MELIA
57. Imperial War Museum, Manchester.

58. Burgess. A (1973).
59. Biswell, A. (2021).
60. Burgess, A. (1969). 1.
61. Melia, M. (2019) “A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Kubrick’s Costume
and Design Research (Paper Given at SCMS Conference, Seattle, March
2019” Art, TV, Film (Blog), https://arttvfilm.wordpress.com/2019/
04/04/a-clockwork-orange-stanley-kubricks-design-and-costume-res
earch-paper-given-at-scms-2019-seattle-march-2019-a-work-in-progress/,
Last viewed: 21/07/2021.
62. Cartwright, A. (2005) The Future is Gothic: Elements of Gothic in
Dystopian Novels, doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, p.43. http://the
ses.gla.ac.uk/1346/1/2005cartwrightphd.pdf Last viewed: 22/07/2021.
63. Burgess, A. (1969). 2.
64. Ibid.
65. This imagery anticipates also both the finale of The Rocky Horror Picture
Show (Sherman, 1973) and the Sid Vicious My Way sequence from The
Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle (Temple, 1980).
66. Southern, T. and Cooper, M. (1966). 1.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Melia, M. (2019).
70. Burgess, A (1969). 89.
71. Biswell, A. (2021).
‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem
Really Real When You Viddy Them
on the Screen’: The Adaptation of Nadsat
in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Benet Vincent and Jim Clarke
1 Introduction
In 1962, the English author Anthony Burgess published an idiosyn-
cratic and uncharacteristic novella set in a dystopian near-future, featuring
roaming gangs of feral teen youths who face state-sponsored brainwashing
to amend their anti-social behaviour. This slight text, written in the argot
of the youthful hoodlum protagonist Alex, was of almost immediate
interest to a range of filmmakers, including, at one point, the Rolling
Stones. It was loosely adapted by Andy Warhol in 1965 as Vinyl but did
not receive a full cinematic adaptation until Stanley Kubrick obtained the
rights and released his A Clockwork Orange in 1971.
B. Vincent (B)
School of Humanities, Coventry University, Coventry, UK
e-mail: ab6667@coventry.ac.uk
J. Clarke
Sapienship, Salento, Italy

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_5
96 B. VINCENT AND J. CLARKE
A Clockwork Orange was Stanley Kubrick’s ninth feature film. One

of the challenges which Kubrick faced in adapting the text was its
invented language, Nadsat, which suffuses Burgess’s narrative and is
both the medium which tells the story and a key mode for psycholog-
ically explaining its delinquent teen narrator, Alex. Nadsat in the novella
functions as an estranging mechanism, ‘standing between reader and
immediate comprehension’1 and thereby distancing the reader from the
brutal details of Alex’s criminality. But it also attempts to ‘brainwash’ the
reader, or at least immerse them in the psychology which underpins and
motivates Alex’s actions. McQueen refers to ‘the doubly coded process
of estrangement’2 of Nadsat, which functions as a linguistic version of
a Suvinian ‘novum’, a disruptive and innovative intrusion into realist
ontology or narrative.
Because of its subject matter, futuristic mise-en-scène, and Kubrick’s
innovative cinematography, A Clockwork Orange has remained both
controversial and highly influential ever since and has been extensively
examined by scholars of Kubrick in particular, and twentieth century
cinema in general. However, though often noted in passing in such
scholarship, the structural act of Kubrick adapting Burgess’s text from
a linguistic milieu to a visual one has not been fully explored to date.
Though Nadsat makes up only 6.5% of the total word count of Burgess’s
text,3 nevertheless it permeates the novel and provides what Isaacs called
‘the most obvious essential quality to be lost in a filmed treatment of
the story’.4 While Nadsat remains present in Kubrick’s 147-minute-long
adaptation, it is obviously not possible to convey the same linguistic
immersion experience as can be achieved in a text of around six times the
length. In this chapter, we will identify the differences that emerge when
one compares Nadsat as represented in Kubrick’s film (film-Nadsat) with
the Nadsat of the original text (book-Nadsat). We apply corpus linguistic
methodologies to both the novella and Kubrick’s screenplay adaptation in
order to explore what might have been lost linguistically in the adaptation
process. In particular, we aim to assess the contemporary critique offered
by film reviewer Pauline Kael who suggested that ‘[t]he movie retains a
little of the slangy Nadsat but none of the fast rhythms of Burgess’s prose,
and so the dialect seems much more arch than it does in the book.’5
‘THE COLOURS OF THE REAL WORLD ONLY SEEM … 97
2 Cinematic Adaptation of Literature

The act of adapting a novel into a movie is an act of translation from one
artistic form to another. As with translating between languages, this act is
less one of mapping meaning across from one semantic plane to another,
and more what Bassnett refers to as ‘an act of both inter-cultural and
inter-temporal communication’.6 Code-shifting in language translation
instigates a metamorphosis of communication, predicated on accultur-
ation, the intricacies of idiom and conventions of discrete narratology.
Similar processes take place in the process of adapting fiction to the cine-
matic medium, where the culture of cinematic expression, and its visual
and often linear forms of ‘language’ accommodate the narratives of fiction
in new and creative forms.
Bluestone attempted to consider what he called the ‘Two Ways of
Seeing’, and arguably triggered not only debate about the transmogrifica-
tion of narrative between creative modes but also the field of adaptation
studies itself. For Bluestone, the emphasis was less on the distinctions
between novel and film as art forms, or as modes of communicating
narrative, and more on the similarities. The ‘conceptual images evoked
by verbal stimuli’ in novels, for example, he argued, ‘can scarcely be
distinguished in the end from those evoked by non-verbal stimuli’.7
Yet this attempt to focus on what fiction and cinema have in common
has not generally been followed by film studies scholars, for whom the
distinctive modes of cinematic aesthetics and communication warrant
equally distinctive forms of analysis. For McFarlane, the key distinction
is the functional mode of communication itself, and the inherent multi-
modality of the cinematic form: ‘The novel draws on a wholly verbal sign
system, the film variously, and sometimes simultaneously, on visual, aural,
and verbal signifiers.’8 This multiplicity of signification is what film critics,
operating somewhat metaphorically, collectively refer to as the ‘language’
of cinema.
This is not language as linguists understand the term, though clearly
cinema succeeds well in communicating meaning across a range of semi-
otic modes. McFarlane notes that ‘[i]f film, unlike verbal language, has
no vocabulary (its images, unlike words, are non-finite), it also lacks a
structuring syntax, instead of which it has conventions in relation to the
operation of its codes.’9 Nevertheless, the metaphorical understanding of
a ‘language’ of cinema is broadly and commonly understood on a less
technical level. As early as 1949, Balázs was discussing what he called
the ‘Form-Language’ of cinema.10 For Balázs, this signified primarily the

distinguishing features which separated cinema from theatre, which he
listed as the ‘varying distance between spectator and scene’, the divi-
sion of a scene into shots, ‘changing angle, perspective and focus’ within
scenes and the assembly of montage.11 As cinema has evolved, both tech-
nically and artistically, so have the components of what is considered the
‘language of cinema’ according to film scholars.
However, the language of cinema is not the same as the use of
language in cinema. This is one of the key issues which arise when novels,
or other written fiction forms, such as the short story, are adapted to
cinema. Language within cinema is merely one component in the film-
maker’s toolkit, be it in the variegated forms of dialogue, voiceover and
subtitles or even in background signage. It vies with the many other
elements of Balázs’ cinematic form-language for the viewer’s attention,
and functions in conjunction with them to generate the screen text. By
contrast, novels are made solely of language. Even if we accept Bluestone’s
reception-based argument, language in literary fiction is expected to do
many more things than language in cinema is, and therefore the aesthetic
encounter with language is surely different.
For this reason, the persistence of arguments about cinematic fidelity,
whether in fandom discourse or among film scholars, is not especially
conducive to assessing the success, however measured, of a cinematic
adaptation of a fictional text source. This persistence has dogged film
studies, partly due to the sheer volume of borrowing from literary sources
by cinema. In the first 50 years of the Academy Awards, according to
Beja, ‘more than three fourths of the awards for ‘best picture’ have
gone to adaptations’, and he further reported that adaptations generally
performed best at the box office also.12 This trend has continued to the
present day, albeit to a less marked degree. Commercially, this is entirely
understandable. An adaptation can seek an audience among those who
were fans of the work in its original literary form and can also draw kudos
and press coverage on a similar basis. This strategy is, of course, nothing
new; the vast majority of Shakespeare’s plays were adaptations of existing
stories, whether historical or fictional, to the demands of the Elizabethan
stage.
3 The Fidelity Debate

With such a lengthy lineage of reworking art from one form to another to
draw upon, it is not immediately clear why the issue of fidelity in cinematic
adaptation in particular exercises so many fans and critics, beyond perhaps
an emotional loyalty to the original literary source. Nevertheless, as Orr
has acknowledged, ‘[t]he concern with the fidelity of the adapted film in
letter and spirit to its literary source has unquestionably dominated the
discourse on adaptation’,13 a situation which has only partially changed
over the three decades since Orr was writing. Indeed, not only has the
fidelity issue persisted, but so has an implicit artistic hierarchy, preva-
lent even among film scholars, which leverages fidelity comparisons to
conclude all too often simply (and simplistically) that, as Stam sarcastically
notes, ‘the book was better’.14 Leitch attributes this persistence to ‘an
appeal to anteriority, the primacy of classic over modern texts which are
likely to come under suspicion by exactly the teachers trained in literary
studies’.15
In other words, we see here the baleful influence of literary peda-
gogues utilising cinematic adaptations to teach literary studies. This might
explain what he calls the ‘stifling grip’ of fidelity criticism within class-
room settings, but does not clarify its continued presence, and occasional
dominance, within film studies scholarship. As Stam explains:
[T]he traditional language of criticism of filmic adaptations of novels …

has often been extremely judgemental, proliferating in terms that imply
that film has performed a disservice to literature. Terms such as ‘infidelity’,
‘betrayal’, ‘deformation’, ‘violation’, ‘vulgarization’, ‘bastardization’, and
‘desecration’, proliferate, with each word carrying its specific charge of
opprobrium.16
An especially pertinent source of such persistent fidelity criticism

comes, inevitably, from novelists themselves. If the literary pedagogues
Leitch has in mind bring their particular prejudices to teaching cine-
matic adaptations, then novelists who see their work adapted to the screen
certainly have vested interests and biases in favour of their own art, their
own discipline.
4 Fidelity in the Adaptation

of A Clockwork Orange
A good example of this fidelity debate is Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novella
A Clockwork Orange. For Burgess, Kubrick’s adaptation of his book was
somewhat of a bruising experience, especially given the controversy which
surrounded the film, and its subsequent retraction from the British market
by the director. Forced in Kubrick’s absence to defend the film and its
source text, Burgess was keen to distinguish his own achievement from
that of Kubrick. In so doing, he reiterated the novelist’s sense that the
book is superior to the film. ‘It all comes back to words,’ he wrote in the
New York Times.
This is why literature is superior to the other arts and, indeed, why there can
be a hierarchy of arts, with ballet at the bottom and sculpture a few rungs
above it. Film, seeming to have all the resources, and more, of literature, still
cannot produce anything as great as a great work of literature. Trying to
adapt such great works is, in a sense, endeavoring to find out why this should
be so.17
This can be contrasted with Kubrick’s viewpoint, which is indicated in

the following extract from Hofler:
Malcolm McDowell, inquired if Kubrick had ever met with Burgess to discuss
the project. ‘Oh, good God, no!’ exclaimed Kubrick. ‘Why would I want to
do that?’
Or, as McDowell surmised, ‘Kubrick didn’t want interference from the
author, who probably didn’t know the first thing about making a movie’.18
Burgess’s hierarchy of the arts is idiosyncratic, but it has a long lineage,

evoking the attempts to categorise, taxonomise and rank art genres which
have been expressed within art forms since the Renaissance, and across art
forms since the Greeks. Elliott sees the phenomenon of ranking literature
higher than its cinematic adaptation, as expressed, curiously, by genera-
tions of film critics, as the latest iteration of what she terms the ‘ancient
word and image wars’.19 These ‘wars’ date back at least as far as Gotthold
Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766,
and hence long predate the emergence of cinema as a form itself. Lessing
was a formative influence on Bluestone’s seminal study, which attempted
among other things to move beyond the ‘fidelity criticism’ of ‘quanti-

tative analyses’, which sought to enumerate and itemise similarities and
differences between a cinematic adaptation and its literary source text
in order to support an aesthetic judgement based on comparing distinct
artistic modes. Despite Bluestone’s intent, however, his resulting compar-
ative judgements tended to assume the superiority of literature as an art
form.
Attempts to efface Lessing’s binary position in the context of cinematic
adaptation of literature, whether by Mitchell or the poststructuralists led
by Deleuze, have largely been focused on eroding this assumed supe-
riority of the literary form. One notable attempt by Hurst recast the
issue in Derridean terms, positing cinematic adaptation as a Derridean
‘undecideable’:
As an undecidable, the adaptation – situated somewhere between the cate-

gories of novel and film, simultaneously recognized as both and as neither –
challenges the novel/film binary, thereby refuting the hierarchy that situates
the novel as innately superior to the film.20
More recent critics, such as Hodgkins, have sought to recharacterize

adaptation studies in terms of Lyotardian drift, examining cinematic
adaptation in terms of its affective qualities.21 This opens up potentially
interesting new vistas for adaptation scholarship, though the risk of hyper-
subjectivity does remain. Or, to put it another way, if the only way we
consider movies is in terms of how we are affected by them, then we run
the risk of the tyranny of the subjective, where everyone is entitled to
their own reading which has primacy, foregoing any ability to generate
consensus analyses. Furthermore, an affective turn in adaptation studies
does not facilitate specific comparison of how language is transformed
from a literary to a cinematic aesthetic context, with less attention paid to
what happens to literary components when they are inevitably amended,
edited, reconstructed or subsumed into the cinematic form.
Even if fidelity criticism has remained stubbornly persistent, the kind
of ‘quantitative analyses’ which Bluestone was reacting against are nowa-
days to be found primarily only on fan forums, where elements within
fandoms such as those of Tolkien often rail against perceived injustices
done to his work by the cinematic adaptations of Peter Jackson in minute,
often tedious, detail. However, this article argues that not only can such
quantitative comparisons still be valuable, indeed they can be extremely
useful in identifying what cinematic adaptation does when it engages in

the metaphorical translation of semantic meaning from page to screen.
This we can investigate by looking at what happens to Nadsat in the
translation process from page to screen.
It is worth mentioning at this point that, in the aftermath of the
public controversy which followed the movie’s release, Kubrick left
defence of both works to Anthony Burgess.22 Burgess ultimately came
to feel unhappy about the movie for multiple reasons, ranging from the
difference in endings (Kubrick’s film follows the 1963 Norton edition
published in America which omitted Burgess’s final chapter), to the way
it came to overshadow his other literary achievements. In particular, he
objected to what he felt was Kubrick’s inability, in both A Clockwork
Orange and his adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), to transcend
the controversial subject matter in both novels. In his autobiography he
wrote:
Lolita could not work well...because Kubrick had found no cinematic equiva-
lent to Nabokov’s literary extravagance… the writer’s aim in both books had
been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the
other hand, was not made out of words.23
Burgess may have been somewhat disingenuous in this retrospective

assessment. Even during the writing of the novel he was aware of the
contentious subject matter to the extent that writing it made him phys-
ically ill. Nevertheless, he makes a fair point that the manipulation of
language, partly intended in both instances to obscure the details of the
actions depicted, plays a significant role in both books. For this reason,
isolating the Nadsat component in both book and film allows us to
examine in detail aspects of the adaptation process.
5 Breaking Nadsat into Categories

Nadsat is an ‘anti-language’, a deliberately obscure lexicon used by a
group that sets itself up in opposition to the values of society.24 It is
the linguistic counterpoint for Kubrick’s visual aesthetic and one of the
most distinctive aspects of both book and film. Created by Burgess to
act as a defamiliarizing and indeed brainwashing device, Nadsat was orig-
inally intended to be learned, in the process of which, in line with the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, readers would theoretically be brought round to
the viewpoint of the thuggish protagonists. In learning that horrorshow – a

word based on the Russian khorosho [good, well] – means ‘good, great’, as
in utterances such as ‘we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking’,25 readers
come to understand not just this word but also the values of this group.
Linguists have tested this hypothesis on second language learners using A
Clockwork Orange, and have found that they retain a number of Nadsat
items even after relatively minimal exposure.26 By contrast, viewers cannot
be expected to pick up a language in the course of a two-hour film.
In order to avoid his invented anti-language becoming dated, Burgess
was careful with its construction, eschewing the slang of the day, which
he felt would age quickly,27 instead deriving its lexicon from a range of
sources. As Vincent and Clarke point out, much previous work on Nadsat
has, unfortunately, been based on the glossary appended to the first
US edition of the book by Stanley Hyman (1963, reprinted in Burgess
2012), who himself admitted that it was somewhat speculative. Their
more systematic approach led to a new categorisation of Nadsat.28
The largest Nadsat category in terms of numbers of items and in terms
of representation in the book is ‘Core Nadsat’, that is, words deriving
predominantly from Russian (e.g. horrorshow) but including some from
other languages (e.g. tasse from the French/German word for ‘cup’) or of
unknown etymology (e.g. filly, meaning ‘play about with’). As can be seen
from the examples, words in this category are at first meeting obscure to
speakers of English; the context in which they are presented is intended
to make it possible to make a good guess at their meaning. The other
categories of Nadsat are compound words (e.g. sleepland, boot-crush),
archaisms (thou, shive), ‘creative morphology’—words with new mean-
ings or morphology (such as cancer for ‘cigarette’, gorgeosity), truncated
words (stetho for ‘stethoscope’, guff for guffaw), ‘baby talk’ (baddiwad,
eggiweg ) and, in a nod to a well-known anti-language, rhyming slang (e.g.
pretty polly stands for ‘lolly’, a slang term for money). The words in these
other categories are far less frequent than the ‘core’ items both in terms
of numbers of items and in terms of frequency across the book, but add
an important flavour of Nadsat to the work.29 Importantly, these words
are generally fairly transparent in meaning, not creating issues of compre-
hension when they are first introduced; their lower frequency and greater
transparency makes them less central to Nadsat as anti-language.
What we are interested to investigate here is whether and how the
distribution of these categories changes between book and film, what sorts
of words are omitted from Nadsat in the film script and what the likely
effect is on the audience of these decisions. In doing so we should bear

in mind the lack of collaboration between Kubrick and Burgess and the
issues of adaptation mentioned above.
6 Methods
As noted already, the identification of Nadsat items in ACO has already
been carried out as reported by Vincent and Clarke.30 The procedure
used in this earlier study was replicated in identifying Nadsat items used
in the film.
First, a transcription of the film was obtained and then checked for
accuracy by watching the film and comparing it line by line. This left us
with a script of 11,540 words (the book has 59,747 words). We then
carried out a keyword analysis using the Sketch Engine online corpus
software and with the 13-billion-word English Web 2015 corpus as a
reference corpus. This procedure identified which words occur compara-
tively more frequently in the film than in English as represented by the
reference corpus, ensuring that unusual words in the film were pushed to
the top of the list. This is a useful starting point for identifying Nadsat
items since by definition they are unusual.31 This is even the case for
Nadsat words that are homonyms of standard English words, such as rot
(Russian word for ‘mouth’) since they are still likely to be comparatively
more frequently found in the film.
Clearly a list created in this way will contain both relevant and irrele-
vant words, so this list was then checked for potential Nadsat items, which
could then be categorised using the classification explained above and
described in detail in Vincent and Clarke.32 Having ready access to the
script meant that we could check how the words were used and remove
instances which were not relevant. As in Vincent and Clarke, we use
‘word’ with respect to Nadsat to refer to what is sometimes referred to as
‘dictionary headword’; reference to the verb viddy (‘see/watch’) encom-
passes all its forms found in the film (viddy, viddied and viddying ).33
Once the definitive list of Nadsat words occurring in the film (including
all their different forms and categorisations) had been compiled, it was
then possible to compare these words with those found in the book.
7 Findings
The first means of comparison which can help us understand the changes
that Nadsat underwent in the adaptation process is to compare the
number of different words (types) in each category. This comparison can
be seen in Fig. 1. We can see that for every category of words, the number
of items has decreased; the proportion of items retained in the film ranges
from around 17% in the case of compound words (i.e. 8 compound words
were retained from the 46 occurring in the book) to 50% for ‘baby talk’ (5
out of 10). Although at first sight the reduction may seem most extreme
in the case of the ‘core Nadsat’ category, it is only just below the average
across all the categories. The overall decrease in items for ‘core’ words is
to be expected as these are the most likely to cause comprehension diffi-
culties for viewers; the fact that similar reductions are also seen in other
categories which do not cause the same degree of difficulty is more diffi-
cult to explain at this stage except with reference to the shorter length of
the film script. This is in any case a crude measure of comparison, since
it does not take into account overall frequencies of items in book and
film or, importantly, which Nadsat words are typically omitted from the
film. This indicates a winnowing or thinning of Nadsat’s complexity on
the part of Kubrick, enforced at least in part by the shorter text of the
screenplay, the briefer artistic encounter of watching a film versus reading
a book, and the ability of cinema to compensate by depicting in action,
scenario or some other audio-visual form things that in the source novella
are signified by Nadsat terms.
A different perspective on the changes in the use of Nadsat items
is provided by comparing the relative frequencies of these across cate-
gories in the book and in the film. The distributions are shown in Fig. 2,
normalised to instances per 10,000 words for the purposes of mean-
ingful comparison. These figures provide an indication of how likely one
is to meet a Nadsat word at any particular point—while in the book
these occur approximately once every 15 words, in the film the figure
is reduced to only once every 60 words. As with the comparisons in
terms of size of lexicon shown in Fig. 1, there is a general trend of
reduction in the figures, which is in line with expectations. This denotes
a significant reduction in what we might term the density of Nadsat
encountered by Kubrick’s audience compared to that experienced by
Burgess’s readers. Again, some of this may be compensated for via cine-
matographic methods, while in other instances it suggests an attempt by
250
200
150
100
50
0
Core Nadsat Compound Archaism Creative Truncation Babytalk Rhyming slang
morphology
Book Film
Fig. 1 Number of words (types) per category in book and film
Kubrick to ensure a more immediate comprehensibility which is better

suited to the cinematic art form.
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Core N Compound Archaism Cr. morph. Truncation Babytalk Rhyming sl.
Book Film
Fig. 2 Frequencies (per 10,000 words) of categories of Nadsat

However, this reduction is not seen in all categories—in fact, in the

case of archaisms and baby talk, we see an increase in relative terms when
it comes to the film. This increase is interesting in that items in these two
categories are most of all attributable to the affected style of Nadsat as
spoken by Alex, supporting Kael’s initial reaction to the film mentioned
above.34 These affectations can be seen in examples of their use such as
(1). This utterance from Alex is retained verbatim from the book with the
archaic use of language being very prominent (didst thou in thy mind),
which is combined with the rather marked word order of putting have in
clause-final position.
1. We’re not little children, are we, Georgie Boy? What, then, didst
thou in thy mind have?
The choice of language in example (1) seems to be associated with

Alex’s rather patronising attitude towards his droog Georgie—the use of
archaisms here suggests a rather sneering delivery (portrayed very effec-
tively by McDowell in the film). The retention of the archaisms in this
instance can be contrasted with the omission of Nadsat words in Georgie’s
response, where he describes the house they are to burgle. We can note
that the description provided by Georgie in the film (2) contains just
the one core Nadsat word, ptitsa (‘woman’), which is relatively easy to
work out from the context, whereas the equivalent description in the
book (3) contains four such words, ptitsa, starry (‘old’) twice and veshches
(‘things’), which would make it significantly harder for a cinema-going
audience to understand in real-time, compared to a readership who have
time to stop and think. While not strictly relevant to Nadsat, it is also
interesting that the film example uses another stylistic traits from the
book, the frequent use of like.
2. It’s owned by this like very rich ptitsa who lives there with her cats
… and she’s completely on her own, and it’s full up with like gold
and silver and like jewels.
3. Where this very starry ptitsa lives with her cats and all these very
starry valuable veshches.
These figures and examples show how the film has attempted to retain
the style and flavour of Nadsat while making it easier for a film audience
to follow.
The extent of the change in the use of Nadsat in the process of adap-
tation from book to film can be seen even more clearly in Fig. 3. Here
we see the dramatic decrease in ‘core’ Nadsat frequency between book
and film compared to the overall slight decrease in aggregated frequen-
cies of other Nadsat categories. A clearer picture starts to emerge here of
how, while overall the prevalence of Nadsat items decreased in the film
script, this decrease was particularly marked for ‘core’ Nadsat items. This
shows how the language was adapted most likely in order not to alienate
viewers who would not have the time to check their meanings or work
them out for themselves. In contrast, it was easier to retain non ‘core’
items to retain the exotic flavour of Nadsat since these do not present
the same difficulties of comprehension for English speakers. Kubrick
naturally had no interest in getting viewers to learn Nadsat but every
interest in portraying Alex and his droogs as outsiders; non-Core Nadsat
words contribute to the estranging effect of the anti-language without
compromising comprehension. It is interesting to note in this respect
that Kubrick actually invented two new Nadsat words to contribute to
this, steakiweaks and the rather more menacing lidlocks, the contraptions
which hold Alex’s eyes open in what is perhaps the best-known image of
the film.
8 Types of Core Nadsat Words Omitted

So far in this chapter, we have seen how the Nadsat of the film ACO
differs from its counterpart in the book not only in a greatly decreased
lexicon, but also in a lexicon apparently designed to be easier to under-
stand by the removal of a large proportion of ‘core Nadsat’ words. It is
interesting to consider which specific types of core words were omitted
in this process and whether a systematic procedure for doing this can be
discerned. This discussion will focus mainly on these ‘core’ words as the
most important category of Nadsat, being by far the largest and most
frequent category in the book, suffering the greatest real-terms losses
in the adaptation process. We might start by mentioning one surprising
omission—the word Nadsat itself, which does not occur at all in the film,
neither in reference to teenagers nor to the argot that they use.
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Core Nadsat Other Nadsat
Book Film
Fig. 3 Comparison of relative frequencies (per 10,000 words) of Core Nadsat

vs. all other categories of Nadsat in book and film
As a general rule, very frequent Nadsat words in the book are more
likely to appear also in the film. Twelve of the top twenty Nadsat words by
frequency in the book are also found in the film; this is a high proportion
of retention compared to the overall figure of 23% mentioned above. This
general rule applies across categories. It also makes sense from the point of
view of comprehension, since a word that is repeated may be understood
on encountering it for a second or third time and also begins to develop
connotations due to the words it co-occurs with. We can see how this can
happen through the example of the word droog(ie), which is based on the
Russian dpyg (transcription drug, meaning ‘friend’), instances of which
are shown in Fig. 4. On our first meeting with this word we might guess
it means something like ‘friend / companion / gang member’ which is
confirmed when we hear the word applied to Billyboy and his gang. We
later see that the use of droogie(s) is Alex’s more patronising way of refer-
ring to them, as evidenced by its collocation with my little (lines 4 and
7) and the reference to him having taught them. The fact that droog is
not quite the same as ‘friend’, incorporating a wider range of meanings is
apparent in line 5 where it is modified by stinking traitorous, terms not
normally applied to one’s friends.
1 There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim
2 we came across Billyboy and his four droogs. They were getting ready
3 O my little brothers. As I am your droog and leader, I am entitled to know
4 I’ve taught you much, my little droogies. Now tell me what you had in mind
5 And where are my stinking traitorous droogs. Get them before they get away.
6 Long time no viddy, droog. How goes?
7 Come, come, come my little droogies. I just don’t get this at all.
Fig. 4 Instances of droog(ie) taken from the film in order of appearance
Beyond the tendency for more frequent words to be retained some

other patterns are discernible, most of which reflect the differences
between the two media. A first pattern of change is related to the nature
of Nadsat as an anti-language, a term introduced by Halliday to describe
a lexicon introduced by a group antagonistic to its society.35 As pointed
out by Curry et. al., the tendency of ‘overlexicalisation’36 seen in anti-
languages, whereby many words exist for apparently similar things,37 also
applies to Nadsat. This means that Nadsat words tend to cluster around
semantic topics that the droogs are most likely to talk about, such as
the numerous (often derogatory) terms for women and the semantic
set of words relating to money.38 Having many different and to some
degree synonymous items adds richness and verisimilitude to a repre-
sentation of an anti-language in a work of literature.39 However, such
lexical complexity is likely to be confusing for a cinema audience, which
is no doubt why the diversity of terms for women drops, from 10 in the
novella to just 3 in the film, these being devotchka (‘girl’), used to refer
to younger women, ptitsa (literally ‘bird’), a general term for women of
any age, and soomka (literally ‘bag’), another derogatory term reflecting
the misogyny of the droogs . The reduction in lexical diversity seen with
words referring to women is part of a general pattern for words referring
to people, accounting for the loss of veck (‘person’), the second most
frequent Nadsat word in the book.
Another semantic category that sees a large reduction in terms is eval-
uative adjectives, which abound in the book and allow Alex as narrator
to express his attitudes to characters and situations he meets. One of the
most significant omissions here is the word starry (‘old’), the fourth most
frequent Nadsat word, which may have been excised because of the confu-
sion it could create (cf. starry night ). Only a small number of evaluative
adjectives survive, notably, of course horrorshow; malenky (‘small’) and
bolshy (‘big’) are the only other core Nadsat adjectives occurring more
than once in the film. We can associate this reduction with the far lower
incidence of narrative segments in the film; while there is some voice-over
narration, this is used sparingly. Furthermore, as McFarlane has noted,
cinematic voiceover narration by its nature “cannot be more than inter-
mittent as distinct from the continuing nature of the novelistic first-person
narration”.40
Other groups of items that experience a large reduction in the film
reflect the change in medium from the written page to the screen. These
are mainly descriptive words which in an audio-visual medium are less
likely to be needed. One significant set is words describing sounds or ways
of speaking, which all but disappear, with the loss of very frequent words
goloss (‘voice’) and creech (‘cry out, scream’). These are of course impor-
tant in a book to give an idea of the attitude of a character but are clear
from the delivery of a line in a film. Another set involves words describing
(manner of) movement, such as yeckate (from the Russian verb meaning
to go somewhere in a vehicle) and itty (‘go’), but we could also mention
words signifying clothes or parts of the body, which feature widely in the
book, often in ways that show the droogs ’ coarseness. Kubrick of course
chose not to omit yarbles/yarblockos (‘balls’), words which are used so
expressively by Alex in expressions such as those shown in (4) and (5).
4. Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you
eunuch jelly thou.
5. Yarbles, great bolshy yarblockos to you.
Another word referring to a part of the body that also remains is

glazz(ie), ‘eye’ which is a significant inclusion as it allows Alex to use this
word when his glazzies are held open with lidlocks to watch the violent
films that are used in his ‘Ludovico treatment’. It is interesting too in
this regard that viddy (‘see/watch’) is another verb that is retained, not
just because of its relationship to glazzies and the watching of films (the
voice-over has him saying ‘and viddy films I would’), but also because it
is the most frequent Nadsat verb in the book. McQueen argues that we
should not read viddy or slooshy as direct analogues of ‘to see’ or ‘to hear’
in the Kubrick movie, because according to him, Kubrick imbues them
with a slightly augmented meaning.41 However, without engaging with
this hypothesis, we can still be assured that Kubrick aimed at retaining
what he considered to be the most key essential components of Nadsat.
9 Conclusion
As it was a key element of the world of A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick
had to include Nadsat in some way in the film. In doing so, he faced
a challenge of keeping the dialogue and narrative voice-over in the film
comprehensible to the majority of viewers, while somehow retaining the
idiosyncrasy of Alex’s argot. We have seen in this chapter that Kubrick
incorporated Nadsat by altering the balance between ‘core; Nadsat words,
which are more difficult to comprehend instantly, and the less challenging
‘non-core’ items. This is not to say that what we might term ‘film-
Nadsat’ is totally unrepresentative of ‘book-Nadsat’. Some important core
Nadsat and other Nadsat terms remain, often in snatches of dialogue
taken verbatim from the book, to provide some of the estranging effect
that is completed by the distinctive visuals of the film. It is important to
remember that the script is only just over one sixth of the length of the
book and inevitably some Nadsat words would have been lost whatever
approach was taken to incorporating this argot.
In conclusion, while Kubrick drastically reduced the range of Nadsat
terms for inclusion in his cinematic adaptation, he also sought to retain
a flavour of the alienating effect of Alex’s argot by including some of its
more comprehensible items. Kubrick aimed in part to adapt the novel,
but also to amend it. It clearly is not possible for the cinematic version to
perform similar audience affects as a novel because the cinematic medium
intervenes to attribute some of those roles to its own audio-visual modes.
As McQueen and others have noted, the estranging factor of Alex’s love
for classical music is partially inverted in the movie by having Beethoven
played on a Moog organ, for example. Kubrick was circumscribed not
only by his artistic vision, but also by the cultural mores of what could
then be depicted on screen, and his adaptation therefore exists in the
intersection of the two.
The final word can be left to Kael, and her perceptive observation that
there is much less Nadsat and it may come across as more ‘arch’ because
what has primarily been retained is Nadsat based on English wordplay and
stylistic flamboyance, rather than the Russian lexis which underpins ‘core’
Nadsat. Kael is additionally correct when she writes,
[t]he film has a distinctive style of estrangement: gloating close ups, bright,
hard-edge, third-degree lighting, and abnormally loud voices. It’s a style,
all right – the movie doesn’t look like other movies, or sound like them –
but it’s a leering, portentous style.42
It was not possible for Kubrick to estrange the viewer from Alex’s
violence the way Burgess does via Nadsat, because the violence is visually
depicted, but Kubrick does marshal the capacities of cinema to estrange
via a departure from realism, via techniques of stylisation, static scenes,
tempo changes and cartoonery. It would be interesting in this regard to
consider the extent to which Burgess’s original script for the film, which
was rejected by Kubrick, made the same concessions to the viewers, or
indeed the script prepared by Terry Southern and Michael Cooper in the
1960s, which was also never used. Other film adaptations of the novella,
such as Warhol’s Vinyl , might fall down in terms of their significant devi-
ations from Burgess’s original text, affecting the role and prominence of
Nadsat therein.
Notes
Palgrave, 101.
2. McQueen, S. (2012) “Adapting to Language: Anthony Burgess’s and
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, Science Fiction Film and Tele-
vision 5.2, 231.
3. Vincent, B., and Clarke, J. (2017) “The Language of A Clockwork Orange:
A Corpus Stylistic Approach to Nadsat”, Language and Literature 26.3,
247–264.
4. Isaacs, N. D. (1973) “Unstuck in Time: Clockwork Orange and Slaugh-
terhouse Five”, Literature/Film Quarterly 1, 124.
5. Kael, P. (1972) “A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Strangelove”, The New
Yorker, January, 137.
6. Bassnett, S. (2002) Translation Studies, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 9.
7. Bluestone, G. (1957) Novels into Film, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 47.
8. McFarlane, B. (1996) Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of
Adaptation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 26.
9. Ibid., 28.
10. Balázs, B. (1952) Theory of the Film, trans. Edith Bone, London: Dennis
Dobson, 30.
11. Ibid., 31.
12. Beja, M. (1979) Film and Literature, New York: Longman, 78.
13. Orr, C. (1984) “The Discourse on Adaptation”, Wide Angle, 6/2, 72.
14. Stam R. (2005) Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of
Adaptation, London: Blackwell Publishing, 3.
15. Leitch, T. (2003) “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation
Theory”, Criticism 45.2, 162.
16. Stam, Literature Through Film, 3.
17. Burgess, A. (1975) “On the Hopelessness of Turning Good Books into
Films”, New York Times, 20 April, X1.
18. Hofler, R. (2014) Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to a Clockwork Orange—
How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, New York: Itbooks,
230.
19. Elliott, K. (2003) Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 13.
20. Hurst, R. (2008) “Adaptation as an Undecidable: Fidelity and Binarity
from Bluestone to Derrida”, in Kranz, L. and Mellerski, N. C. (Eds.),
In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 187.
21. Hodgkins, J. (2013) The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives
on Fidelity, London: Bloomsbury.
22. Darlington, J. (2016) “A Clockwork Orange: The Art of Moral Panic?”,
The Cambridge Quarterly 45.2, 119–134.
23. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the
Confessions of Anthony Burgess, London: Heinemann, 244.
24. Halliday, M. (1976) “Anti-languages”, American Anthropologist 78.3,
570–584; Fowler, R. (1979) “Anti-Languages in Fiction”, Style 13.3,
259–278.
25. Burgess, A. (2012) A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, London:
Penguin, 8.
26. Saragi, T., Nation, I. S. P., & Meister, F. (1978). “Vocabulary Learning
and Reading”, System, 6, 72–78.
27. Burgess, A. (1990), 2.
28. Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2017).
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.; Janak, P. (2015) “Multilingualism in A Clockwork Orange and
Its Translations”, Unpublished MA Dissertation, Charles University in
Prague.
32. Vincent B. and Clarke, J. (2017).
33. Ibid.
34. Kael, P. (1972).

35. Halliday, M. (1976).
36. Curry, N., Clarke, J. and Vincent, B. (forthcoming). “Ponying the Slovos:
A Parallel Linguistic Analysis of A Clockwork Orange in English, French,
and Spanish”, in Science Fiction in Translation, ed. Ian Campbell, New
York: Palgrave.
37. Halliday, M. (1976).
38. Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2020) “Nadsat in translation: A Clockwork
Orange and L’Orange Mécanique”, Meta: Journal des traducteurs 65.3,
642–663.
39. Fowler, R. (1979). Anti-languages in fiction, in Style 13, no. 3, pp. 259–
278.
40. McFarlane, B. (1996) 16.
41. McQueen, S. (2012).
42. Kael, P. (1972), 134.
“Language, Language”: The Social Politics
of ‘Goloss’ in Time for a Tiger
and A Clockwork Orange
Julian Preece
Anthony Burgess was commissioned to write A Clockwork Orange directly

after writing a trilogy of late colonial novels based on his experience as a
teacher of English in Malaya and Borneo in the last days of British rule.
The apparent contrasts in setting, themes, and styles between Time for
a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East
(1959), and the modernist dystopia of A Clockwork Orange (1962) is at
first glance striking. A reader may be entitled to ask: Where is the real
Burgess? It does not get us far to wonder whether he was a jobbing hack
obliged to take on such commissions when they came his way or a multi-
talented novelist who could turn his hand to a variety of genres. Burgess
was undoubtedly both. He often expressed unease in later life, however,
that Alex’s neo-picaresque faux confession quickly became his signature
work. What interests me in this chapter is the connection between the
colonial trilogy and the futurist sci-fi when it comes to language, which I
J. Preece (B)
School of Culture and Communication, Keir Hardie Building, Singleton
Campus, Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK
e-mail: j.e.preece@swansea.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_6
118 J. PREECE
hope to use as a way into understanding the dynamics between language

use and power in A Clockwork Orange.
Burgess returned to the UK in 1960 after eight years in Southeast
Asia and found the country much changed. A Clockwork Orange is in
part a critique of Britain’s emergent youth culture and a polemic against
modern life in general motivated by a perception that the threat of street
violence was growing. This part of the novel is reactionary. The part
which shows the working-class murderer and rapist hero Alex adoring
the music of ‘Ludwig van’ echoes Walter Benjamin’s observation that
“there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a docu-
ment of barbarism”.1 It is possible that Burgess was inspired by Benjamin,
though it seems to me unlikely. Without Burgess’s extended sojourn
in the alien environments of Malaya and Borneo, however, there surely
would have been no new perspective on his native Britain. Without his
effort in Time for a Tiger to convey encounters in a multilingual colonial
society and map the contrasting strategies adopted by different characters
to navigate it to their best advantage, there would have been no Nadsat.
Language is the connection between the novels. Readers who come to
gang-leader Alex after following the Malayan travails of Nabby Adams
and Victor Crabbe may be struck at second glance by the novels’ shared
concerns with social prestige, cultural capital, rebellion against compro-
mised authority and allegiance to groups defined by age, ethnic affiliation,
or language, all of which Burgess explores in two different contexts. The
ex-pat who wrote the Malayan Trilogy is an ethnographer who gazed on
the colony in open revolt with the eye of a participant observer (refer-
ences in Time for a Tiger to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough signal
this anthropological strand to the novel).2 He casts a similar look on his
changed home country on his return, seeing a constellation of competing
and antagonistic social groups whose workings and interactions with one
another are at once both familiar and strange.
His holding up a mirror to contemporary British society in A Clock-
work Orange comes across in some respects more clearly in Stanley
Kubrick’s film adaptation through outside location shots, newspaper
headlines, and most forcefully through the representation of English
speech. Malcolm McDowell plays Alex with a Yorkshire accent, which, like
the English locution of the other characters, roots the film linguistically
in England. With respect to language, we thus have a classic case of both
adaptation loss (much of Alex’s distinctive narrative voice disappears) and
“LANGUAGE, LANGUAGE”: THE SOCIAL POLITICS … 119
gain through compensation (we experience more about how all the char-
acters speak by hearing them do so). When Burgess himself read from
the novel, he showed how he understood Nadsat to be absorbed into
English by naturalising the alien terms in his own Manchester-inflected
pronunciation.
My interest in this chapter is in how power relations are depicted
through the different uses to which speech and language are put. First,
I will outline how I see these dynamics at work in the first instalment of
The Malayan Trilogy, Time for a Tiger, in which the ‘language personal-
ities’ of the major figures are more fully developed than in volumes two
and three.
In this novel, interest in other languages for their own sake is a mark
of moral integrity. The more unsympathetic the characters are, the less
respect they show to their multilingual environment in which many of the
major languages of the Indian sub-continent jostle with Malay, Chinese,
Arabic, and English. The ambitious Punjabi Alladad Khan, for instance,
is learning English and Western ways for instrumental reasons. For the
sake of furthering his career, he is even prepared to make the sacrifice of
drinking alcohol, for which he develops a taste. He also wrongly believes
that he has a chance of seducing Fenella Crabbe. He overestimates too
his language proficiency: “All the English he knew was: names of cars and
car-parts; army terms, including words of command; brands of beer and
cigarettes; swear-words”.3
The authoritarian head master Boothby who lashes out at his pupils
and teachers because he is losing his grip is in the habit of anglicising
local names, making ‘Pushpenny’ out of ‘Pushpanathan’, and calling non-
Europeans ‘Wogs’.4 If Khan is a figure of comedy, Boothby is a butt
of anti-colonial satire. Boothby’s independent-minded History master,
Fenella’s husband, Victor Crabbe, in contrast, whom he wrongly suspects
of being the brains behind a pupils’ protest, is labouriously learning Malay,
which he is said to speak ‘slowly’. Victor Crabbe is firm in his idealistic
conviction that he and his wife Fenella are living there for ‘the incredible
mixture of religions and cultures and languages’ and ‘to absorb the coun-
try’.5 At the beginning, Fenella wants to join a film club showing such
imported works as “The Battleship Potemkin; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari;
Sang d’un poète; Metropolis; Les Visiteurs du soir”6 ; in other words, she
wants to join a bubble of Western high culture with like-minded members
of her own diaspora. She shows her mettle, however, by adapting and
being ready to spend time with the local inhabitants: by the end of the
120 J. PREECE
novel, she is no longer interested in culturally prestigious films brought

in from the other side of the globe, having found that local customs are
“Like something out of The Golden Bough”.7 The best linguist in the
novel by some margin is the alcoholic NCO and old India hand Nabby
Adams who speaks both Punjabi and “clean grammatical Urdu”,8 though
is losing his command of his native English. Burgess renders Nabby’s
Urdu through correct but over-elaborate, slightly stilted English with
archaic insertions. Take for example this exchange with Alladad Khan who
has incurred his displeasure by making too much noise outside a bar. Khan
apologises, then Adams explains a scam he has worked out, around which
much of the novel’s plot will turn:
‘I was tortured with thirst, sahib.’
‘Well, next time you’re thirsty you can pay for your bloody own,’ said
Nabby Adams in violent English. ‘Do you think I am bloody made of
beer?’
‘Sahib?’
‘Listen.’ Nabby Adams returned to Urdu. ‘We are going to injure a car.
We then shall buy it. Then we shall sell it. We shall buy it cheap and sell
it dear, as is the way of merchants.’9
For Burgess, the representation in English of other languages is

amusing but at the same time a means of showing how both the projec-
tion and apprehension of personality can change when the language is
switched. Curiously, since his transfer from India, Nabby has developed
no interest in the two most widely spoken languages in Malaya: “He could
not take Malay seriously. It was not a real language, not like Urdu or
Punjabi. And as for Chinese. Plink plank plonk. Anybody could speak
that. It was a bloody hoax”.10 As linguist and as human being, Adams
has his flaws, but the novel rewards him not only with a handsome profit
on his second-hand car deal, he also wins the lottery with what in Taoist
lore is a very special “arrangement of nine numbers”11 : “Whichever way
you added up, across or down or diagonally, you got the number 15,
symbol of Man Perfected”.12 His love of grammar is transferred to math-
ematics and arithmetical symmetry. If the novel has a linguistic ideal, it is
collective and embodied by the principal characters sitting together of an
evening over a drink:
Three languages rapped, fumbled or rumblingly oozed all the while. At

these sessions Nabby Adams spoke only Urdu and English, Alladad Khan
only Urdu and Malay, the Crabbes only English and a little Malay. And so
it was always, “What did you say then?”, ‘“What did he say?” “What did
all that mean?”13
Like A Clockwork Orange, Time for a Tiger has an appended glos-

sary, containing slightly more than 200 terms and phrases from Arabic,
Chinese, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, and German as well
as Malay. The total is roughly the same as in the glossary of Nadsat,
which was added by the American publishers for A Clockwork Orange’s
second edition. Unlike A Clockwork Orange, however, a glossary appeared
at the end of Time for a Tiger from the start, though it has recently
been updated and expanded. The vocabulary and phrases in this glos-
sary are richer than Nadsat and drawn from a variety of colloquial
domains, including sex, food, and religion. It also contains potentially
useful phrases, such as “I am sorry I have no money” (in Malay), “you’ve
done a terribly wrong thing” (in Tamil), or “I love you” (in Chinese),
as well as philosophical concepts and adjectives such as “beautiful”. Time
for a Tiger is a comic and fundamentally happy novel, which is reflected
in much of the non-English terminology featured in the dialogues. There
are minor overlaps with A Clockwork Orange when it comes to sexuality
and profanities. The Malay term for what Alex knows as ‘yarbles’ is listed,
for example.
Glossaries are not as rare as one may think at the end of novels with far-
away settings where the locals speak other languages. They equip readers
with the smattering of key terms they may need before they begin to
find their way in a new linguistic universe.14 Such new terms can also
be explained through context as you read along, as Burgess believed he
had done in A Clockwork Orange, or in a prefatory note. Their itali-
cised inclusion can be ornamental, tokenistic, atmospheric, or perhaps
metonymic, a sign to readers that they are reading an imagined trans-
lation. Not all foreign words have to be glossed as they can serve as
residues of incomprehensibility to all but that small minority which has
knowledge of the relevant language. If they are entirely absent, however,
and the novel is rendered in English as if it were taking place between
monolingual English speakers, then a key element of the foreign setting
is surely lost. The monolingual approach is usually a sign that the writer
122 J. PREECE
him- or herself is ignorant of the languages in question. Partial knowl-

edge can result in strange errors of syntax or spelling, which in turn point
back towards an insufficient understanding of the cultural context which
is being depicted.15 Such absences and insufficiencies are not necessarily
signs of bad novels, though readers with the requisite linguistic knowl-
edge will have their trust in the writer’s judgement shaken. If the language
is wrong, then what else is wrong too?
In the Penguin “restored edition”, the glossary of Nadsat contains
203 words, fewer than other published glossaries.16 A quick internet
search will throw up more comprehensive word lists compiled by fans
which include not only more terms but also give their linguistic origins
(mainly Russian, but with French and German, Cockney rhyming as well
as schoolboy slang as well as baby-talk, though not Roma, as misleadingly
claimed in the novel itself and sometimes repeated in the scholarship).
Vincent and Clarke show how difficult it can be to decide what counts as
Nadsat and what is just inventive use of English, such as Shakespearean
archaisms, but they count 218 terms as core.17 Nadsat moreover is limited
to nouns, adjectives and verbs. The only partial adverb is ‘horrorshow’
(derived surprisingly from a real word), which is more usually used adjec-
tivally. There are no connectors or prepositions, no abstract nouns and
no colloquial phrases. You cannot construct sentences from this linguistic
débris.
A Clockwork Orange is a cruel text. As well as aggression and conflict,
the emphasis is on deception, which could be the reason that Nadsat has
room for synonyms: both ‘guff’ and ‘to smeck’ are given as laugh or to
laugh and ‘millicent’ and ‘rozz’ both mean policeman, while dirty has
the variants ‘grahzny’ and ‘grazzy’. A noticeable interest is the different
types of men and women, but especially women, which signals how Alex
divides up the people he meets into types. The Penguin edition lists
nine terms for the female sex and four for the male. An old woman
is either a ‘baboochka’ or a ‘lighter’, a woman is a ‘cheena’ (presum-
ably from ‘zheena’, which is recorded as wife), a ‘sharp’, a ‘ptitsa’, or a
‘forella’ (which can also mean trout, as it does in Russian and German). A
woman considered unattractive is a ‘soomka’, while a girl is a ‘devotchka’.
Penguin misses out ‘dama’ for lady, perhaps because it is too close to dame
or madame, but gives ‘bratty’ or ‘brat’ for brother, ‘malchick’ for boy,
‘moodge’ for man or husband, and ‘veck’ for man or guy. As most of the
terms in Nadsat are taken from Russian, the great majority of Burgess’s
Anglophone readership will not know them in advance. The effect is
linguistic defamiliarisation or estrangement, what the Russian Formalists

termed ostranenie. Look at your world afresh now that is being reflected
back to you in this linguistically unaccustomed way.
Nadsat is only one element in Alex’s fascination with the ways different
people or groups of people use language, which he calls their ‘goloss’ or
voice (which in Russian also means ‘vote’). Alex is a schoolboy and as
we all know Nadsat means ‘teen’ and denotes the argot invented by him
and his gang. He and his ‘droogs’ separate themselves off from adults
by communicating in language which their parents and other figures of
authority cannot understand. His speech acts often confront and mock a
world controlled by adults, who inhabit the realms of authority, religion,
and science. Alex also alters his ‘goloss’ according to the effect he wishes
to have on his interlocutor. He judges everyone he meets by the way they
speak, presenting a variation of his language personality in each encounter.
He likes to have language supremacy, especially over his ‘droogs’, that is
he endeavours to set the tone in each language act by establishing the
parameters of diction and lexis. His acts of trickery often depend on his
ability to imitate others’ language.
What becomes clearer in the second half of the novel is that figures
of authority make little attempt to understand Alex, which is why he
communicates with them in a parody of their own speech. First the
Discharge Officer fails to understand his reference to “pee and em”,18
which Alex has to translate as ‘parents’. Dr Brodsky and Dr Branom who
carry out the Ludovico Technique to cure him of his violent urges are
made to sound like two colonial ethnographers when they take a momen-
tary interest in how Alex is talking to them. In response to a one-sentence
answer Alex has given containing no fewer than four items of Nadsat,
Brodsky says,
Quaint […] the dialect of the tribe. Do you know something of its prove-
nance Branom?’ This prompts Branom’s famous characterisation: ‘Odd bits
of old rhyming slang […] A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots
are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.19
In Time for a Tiger, ethnographic curiosity on the part of the

colonisers was presented as a positive; in A Clockwork Orange, such
knowledge is revealed to be imperfect but at the same time it is a
pre-requisite of power.
124 J. PREECE
Alex is a different sort of linguist than the colonial characters in Time

for a Tiger but no less accomplished than the similarly self-taught Nabby
Adams. He respects everyone he meets to the extent that he listens care-
fully to them, thus behaving in ways which in Time for a Tiger are
indicators of ethical integrity. Life in jail introduces him to a new range
of usage, not all of which he can understand. An old lag speaks in “this
very old-time real criminal’s slang”,20 which includes words like ‘sproog’
and ‘poggy’, which do not feature in any of the glossaries because they
do not belong to Nadsat. Alex expresses admiration for another cell-mate
because: “Although he specialised in Sexual Assault he had a nice way of
govereeting, quiet and like precise”.21 Criminal subcultures complement
or mirror those defined by youth. Like Alex and the droogs, the jailbirds
confront authority and participate their own sub-culture. In jail, Alex is
re-introduced by the ‘prison charlie’ to the ultimate linguistic arbiter, the
originator of the Divine Word, recalling the chaplain preaching “the Word
of the Lord”22 and reading “out from the book about chellovecks who
slooshied the slovo”.23 Alex reads the Bible from cover to cover, prefer-
ring the Old to the New Testament. He explains his method in a parodic
precis which presents the good book in his own terms:
I would read of those starry yahoodies tolchocking each other and then
peeting their Hebrew vino and getting on to the bed with their wives’
like handmaidens, real horrorshow. That kept me going, brothers. I didn’t
so much kopat the later part of the book, which is more like all preachy
govereeting than fighting and the old in-out.24
The point here is not whether Alex gets religion but that he
understands religion as being about language, listening, and linguistic
supremacy.
Alex also varies how he speaks according to how confident he is and
how much control he believes that he has over a situation. He is never
entirely serious, always parodying the diction which he is borrowing but
never completely inhabiting it. Take two examples from the first chapter.
In the first, there is a contrast between the passage in his first-person
narrative voice, containing four items of Nadsat, and his direct utterance
to the elderly man returning from the library, in which Alex impersonates
a middle-aged conservative:
He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us like that,
coming so quiet and polite and smiling, but he said, ‘Yes? What is it?’ In
a very loud teacher-type goloss, as if he was trying to show us he wasn’t
poogly. I said:
‘I see you have them books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare
pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother.’25
As a connoisseur of speech, Alex notices that the “doddery starry

schoolmaster type veck” he has selected to beat up attempts to exert some
authority and to gain control over the encounter by adopting a linguistic
pose and speaking like a teacher. The grammatically incorrect ‘them’ in
Alex’s answer is likely to be deliberate, while addressing the much older
man as ‘brother’ is menacingly but also playfully inappropriate, even if it
is an echo of the communist ‘comrade’. Alex is adopting a ‘teacher-type
goloss’ when he expresses his joy at finding someone who ‘still reads’,
aware, as are his readers, that this sort of comment is usually directed at
the young by the old. Together we enjoy the reversal. By the end of the
chapter in a confrontation with police officers in the Korova Milk Bar,
Alex has reached the height of cockiness, so confident is he in his abilities
to elude the law.
‘Stealing and roughing. Two hospitalisations. Where’ve you lot been this
evening?’
‘I don’t go for that nasty tone’, I said. ‘I don’t care much for these
nasty insinuations. A very suspicious nature all this betokeneth, my little
brothers.’26
Linguistically, the police are no match for Alex who reverses the
expected roles in the dialogue, once again adopting that of the older
person and this time claiming cultural superiority with the mock archaism
‘betokeneth’. He adopts a similar tone when questioned later by his father
on the subject of his nocturnal exploits: “Never worry about thine only
son and heir, O my father”, I said. “Fear not. He canst take care of
himself, verily”.27
Alex is delighted to be obliged to his game in chapter two, first with
the drunk who takes him on in song before he is beaten up, then with
the middle-class writer and his wife. Words have to be backed up with
fists, however. He is also attracted to the two girls Marty and Soni-
etta, whom he claims are only ten, partly because they have their own
teenage slang. Burgess aligns them with two great practitioners of parodic
126 J. PREECE
multiple-voiced narratives in the European literary tradition, the authors

of Tristram Shandy and Dead Souls:
After Alex has chosen his new record, he reports:
I fumbled out the deng to pay and one of the little ptitsas said:
‘What you getten, bratty? What biggy, what only?’ These young
devotchkas had their own like way of govereeting. ‘The Heaven Seventeen?
Luke Sterne? Goggly Gogol?’28
A Clockwork Orange mixes high and low registers just like the classic
picaresque tales from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It is
heteroglossic in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms as each of the many voices is
aware of the others and in dialogue with them. Alex is furthermore as
linguistically astute as any first-person narrator in the international history
of the picaresque genre. His at best ambivalent attitude to owning to
his wicked actions as he narrates his past life echoes the slippery stances
taken by the first-person narrators of the classic picaresque novels, from
Lazarillo di Tormes to Moll Flanders. He also challenges a range of read-
ers’ preconceptions, above all those of bien-pensant liberals, one of the
targets of Burgess’s satire, and does so what’s more in true picaresque
style: A Clockwork Orange is a pseudo-confession. Alex’s greatest speech
act of all is the novel A Clockwork Orange, which is a title he borrows
from the writer whose wife dies from the injuries Alex inflicted on her.
When he meets him for the second time, Alex discovers the writer shares
his name. What is more F. Alexander has written up the story of Alex’s
life but only to further his own liberal agenda in his battle with what he
believes to be an authoritarian government. Alex has to reclaim ownership
of his own story when confronted with this text:
Well, brothers, what he had written was a very long a very weepy piece
of writing, and as I read it I felt very sorry for the poor malchick who
was govereeting about his sufferings and how the Government had sapped
his will and how it was up to all lewdies to not let such a rotten and evil
Government rule them again, and then of course I realised that the poor
suffering malchick was none other than Y.H.N. ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘Real
horrorshow. Written well thou hast, O sir.’ And then he looked at me very
narrow and said:
‘What?’
‘Oh, that,’ I said, ‘is what we call nadsat talk. All the teens use that,
sir.’29
Alex shows literary self-awareness in his repeated references to himself

as “Your Humble Narrator” or “Y.H.N.” and his Baudelairean invocation
of his readers as “O my brothers”. If his encounter with his former droog
Pete and Pete’s wife in the last chapter is anything to go by, Alex has long
since relinquished this teen slang. Classic picaresque novels distinguished
the narrative present more clearly from the narrated past, but Burgess
makes the distinction too at the end of A Clockwork Orange. Viewed
in this light, the similarities between Alex and Humbert, the narrator of
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, are striking. Both men are linguistically seduc-
tive and artful, drawing in readers to participate in their crimes. Lolita was
Stanley Kubrick’s first literary adaptation.
The deployment of other languages and depictions of inter-linguistic
communication in Time for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange were both
directly or indirectly products of Burgess’ Malayan period when he was
exposed to new languages and obliged to use them. Language use is
connected with power relations in both novels, though the depiction of
the ability to speak other languages could not differ more starkly: the
utopian moment at the end of Time for a Tiger is cancelled in A Clock-
work Orange in the same way that Alex’s appreciation of classical music
invalidates claims that exposure to high culture is morally improving.
Acknowledgements This article is one of several outputs from a project entitled

‘Bilingual British Writers: Mental Migrants or Language Ambassadors?’ which
was one of Swansea University’s contribution to ‘Cross-Language Dynamics:
Reshaping Communities’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
through the Open World Research Initiative. Other outputs include Preece
and Aled Rees, ‘How Bilingual Novelists Utilize their Linguistic Knowledge:
Towards a Typology of the Contemporary “Modern Languages Novel” in
English’, Modern Languages Open (2021), n.p. and Preece, ‘“Canaille, canaglia,
Schweinhunderei”: Language Personalities and Communication Failure in the
Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess’, Polyphonie: Mehrsprachigkeit_ Kreativ-
ität_Schreiben (2019) 6:1, n.p.
Notes
1. Benjamin, W. (1970) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Arendt, H.
(ed.), Illuminations, London: Cape, 255–266, here 258, first published
in the USA in 1968. The text was first published in German in 1950
as ‘Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen’ and gained widespread circulation
128 J. PREECE
in Adorno, T., and Adorno, G. (1955) (eds.), Schriften, Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp.
2. On Modern Linguists as ethnographers, see Wells, N. et al. (2019)
‘Ethnography and Modern Languages’, Modern Languages Open 1
(2019). http://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.242.
3. Burgess, A. (2000) The Malayan Trilogy. Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in
the Blanket, Beds in the East, London: Vintage, 39.
4. Time for a Tiger, 50–51.
5. Ibid., 57.
6. Ibid., 54.
7. Ibid., 84.
8. Ibid., 68.
9. Ibid., 68.
10. Ibid., 61, 62.
11. Ibid., 163.
12. Ibid., 164.
13. Ibid., 115.
14. Trojanow, I. (2006) Der Weltensammler, for example, which is inspired by
episodes in the life of the colonialist traveller and author Richard Burton
(1821–90), has one. See Trojanow, I. (2008) The Collector of Worlds,
trans. Hobson, W., London: Faber & Faber.
15. Paton Walsh, J. (2001) A Desert in Bohemia, London: Corgi, set in
Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, is an entirely Anglophone projec-
tion; Edugyan, E. (2011) Half-Blood Blues, London: Serpent’s Tail,
on the other hand, reproduces key concepts in German with multiple
inaccuracies.
16. Burgess, A. (2012) A Clockwork Orange. The Restored Edition, London:
Penguin, 215–218. In a conversation at the Clockwork Conference in
2018, the editor, Andrew Biswell explained that he was not responsible
for the glossary, however, which was added by the publisher.
17. See Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2017) ‘The Language of A Clockwork
Orange: A Corpus Stylistic Approach’, Language and Literature 26:3
247–264 for an overview of research on Nadsat.
18. Burgess, A. (2012), 120.
19. Burgess, A. (2012), 125.
20. Burgess, A. (2012), 93.
21. Burgess, A. (2012), 97.
22. Burgess, A. (2012), 88.
23. Burgess, A. (2012), 89.
24. Burgess, A. (2012), 88, 89.
25. Burgess, A. (2012), 11.
26. Burgess, A. (2012), 18.
27. Burgess, A. (2012), 54.

28. Burgess, A. (2012), 49.
29. Burgess, A. (2012), 174, 175.
20th Century Contexts: Architectural, Art
Historical and Theoretical Approaches
Art and Violence: The Legacy
of Avant-Garde Art in Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
Dijana Metlic´
1 Images and Violence

From its release in December 1971, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange, based on Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel of the same title, was
singled out as one of the most controversial films in the history of cinema.
It was usually accompanied by pompous newspaper headlines or sharp
criticism, like: “Made as decadent and nihilistic”1 or “Designed in such
a way as to enable viewers to enjoy scenes of rape and beatings”.2 It
was shown in London theatres until 1974 when the director withdrew it
from the circulation due to accusations that it had inspired the copy-cat
murders in England, increased violence amongst teenagers, and encour-
aged the revolt of counter-culture youth groups. Before Kubrick decided
to ban cinema screenings in the UK permanently where, in the words
of his wife Christiane, A Clockwork Orange “was blamed for every crime
in the history of England”,3 it is worth mentioning that the film was
praised by Fellini and Kurosawa, while Luis Buñuel singled it out as one
D. Metlić (B)
Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia
e-mail: dijana.metlic@uns.ac.rs

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_7
134 D. METLIĆ
of his favourites: “I was very predisposed against the film. After seeing it I
realized it is the only movie about what the modern world really means”.4
In the first part of the film, before Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is
arrested after the brutal murder of the Cat lady (Miriam Karlin), our
“humble narrator” introduces himself as a charming monster, the irre-
sistible, witty and intelligent performance artist who minutely directs his
“enjoyable” vicious acts. Not more than once presented as a Gothic
monster,5 the young exhibitionist Alex—with eyelashes on just one eye,
stylishly dressed in a white uniform, black bowler hat and unavoid-
able codpiece, which is intended to provoke, shock and emphasise his
masculinity—is a surprisingly mindful subject who, almost lustfully seeks
witnesses of his aggressive “creativeness”.
His futuristic dress frees his imagination and unmasks his true nature. It
is an extraordinary combination of traditional and modern clothes: tight
white trousers and black Dr Martens boots allude to the dangerous skin-
head look; the walking stick and the black bowler are conventional signs
of a gentleman’s status, while the codpiece is an archaic symbol of male
sexual power and virility.6
Alex is a “criminal-as-artist” and he always performs his ultra-violence

for someone’s gaze. Both humans and artworks witness his “staged” rapes
and killings, and in the words of Robert Hughes, paintings and sculptures
become the mute and unblinking characters in the drama.7 Kubrick chose
to substitute the realistic representation of Alex’s violence for a highly
stylised one and thus managed to find his visual equivalent for Burgess’s
distinctive prose.
When speaking of film form, Kubrick thought of himself as a tradi-
tionalist. In A Clockwork Orange, his most radical and visually most
challenging film, he turned to the stylistic means typical of historical
avant-garde movements in order “to communicate character point of
view”8 and to make him closer to the spectator. He succeeded in his
intentions through narration (Alex’s voice-over, his subjective point of
view and his mind screen), and with a provoking visual style that sharply
divides two worlds: the cold and bleak everyday reality of dystopian
British society and the eye-catching glittering futurist and surrealist inte-
riors (Korova bar, the Cat lady’s house, Alex’s room or Mr Alexander’s
HOME) that become stages for the narrator’s appealing “life-art-work”.
Alex’s public persona is both frightening and appealing: he fights against
ART AND VIOLENCE: THE LEGACY … 135
boring and meaningless reality by choosing diverse roles. He easily trans-

forms himself from a victim into a monster, from a rapist into a teenager
and from a rebellious youngster into a sarcastic dandy.
Matthew Melia has noted that:
Modernist and kitsch interiors sit in contrast with brutalist and gothic exte-
riors: the exterior of Alex’s parents’ house as ‘Brutalist gothic’ and the
gothic ‘home’ of the professor to which Alex stumbles again in the second
half of the film as a Frankenstein looking for shelter.9
According to Judith Switzer, there are so many different interiors in

the film which might be grouped into so-called “psychological land-
scapes” and institutionalised spaces.10 The former, among which Alex’s
room or the Cat lady’s gym might be interpreted as an “externalization
of narrator’s mind”,11 are full of mirrors, fibreglass sculptures, violent
erotic paintings, polished floors and kitschy figurines, while the latter are
stern, unpleasant, sterile environments (the prison, hospital, police estate,
etc.), in which the characters seem oppressed.
Alex’s artistic sensibility is radically different from his family’s. His
parents wish to display “art” on their walls, but they have distinctly
lower-class kitsch taste in art. The rooms of their apartment, with glossy
and colourful plasticised walls, are decorated with Joseph H. Lynch’s
mass reproduced paintings (Autumn Leaves, Nymph and Tina), depicting
sultry and attractive young women (Fig. 1).
Alex’s room is a stylish safe deposit box very similar to the Cat
lady’s hidden gym. They both admire Beethoven (poster in Alex’s
room and bust in the Cat lady’s mansion) and secretly enjoy images
of naked women in submissive poses, painted by Cornelis Makkink.
These artworks resemble the Great American Nude series by American
Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, whose paintings—echoing the pin-up girls’
photos and advertisements from illustrated magazines—are actually the
intimate nudes of his wife Claire Selley, whose beloved body he objectified
and commodified.
In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick emphasises an interplay between
provocative, sexually charged sculptures and paintings (seen in the Cat
lady’s house or Alex’s room) and art-as-commodity with the Korova
decor. Created for the film by Liz Moore, functional bar tables and
beverage machines shaped like beautiful slender women, transfer art from
the realm of “the untouchable” into the realm of the mundane. In A
136 D. METLIĆ
Fig. 1 Alex’s room, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
Clockwork Orange even Christ is commodified: Alex’s kitschy porcelain

(Herman Makkink’s sculpture Christ Unlimited, 1971) multiplies Jesus’s
figure with the crown of thorns and shows him dancing in the cancan
rhythm. The decor of Alex’s room not only reveals his subconscious or
points to his system of values, but also mocks the artistic taste of the social
elite who accepted Pop-art erotica as high art. Alex despises the decadence
of the rich and he openly expresses it. His subconscious shapes his vivid
reality before his imprisonment, and the key to understanding the film
might be found in the exploration of links between its aesthetic qualities
and its political statements. In A Clockwork Orange Kubrick came closest
to the techniques invented and favoured by Futurists, Dadaists and Surre-
alists. He used slow and fast motion, lighting effects, wide-angle lenses,
extreme camera angles and rapid montage, and inserted brief cartoonish
images (open mouth or squeezed breasts at the end of the Cat lady’s
murder) into his fragmented and disintegrated shots, thus avoiding to
show the climax of the most horrifying scenes. The intention of avant-
garde artists was radical: to expose the medium itself, to provoke and
make fun of everything, to destroy tradition (“down with the past”) and
to express open disdain for outmoded institutions like family, church,
university, art, etc.12
In A Clockwork Orange, avant-garde activism and nihilism are insep-

arable from Alex’s behaviour and thanks to his energy and charming
appearance he eventually becomes one of the most attractive protagonists
in the story, despite his immorality. In an interview with Michel Ciment,
Kubrick noted:
Alex has vitality, courage and intelligence, but you cannot fail to see that he
is thoroughly evil. At the same time, there is a strange kind of psychological
identification with him which gradually occurs, however much you may be
repelled by his behaviour. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. First
of all, Alex is always completely honest in his first-person narrative, perhaps
even painfully so. Secondly, because on the unconscious level I suspect we
share certain aspects of Alex’s personality.13
Except for the chaplain who opposes the Ludovico Treatment and
according to Nathan Abrams expresses “the importance of the human
capacity for free will”,14 “women are victims, parents stupid, politicians
corrupt and doctors inhumane”.15 In A Clockwork Orange, most of the
protagonists are structured as uninspiring people, caricatures, disguised
lunatics or sadists belonging to different social strata. In such a world, it
is not hard to single out Alex. Though he lacks moral virtues, the ethic
stays powerless: he is intellectually superior to most of the characters in
the film and radiates charisma attractive to the spectators.
This analysis will outline avant-garde ideas, the main themes and
motives, as well as artistic strategies that can be traced in Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange and that shaped his unforgettable anti-hero Alex
DeLarge as a self-aware individual who refuses to accept the herd-morality
blindly. Structuring him as a victim of a much greater institutional
evil, Kubrick made Alex more “human” than the others. He constantly
opposes the society and shows that life is worth living if: (a) one can
express an open criticism of the system, (b) a person has a right to choose
between good and evil or (c) approaches life with a healthy dose of
irony and humour. Pointing towards the misuse of art as an instrument
of manipulation by both individuals and institutions, the director firmly
linked art and violence on at least three different levels, which W. J. T.
Mitchell in his 1994 Picture Theory classified as follows16 :
1. An image can be a weapon of violence without representing it

(Beethoven’s music applied in the scenes of Alex’s tortures; Rocking
138 D. METLIĆ
machine used by Alex to kill the Cat lady; Beethoven’s bust

employed by the Cat lady to defend herself against Alex);
2. It may become the object of violence without ever being used as a
weapon (huge mural in the hall of Alex’s residential building violated
with vulgar graffiti; books in Mr Alexander’s villa that Alex brutally
destroys to express his revolt against the past); and
3. It may represent violence without ever exerting or suffering it
(distorted Korova sculptures objectifying women’s bodies; cruelly
twisted women’s figures on paintings in the Cat lady’s mansion
that fetishise parts of women’s bodies; and films screened in the
Ludovico cinema that violently reshape Alex’s personality).
Thus Kubrick offered a highly original visual upgrade of Burgess’s

novel, in which modern art was almost of no relevance.
2 Avant-Garde Strategies
in A Clockwork Orange
2.1 Dada, Surrealism and Sexual Violence
It may not come as a surprise that Kubrick turned to the avant-garde
aesthetics in A Clockwork Orange to establish a tight connection between
its narrative structures, formal qualities and his political beliefs. First of all,
Burgess’s experiments with syntax (introduction of new words, unusual
grammar, and destruction of semantic) challenged Kubrick to seek the
corresponding form of visual language. According to Blake Morrison, in a
novel which takes brainwashing as its subject, Burgess intended his way of
brainwashing, which was to force readers to use a Russian dictionary and
learn nadsat words whose meanings were often clear from the context.17
Kubrick was inspired by the artistic scene of the 1940s-New York where
he spent his youth. Influential Dadaists and Surrealists immigrated to the
USA just before the Second World War broke out in Europe in 1939.
He had a chance to befriend some of them since in 1947 he appeared as
an anonymous extra in Hans Richter’s experimental feature film Dream
that Money Can Buy, where dream sequences in which the American fate
in psychoanalysis was parodied, were created by such great names like
Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Alexander
Calder:
Here a man sets up a business to provide dreams for Americans too dull
to dream their own. For many exiled Europeans, who saw psychoanalysis
as a cure for serious disorders rather than as a mascot of wealth and depth,
this idea of buying a fantasy was equivalent to the American’s visit to the
shrink.18
Similarly, in Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999), well-situated

doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is forced to pay for his sexual fantasies
because, unlike his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), he is incapable of having
his own.
Although Kubrick was only nineteen in 1947, he was well aware of the
artistic developments in his hometown: his early encounters with radical
photographers, filmmakers and visual artists who will shape the poetics
of American Abstract expressionism, Pop art, Neo-dada and Conceptual
and Performance art, have left a strong mark on his future photography
practice and his film oeuvre. Even though he never explicitly talked about
it, he shared a wealth of similar ideas with his avant-garde contemporaries.
Hans Richter was probably one of the first European avant-garde artists
interested in the expanded possibilities of cinema and experiments with
both figuration and abstraction. His colleagues were radically opposing
the legacy of art history and challenged the art establishment, especially
Marcel Duchamp who ironically drew a moustache on Mona Lisa’s face
(L. H. O. O. Q , 1919), or displayed an industrial object (urinal) as the
Fountain (1917), signed it, praised it as an artwork, and thus violated
“the aura” of the elitist, bourgeois art. Duchamp’s provocation posed
a fundamental question: what are the characteristics and conditions that
define an object as a work of art? (Fig. 2).
Similar considerations were ironically commented in the scene of the
Cat lady’s death when Alex faces a huge fibreglass sculpture (Herman
Makkink’s Rocking Machine, 1969) which he sees as nothing but an over-
sized phallus, while a “sophisticated” old woman defends it “as a very
important work of art”. By using it as a weapon to kill her, Alex shows
he understands that the market value of this shiny white phallic object
is far more important than the artistic one. By touching and eventually
smashing an artwork that is supposed to be enjoyed from afar, he called
into question the bourgeoisies’ privileged understanding of art. Alex is
not a hypocrite: his knowledge of the everyday world is certainly better
than his familiarity with art, but his act of destruction becomes an active
“opposition”, the one that provokes and enlightens. Alex certainly follows
140 D. METLIĆ
Fig. 2 The Cat lady’s phallic sculpture, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971
one of the defining characteristics of the avant-garde tradition: he ques-

tions the status of art within a society and within the modern order of
things.19
In his conversation with Penelope Houston in 1971, Kubrick admitted
his affinity to fairy tales, myths, magical, surrealistic and allegorical stories,
and concluded that he “had always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surre-
alist situation and presenting it in a realistic manner”.20 The Surrealists’
interest in the uncanny, unconscious, sexual desires, the strange, the
absurd, and the grotesque can be traced in almost every single Kubrick’s
film. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, organised an émigré exhi-
bition of the Surrealists in New York, at the Whitelaw-Reid mansion
as early as in 1942. “On the occasion of the exhibition, Duchamp
festooned the mansion interior with several miles of string, transforming
the gallery into a labyrinth”.21 Freud’s psychoanalysis deeply influenced
both Breton22 and Kubrick, and Freud’s significant treatise “The Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” written in 1905 was translated into
English in 1910. A similar impact on the Surrealists’ and Kubrick’s explo-
ration of the human psyche was made by Freud’s essay The Uncanny
published in 1919, while Humour from 1928 shaped Breton’s concept of
humour noir which, according to Michael Richardson, can be understood

as a refusal of a given condition and a revolt against whatever is imposed
on us.23 This kind of humour is essential not just for Alex in A Clockwork
Orange, but for many Kubrick’s characters—Humbert Humbert (James
Mason), Dr Zempf (Peter Sellers), Dr Strangelove (Peter Sellers), Barry
Lyndon (Ryan O’Neal), etc.:
It tends to induce a feeling of discomfort even as it causes us to laugh (...)

It reminds us that we know nothing of why we are here or what purpose
we are really supposed to serve. At the same time, it asserts that those
purposes imposed upon us by society (above all as a result of loyalty to
family, nation and church) are false and to be opposed.24
Influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis, whose main ideas Kubrick

adopted as a young man thanks to his father’s extensive personal library,25
in A Clockwork Orange he pointed to diverse neuroses and pressures that
suddenly turn human into inhuman—Mr Alexander (Patrick Magee), Dr
Brodsky (Carl Duering), Alex’s parents (Sheila Raynor and Philip Stone)
and friends, etc. Under a thin layer of civilised behaviour lies a well
suppressed and hidden barbaric nature of man that can appear unexpect-
edly. In the words of art historian David Hopkins, “the notion of the
unconscious presupposes that man is governed by the internal ‘other’”26
That internal “other” might even be worse than Alex: Kubrick reveals this
fact during the Ludovico treatment and all through Alex’s post-Ludovico
phase, when the narrator has to face the challenges of the outside world
unable to provide any resistance and defence mechanisms.
Another striking figure stands out as an important catalyst of a surre-
alist interest in a subversive sexuality, sexual desire and sexual violence.
It was Marquis de Sade, whose life and work permeated the art of Dalí
and Buñuel, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, André Masson, Robert Desnos. As
Kolker and Abrams observed, “sex was often on Kubrick’s mind (…) and
sexual imagery permeates Kubrick’s work from his earliest photography
for Look magazine through his last film”.27 According to Richardson,
“Sade’s value indeed lay precisely in the fact that he was unacceptable,
that he both embodied and refuted the unacceptable nature of exis-
tence itself, as well as in his refusal to allow the world to dictate what
he should be”.28 This dedication to the Divine Sade became obvious
at the 1959 major International Surrealist Exhibition—EROS where
142 D. METLIĆ
many displayed artworks celebrated eroticism in connection with sexually

perverse violence, body torture, sexual crimes, etc.
It is important to stress that Patrick Magee won a 1965 Tony Award
for his Broadway portrayal of Marquis de Sade in Peter Weiss’s The Perse-
cution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates
of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
The sadism of the writer, Mr Alexander (impersonated by Magee in
A Clockwork Orange), as demonstrated in the scene of Alex’s extorted
suicide attempt, reveals the links between eroticism, cruelty and the
deviant need of an individual to mentally torture another person. Previ-
ously seen in many Alex’s brutal acts, this capacity for violence addresses
the problems of human aggression due to the repressed sexuality or sexu-
ally pleasurable extreme violence against the weak (be it a woman, a young
girl, an old tramp or ultimately a teenager like Alex). As Cox indicated,
in his Interpretations of Dreams (1899) and in “The Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality”:
Freud argued that the repression of sexual desire is constitutive of the

mind’s pathologies (often manifested somatically), and his interpretative
machinery ingeniously pointed to the places where desires irrupt, breaking
the bonds of our socialized consciousness. (...) Fetishism, homosexuality,
anal eroticism, and even extreme sadistic and masochistic behaviours could
be understood as continuous in their origin with ‘normal’ genital sexual
activity, and as repressed or sublimated features of the sexual lives of even
the most morally puritanical individuals, as the content of their sexual
fantasies.29
Sexual irritation and provocation are present in almost every segment

of A Clockwork Orange: in the ambiguous language constructions, in
the costumes exaggerating male virility, or in the artworks displayed in
diverse interiors. It is inevitably linked to the body which, depending
on the situation, can be mechanical (police officers, doctors, prisoners,
etc.), eroticised (Alexander’s wife / Adrienne Corri, two girls from the
music store, Korova sculptures, the Cat lady), or spectacularised (Alex
DeLarge and his droogs). Alex’s body is in the focus of the narra-
tive: it feels pleasure and pain; it is aggressive and submissive; and
it tortures and is subjugated to agony. On the other side, there are
women’s bodies, intensely static, fetishised and objectified: for example,
the fibreglass nudes in the Korova milk bar with explicitly exposed geni-
tals or, numerous paintings of women depicted in almost impossible body
postures, displayed on the walls of the Cat lady’s house or Alex’s room
(Fig. 3).
With its sculptures of naked women used as tables or milk dispensers
symmetrically lining the right and the left side of Kubrick’s film shot, the
Korova milk bar resembles a purely surrealist set. This unusual under-
world, poorly illuminated by neon lights, can be understood as a long
corridor (tunnel) leading directly to Alex’s unconscious. It can also be
compared with the installation entitled The Most Beautiful Streets of Paris,
consisting of sixteen nude or semi-nude mannequins created by André
Masson, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Oscar
Domínguez, and arranged in a line to welcome visitors to the Expo-
sition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938. The displayed
female tailor dummies reflected the surrealist motives and techniques and
expressed the power of unconscious desire, which was to be fully revealed
in the main exhibition room dark like a womb. Some art historians
interpreted the whole installation as a uterus that symbolically marked
Fig. 3 The Korova Milk-Bar set, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971
144 D. METLIĆ
the ideological shift inside surrealism away from Freud’s rigid interpre-
tation of the Oedipus complex towards Otto Rank’s recognition of the
emotional nature of the child and its ties to the mother.30 Alex and his
droogs are indeed still teenagers: in the Korova bar they drink milk (with
synthetic drugs), which might refer to their infantilism; before raping the
writer’s wife, Alex first uncovers her breasts, thus revealing his fixation on
the oral stage of sexual pleasure rather than the sexual intercourse itself.
Finally, his male virility must always be supported and improved by the
external signs of sexuality (codpiece, phallus mask, or knife).
On the other side, the Korova sculptures echo Allen Jones’s life-size
hyper-realistic women-as-furniture (Hatstand, Table and Chair), made
and exhibited by this influential British Pop artist in 1969. According to
their creator, with these artworks, he never intended to objectify women,
but to oppose the predominant minimalist aesthetics in America that
followed Mondrian’s purism and rejected at least two millennia of making
figurative images. Following an avant-garde project in which elements of
high and low culture were freely combined, Jones used fetish and girlie
magazines, advertisements and catalogues as an inspiration for his figures.
It was a radical break with the then-governing mainstream abstract art.
Jones mixed the theatrical, sexual, commercial and personal to see the
impact his provocative sculptures would make on art language.31
Although he labelled himself a feminist and a socialist with a ruling
interest in artistic form, according to film theorist Laura Mulvey who
drew on Freudian theory, Jones’s works undoubtedly reveal the sadistic
aspect of male fetishism, fantasies and castration fears which Jones
(obviously?) knows nothing about:
Women are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or
another, but what they see bears little relation or relevance to their own
unconscious fantasies, their own hidden fears and desires. They are being
turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at
and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all.
The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man.
The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery onto
which men project their narcissistic fantasies.32
Claiming that women are displayed for men as figures in an amazing

masquerade, Mulvey singled out three aspects of the fetishist image of
women: (a) woman plus phallic substitute; (b) woman minus phallus,
punished and humiliated; and (c) woman as phallus.33 In A Clockwork

Orange, where many women participate in diverse erotic fantasies, jokes
and hallucinations, the Cat lady is not just the most obvious example
of the woman plus phallic substitute because of the Beethoven’s bust she
employs as a weapon to fearlessly confront the aggressor, but because an
enormous phallus is incorporated into the scenery. On the other side,
Alexander’s wife is the woman without phallus, and she must undergo
double punishment: by Alex’s rape and fetish objects, which in her case
are a tight red dress and high-heeled shoes. Moreover, she cannot seek
the protection from her husband, as he is an elderly impotent intellec-
tual whose sexual energy is invested in writing his political pamphlets and
books. Attractive and slender, Mr. Alexander’s wife is the perfect example
of a beautiful art object “displayed” in her husband’s house. She is his
trophy: to be looked at and enjoyed from afar. Although it is not easy to
single out the woman as phallus in Kubrick’s film, it might be identified
as the irresistible blonde (Virginia Wetherell) who mentally tortures Alex
on the stage of the hospital theatre. By choosing to show her from an
extremely low angle which suggests Alex’s point of view, Kubrick trans-
forms the female body into a threatening phallic suggestion: a single
shot from breasts to legs solely, makes the breasts look like testicles and,
according to Freud, revives the male castration complex.
The representation of subversive sexuality in A Clockwork Orange can
be associated with all sorts of surrealist deviant imagery including women
bodies, dolls and mannequins, seen in Man Ray’s, Magritte’s or especially
Hans Bellmer’s art. The horrible rape of the writer’s young wife, accom-
panied by a cheerful refrain of one of the Hollywood’s most beloved
musical themes “Singing in the Rain”, enhances the horror of Alex’s
show and focuses on the disturbing subjugation of both male and female
bodies. The writer will end up in a wheelchair after the shock he hardly
managed to survive, while his young wife will die incapable of over-
coming the trauma. In 1945 Belgian artists René Magritte, famous for his
uncanny surrealist scenes presented in a hyper-realistic style, painted one
of the most upsetting works in his whole opus and named it The Rape.
He replaced the woman’s facial features with the torso of her naked body,
suggesting the way males look at women. A sexual image is created out
of the woman’s face, the first thing one would encounter. In A Clockwork
Orange, Alexander’s powerless wife is brutally undressed and her face is
symbolically substituted for her twisted, naked Venus-like body trying to
defend herself from the rapist. The woman’s body and Alex’s frightening
146 D. METLIĆ
phallic mask, which announces the terrible outcome of this scene, might
help reveal a well-concealed idea of Magritte’s painting in which the face,
the neck and the unnatural hair resembling the pubic zone outline a huge
phallus. While Alex’s phallic mask penetrates the film screen to shock the
viewer with the upcoming crime, Magritte’s work depicts precisely the
same: the ongoing horrible rape.
Alexander Walker noticed Kubrick’s surrealism in the Killer’s Kiss
(1955), where “parts of tailors’ dummies provide a bizarre environ-
ment”34 for the final fight between Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) and
Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera), initiated by their sexual urge to “own”
the irresistible Gloria (Irene Kane) who is depicted as distanced and
frigid like a plastic doll. “Bellmer’s mannequin-like sculpture – bound,
disjointed, dismembered, reassembled in monstrous ways – spoke back
to the classical nude, foundational genre of Western art, about the
physical and social body’s most uncivilized drives.”35 His hybrid and
transformable dolls deny the biological nature of anatomy and can be
defined as queer. The exploration of the natural body and its mutability,
as well as sex/gender codes, were in the focus of Duchamp’s visual inves-
tigations: he played with homoeroticism and openly challenged the male
identity with the construction of his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy (trans.
Eros is life). Although he mainly aimed at mocking the promotional
images of irresistible Hollywood stars, he inevitably raised an important
question about gender fixity, the very same issue that Kubrick ironically
addressed in several situations: when he puts lipstick on the face of “poor
old Dim (Warren Clarke) who had a very hound-and horny one of a
clown’s litso”,36 with eyelashes on Alex’s one eye as a striking detail that
destabilizes his male virility, or when he introduced the Cat lady, having
an androgynous body and a deep, strong, male voice.
Although the sexual imagery is everywhere, in A Clockwork Orange sex
became a mere automatic act. The Dada artists (Man Ray, Francis Picabia,
Georg Grosz), and above all Duchamp, in his ironic paintings (Choco-
late Grinder, 1914) and complex installations (Large Glass, 1915–1923)
pointed to the mechanical nature of sex or, in Breton’s words, summarised
“mechanistic, cynical interpretation of the phenomenon of love”.37 In the
sexual act, Alex himself sees nothing more than “good old in-out”: it is
best illustrated in the contactless and emotionless high-speed orgy with
two teenage girls. As Mario Falsetto noted, sex “is merely another way
for Alex to place himself at the centre of his actions”.38 On the other
side, the reduction of the human body to an automaton, a mechanical
object or a doll was one more issue preoccupying not only Dadaists and
Surrealists but Kubrick as well. James Naremore traced this imagery in
films like Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The
Bomb (1964), in which the mad scientist is part man and part puppet; in
A Clockwork Orange whose very title indicates a grotesque combination
of the organic and the mechanical; or in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in
which a computer has an uncannily human voice and personality.39 Prob-
ably because he was afraid for the future of humankind, Kubrick explained
his concerns as follows:
It is absolutely essential that Alex is seen to be guilty of a terrible violence

against society so that when he is eventually transformed by the State into
a harmless zombie (underlined by D. M.), you can reach a meaningful
conclusion about the relative rights and wrongs.40
2.2 Destruction of All Values

“The topos of destruction as a preparatory action for construction”41
familiar to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, who
with its aggressive tone, intended to arouse controversy, is similar to
Alex’s constant desire for repudiation of traditional values (demolition
of books and objects of art). His revolt against British society and violent
activism can be associated with a wealth of avant-garde ideas expressed in
the manifestoes of Futurism (1909–1920), Dada (1918) and Surrealism
(1924, 1930, and 1942). Alex enjoys ultra-violence, danger, freedom and
despises modesty and cowardice, and just like Marinetti, who glorified
the beauty of violence, belongs to “the group of young men who are
utterly rebellious and destructive, who are fed up with adoring past, sick
of academic pedantry bursting with the desire for fearless originality”.42
Alex is well aware of class polarities, social injustice and vertical immo-
bility: he openly expresses contempt for bourgeois’ peaceful life and its
comfort, because it offends him. As Nathan Abrams suggested, unfortu-
nately, Alex is the sacrificial victim, the scapegoat, the Isaac of the film.43
Feeling trapped in his own life, he constantly confronts the repressive
morality of his fathers and finds pure joy and excitement in making them
feel pain. Already in 1910, Marinetti wrote: “Is not violence perhaps
synonymous with the youth of people? Order, pacifism, moderation, the
diplomatic and reformist spirit, are these not perhaps representatives of
the gradual blocking of the arteries, old age, and death?”44
148 D. METLIĆ
Similar to Futurists who did not see themselves as intellectuals but as

“instinctive beings who are ruled only by divine”45 Alex’s creative acts are
inspired by God, while heavenly classical scores of Ludwig van Beethoven
sharpen him even more for the vicious acts:
I viddied that thinking is for gloopy ones and that oomny ones use like
inspiration and what Bog sends. (...) I could just slooshy a bar or so of
Ludwig van and I viddied right at once what to do.46
Alex, the rapist and the murderer, enjoys classical music and has a
very developed artistic taste also proven by his stylish outfit and patiently
chosen costumes for different occasions, which makes him very appealing
to the audience. Although he is openly immoral, he is intellectually supe-
rior and culturally more sensible than most of the protagonists of the
story. Thus, one more question comes to mind: can culture morally
improve people? In an interview with Ciment, Kubrick commented:
I think this suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect
on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and
sophisticated men but it didn’t do them, or anyone else, much good.47
Alex persistently makes fun of capitalist values, false intellectualism and

decadent culture:
I didn’t care of any of this, my brother. ‘And what will you do’, I said
‘with a big big big deng or money as you so fighfaluting call it? Have
you not every vesch you need? 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?’48
Similarly, he feels indifference to his collection of stolen “precious”

things and develops an ironic detachment from individual and more
general social properties:
Humour became a weapon, a means of revealing the absurdity and

brutality of a society that had degenerated to the extent of initiating brutal
and murderous combat. For the Dadaists all values needed to be brought
into question; society had to be reorganized from scratch.49
Drawing on his very own nadsat , a language derived from different

sources (Russian, Romany, Cockney rhyming slang, the English of Shake-
speare and the Elizabethans, armed forces slang and the Malay language
familiar to Burgess), Alex provokes the representatives of the state and
social establishment. Full of witty lexical combinations, provocative struc-
tures, deliberate repetitions, rapid and unexpected juxtapositions, and
absence of causal links between the words working against grammatical
connectivity, Burgess’s “Nadsat” was, according to its creator, developed
under the influence of Joyce, Huxley and Orwell. On the other side,
Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists, throughout the 1920s and 1930s,
proposed their destruction of syntax and introduced new words to
existing languages. Futurists wanted to liberate words. Dadaists loved
onomatopoeia and baby talk, while the founder of the Zürich group,
Hugo Ball sought a zero degree of language and a word as a thing by
itself.50 In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton proposed
automatic writing guided by no rational control.51 An avant-garde revolt
against society began in language, and Rudolf E. Kuenzli accurately
remarked that “the deconstruction of semantics was intended to signal
a dismantling of the entire social order”.52
Consciously emphasising his intellectual radicalism, Alex is against
both the ordinary stupid prestoopniks and all the alleged “protectors” of
morality: “If you all bastards are on the side of the Good then I’m glad
I belong to the other shop”.53 According to Renato Poggioli, the anar-
chistic state of mind presupposes the individualistic revolt of the “unique”
against society in the largest sense.54 Similar to avant-garde artists who
“remodelled life as an artwork and strove to turn it into the ultimate Total
Work of Art”,55 the textual, the visual and the performative constantly
overlap in Alex’s actions. Violence expressed in language—accompanied
by his eccentric dressing style, his exhibitionism and his frightening body
expressiveness—announces violent performances on the stage of everyday
life. Of course, Alex’s subversive character and open hostility towards the
system matches the demagogic moment characteristic of avant-gardes and
“its tendency toward self-advertisement”.56 Alex is superior in his eyes;
the star of his life. This attitude improves his self-esteem, and that is one
of the reasons he easily rejects all values of contemporary society.
150 D. METLIĆ
3 Conclusion
Why does A Clockwork Orange challenge its audience even today and
“[throw] the admirer into the state of crisis”?57 Is it because this film
undoubtedly shows that the main ideological and aesthetic propositions
of historical avant-gardes can provoke society nowadays, as they could at
the beginning of the twentieth century? Is it because this film has raised
important issues, such as individual freedoms, the right to choose between
good and evil, society’s manipulation over an individual, misuse of art,
and links between violence and art? Is it because its charming anti-hero
Alex DeLarge, despite all his sins, magnetically attracts us and imprison us
in the web of his thoughts? Why do we sympathize with him and forgive
him all the atrocities, which we would not justify in reality?
Avant-garde artists violated the idea of art’s autonomy, and in their
works, they addressed social injustice, alienation, stereotypes on which
ideological manipulation rests, good and evil, morality and immorality,
connections between humans and machines, and links between uncon-
scious desires and sexual frustrations. As progressive young intellectuals,
they resisted kitsch and art clichés, raised their voices against “elitist art”,
and called for the merging of art into the praxis of life. Avant-gardes
rejected the pure art form and clear rules of each genre: the idea of a Total
Work of Art, or Gesamtkunstwerk has finally come to fruition thanks to the
theories of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky which were widely circulating
Europe before the First World War.58 Aspirations for artistic and social
de hiérarchisation were in the foundations of avant-garde syncretism of
the arts.59 In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick combined different media
and went beyond cinema’s media-specific aesthetics. In an amalgamation
of literature, architecture, painting, dance, sculpture, music, theatre and
film, he followed the late eighteenth-century concept of a synaesthetic
artwork. Liberated from the dictate of the traditional genre definitions,
like most of the modernists, Kubrick united different artistic media and
mixed them into one work of art. This fusion, which resulted in the frag-
mented, conflicting and disjointed visual structures, signalled the disorder
of the whole world. To accomplish this aim, A Clockwork Orange was
patiently arranged, composed and ordered.
Asking the question “Does art cause violence or provide a way out?”,
in many occasions Kubrick defended the freedom of art and its obliga-
tion to be a barometer of the actual social situation: “…the film has been
accepted as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done a social harm,
though a great deal of social harm has been done by those who have
sought to protect society against works of art which they regarded as
dangerous”.60 While he was aware of the controversies that A Clockwork
Orange will tackle, in one of his interviews Kubrick noted: “Art consists
of reshaping life but it does not create life or cause life. Furthermore, to
attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scien-
tifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis, in a post-hypnotic
state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their
nature.”61
Just before his jump into freedom, Alex will receive a sign from Fate.
He saw “a malenkky booklet which had an open window on the cover,
and it said: ‘Open the window to fresh air, fresh ideas, a new way of
living’.”62 A Clockwork Orange, whose ideas and a striking visual style
opened a new cinema window and inspired a new way of thinking, still
proves to be current and provocative, even today, fifty years since its
release.
Notes
1. Denby, D. (1972) “Pop Nihilism at the Movies”, Atlantic, 229 no. 3,
100–104.
2. Kael, P. (1972) “A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Strangelove”, The New
Yorker, 1 January, 52–53.
3. Hughes, D. (2000) The Complete Kubrick, London: Virgin Publishing,
170.
4. Ciment M. (2016) “A Clockwork Orange” in Castle, A. (ed) The Stanley
Kubrick Archives, Köln: Taschen, 511.
5. Melia, M. (2019) A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Kubrick’s Design and
Costume Research, Art TV Film, November, https://arttvfilm.wordpress.
com/2019/04/04/a-clockwork-orange-stanley-kubricks-design-and-cos
tume-research-paper-given-at-scms-2019-seattle-march-2019-a-work-in-
progress/.
6. Metlić, D. (2017) “Unmasking the Society: The Use of Masks in
Kubrick’s Films”, Cinergie – Il Cinema E Le Altre Arti, 6, no. 12, 21–30,
accessed June 4, 2021, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2280-9481/7338.
7. Hughes, R. (1971) “The Décor of Tomorrow’s Hell”, Time, 27
December.
8. Falsetto, M. (2001) Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis,
Westport: Praeger Publishers, 58.
9. Melia, M. (2019).
152 D. METLIĆ
10. Switzer, J. (1983) Stanley Kubrick: The Filmmaker as Satirist, Ann Arbor:
University Microfilms International, 56–57.
11. Ibid.
12. Poggioli, R. (1968) The Theory of Avant-garde, Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press, 50–78.
13. Ciment, M. (2003) Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, New York: Faber and
Faber, 157.
14. Abrams, N. (2018) Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 152.
15. Matheson, K. (1972) “Jewish Advocate”, February 17, cf. Abrams, Stanley
Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, 152.
16. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 371–394.
17. Morrison, B. (2000) “Introduction”, in Burgess, A. (1962/2000) A
Clockwork Orange, London: Penguin Books, x.
18. Boaden, J. (2016) “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage? The North
American reception of Dada and Surrealism”, in Hopkins, D. (ed) A
Companion to Dada and Surrealism Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons Inc,
2016, 409.
19. Frascina, F. and Blake, N. (1993), “Courbet: Representing the Country to
the Town” in Frascina, F. et. al. (eds) Modernity and Modernism: French
Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, London: Yale University
Press, 80.
20. Houston, P. (2001) “Kubrick Country”, in Phillips, G.D. (ed) Stanley
Kubrick Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 114.
21. Jolles A. (2016), “Artists to Curators: Dada and Surrealist Exhibition
Practices”, in Hopkins, D. (ed) A Companion to Dada and Surrealism,
220.
22. Susik, A. (2016) “Chance and Automatism: Genealogies of the Dissocia-
tive and Dada and Surrealism”, Hopkins, D. (ed) A Companion to Dada
and Surrealism, 251.
23. Richardson, M. (2016) “Black Humour”, in Fijalkowski, K. and
Richardson, M. (eds) Surrealism Key Concepts, London, New York:
Routledge, 207.
24. Ibid.
25. Abrams, N. (2018), 4.
26. Hopkins, D. (2004) Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 101.
27. Kolker, R. and Abrams, N. (2019) Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and
the Making of His Final Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 15.
28. Richardson, M. (2016) “The Marquis de Sade and Revolutionary
Violence”, in Fijalkowski, K. and Richardson, M. (eds) Surrealism Key
Concepts, 71.
29. Cox, N. (2016) “Desire Bound: Violence, Body, Machine”, in Hopkins,

D. (ed) A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 335.
30. Neufert, A. (2015) Auf Liebe und Tod. Das Leben des Surrealisten
Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin: Parthas, 347.
31. Anon. (2014) “Allen Jones: I Think of myself as a feminist”, The
Guardian, 31 October, http://www.syberberg.de/Syberberg4_2010/
Susan-Sontag-Syberbergs-Hitler-engl.html.
32. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures, New York: Palgrave, 13.
33. Ibid, 7.
34. Walker, A. et al. (1999) Stanley Kubrick Director, New York, London: W.
W. Norton and Company, 59.
35. True Latimer, T. (2016) “Equivocal Gender: Dada/Surrealism and Sexual
Politics between the Wars”, in Hopkins, D. (ed) A Companion to Dada
and Surrealism, 354.
36. Burgess, A. (1962/2000) A Clockwork Orange, London: Penguin Books,
4.
37. Breton, A. (1972) Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor,
London: MacDonald, 1972, 94.
38. Falsetto, M. (2001), 122.
39. Naremore, J. (2014) On Kubrick, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 31.
40. Ciment, M. (2003), 162.
41. Berghaus, G. (2009) “Violence, War, Revolution: Marinetti’s Concept of
a Futurist Cleanser for the World”, Annali D’Italianistica 27, 37.
42. Marinetti, F.T. (2006) “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence”, in
Berghaus, G. (ed) F. T. Marinetti Critical Writings, New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 60.
43. Abrams, N. (2018), 160.
44. Marinetti, F.T. (2006), 66.
45. Ibid.
46. Burgess, A. (1962/2000), 40.
47. Ciment, M. (2003), 163.
48. Burgess, A. (1962/2000), 40.
49. Richardson, M. (2016a), 209.
50. Robertson, E. (2016) “Dada and Surrealists Poetic”, in Hopkins, D. (ed)
A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 228.
51. Breton, A. (1969) Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbour: The University
of Michigan Press, 19–29.
52. Kuenzli, R. (1979) “The Semiotics of Dada Poetry”, in Foster, S. and
Kuenzli, R. (eds) Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, Madison, WI:
Coda Press, University of Iowa Press, 56.
53. Burgess, A. (1962/2000), 53.
54. Poggioli, R. (1968), 30.
154 D. METLIĆ
55. Günter Berghaus, “The Futurist Concept of Gesamkunstwerk and Marinet-

ti’s Total Theatre”, Italogramma, 4, (2012): 286.
56. Poggioli, R. (1968), 34.
57. Sontag, S. (1980) “Syberberg’s Hitler”, The New York Review, 21
February.
58. Berghaus, G. (2006), 285.
59. Poggioli, R. (1968), 133.
60. Ciment, M. (2003), 162.
61. Strick, P. and Houston, P. (2009) “Modern Times: An Interview with
Stanley Kubrick”, in Phillips, G.D. (ed) Stanley Kubrick Interviews,
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, 129.
62. Burgess, A. (1962/2000), 124.
Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork
Orange
Joseph Darlington
1 Introduction
Modernist architecture plays a pivotal role in A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Kubrick uses the landscapes of modernism as a visual shorthand, evoking
a number of the film’s key themes: violence, decay and totalitarianism.
In this chapter, we will unpack the semiotics of modernist architecture in
the movie A Clockwork Orange. We will then turn to Anthony Burgess’
novel and unpack his use of architecture and its biographical inspiration.
Written in 1961, A Clockwork Orange (1962) coincides with widespread
“slum clearances” taking place in Britain; the destruction of old Victo-
rian houses and their replacement by modernist tower blocks and council
estates. Burgess was ahead of his time in foreseeing the social damage that
such a process would inflict. By the time of the movie being filmed, 1970
to 1971, municipal modernism, with its high rises and brutalist style, was
synonymous with violence, deprivation and a lawless, “concrete jungle”
mentality. The final section of the chapter will look at unused locations,
sourced from the Kubrick Archive at UAL. From these, we can excavate
J. Darlington (B)
Futureworks Media School, Manchester, UK
e-mail: Joe.darlington@futureworks.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_8
156 J. DARLINGTON
some of Kubrick’s thinking about urban geography and how it could be

used to reflect his movie’s core themes on a visual level. We can see the
movie as it wasn’t.
First, however, we will look to the rise of modernism and its discon-
tents. Specifically, the architects Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman; two key
critics of modernism who published their major works roughly simul-
taneous to the release of A Clockwork Orange in novel and movie
form.
2 Defensible Space in A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The post-war era was a time of significant change across both Europe and
the United States. The mass mobilisation involved in fighting a world war
had demonstrated the capacity of government to organise people on a
mass level. Upon the soldiers’ return, even traditionally laisses faire coun-
tries like Britain and the United States voted in governments who were
committed to centralising state power. The welfare states were born. In
planning, this meant an unprecedented level of power was granted to
architects and town planners, including the ability to level whole city
blocks in the name of slum clearing. Whole towns and neighbourhoods
would be built from scratch. Old, ramshackle buildings were torn down
and new, modernist buildings—cheap and high-density—took their place.
The change occurred more quickly in America, booming after the conflict,
than in Europe, where economies were slower to recover. As a result,
the first warning signs were heard in America at precisely the moment
when the British government was embracing the policy of slum-clearing
wholeheartedly.
In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American
Cities; the first extensive study of the effects of central planning on city
neighbourhoods. Her findings showed that where neighbourhoods had
grown organically, without central planning, there existed a bustling street
life—often loud, raucous and messy, but always human—while the new
micromanaged city blocks produced “social deserts”1 empty of pedes-
trians. The new modernist cities saw residents moving back and forth
from home to work in their cars, stopping at shopping centres when
they needed to buy things. As a result, city streets are abandoned and
left to the itinerant, criminals and troublemakers. A siege mentality sank
in. The middle classes left high-density housing en masse. Finally, in an
ironic turn of fate, the high turnover of residents in what were, by that
ARCHITECTURE AND FREEDOM IN A CLOCKWORK ORANGE 157
time, low-cost housing areas produced extreme wear, and so modernist

areas descended into dereliction far faster than the older buildings they
were knocked down to make way for. “Residents of a perpetual slum
constantly change”,2 Jacobs noted, while a healthy city requires a stable
population “of different people and different private organisations, with
vastly differing ideas and purposes”3 in order to remain vital, varied and
alive. Jacobs was the first writer to really bring to life the complex nature
of a city with its “organic, spontaneous, messy, complex systems that
result from evolutionary processes”.4 A city cannot be replicated through
central planning, she argued, no matter how knowledgeable or powerful
the planners are.
Jacobs’ argument is fundamentally humanist. It is anti-systemic in the
way that Kubrick and Burgess’ are when faced by B.F. Skinner. Human
complexity cannot be accounted for, and certainly can’t be corrected, by
environmental and behavioural scientists. Jacobs’ message would be slow
to disseminate, however, and would remain a niche interest within the
urban planning community. The reason for this can perhaps be found in
the economic boom times that occurred in the early 1960s. Widespread
prosperity, the consumer society, technological innovations and a loos-
ening of traditional values made the “swinging sixties” a time with a
positive outlook. It is also this time when Burgess publishes A Clock-
work Orange (1962) to meagre success. His vision of modernist cities
in decline, addressed later in this chapter, comes, like Jacobs’, too early
to prompt widespread recognition. By the time of Kubrick’s A Clock-
work Orange (1971), however, these violent inner cities would be all too
familiar to his audience. Widespread civil unrest, industrial strife, inflation
and depression were the norm throughout the 1970s and city centres
around the developed world were abandoned to crime, drugs and squalid
conditions as the middle classes moved out to the suburbs. This is quite
clearly the geography of A Clockwork Orange, from the flatblocks of little
Alex to the leafy cottage called HOME.
In response to these conditions, Oscar Newman introduced his theory
of “defensible space”. Defensible Space, his 1971 report to the US Depart-
ment for Housing is like a dark mirror image of Jacobs’ Death and Life.
Where Jacobs is anti-systemic, celebrating the organic, Newman focuses
on the same urban problems but proposes a more highly developed
form of planning, pessimistic in outlook and behaviouralist in its inten-
tions, as a means to “build in” sociality to new modernist constructions.5
Comparing high-rises with low-rises and standard housing, Newman
158 J. DARLINGTON
noted that the alienating effects of modernist estates only take place after
a certain density has been reached. The space around a high-rise, unlike
individual gardens or the private gardens held collectively in low-rises,
is “accessible to everyone and not assigned to particular buildings. The
residents, as a result, feel little association with or responsibility for the
grounds and even less association with the surrounding public areas”.6
By housing people vertically, planners had broken their natural territo-
rial instincts, and so they did not feel entitled to exert control over their
local area. He described these territorial instincts as “natural surveillance”
(Fig. 1).7
In other words, where the residents of a row of terraced houses might
see a loitering gang of criminal youths and think “not on my street”,
telling them to move on safe in the knowledge that local people will
support them should a confrontation occur, the resident of the high-
rise inhabits an alienated environment; their streets aren’t “theirs”, only
their own flat is. The outside is abandoned to outsiders, and agoraphobia
becomes the norm. Newman suggested a series of design features and
legal measures that might reinstate residents with a sense of “defen-
sible space”. These, however, tended to mimic or even exacerbate the
Fig. 1 Illustration from Newman’s study demonstrating the concept of “natural

surveillance”
“economy of fear”8 gripping the inner cities. Public housing itself became
“a source of fear”9 and by proposing solutions based around personal
security, crime management and surveillance, Newman and his school of
thought merely reflected the all-encompassing paranoia of the era.
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) is a direct visualisation of these
fears. Its cinematography uses post-war modernist architecture as a visual
shorthand, provoking the audience’s anxieties around defensible space as
a core element in its overall unsettling effect. In writing about Kubrick’s
cinematic worlds, Coëgnarts highlights his masterful use of the Kuleshov
effect, whereby “viewers infer a spatial whole on the basis of seeing only
the component parts”10 of a landscape. John Alcott, Kubrick’s cine-
matographer on A Clockwork Orange, had previously worked with him on
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In that film, he used carefully constructed
sets matched with SFX establishing shots to imply huge spaceships in the
vastness of space. In A Clockwork Orange, the same techniques of cine-
matic implication were used to depict a world in chaos. The theatre that
appears early in the action, an old music hall long abandoned, is a testa-
ment to a world in decline. With the theatregoing public locked indoors,
the deserted theatre instead provides entertainment for Billy Boy, Alex
and their warring droogs (Fig. 2).
Critics have interpreted this scene as symbolic of Kubrick’s “staged-
ness”.11 It makes clear the Shakespearean, performative nature of Alex’s
Fig. 2 Establishing shot from the gang-fight scene, still from A Clockwork
Orange, Stanley Kubrick 1971
160 J. DARLINGTON
violence. On the level of mise-en-scene, however, it is also staging for us

a world once decadent, now depraved, where the old sociality of theatre
has given way to the atomised entertainment available within individual’s
flats. The “blue dancing light” of the “telly”, as Alex describes it in the
novel.12 It beams out of “the windows of all the flats you could viddy”
and has supplanted the outside world; a world no longer defensible, being
abandoned to trouble and despair.13
Later, we see that Alex’s own flatblock shares in the desolation. As
much as his bedroom, with his private musical entertainment, and the
living room, with his parent’s private visual entertainment, may evoke
a cosy domesticity, the atrium of the DeLarge’s building has been
vandalised into total disrepair. Abandoned, it becomes a hunting ground
of the droogs (Figs. 3 and 4).
Behind Dim’s head we can see a socialist mural scrawled with rude
jokes and obscene imagery. This is the clearest cinematic reference that
Kubrick makes to socialism’s failed social housing project, while the
squareness of the building’s design, its large rectangular windows and
concrete stairs, align the socialist project with modernist architectural
design.
The scene is described in the novel itself. Alex introduces us to his
Flatblock, 18A, “between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonsway”—a reference
to two Labour Party politicians—wherein:
Fig. 3 Interior of Flatblock 18A featuring Alex and Droogs. Mural visible on
the right. Stills from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
Fig. 4 Close-up of Dim with vandalised mural in background, still from A

Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
In the hallway was a good old municipal painting on the walls – vecks
and ptitsas very well developed, stern in the dignity of labour, at work-
bench and machine with not one stitch of platties on their well-developed
plots. But of course some of the malchicks living in 18A had, as was to
be expected, embellished and decorated the said big painting with handy
pencil and ballpoint, adding hair and stiff rods and ballooning slovos out
of the dignified rots of these nagoy (bare, that is) cheenas and vecks.14
The municipal style in Europe often integrated socialist elements, to

which Burgess is referring with his mural. The incorporation of the mural
into Kubrick’s film, however, may presumably be drawing international
parallels; murals to the dignity of labour being more commonly associ-
ated with Soviet communism, while the modernism of the block’s design,
and its brutally functional name, “18A”, better suggests the American
projects; buildings of the type excoriated by Oscar Newman and Jane
Jacobs alike.
Such an impression is reinforced by the institutional architecture that
we later see in the Ludovico treatment centre and its surrounding build-
ings. The exterior is Brunel University’s imposing concrete frontage, all
jutting slabs and grey pillars (Fig. 5).
Its meaning is unmistakeable. Framed by concrete below, grey skies
above, wire fencing to the right and the modernist mass looming from
162 J. DARLINGTON
Fig. 5 The Ludovico treatment centre with approaching guards, still from A
Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
centre-left, the only humans on screen are two stiff-backed, evil-grinning

men in uniform, accompanying a prisoner (Alex), who strut ominously
towards the camera, staring we, the viewers, down. These are clearly men
who enjoy their power, and it is a power that is rock hard, immovable,
and, like those huge slabs of concrete behind them, always looming over
you. Here is municipal modernism at its most totalitarian. These humans
and their built environment are presented to us in an ominous unity.
Where the old society of the individual crumbles away, at variance with
the intentions of its modernist architects, here are the new men properly
habituated to the landscape of brutalism.
Against these warring forces, the environments of the criminal and
the state, we are presented with HOME, the writer’s domicile on the
outskirts of town. Webster points to this scene as critical in establishing
Kubrick’s “continued theme of the Citadel”.15 It is the antithesis of a
defensible space. The framing of this scene evokes immediate vulnera-
bility. The establishing shot shows a single light, shining through a slim
modernist pane of glass, buried in a dark landscape with branches, like
crooked hands, encroaching from off-screen (Figs. 6, 7, and 8).
Inside, we see the writer’s wife sitting in an egg. The egg, symbolic of
fragility, is also, in the form of the egg chair, a classic of pop-modernist
design. The playsuit that she wears is the height of fashion too, yet its
Fig. 6 Exterior establishing shot of HOME. Still from A Clockwork Orange,

Stanley Kubrick, 1971
Fig. 7 Interior shot of HOME with occupants relaxing as doorbell rings. Still
from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
childlike implications here remind us of these characters’ terrible inno-

cence, about to be ripped from them. Kubrick centrally aligns these shots,
giving the building the look of a doll’s house. White colours are pris-
tine, awaiting ruination, while the mirrors that reflect back this bourgeois
164 J. DARLINGTON
Fig. 8 Interior shot of HOME, the writer’s wife approaching the front door.
Still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
dream home are delicate too, waiting to be smashed. Alex, when he

knocks on the door, is framed as an outside force, barging his way into
this space and bringing his rampaging droogs with him. There is nothing
defensible about this space, Kubrick tells us. Every inch of it is vulner-
able, and in the paranoid world of 1970s design, such vulnerability invites
violence.
All three of these examples present a typical modernist mode: institu-
tional (the Ludovico centre), urban (Flatblock 18A) and chic (HOME).
Of the three, only one is truly successful: the totalitarian brutalism of
the institutional style. Urban modernism is shown to bring destruction
and decay. The chic style, high modernism as visualised in the fashion
magazines, is the most vulnerable of all. Kubrick’s camera eye, we might
conclude, shares its vision with Oscar Newman. The most important
architectural element in these scenes is their defensibility. Through his
framing, Kubrick trains the viewer to share this vision, to associate spatial
vulnerability with the imminence of attack. Yet he also implies the dangers
of such a pessimistic view. The only men who thrive in such conditions,
he shows us, are the police and the powerful; those whose behaviour
has aligned itself to the rigidity of their built environment. Jane Jacobs
describes how many municipal architects looked with “impatience, or
even contempt”16 on evidence of human habitation in cities, feeling it
ruined the pristine clarity of their vision. Here, Kubrick goes further
and shows us the kinds of humans that such architectural movements
presumably seek to create; ones as concrete as the buildings that surround
them.
3 Municipal Modernism
in A Clockwork Orange (1962)
In Britain, the modernist movement in town planning was most closely
associated with the idea of “slum clearing”. Old Victorian terraces,
thrown up during the industrial revolution, were associated in the public
mind with squalor, deprivation and criminality. From the late 1950s
through to the mid-1960s, these areas were targeted for demolition.
The rhetoric around these clearances described the process in terms of
“modernisation”. In 1964, Prime Minister Harold Wilson promised a
rebuilt country, “forged in the white heat” of a “scientific revolution”.
In practice, 1.48 million homes were destroyed and 3.66 million people
were displaced.17 Tankers would travel around the soon-to-be demolished
slums, spraying the houses with DDT to disinfect them. As Doris Lessing
wrote in her memoir of the time, “up and down this happy land, people
whose hearts beat day and night with love and concern for the working
classes were saying, ‘We’ll clear them all out, we’ll clean it all up’”.18 High
density tower blocks were to provide modern social housing. Housing of
the type already critiqued by Jane Jacobs after its earlier failure in America.
Anthony Burgess was born and raised in one of these slums. Living
above a pub in the Moss Side area of Manchester, Burgess was more
than familiar with the unseemly side of redbrick slum life. Yet he was
also, in line with Jane Jacobs’ thinking about such areas, well integrated
into a local community, reading out the words at the local silent cinema
for the benefit of illiterate cinemagoers and accompanying his father, a
pianoplayer, as he taught music to local kids and played in pubs and
theatres.19 The Victorian legacy of his Moss Side house lived on in his
step-mother’s collection of schmaltzy ceramic bric-a-brac, the woollen
clothes—“we all wore wool next to the skin”20 —and his own Dickensian
bedroom, “I slept alone in a cold room with one picture on the wall”.21
He would later describe Manchester’s old redbrick districts as “far from
beautiful […] concerned with trade, not Ruskinian aesthetics”.22
And yet, it was with sadness that he heard the news of Moss Sides’
destruction, and its modernist redevelopment inspired an even greater
166 J. DARLINGTON
lament. “The wiping out of one’s youth is intolerable”, he wrote, “but

so is the conversion of a once leafy commercially prosperous district into
what has been termed the Bronx of Manchester”.23 An episode of The
World in Action from 1978 shows the modernist Hume Crescents that
were erected just down the road from the site of Burgess’ childhood home
(Fig. 9).
The Crescents were a quintessential example of British municipal
modernism. Concrete blocks, anonymous, built cheaply and set down
in the midst of a tarmac desert. The nearby Moss Side low-rises are, by
comparison, closely-set and irregular, with walkways, ginnels and blind
corners providing endless opportunities for unsurveilled crime. Seen from
high above and vacant of people, as they would have appeared in the
architectural blueprints, the Crescents look like a modern, clean and
orderly alternative to Victorian terraces. In reality, they displaced a poor
but tight-knit community and replaced them with a transitory population,
alienated and besieged.
The youth who inhabited these modernist landscapes were often the
only people who ventured outside and so, left free from nagging neigh-
bours and Newman’s “natural surveillance”, many would descend rapidly
into criminality. The youth trends of the time were suitably rebellious,
from the Teddy Boys who reputedly inspired the book,24 to the Mods and
Rockers whose infamy accompanied its release,25 to American-inspired
Fig. 9 Hume Crescents as shown on World in Action (1978), Moss Side rede-
velopments to the top and top-left. Still from still from ITV show The World in
Action, episode “There’s No Place Like Hulme” 1978
biker gangs, hipster rebels and the proto-punks and yardies who also
emerged from these areas. The Droogs are the “new gang in town”,26
a variation on a long-running theme. Looking at the illustrations on A
Clockwork Orange jacket designs released prior to the movie, a range of
looks are imagined for these fashionable inner-city hoodlums (Figs. 10,
11, and 12).
The grittier reality that these images suggest, free of the balletic theatri-
cality of Kubrick’s version, are reinforced by Burgess’ own reading of the
novel. A recording of this exists (from Caedmon Records, 1973) and in
it Burgess performs Alex in a deep-voiced Mancunian accent no doubt
familiar from the Moss Side of his youth. Where Malcolm McDowell’s
Alex pronounces his nadsat with a cheeky flamboyance, Burgess’ Alex
chews over his words like a dour, broken-down slum dweller. Burgess’
Alex is someone for whom slang is a means to hide, rather than heighten,
his words’ meaning. A speaker still wary of surveillance.
Fig. 10 Norton US
paperback edition 1963,
featuring Teddy Boys
168 J. DARLINGTON
Fig. 11 Ballantine
featuring Beatniks
The landscapes of A Clockwork Orange (1962) are those of a post-slum

clearance Britain. Flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilson’s
Way (the same Wilson who promised the “white heat” of technological
revolution), is quite clearly a socialist project turned sour. Murals to the
dignity of labour were not entirely unknown in British social housing,
although its incongruence in the novel is likely a reference to Soviet
influence over British socialists; a phenomenon Burgess writes about in
1985 (published 1978). As Alex returns home, he finds the “electric
knopka” to have been “tolchoked real horrorshow this night, metal doors
all buckled, some feat of real strength indeed, so I had to walk the ten
floors up”.27 Ten flights is enough to place Alex in a building considered a
high-rise, the category Newman described as the most socially disruptive.
We do not know whether Alex lived high up within this tower block,
Fig. 12 Ballantine
featuring a hippy
either, leaving the possibility open that Flatblock 18A, presumably one
of many, could reach Ballardian proportions (to reference another sci-fi
novel taking its inspiration from municipal modernism). A large number
of identical flatblocks all reaching up into the grey Manchester sky is truly
a dystopian image. It is worth also remembering that 1984, despite its
many filmic adaptations filled with faceless office blocks and modernist
bureaucracy, in fact takes place, within the novel at least, among “vistas of
rotting nineteenth-century houses;” a landscape Burgess describes as “the
London of wartime or just after”.28 The instant association of modernist
architecture with alienation was not as apparent in 1961 as it would be
now. Burgess was ahead of his time in seeing buildings like Flatblock 18A
as breeding grounds for violence and disillusion. His speculative novel was
not simply repackaging existing dystopias but actively inventing them.
By contrast, Alex’s hunting grounds are the starry domies where the
middle classes live; older houses untouched by the slum clearances. Alex
170 J. DARLINGTON
describes his walk past the pub and some office blocks, “the starry beat-
up biblio and then was the bolshy flatblock called Victoria Flatblock
after some victory or other, and then you came to the like starry type
houses of the town in what was called Oldtown”.29 Alex, unaware of
Queen Victoria or the era named after her, reads the name Victoria
Flatblock as a reference to a battle. More likely, this is either an older
multileveled Victorian building, a luxury relic spared from the clearing,
or else a new, modernist flatblock ironically named after the Victorian
slum that was cleared to make room for it. Either way, it borders on old
buildings, untouched by modernisation: “real horrorshow ancient domies
here, my brothers, with starry lewdies living in them”.30 It is these starry
lewdies, or old people, that are Alex’s chosen victims. Urban planner S.S.
Rosenthal has argued that whereas “moderately older housing portends a
neighbourhood in economic decline [...], much older housing becomes
more attractive for gentrification”.31 In Mancunian terms, the Victorian
mansions of Didsbury and Chorlton are the “horrorshow ancient” neigh-
bourhoods bordering on the social housing flatblocks of Moss Side and
Hulme. Here, buildings identical in design to those levelled are instead
converted into bohemian flats or else occupied by single families as large
luxury houses. Buildings considered “outdated” in slum areas are here
considered to be “heritage”. The proximity between these neighbour-
hoods also leads to crime, just as it does in the novel, with Chorlton being
the most burgled area in all of Great Britain.32 Both Alex and his real-
life counterparts clearly identify older homes with more wealth. HOME,
it should be remembered, is not a pop-modernist paradise in Burgess’ A
Clockwork Orange, but, rather, a “cottage”.33 The starriest lewdies of all
live in a rural idyll. A “cottage” suggests a building that could be even
older than the Victorian era.
The contrast between old homes and new social housing embodies
Burgess’ beliefs about government. An English conservative, Burgess
believed that the spirit of liberty is rooted in property; that, to use
a common phrase, an Englishman’s home is his castle. Municipal
modernism was a clear example of government overextension, with
compulsory purchase orders effectively forcing working people out from
the homes that they owned and into building projects designed with
coercive socialist agendas in mind. The middle classes were, of course,
not subject to this “modernisation”. Only the working classes were to
be remade. A Clockwork Orange was famously written as a satire of B.F.
Skinner’s behaviouralism. “We need to be conditioned”, Burgess wrote,
paraphrasing Skinner, “in order to save the environment and the race. But
it must be conditioning of the right sort”34 ; meaning, presumably, the
sort that specifically targeted the working class and other “slum” dwellers.
The Ludovico technique was Burgess’ own, far less subtle rendering of
behaviouralist practice. Kubrick shared Burgess’ scepticism, and placed a
copy of Skinner’s Walden Two on the prison governor’s desk in the scene
where Alex agrees to sign up for the Ludovico treatment.35 Skinner’s
views on the environment indeed aligned with those of the town plan-
ners. “The environment can be manipulated”, Skinner wrote, and while
“man’s genetic endowment can be changed only very slowly, changes in
the environment have quick and dramatic effects”.36 By tearing down
the dirty, overcrowded slums and replacing them with hard, angular,
orderly and uniform tower blocks, the government presumably hoped for
a corresponding change in the population to result. As it is, municipal
modernism’s behaviouralist dreams failed, just as the Ludovico technique
fails. The human condition is ultimately more powerful, Burgess shows
us, than the techniques used to curb it, even if the expression of that
humanity is limited to violence and criminality.
Skinner’s own use of the term “environment” is also purely socio-
logical. His consideration of matters relating to the built environment
is, on the rare occasions when he expresses it, naïve at best. “Housing
is a matter not only of buildings and cities but of how people live”,
he writes in Beyond Freedom and Dignity; “overcrowding can only be
corrected by inducing people not to crowd”.37 Burgess’ association of
tower blocks with social engineering does not derive entirely from B.F.
Skinner then, but with the wider behaviouralist background against which
Burgess reads him. In 1985, for example, Burgess links Skinner back to
the Soviet behaviouralist Pavlov, and Pavlov himself to the Communist
Party and Lenin who “gave orders that [he] should be lodged in capi-
talist luxury, fed with special rations, and that every possibly technical
facility should be granted the master, so that he could devise ways of
manufacturing Soviet Man”.38 Flatblock 18A has a definite Soviet flavour,
while the youth of the novel also appear to be an uncanny fusion between
Russian stilyagi (or “style boys”39 ) and British hooligans. Nadsat is
largely Russian-based and Alex’s record collection touts Russian-sounding
band names: “SOUTH 4, METRO CORSKOL BLUE DIVISION, THE
BOYS OF ALPHA”.40 Burgess himself visited the Soviet Union, specifi-
cally Leningrad, in 1961, shortly before composing the novel. In writing
about his experience for The Listener, he celebrated the Soviet people as
172 J. DARLINGTON
“human beings at their most human; or, to put it another way, at their
most inefficient”.41 Instead of the “frightening steel-and-stone image of
the Orwellian future”42 that he had expected, he found a landscape of
faded tower blocks and jaded people. Lenin’s dreams of a new Soviet Man
had been undermined by the stubbornness of human nature. Burgess had
no doubt that the dreams of town planners, behaviouralists and other
social engineers leading the “scientific revolution” in Britain would meet
with a similar end.
The other great influence on Burgess’ thinking about modernist archi-
tecture was the movie Metropolis (1927). Burgess watched the film in
the cinema as a youth and its influence remained within him, deeply
and profoundly marking his psyche: “I can never free myself from
Metropolis ”,43 he would later write. He would see in the redesigned,
modernist British Library a “great monolith of a monument”44 built
on the model of Metropolis. The landscape of A Clockwork Orange
is the same, with Alex’s droogs first clashing with Billy Boy beneath
the looming “Municipal Power Plant”45 before escaping between flat-
blocks like “the feet of two terrific and very enormous mountains”.46
Modernism is alive and terrifying, not so much inhuman as anti-human.
Burgess’ rendering of it, through Alex’s nadsat, is the linguistic equiv-
alent of German expressionism; a combination, as Burgess describes, is
of “symbolism, song, chant, stylised movement [and] décor” in order to
“thud home a thesis”.47 Notably, it is not a fascist model of totalitarianism
that Metropolis depicts, but rather an “American rationalism, Taylorism
if you like, a world away from the Teutonic dreams of Hitler”.48 Both
B.F. Skinner and Pavlov both depict themselves as pure rationalists,
above ideology, while Lenin admired F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific
Management (1911), the foundational text of management theory, just as
much as Henry Ford and other American capitalists did. The subjection of
messy human life to rational principles and order is a universal longing,
Burgess suggests, which can be driven just as much by the demands of
capitalist efficiency as socialist order. The individual is caged by both.
It is the individual that matters to Burgess, and the Dionysian will that
drives the individual both to create and to destroy.49 It is this duality, he
believes, that makes us human. In his only essay specifically engaging with
architecture, Burgess celebrates the work of Gaudi as an embodiment of
the human struggle against rational order.
Gaudi was, I think, obsessed with a dilemma which no longer touches the
designers of office-blocks and residential highrises. The dilemma is how to
reconcile the curvilinear with the rectilinear. Or, putting it another way,
how to make a building seem more than a submission to the geometrical
datum of length, breadth and height.50
The dilemma of “squaring the circle”, Burgess knows, was one that
obsessed all of the great architectural geniuses of the past, from the anony-
mous designers of Gothic cathedrals to the renaissance artists Leonardo,
Michelangelo and Brunelleschi. Mathematically impossible, the search to
square the circle reflected, on a symbolic level, the desire to unify nature,
embodied in the circular, with man’s reason, embodied in the square.51
Only Gaudi seems to have carried this concern into the modern world.
The modernists, by contrast, chose to eliminate the circular and embrace
purely rectilinear, and so purely rational forms. The hospital wing where
Alex undergoes the Ludovico treatment is precisely one of these “very
new buildings” with a “horrible bolshy bare hall” and “a new cold like
sizy smell which gave you a bit of the shivers”.52 There is nothing human
about it. Meanwhile, the only landscapes that do reveal some longing for
the divine are those within Alex’s head itself. Alex’s love of music, his
“only redeeming characteristic”53 according to Gengaro, carries him up,
rising “to the top of its biggest highest tower”,54 “a bird of rarest spun
heavenmetal, or silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense
now”.55 He feels himself, filled with the music, locked in a “cage of silk
around my bed”, with the instruments curling “like worms of like plat-
inum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver”.56 Alex’s Dionysian
dreamscapes are Gaudi-esque in their seething organic ornamentation.
Surrounded by and encroached upon by an environment of cold ratio-
nality, straight lines, squares and hardness, Alex’s interior landscape only
becomes more sublime and euphoric in its escapism. The only truly defen-
sible space left in the socially engineered world, Burgess shows us, is the
human imagination.
4 Brutalism and the Location

Scouting of A Clockwork Orange (1971)
By the time Stanley Kubrick came to adapt Burgess’ novel to the screen,
Burgess’ views on modernism had become mainstream. What could have
been seen as a backwards-looking, curmudgeonly view in the early 1960s,
174 J. DARLINGTON
while slum clearing was still popular, had been proven to be farsighted
by 1970. The municipal modernism of tower blocks, social housing
and government bureaucracy all carried the whiff of failure and decline.
Economic stagnation, widespread political discontent and recurrent crime
waves were the markers of inner-city life in the 1970s.
As the movie moved into full-scale preproduction, a huge range of

possible locations presented themselves. The film was one of Kubrick’s
quickest to make, with shooting taking place between September of 1970
and March 1971, with the whole process, from start to finish, taking
“little more than two years from inception to completion – a feat Kubrick
would never manage to repeat again”.57 The ready availability of locations
no doubt helped. Modernist architecture, once a high-brow affair, had
become the default setting for most municipal architecture projects across
Britain, America and Europe. Le Corbusier’s 1920s vision of “machines
for living”,58 a vision that had aimed only to produce “a few splendid
edifices at the highest level of modernism, where the rules of mathematics
will reign”,59 had now metastasised. The British contingent of the new
modernism was known as the brutalists. The brutality of their designs, of
which they were only too proud, boasted of a total subjection of aesthetics
in favour of a concern for “the way buildings worked and their place in
the social and cultural landscape”.60 The social role of the building, its
behaviouralist function, was of sole interest to the brutalists. Brutalist
aesthetics, meanwhile, when they weren’t merely a by-product of social
schemes, were a celebration of raw concrete, bare metal and the straight
line.
Going through the location scout’s slides at the Kubrick archive,
Kubrick’s obsession with municipal modernism, and particularly its more
aggressive brutalist embodiment, is plain to see. On a mundane level,
he sought out office blocks. Spaces without foliage that demonstrated a
wearying repetition of banality (Fig. 13a, b, c).
Ultimately even these shots were too tame for the final movie, although
a clear image of what Kubrick was seeking reveals itself in them. Bureau-
cracy, stripped of imagination, boxed in by its own smallness. One
particular office was of key concern to Kubrick, with second and third
shoots taking place at it (Fig. 14a, b).
The archive holds numerous variations on these shots. The massive
concrete blocks, all five of them identical, repeating themselves out of the
office window over the shoulder of the workers, present an unmistakable
a b c
Fig. 13 Location research slides from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick

Archive. With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros. And University of
the Arts London
a b
Fig. 14 Location research slides, Stanley Kubrick Archive. With thanks to SK

Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros. And University of the Arts London
visual image. Whoever is in this office is fully within this system. Perhaps it
is the prison governor, who seems at times weighed upon by the burden
of the state around him, or perhaps it’s the social worker who takes a
perverse pleasure in his role? Perhaps it is the office of the politician or
the Ludovico scientists for whom the mindless repetition of uniformity
is a high moral imperative? Whatever the final intention was for these
offices, the architecture is the key signifier within the scene. Kubrick liked
to use visual allegories, believing them to attract “something in the human
personality which resents things that are clear”.61 The blocks here are
striking, their meaning clear but not didactic. If anything, they simply
weren’t otherworldly enough.
A Clockwork Orange is, after all, speculative fiction. Its society may
have borne much in common with Britain in the 1970s, but it is also an
exaggerated rendering: a “corrupt, totalitarian society”62 without hope.
The rhythm of the film, as Samuels writes, “takes its cue from the racing
176 J. DARLINGTON
pulse”,63 and so Kubrick must deal in extreme images, images that push
the viewer beyond their everyday mundanities to a newer, more brutal
level of existence. In searching for this, the location scout amassed a large
array of images containing brutalist architecture pushed to the level of
abstraction (Fig. 15a, b, c).
A staircase at Wembley stadium, a set of exhaust pipes and a shot of
Brunel University pushed beyond close-up. These all provide images of
strange, otherworldly architecture. Heavy concrete twisted into shapes
that, on first viewing, either serve no function or perform strange roles
known only to the architects themselves. They are science-fictional, in the
sense that they awaken our speculation. Like many of the shots that made
it into the final film, including the shot of Brunel shown above, they push
the alienated qualities of brutalist architecture to truly alien levels.
Notably, another shot of Brunel, one that used the construction work
being undertaken opposite as a visual signifier for urban decay, was
rejected in favour of the pure, hard, implacable shot (Fig. 16).
Where decay and destruction might be pertinent in Flatblock 18A,
where the subjects of modernist social engineering are to live, the build-
ings that house the engineers themselves are to be pristine and orderly.
The buildings are to be as rigid and inhuman as the people that inhabit
them. Subject only to ideology and not to human feeling. They are,
therefore, abstract, or bordering on the abstract; the pure and rigid lines
of rational thought are unencumbered by organic life in all its curvi-
linear softness and mess. The “excess” of the shot, as Connelly argues,
“entails a psychical force on our viewership”.64 The Ludovico scien-
tists are more thought than human. Kubrick reflects this visually, by
a b c

Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros. and University of the Arts London
Fig. 16 Location
research slides, Stanley
Kubrick Archive. With
thanks to SK Film
Archive LLC, Warner
Bros. and University of
the Arts London
pushing brutalism beyond concrete into an abstract transcendence of

pure, screen-overflowing all-pervading concreteness.
The same push towards abstraction can be found in the location
scouting for HOME. It is clear from the start that Kubrick had no inten-
tion of recreating Burgess’ urban geography when it came to bolshy
lewdies and their starry domies. The “cottage” described in the novel
was always going to be modernist. Initial location shots suggest a far
more suburban image of 1960s domesticity than emerges in the final film,
however (Fig. 17a, b).
Here, modernism is tempered by community gardens and greenery.
The spaces are, like the flatblocks, still soulless, but they are soulless in a
cosy, suburban manner. These are, in fact, social housing developments
build on Oscar Newman’s ideal model. Their smaller density and the
a b

178 J. DARLINGTON
inclusion of green space encourages the “natural surveillance” at the heart

of the defensible space concept. These locations are eminently defensible.
This may be why Kubrick abandoned them in favour of a remote house,
as, despite their uncanny domesticity, the geography of these spaces would
make a loud attack almost impossible. One feels the suburbanite inhabi-
tants of such a neighbourhood would have called the police the second
Alex and his droogs stepped off the footpath.
Closer to the final rendering of HOME is another pair of modernist
homes conveniently set back within wooded areas (Fig. 18a, b).
Lit properly, it is likely that these buildings would both incite the unset-
tling, vulnerable feeling prompted by the final shot in the movie (the
shot seen above). The predominance of glass emphasises this vulnerability
while the modernist squareness of the architecture keeps the building
recognisably within the cinematic world of A Clockwork Orange. These
spaces feel less defensible, and they also mimic the Ludovico treatment
centre in their cleanliness and order. HOME, it is worth remembering,
is also the site of a social conditioning; that being Alex and the droogs’
violent attack which, as Fiore points out, “programmes his victims along
the lines of his previous life of violence”,65 turning them violent too.
Alex’s attacks, although they might “represent moments of autonomy
from political and legal [coercive] forces”, also “serve to strengthen these
very forces”66 by proving them correct. HOME must, therefore, be an
inverted version of the Ludovico centre. Where the Ludovico treatment
centre is a building that is perfectly defensible, looking like a bunker,
a b

HOME has to be equally pristine but entirely indefensible. The final set
is so filled with windows, mirrors, eggs and other fragile and smashable
objects that its very fragility hums on the screen. It is a strange house in
its final rendering. As we can see from the location shoots that led to it,
this is because it is the endpoint of a process of ever-increasing exagger-
ation and abstraction. Kubrick’s play of spaces, infinitely defensible and
vulnerable, is born from the built environment of modernist Britain itself.
5 Conclusion
A Clockwork Orange, both the movie and the book, utilises architec-
ture and the associations that come with the urban built environment to
convey their core themes. Modernism, in its municipal, institutional and
pop forms, represents an alienated world, a world of threats, where char-
acters circulate in an endless cycle of threatening and being threatened.
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) is a visual manifestation of Oscar
Newman’s ideas about defensible space. It is a paranoid world, where
architecture is either oppressive or else vulnerable. Burgess’ A Clock-
work Orange (1961) depicts the disenfranchised, alienated and decaying
world that Jane Jacobs foresaw. A world where politicians, scientists and
town planners align to impose social engineering schemes that, like the
Ludovico technique, are doomed to cause more problems than they
remedy. By looking at architecture and its role in both the movie and
the film of A Clockwork Orange, it is hoped that we have come to a
better understanding of how these elements contribute meaning to this
important cinematic and literary classic.
Notes
1. Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York:
Vintage, 145.
2. Ibid., 276.
3. Ibid., 241.
4. King, K. (2013) “Jane Jacobs and ‘The Need for Aged Builder’: Neigh-
bourhood History Development Pace and Community Social Relations”,
Urban Studies 50(12): 2407–2424, 2409.
5. Simpson, D. (2016) “Defensible Space as a Crime Preventative Measure”,
in Simpson, D. (ed) The City Between Freedom and Security, Munich:
Birkhäuser, 68.
180 J. DARLINGTON
6. Newman, O. (1971) Creating Defensible Space: Report for the U.S.

Department for Housing and Urban Development, 20.
7. Ibid., 78.
8. Knoblauch, J. (2014) “The Economy of Fear: Oscar Newman Launches
Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1969–97X)”, Architecture
Theory Review 19(3): 336–354, 339.
9. Ibid., 339.
10. Coëgnarts, M. (2019) Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of
Stanley Kubrick, Brookline: Academic Studies Press, 108.
11. Krämer, P. (2011) A Clockwork Orange, London: Palgrave, 28 and
Matthys, W. (2013) Observe All: On the Staging of Fundamental Fantasy,
Jouissance, and Gaze in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, American
Imago 70(2): 225–247, 225.
12. Burgess, A. (2000) A Clockwork Orange, London: Penguin, 15.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 25.
15. Webster, P. (2011) Love and Death in Kubrick, London: McFarland and
Co., 86.
16. Jacobs, 379.
17. Yelling, J. (2000) “The Incidence of Slum Clearance in England and
Wales, 1955–1985”, Urban History 27(2): 234–254, 234.
18. Lessing, D. (1998) Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiog-
raphy, 1949–1962, London: Flamingo, 358.
19. Burgess, A. (1986) Little Wilson and Big God, New York: Wiedenfield and
Nicolson, 19–52.
20. Ibid., 49.
21. Ibid., 19.
22. Burgess, A. (1998) “Farewell (And Hello Again) to Manchester”, in
Burgess, A (ed), One Man’s Chorus, New York: Carroll and Graf, 76.
23. Burgess, A. (1998) “Manchester As Was”, in One Man’s Chorus, New
York: Carroll and Graf, 89.
24. Bullock, G. (1962) “Review”, Birmingham Post, 15 May, 14.
25. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve Had Your Time, New York: Wiedenfield and
Nicolson, 26.
26. Kirby, J. (2015) “A New Gang in Town: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
as Adaptation and Subversion of the 1950s Juvenile Delinquent Cycle”,
Literature/Film Quarterly 43(4): 291–303, 291.
27. Burgess (2000), 25.
28. Burgess, A. (2013) 1985, London: Serpent’s Tail, 14.
29. Burgess (2000), 43.
30. Ibid., 43.
31. Rosenthal, S.S. (2008) “Old Homes, Externalities, and Poor Neighbour-
hoods: A Model of Urban Decline and Renewal”, Journal of Urban
Economics 63: 816–840, 818.
32. Wheatstone, R. (2014) “Chorlton Named Burglary Hotspot of the UK

Following Analysis of Insurance Claim Figures”, Manchester Evening
News, 24 January.
33. Burgess (2000), 26.
34. Burgess, A. (2012) “The Clockwork Condition”, The New Yorker, 4–11
June, 71.
35. Webster, P. (2011), 80.
36. Skinner, B.F. (1973) Beyond Freedom and Dignity, London: Penguin, 24.
37. Ibid., 10.
38. Burgess, A. (2013), 76.
39. Arkell, D. (1972) “Oh My Brothers, He’s a Clever Malchick”, Draft piece
held in International Anthony Burgess Foundation Archive, Manchester,
UK, 2.
40. Burgess (2000), 26.
41. Burgess, A. (1961) “The Human Russians”, The Listener, 28 December,
23.
42. Ibid., 23.
43. Burgess, A. (2018) “A Movie that Changed My Life”, in Carr, W. (ed),
The Ink Trade, Manchester: Carcanet, 117.
44. Burgess, A. (1968) “Why All this Fuss About Libraries?” in Urgent Copy,
New York: Norton, 261.
45. Burgess, A. (2000), 13.
46. Ibid., 15.
47. Burgess, A. (2018), 116.
48. Ibid., 117.
Palgrave, 24.
50. Burgess, A. (1998) The Gaudiness of Gaudi in One Man’s Chorus, New
York: Carroll and Graf, 3.
51. The square is a shape consisting of equal angles and parallel lines, repre-
senting the rational human ideal of orderliness. The circle contains pi, a
number stretching out along a seemingly infinite string of decimal places,
unfathomable to the human mind and so a representation of God’s divine
mystery. The play of shapes and circles therefore represents the human
intellect grappling with God’s mystery on a geometrical level.
52. Burgess, A. (2000), 72.
53. Gengaro, C. (2014) Listening to Stanley Kubrick, London: Rowman and
Littlefield, 119.
54. Burgess, A. (2000), 27.
55. Ibid., 26.
56. Ibid., 27.
57. Webster, P. (2011), 67.
182 J. DARLINGTON
58. Clement, A. (2012) Brutalism: Post-War British Architecture, London:

Crowood, 149.
59. Ibid., 144.
60. Ibid., 33.
61. Walker, A., Taylor, S. and Ruchti, U. (eds) (1999) Stanley Kubrick,
Director: A Visual Analysis, New York: Rev Editions, 38.
62. Hughes, D. (2000) The Complete Kubrick, London: Virgin, 174.
63. Samuels, C.T. (1972) “The Context of A Clockwork Orange”, The
American Scholar 41(3): 439–443, 439.
64. Connelly, T.J. (2019) Cinema of Confinement, Illinois: Northwestern
65. Fiore, P.A. (1973) “Milton and Kubrick: Eden’s Apple or a Clockwork
Orange?”, CEA Critic 35(2): 14–17, 14.
66. Sumner, C. (2012) “Humanist Drama in A Clockwork Orange”, The
Yearbook of English Studies 42: 49–63, 49.
Glazzies Wide Open: Spectral Torture,
Kubrick, and A Clockwork Orange (A Brainie
by Fifteen Thinks)
Murray Pomerance
M. Pomerance (B)
Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: murraypomerance@hotmail.com
RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_9
184 M. POMERANCE
1
A foregone conclusion for those who watch narrative cinema is that when
they see a character looking at something (typically, looking out of frame),
and then see what is (intended to be taken as) the thing being looked at,
they are looking at this thing along with the character. Along with: at
the same instant, from the same point, inside the same body or very near
it, with the same basic attitude. Moreover, not only are the viewers in
the audience looking at this thing along with the character, the character
is looking at this thing along with the audience. This of course presumes
that not only the subject on view but also its aspect is available for looking.
The diegetic looker sees not just the lady sitting opposite him taking tea
but also, from this delicious position, the creases in her garment, the glow
of her pearls, and the soft radiance of her neck where the pearls hang, and
we do, too (because of the cinematographer’s framing and lighting). Let’s
argue: our seeing engenders the character’s seeing. Our eyes open the
character’s eyes. Not just the lady taking tea—lady + pearls + garment +
tea—but the specific and telling details that would help sort this lady out
from all ladies everywhere taking tea all the time.
2
It is technically possible for a film-maker to guide the viewer in the
theater toward a very specific sighting, in that way implying that the
character being sided with in this moment of looking is having the
same view. A textbook example of optical guidance can be found in the
Gallery sequence of Vertigo (1958), where Hitchcock literally uses careful
framing, zooming in, and precisely calculated cutaways to the gazing face
of James Stewart to suggest not only that he is noting Madeleine sitting
on a bench with a bouquet at her side and gazing up at a portrait but
exactly what he is noting of that woman, that bench, that bouquet, and
that portrait. Thus, also what the woman is noting in the portrait she
sees. Not only is Scottie (Stewart) being bound to the audience gaze, so
is Madeleine (Kim Novak), since he notes all the “details” revealed to us
as being noted by him not willy-nilly but because he is affiliating with her
gaze and believing that they are the details being noted by her. To ice the
cake, in the portrait frame is a painting of a woman also using her eyes to
gaze, but her subject is not given to us (as with the Mona Lisa).
When one character (A) watches another character (B) watching and
sees what she sees in the way that she sees it, and when we are given to
do the same, we are being bonded to (A), and more than the two of us
(the viewer and [A]) looking at just the same object (in this case, [B] on
GLAZZIES WIDE OPEN: SPECTRAL TORTURE, KUBRICK … 185
the bench) we see with a kind of emphasis or penetration what (B) sees
in her gaze. Watching film, we examine the way film characters do.
3
One can forthrightly display characters using their optical powers to indi-
cate fascination, special intrigue, courtesy, or wonder. Prof. Barnhardt
(Sam Jaffe) meeting Klaatu (Michael Rennie) in The Day the Earth Stood
Still (1951). Little Elliott (Henry Thomas) when first he sees E.T. We see
eyes looking in love (Laurence Olivier seeing Merle Oberon in Wuthering
Heights [1939]); cupidinous eyes (Geoffrey Rush’s in confrontation with
Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
[2003]); horrified eyes (Matthew McConaughey anticipating a torpedo in
U-571 [2000]); conniving eyes (Joan Crawford looking at Jack Palance in
Sudden Fear [1952]). The open-eyed character shot is helpful for selling
performers, too, since particular (and particularly appealing) radiance can
be shown (having been lit to be shown) and eye color can be matched by
clothing or scenery so as to show off very strikingly. There are both narra-
tive and extra-narrative functions, then, always set up so that the viewer
can leap in and imitate, if imitation is desired. And the viewer can imitate
not only the character looking but the way of that looking, the anger, the
zeal, the frustration, and the uncomprehending curiosity.
4
And then there are character moments when to the observant viewer it
seems the person on display doesn’t really watch the world but intuits,
calculates, concludes, or daydreams, or simply uses another sense for
approximating reality. Eyes open, not really looking. In his study in The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Dr. Grogan (Leo McKern) sniffing
his guest, sniffing the truth of his situation through a bulbous and queru-
lous nose. He doesn’t seem to notice things with his huge eyes. We,
however, use our eyes for noticing all this, since with cinema our canny
viewer’s nose is formally out of the picture. In The King (2019), Prince
Hal (Timothée Chalamet) is anointed King of England in a process
that cloaks him off sensorially: he doesn’t seem to see any of the offi-
cials hovering around and administering the ceremony. Or Kane himself
(Orson Welles) at Xanadu: his grand home, not a place where he actually
stands around looking at anything the way we do.
5
With one more tiny step, we will be ready for A Clockwork Orange
(1971), the subject of my own viddy. This would be the recognition of a
186 M. POMERANCE
twofold truth: that eye use in cinema almost always, if it is made distinc-
tive, signs a progression in the action, moves things “forward,” helps
“unfold” what is happening. Seeing as revealing, understanding, learning,
accepting, acknowledging. Yet, too, all the seeing onscreen is meant to
stimulate our own seeing of all this seeing in such a way that we find ulti-
mate benefit in sight. Seeing is good. We watch the screen because it is
pleasant to do so. We gain a pleasure in the view, in the manipulation of
subject matter for our consideration, in light moving onscreen. The movie
is not treated as though it provokes pain, wounds the personality or the
sensibility, or in some way subverts logic and orientation: the movie is not
a torture, really, for those who watch it. One can be offended, turned off,
or repulsed, but all these reactions are experienced in robust good health.
What we see onscreen is beneficial to see (even when it is configured to
seem hideous or grotesque); beneficial in the seeing. And seeing of what
is there to be seen not only tickles but also leads. We are led by the eye.
6
Needless to elaborate, when we watch cinema we apprehend what we see,
take it in, filter it, digest it, incorporate what is relevant into our schema.
This, even if all that is available to sight is fictional claptrap: in it goes, to
be understood and undertaken. One could go so far as to say that movies
are educational.
7
Now, by roundabout roundies, to the interesting, indeed supreme
problem confronting Stanley Kubrick as he commits Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange to film:
The easy part for him—Kubrick has a brilliant vision, but he also knows
what it is to write—is rendering events Burgess has elaborated textually in
a way that will be cinematically logical, scene by scene. The mind moves
from vision to vision in a different dance than moving from phrase to
phrase. As dramatization, with the help of a good script (by Kubrick),
adequate performers (Malcolm McDowell among numerous others), and
a competent lighting cameraman (John Alcott), one can do a very pass-
able job unstressfully. To a mind like Kubrick’s, eager always to explore
and apprehend, it would be interesting that in its essence the futurist
novel is about education: education used under the aegis of the state in
order to render a good for the people at large out of material that is
threatening, even hostile or evil. It is too easy to neglect today the peculiar
and intensive traumas a person in Burgess’s generation would have expe-
rienced. Anyone of his age in England—he was born in 1917—would
have lived and, somewhat unhappily, served through the Blitz and the
long postwar days grown to years of saddening deprivation, struggle, and
fear, and in confrontation with a not at all fully satisfying Labor govern-
ment sometimes lethargic in addressing public needs, sometimes bullyish,
sometimes apparently incompetent, but always in general there and domi-
nating civilian life. Everyone agreed the formation of the NHS in 1949
was a miracle, but miracles don’t tumble one after another.
One needn’t conceive A Clockwork Orange as an allegory of postwar
life in Britain to see that the author would have been influenced by that
life if only because perforce he was living it. The people were protected
from Labor’s straw man, the dominating, brutal, finally alien capitalists
sucking away the mead of British workers, yet the government bulwark
in its way constituted a dominating, brutal, and alien enemy, too. When
Labor was defeated and Churchill came back in 1951 this became all too
true, with social control steadily, grittily aimed at—putatively—still more
dominating, brutal, alien enemies except now the brutals were the slaves
in the housing estates—Burgess’s droogs, enemies, by the late years of the
1950s, of the meritocrats.1
This was the era of urban reconstruction, Coventry leading the way,
with city centers replaced by purportedly wonderful if cramped new tracts
in which everyone could have a square foot of lawn. A Clockwork Orange
was published as the new estates began to fill up, in 1962, only eight
years after meat rationing had been taken off the British table. What is
crucial in the book—and Kubrick saw that this had to be preserved at all
costs—was the depiction of a wanton discomfort, malevolent hatred, and
reasonless violence described in so barefaced a way that no one could
mistake it for anything sanguine. This syndrome was to be corralled,
curbed, and methodically restructured into a “proper” pacific attitude
from which animal feeling had been systematically leeched. Education,
wailing out of Rousseau. (After the war, in the Far East, Burgess main-
tained a serious interest in education.) The flavor of the book evinces an
attitude to the public schools that makes Orwell’s scathing “Such, Such
Were the Joys…”2 seem beatific.
If he was not exactly media-savvy, as we might call someone today,
Burgess was aware of what media could do to influence the psychology,
and in this he was somewhat prescient, since the Blake scholar-become-
media guru Marshall McLuhan didn’t publish Understanding Media, the
book that opened the door, until two years later. The possibility is cannily
imagined in A Clockwork Orange of the fertility dance that in the 1970s
188 M. POMERANCE
was called “using media in education,” very popular in North America.

This was a craven enough practice that took interest in media mate-
rials not for what they were—their history, their way of thinking—but
for their illustrative ability, their wondrous capacity to replace conver-
sation. For example, Frederick Wiseman’s astonishing and cutting High
School (1968) could be used not for teaching about what a documentary
form can do, or what Wiseman’s vision could show and not show, but
for replacing a quick lecture on socialization in the educational system.
Movie as truth. For his part, Burgess wanted to explore fictionally what
the screen image could do as an agency of brainwashing, a term coined
by Edgar Schein in a 1961 study of American soldiers in Korea (and
played up a year later in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candi-
date, which was itself based on the John Condon novel of 1959—a source
that may have inspired Schein). Brainwashing as education; education as
brainwashing.
Schein’s model, understood implicitly by Burgess, called for three
phases: unfreezing, introduction of the new idea, then refreezing.
Refreezing would clearly involve modified social context, “new” friends
with new ideas, adjusting one’s “renovated” self to the social world. And
the implantation of the seed was similarly straightforward once a deep
enough furrow had been dug in the candidate. As an educational model,
Schein’s theory of brainwashing is most helpful in showing us how the
teaching process and its solidification into practice can rest very much on
something with a far less salutary appearance, namely, “undoing” the way
a person already understands the world in order to make room for the
novel vision.
To “cure” the beastly and sociopathic droogs, as Burgess had it, the
State would subject them to a mechanical process—Kafka’s inscribing
Machine, that worked “without the slightest audible hum,” here the
Ludovico Technique—that would comfortably resettle a criminal person-
ality into a socially appropriate set of relations, after calmly and patiently
inputting a fresh approach to life, but all this only after prying open
the recalcitrant consciousness—a consciousness, that is, always already
presumed to be recalcitrant; after displacing, even erasing a self deemed
impossibly inappropriate in all situations; after jogging the mind by literal
brain-shaking or brain-traumatizing inputs. Make a person feel excruci-
ating pain when he sees something he always thought was wonderful. Kill
the wonderful, and kill the wonder.
8
Burgess’s brainwasher has a name that rings with the scientific. Not merely
a working through or an operation upon but a cold and objective tech-
nique, facilitated by the specific and precise intermeshing of intricate parts
thrown into motion seriatim. Something happens, and concomitantly
something else happens definitively. In seeing or with Kubrick hearing
the word “Ludovico,” we are to envision a brilliant inventor somewhere
east of the Channel, surely not far from the Iron Curtain, in Kafka “the
Commandant,” no longer present and omnipotent in his vacuity. The
creator who made a universe and then vanished, so that one is forced
always to speak of him without presence, in fact in the past tense. (Every
Institute is named for somebody, after all.) As the Ludovico business
was done in the past, it stands upon an embedding, it has bona fides.
Perfect is the Ludovico Technique as an entry point for Kubrick, himself
a master creator who vanishes when his work is done, an artist always to
be addressed historically. With cinema he has another machine of intri-
cate and intermeshed parts, parts that go into motion one after another,
indeed parts that put before the viewer a chain of images, one frame after
another, blurring the disjunctions.
The trouble for Kubrick, however, master of the cinematic image as we
may reasonably think him, is that in his rendition of Alex’s (McDowell)
brainwashing one single feature of the cinematic experience—experi-
ence is greater than images—is brought into jeopardy, is, in effect, itself
“washed out” of the “idea” of going to the movies. And this is the very
pleasure of the eye that I addressed earlier, the exciting joy of seeing
the image. There must be a clearly photographed and powerfully chore-
ographed sequence in the film where the Ludovico Technique is shown
as the essential part of the narrative that it is, an evacuator.
9
Alex will have a Violent Urge, the bashjoy as we might think it (brutally
mocking up a non-Slavic Nadsat)—profoundly erotic and profoundly
against the received public grain—subtracted from his consciousness.
Shinyminus. He will lose the ability to conceive of certain actions (you
and I, dear reader, would so very properly call them ugly) in which he had
learned, quite well, to take the deepest pleasure, to crave as yumtwiddle;
and will then take to heart the at first peculiar suggestion (the retraining)
that these actions and others like them are, of all possibilities, bitter to
the end. A similar fate was described in 1949 by Orwell, who proposed
as part of his fictional 1984 a language called Newspeak:
190 M. POMERANCE
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression

for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc,
but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended
that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak
forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the prin-
ciples of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought
is dependent on words.3
This dependency of thought upon words was fraught in itself, thought

Orwell, who gave rather clear instruction for the improved use of English
in his celebrated “Politics and the English Language” (1946):
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you
want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt
about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think
of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start,
and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect
will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or
even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words
as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through
pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose—not simply accept—the
phrases that will best cover the meaning.4
Well, Orwell that goofbluddy! Watching his movie screen, his because
it is the screen before which he has been placed and basically immobi-
lized, Alex will be “taught” to deny what we outsiders would call negative
thoughts, just as, watching all this happening to him, and by virtue of that
watching being compelled occasionally to share his view of the screen,
we are being “taught” to find what he is looking at, and even our very
looking, horrible. The hunger to see, that brought us to cinema, is now
turned back on us. Do we perhaps come to have a negative view of forced
education just as Alex learns a negative view of his yummytwiddles?
10
Because—there is no mistaking it—what we are going to see when we
watch the transformation, that Kubrick has labored to show us, is, to put
it mildly, nauseating. And this vision, a chain of disturbances punctuated
by piercing jolts of anguish for us, also educates, make no mistake. We are
educated watching A Clockwork Orange, and, as whispers our very moral-
istic voice of self-awareness and self-protectivity in a universe invoking and
meriting paranoia, we benefit from the experience. Disgusting as it may
be, we are better afterward. Watching the film, would we prefer to argue
that the experience of opening our eyes to it was poison? This fabulous
Institute, with all its prettily-attired staff, this Kubrickio, and its gleamy
hypodermics: must it not serve some social benefit, after all?
11
Alex’s physical immobilization in his cinema—he reincarnates Ludwig
II of Bavaria, who, having paid for them, was treated to performances
of Wagner’s Ring cycle in a special theater with only one seat—is part
of the “very simple but very drastic” Ludovico Technique. “The ques-
tion is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness
comes from within”5 Ah, but it is the “within” that needs address—read:
correction, improvement, cleansing, even purification. One must find an
access port, a way to crawl in and worm oneself to the heart of someone
else’s being. First comes—and we will be disarmed (disabled) by Burgess’s
exquisite use of the exquisitely polite—the drug injection to drain away
some consciousness, soften Alex’s resistance army:
“Don’t fight against it, please. There’s no point in your fighting. You can’t
get the better of us.”
“Grahzny bratchnies,” I said, like sniveling.… I didn’t understand all
these slovos.6
The author uses his character’s recounting—confession of a victim of

the system, in its way very like Marco Polo’s diary, written from prison—
to give a quite meticulous stipulation of the process:
I had truly done my best morning and afternoon to play it their way and
sit like a horrorshow smiling cooperative malchick in their chair of torture
while they flashed nasty bits of ultra-violence on the screen, my glazzies
clipped open to viddy all, my plott and rookers and nogas fixed to the chair
so I could not get away. What I was being made to viddy now was not
really a veshch I would have thought to be too bad before, it being only
three or four malchicks crasting in a shop and filling their carmans with
cutter.7
And of a later “putting-up” session:
Now this time, O my brothers, I was not only very sick but very puzzled.
There it was again, all the old ultra-violence and vecks with their gullivers
smashed and torn krovvy-dripping ptitsas creeching for mercy, the like
192 M. POMERANCE
private and individual fillying and nastiness. Then there were the prison-
camps and the Jews and the grey like foreign streets full of tanks and
uniforms and vecks going down in withering rifle-fire, this being the public
side of it. And this time I could blame nothing for me feeling sick and
thirsty and full of aches except what I was forced to viddy, my glazzies
still being clipped open and my nogas and plot fixed to the chair … this
Ludovico stuff was like a vaccination.8
And then of a finale—because we must be given our own release,

of course—when they have broken the camel’s back by letting old
Ludwig van B. accompany the Nuremberg Rally, a sin of the greatest
magnitude for Alex as, had he not invented it himself, it would have
been for Kubrick: bad musical scoring. Now the boy explodes in pain and
defeat, bleating like a pokapiggy. Burgess is here totally outdone by the
film, since his verbschmearing is, if anything, civil and courteous, rather
shockingly under control:
“You needn’t take it any further sir.” I’d changed my tune a malenky bit
in my cunning way. “You’ve proved to me that all this dratsing and ultra-
violence and killing is wrong wrong and terribly wrong. I’ve learned my
lesson, sirs. I see now what I’ve never seen before. I’m cured, praise God.”
And I raised my glazzies in a like holy way to the ceiling. But both these
doctors shook their gullivers like sadly and Dr Brodsky said:
“You’re not cured yet. There’s still a lot to be done. Only when your
body reacts promptly and violently to violence, as to a snake, without
further help from us, without medication, only then----”9
Raised my glazzies in like a holy way, indeed.

To simplify the Technique, then, because it’s been around foreveran-
ever, Kubrick contrives that we should witness: (a) bumlocky: candidate
affixed to a seated position, taken beyond comfort into plot seizure,
(b) strapgrabs: his moving in any way, or leaving, made impossible, (c)
glazzyfingers: his eyes in some magical way “clipped” open so that closing
the lids for either avoidance or blinking is out of the question, and (d)
candypomp: a predetermined series of images made not only accessible
but also mandatory feed. This predetermined series—important: not only
the images as selected but also the images as temporally sequenced—will
function for Kubrick as a small film-within-the-film, and we will have
the “pleasure” of joining Alex to watch it (also strapgrabbed), intermit-
tently cutting back to his face with those “glazzies still being clipped
open” and a great deal of moistening being administered by an aide.

(See below.) The eye becomes something of a meta-metaphorical window,
not to the soul but to the subject’s “goodness,” whatever that might or
might not be. And once we get inside—Kubrick’s Ludovico predicts our
arrival—what do we come upon in the In? That Cyclops eye imagined by
Artaud, “the inner eye of the mind”10 ? Images of horror to be digested
through the hungry apertures—the goose overfed—thus feeding, swelling
the liver of, the appetite for goodness. Horroryums, and squishpushing, or,
as Burgess had Alex say it, “sick and thirsty and full of aches.”
12
But:
Are we to imagine Stanley Kubrick innocent of the thought that
in making a movie of Clockwork, in doing the Ludovico scene, he
would himself be using a process with distinctive mechanical features
for showing and commenting upon a process with distinctive mechanical
features? Jean-Louis Comolli finds good reason to invoke a commentary
by Marcelin Pleynet:
Have you noticed how all the many possible discourses on the cinema
assume the a priori existence of a non-signifying apparatus/producer of
images which gives impartial service in any situation, to the left and to the
right? Before thinking about their “militant role” would film-makers not
be well advised to think about the ideology produced by the apparatus
(the camera) which defines the cinema?11
Pleynet cautions the film-maker bent on changing the world that

the bourgeois camera has changed it already. And Comolli will work
to take Pleynet to task, arguing that although there is ideology aplenty
involved in cinematic work, it is hardly the camera, as apparatus, that
bears prime responsibility. Not the thing but the thingamabobbers. For
Kubrick’s Ludovico sequence, the “camera” is replaced by the “pro-
jector,” a matching unspooler with a similar intermittent,12 in short a
matching “machine.” Will it be because of the machine not the machiners
that Alex’s disturbed attitude is revoked and refreshed anew? The body of
Alex will be submitted to a machine process, in this reflection of Kafka.
But there shines a clue in Kubrick’s special arrangement that Alex go
hogwild when he hears the Ludwig. Like any good musician the boy
reveres Beethoven, esteems, and swoons to every note in every bar. The
addition of “Alle Menschen” to imagery – in this particular case the
194 M. POMERANCE
Nuremberg imagery—produces, Kubrick (a musician himself) knows well,

an effect that transcends the mechanical. The transcendence steps ahead
of the Ludovico, at least for Kubrick. Transcendence as transformation.
Or: let Ludwig do the dirty work, even posthumously. Here is Pascal
Bonitzer stepping away from the technical:
The technician’s work involves Maintaining (a level, or a machine in

working order), gauging, contriving (effects), improving, assuring (conti-
nuity), balancing, etc., in short building up all the subordinate operations
possible without ever, ever TRANSFORMING anything, no matter what.
(297)13
Being transformed instead of being reformed.

13
Alex’s eyes are like a giant’s, bulbous, both ravenous and afraid, both
eager and in flight. One must keep in mind that when this film came
out there were no ways to see it other than in a theater on a big screen,
twenty-five or so feet in height, 1.66 times as wide. The mouth gaped in
a mammoth rictus. McDowell’s blue-gray eyes, visible and alluring within
the United Kingdom only until roughly mid-March 1972 (and in the
USA a little later)—the Warnercolor-processed negatives tended to fade
after several projections, and there would have been at any theater roughly
five per day—were harbingers, but of what, one had to hold the breath
to learn. What is truly bizarre about our Alex is that he seems not to
be holding his. Sade’s obsession with the eye as a site of therapy inflects
Kubrick:
The person that Monsieur Grandjean came to see at Vincennes had taken
the utmost care to wash out his eye daily with the sea-water eyewash that
had been prescribed to him, as well as follow assiduously the injections
of iris powder. The only problem is, he sees no real change in the status
of the eye in question; the opacity remains constantly and absolutely the
same, and although the surgeon assures him that he sees an improvement
there, the patient perceives none whatsoever.14
. A: wash out his eye daily: the persistence, the rhythm, the feeling of
interminability, the cyclicity which itself duplicates that of the finger
slowly rotating around the eye. Kubrick is meticulous in showing the
aide’s (unfeeling) fingers playing around Alex’s face.
. B: the injections of iris powder: for Alex, the injections are drug
administrations as preludes, intended to both soften him and
increase his sensitivity at once.
. C: the opacity remains the same: the shining surface of the eyes
pushing against the surface of our eyes in the theater, watching, and
highlighted so as to gleam. There are specific key light reflections in
each eye. Try to get in; can’t get in; the boy won’t release the valve.
. D: the surgeon assures him: Far more than a surgeon, a torturer we
are not permitted to name as such, an educator, a reformer.
And the spread of the eye, its way of taking over the screen in part
because of the clips keeping it open, themselves shining metallically—
metal at one’s eye!—is from Vertigo, of course, and from Un chien
andalou. The eye that is the world. Glazzienost.
14
And here our Prince of the Kubrickinder tippytoes upon a conundrum.
He is fully committed—here and in all his films—to the cinema as an
optical pleasure, and to the various permutations and combinations of
his audience’s emotional, but finally satisfying, response to the scenes he
stages. At the same time, if he is going to be faithful to Burgess (he surely
wishes to be), he must show us the Ludovico Technique in operation, and
in all its hideous, depraved, malforming glory. This will involve offering
up images most un-pleasing to look at and, indeed, an overall image of the
technique and its effect upon Alex that is painful to receive. More painful
than Alex’s reception? A lovely question, yet moot, since Alex for us is but
a figure and our focus is ourselves. Let us say that at least mentally, and
I think even more, we twitch as he does, and struggle in our bindings.
There can be no doubt the scene is designed for this effect.
One way to mitigate against our pain is to give us such a negative
portrait of Alex (and his droogs) that we will be tickled by his conver-
sion. Every cleansing step, every droogsnort, would bring us closer to a
supreme delight, eclipse at his downfall and rebirth, the way the applica-
tion of stinging hydrogen peroxide to an open wound carries so fulsome a
promise of cure. It would be impossible for Kubrick to avoid this method,
sucked from the published story. And Alex, cast as he was to look pretty,
must absolutely require some very dark choreography. We can watch
because moral alignment with the principles of the Ludovico sequence
is so easy as to be almost natural.
196 M. POMERANCE
Kubrick’s passion goes still deeper, however. Beyond tickling our

hunger to see Alex stained, our hunger to watch, he wants to find a way
to address the horror implicit in that hunger. Screen delight, finally. Alex
will have his eyes fixed open, after all, but we will not. No clipperslips
for us. If our glazzies are “clipped” the clipping will be by virtue of film
clips. The shots intercalated, the jumping vision: we won’t turn away from
it, as though disempowered. Kubrick understood how while it is being
projected cinema can be disempowering to those who find their pleasure
in watching: how appetite, need, orientation, belief, and feeling in general
can be stifled by being fed.15 He must make a really good movie scene
about someone confronted by a really bad movie.
Really bad not just in the character’s debilitated estimation, as the roly-
poly swings on, but for us, too. And he must show us the character,
something of an analog for ourselves, “glued to the screen,” in abject
torture—the more abject the more therapeutic—all the while reassuring
that we are not in danger of having our pleasure converted in the same
way. This is a standard directorial problem and tactic in horror cinema,
where a character must witness the unwitnessable, and we over the
shoulder, while thrilling to witness. But in horror, the viewing character is
always capable of rejecting the vision somehow—turning, escaping—even
if he or she remains “glued.” If escape is possible, we can attribute the
sustenance of viewing position to the character’s will and desire. In Clock-
work Orange, we must witness technically achieved paralysis and discover
a way to make it pleasurable to see.
So pleasurable that when the film is done we do not vomit out our
repulsion but think of the next film to see. Schadenfreuden Pudding: let
Alex have the pain of conversion, but we will not be converted. We must
not be, we should not be.16
15
A number of tactics come to play in the Kubrick “torture” scene, none
of them going against the implications of what is in Burgess yet all of
them working in a purely visual and purely dramaturgical way, in short,
helping the viewer to attain and maintain a peak of visual pleasure even
watching the victimization of this victimizer. It is one thing to revel in
the instrument of torture, as in the Kafka or as in Dreyer’s The Passion of
Joan of Arc (1928), but quite another to see the victim’s eyes wide open
and be swayed ourselves from looking away. The glazzie clips in our case
must be inside the material itself, not adjunct to it.
. First, Alex is fixed into a seat in the center of the first row of a
theater, all of which we can witness as the scene opens. Behind him
are ten empty rows, and then at the back a few rows of white-clad
medical staff, there for instructional observation themselves. He is
going to be staring at the screen, they are going to be staring at him
staring, but from behind, as in Plato’s powerful beam that comes
past unkenning observers from behind them—“For these prisoners
the truth would be no more than the shadows of objects” (Republic
VII: 515); and in this scene there is more glaring and less revealing
presence than that of the “light of truth” which blazes into the
camera from the Ludovico projection booth. Alex has been awarded
what under other circumstances could be regarded as “the best seat
in the house,” definitely an unobstructed view of the screen, and so
the “viddy” experience will be for him complete, unredacted, unin-
terrupted, pure. Also, in our initial glance we detect his presence
in this special seat by calculating from a vision of his feet, since the
attendant strapping him in stands in front of Alex, bent over, and
utterly obscures his body. The strapping-in will not be part of the
show, then, but the strapped-in form will be. Alex looks very much
like a package ready for the mail, with a head sticking out. (Standard
movie capital punishment style.)
. Here, as elsewhere in the film, our protagonist, desperately anti-
social and curmudgeonly brutal, is as placid-looking as an angel, his
long golden tresses drawn from the Age of Myths, his smile never
less than genuine, though he regards conventional social practices
with condescension and loathing. He is a pleasure to look at, and
it is true both that we would not wish to see his gilded beauty
marred and that taking the virginity is our profoundest desire. Yet,
too, there is no hint at this point that anything negative will be done
to his exterior features, this the classy refinement of the process. The
point is to get in by stark contrast, and by careful arrangements for
emphasis. The attendant immediately working with/on him is barely
given a portrait, and the two doctors controlling the scene, sitting at
back, are played to be coldly malevolent, notwithstanding the scien-
tific garble in their conversation. Dr Brodsky is Carl Duering, with
puffy European self-satisfaction, eyes that will not rest from looking
askance, and a voice that seems to have been clipped by shears.
His colleague Dr Branom is Madge Ryan, a prototypical stentorian
schoolmarm, lips sealed in a taut rictus, who has been responsible for
198 M. POMERANCE
injecting Alex with “something like a vitamin”—actually a drug that

will cause paralysis and mortifying panic. One returns to glowing
Alex, sweetly obedient if under constraint.
. The human eye will lose its capacity to form an image if it is not
repeatedly wiped over—made teary—by the blinking eyelids. Some
research in the 1960s by Prof. Simon Ostrach of Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland was dedicated to solving a problem
NASA had discovered among some of its astronauts, who under zero
gravity were mysteriously blacking out. He suggested the astron-
avigators shake their heads once in a while since zero gravity had
stopped their tearing. Here with Alex, the staff at the Ludovico
Institute—an august and hyperformal, architecturally brutalist envi-
ronment in arriving at which the boy is accompanied by no less than
Edward Elgar’s first “Pomp and Circumstance” march—are metic-
ulous, even generous, in attending to his physical needs outside of
the brainwashing itself. Having strapped him in (an astronaut in his
capsule!) the attendant moves beside him and with an eyedropper
applies saline to first one bulb and then the other. The saline causes
the eyes to shine brightly in Kubrick’s portrait light, optimistically,
cleanly. But the attendant makes his moves with the greatest deli-
cacy and gentleness, an emotional redemption for us and a guide to
seeing the entire session as an affectionate form of therapy.
. Although he sits in forced stillness, his “gulliver strapped to a head-
rest,” Kubrick’s portrait shots of Alex concentrate on the expressive
organs of the face, principally the eyes and mouth, and the band
holding the head works graphically as a mere boundary line. He
appears submissive, relaxed, calm, quite as though he is patiently
collaborating in the research, as though in behavior he carries out
the very principles touted in the Ludovico’s promotional comments,
clearly read by us as bogus. Finally after centuries of struggle, author-
ities devised in the lethal injection an execution paradigm that causes
total “cooperation” of the subject before the final coup: very like
this.
. The violent images projected onscreen are not perfectly composed
pictures of discomposed action; they proceed jerkily and are badly
and often incoherently edited and difficult to follow through, except
that in his charming and melodious voice, and entirely amicable
tone, Alex is telling “us” exactly what he sees happening. Caught
in a machine, then, he narrates its movements just as it devours him.
Text has no direct way to manage a juxtaposition like this, even from
the pen of the brilliant Anthony Burgess.
. McDowell is evident from the film’s earliest moments as a gifted
young actor with a powerfully expressive mouth, fulsome lips, and
trained muscular movement of the lower face. During his brain-
washing, we are given to read his emotional reaction to the imagery
directly by the shape he contrives with his mouth. As the scene
begins, the lips are frozen upward in a rigid smile. When it reaches
culmination the shape is elegantly reversed. Alex therefore hands
over the twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy, signaling the dramatic
context of the event we see. Dramatic for Kubrick, but dramatic also
for Alex, now being regaled in a little theater by a “drama” that is
the apex and epitome of his unfreezing, retraining, and refreezing.
Kubrick is managing a tiny homage to Kuleshov as well, since the
glazzie clips and attendant lubrications rationalize the absolute fixa-
tion of the open eyes—the lack of expressive modulation—and only
through the change of mouth shape do we read the entire face.
. Finally, a beautiful little aesthetic effect carefully arranged between
Kubrick, Alcott, and the make-up team and production designers.
The theater itself, with its turgid brown seats, is both depressing
to look at and optically retiring. The projection beam is so strong
as to be neutralized. All of the medical personnel are both dressed
and made up to look cold, neutral, not only unfeeling but also
unthinking, in short unresponsive to animal feeling. The attendant
next to Alex is an epitome of this cold look, and the meter of his
exertions adds to his pure functionality. The films themselves are
not well exposed and are fundamentally colorless (filled with white
coveralls) with the exception of Alex’s “old friend,” the red blood.
But when we cut back to him, we are given a splendid color compo-
sition since even in smallest wisps the pure gold of his hair shines
beneath the turgid straps and most especially since, mechanically
popped open, his glaucque eyes grab and maintain our attention.
His eyes: center of the universe, blue gray as the sea, blue gray as
the receding sky. How serene, how universal, how exciting!
But in a philosophical quip, delivered with the lightness of a clarinet

solo, Alex pronounces upon that blood, by implication upon those eyes
of his and upon color in general, pointing with pricking philosophy to
a serious film-maker and his serious film-maker labors: “It’s funny how
200 M. POMERANCE
the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them
on a screen.” Here we are, then, bleating at our own high moment and
startled by an awareness of the eye-trip in which we ourselves are riding.
Not only the colors but also the actions and the faces and the pauses and
the blood. Film giving our own re-education.
Notes
1. David Kynaston reports a Richard Crossman opinion of the literary hit
of 1957, John Braine’s Room at the Top, with its ruthless post-Kingsley
Amis hero, “lower middle-class, anti-working-class, describing the working
classes as dirty, smelly people, eating fish and chips and favouring the
upper class as people who have tiled bathrooms and beautiful voices.” C.f.
Kynaston, D. (2013) Modernity Britain 1957–1962, London: Bloomsbury,
203. Like Burgess’s Alex not long later, this young fellow was considered
“nauseating”.
2. Orwell, G. (1981) “Such, Such Were the Joys…,” in Orwell, G. (ed.), A
Collection of Essays, Houghton-Mifflin, 1–47.
3. Orwell, G. (1949) 1984. New York: Harcourt, 286 (emphasis added).
4. Orwell, G. (1981) “Politics and the English Language,” in Orwell, G.
(ed.), A Collection of Essays, Houghton-Mifflin, 169,170.
5. Burgess, A. (2019/1962) A Clockwork Orange, New York: W. W. Norton,
93.
6. Ibid., 129 (emphasis added).
7. Ibid., 196 (emphasis added).
8. Ibid., 133.
9. Ibid., 129, 130.
10. Artaud, A. (1958) The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline
Richards. New York: Grove Press, 66.
11. Comolli, J.L. (1990) “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective,
Depth of Field,” trans. Diana Matias, in Browne, N. (ed.), Cahiers
du Cinéma: 1969–1972—The Politics of Representation, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 213–47; originally in Cahiers du cinéma 229
and 230, May–June and July, 1971, 125.
12. Intermittent: the internal mechanism that closes the shutter, grabs the
sprocket hole, advances the film one frame, and opens the shutter again.
13. Bonitzer, P. (1990) “Off-screen Space,” trans. Lindley Hanlon, in
Browne, N. (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1969–1972—The Politics of Repre-
sentation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 291–305; originally
in Cahiers du cinéma 234–235, December 1971, January–February, 1972,
297.
14. Marquis de Sade, D.A.F. (1999) Letter to Monsieur Grandjean, 20
February 1783, in Letters from Prison, trans. R. Seaver. New York: Arcade.
15. An exception to “prove the rule”: in the autumn of 1978, I was in a dark
theater watching a now forgotten French import when I was stabbed in
the back by a Roman centurion’s lance (as it felt). The pain was far more
than totally unendurable. I staggered out, and a few hours later learned
that I had a kidney stone. Nothing less serious, not even a miserable film,
has led me to do a walk-out.
16. The full “pleasure” of Alex’s conversion to normalcy, it should be noted,
was, as it turned out, for British readers only, because the American
publisher, Norton, didn’t think its readers would buy anything but a dark
ending. They cut the final, twenty-first, chapter of Burgess’s manuscript
with the author’s agreement.
20th Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange
and the Cold War
When Burgess Met the Stilyagi on a White
Night: Subcultures, Hegemony
and Resistance in the Soviet Roots
of A Clockwork Orange’s Droogs
Cristian Pasotti
1 Introduction
Dystopic representation and imagery, philosophical and theological reflec-
tions, the picaresque, bildungsroman, satire, black humour, experimental
language and music, are all elements of Anthony Burgess’s novel.
However, despite these remarkable peculiarities, after the release of
Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation in 1971, the focus shifted from the
theme of conditioning1 to the inner violence of juvenile subculture, due
to the “copycat crimes” allegedly inspired by the film and, in general,
to its reception.2 Through Alex and his Droogs’ gang, Burgess summed
up different aspects of youth rebellion and, by avoiding a well-defined
setting, he depicted a kind of “universal revolt” that more specific groups
C. Pasotti (B)
Kultur- Und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät, Universität Luzern, Luzern,
Switzerland
e-mail: Pasotti.ch@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_10
206 C. PASOTTI
could in turn identify with. While Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 transposi-

tion clearly influenced punks and glam rockers,3 the skinhead subcul-
ture represents a further interesting case: according to Stephen Ross,
Anthony Burgess “prophesised” the street gang attitude and the model of
masculinity of this late 60s subculture.4 Moreover, this newborn subcul-
ture (and the look made of boots and braces) influenced the costume
designs of Milena Canonero and, in turn, the skinhead movement found
new vitality: with young skinheads flattered by the attention that someone
was finally paying to them.5
In February 1972, Anthony Burgess wrote a letter to the Los Angeles
Times: defending Stanley Kubrick’s film, he explained that in 1961, while
writing A Clockwork Orange, the British press was talking about the
growing of criminality:
The youth of the late 50’s were restless and naughty, dissatisfied with the
post-war world; violent and destructive, and they (being more conspicuous
than mere old-time crooks and hoods) were what many people meant when
they talked about growing criminality.6
The phenomenon was global and, by mixing local elements with

“global subcultures” (especially Teddy boys and Rockers ) the result
became, for instance, Blusons noirs in France, Nozems in The Nether-
lands, Ducktails in South Africa, Raggares in Scandinavia, Halbstarkers
in German-speaking countries and Stilyagi in the USSR. During a visit
to the USSR, Burgess was struck by the latter and their resemblance to
the English Teddy boys of the 1950s. This made him perceive youth in
revolt (whether violent and destructive or just non-conformist) as a “uni-
versal phenomenon”, and its need for a defined “style of aggression and
dressing up violence”7 —a kind of zeitgeist, to be included in A Clockwork
Orange through an undefined setting and a non-ideologized anti-hero, in
order to preserve the universality itself.
2 Stilyagi: The Origins

During the 1950s, the role of the teenager as a new “economic subject”
became the object of essays like Mark Abrams’ The Teenage Consumer,
while Eric Hobsbawm, in his book The Age of Extremes, described the
socio-economical changing surrounding the youth culture, that became
dominant in the developed market economies, because boys and girls
WHEN BURGESS MET THE STILYAGI ON A WHITE NIGHT … 207
were more and more financially independent than in the past.8 In 1961,
significantly the same year of both Burgess’ trip to USSR (and his
submission of A Clockwork Orange typescript), Tosco R. Fyvel published
The Insecure Offender, the first important comparative analysis of both
global juvenile subcultures and criminality. Fyvel observed how the main
differences between the USSR and the Western world (especially British
and American world) were in the school system9 and in the lack of
a proper teenage culture, because official teenage groups like Pioneers
and Komsomol (political youth movements affiliated to the Communist
Party) were too rigid to reflect the teen’s instinct for natural freedom.10
However, despite the difficulty of using the word “class” outside the
historical context of capitalist society11 Fyvel also noticed that the Soviet
education system created differences in the social scale supporting a
“Soviet middle class”. In this middle class, in turn privileged in terms of
higher education, travels, access to consumer goods and better accommo-
dation12 flourished the Stilyagi subculture, while more lawless hooligans
mostly belonging to the youth well down the social scale.13 It was
the generation that Vladislav Zubok considers the moral heir of Boris
Pasternak,14 by calling them “Zhivago’s Children”.15 One of their most
important representatives was the dissident novelist Vasily Aksyonov,16 a
Stilyaga himself, whose 1961 cult novel Zviozdny Bilet narrates the adven-
tures on the road of Dimka, a teenager fond of jazz, travelling with his
friends from Moscow to Estonia.17
The origins of this subculture are to be found in the anti-
cosmopolitan18 and anti-Semitic campaign that caused the ban of jazz
music in the USSR (because of its Western origins)19 and which mostly
affected Jewish jazzmen also because their strong presence in the scene.20
The ban became official from 1948 when also the use of the word
“dhzaz”21 was forbidden: with the ban, jazz became associated with the
Stilyagi,22 and, in a sense, this situation brought this music genre back
to his subcultural origins. The Stilyagi were originally the privileged chil-
dren of the Soviet elite23 who could afford contacts with the Western
world and its goods (including clothing and records). This was an impor-
tant difference between the Stilyagi and the Teddy Boys, being the latter
rooted in the British working-class (or even Lumpenproletariät ),24 while
they had in common the origin of their name, in both cases owed to the
press. The Stilyagi (meaning “Style Hunters”) proudly adopted the name
they got from the satirical soviet magazine Krokodil (“Crocodile”)25
supporting the Government policy, mostly based on discrediting the
208 C. PASOTTI
movement rather than repressing it. However, while in the magazine they
were constantly mocked (especially for their look or their work refusal),26
a further violent response against the Stilyagi came from the mentioned
Komsomol (the youth division of the USSR Communist Party) whose
attacks against the subculture were not just mediatic (blaming them as
hooligans on their newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda) but also physical.27
Most youthful revolt in the world, until the early ‘60s was an expres-
sion of self-indulgence or criminality rather than idealism or political
commitment and, in a sense, closer to Burgess’s opinion about it,28 and
Alex’s himself when he complains about “nothing to fight against”.29
From this point of view the Stilyagi were not far from that vision30 .
Unlike Aksyonov, the average Stilyagi rarely opposed the system, some-
times supporting it31 or, at least, accepting it despite giving preference
to both Western music and cinema rather than Soviet propaganda.32
Burgess’s perception of the phenomenon in the USSR was heavily influ-
enced by both subcultural violence and consequent moral panic in the
Western world, as violence in their case was only a fringe aspect, and was
merged into the subculture when the style was adopted by less privileged
Soviet youth.33
3 Burgess in the USSR

Before leaving for his trip to Leningrad, Burgess was rather keen on
improving his spoken Russian and admiring the architecture of the former
Empire capital city, being a Russian literature lover who owed it a certain
influence on his work.34 Burgess narrated in Honey for the Bears 35 his
first encounter with the Soviet youth, and he also reflected on an episode
involving the Stilyagi,36 years later:
In January 1969, Anthony Burgess was speaking to a large university audi-

ence in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was telling us how in 1961,
during a visit to Leningrad, he and his wife were startled as they dined in
a restaurant by loud hammering at the door. Having been filled with usual
western propaganda, they immediately had the terrifying thought that the
hammers were after them the capitalist enemy. Like Paul Hussey in Honey
for the Bears , he was reminded of a Biblical phrase: ‘Bring us the strangers,
that we may know them’. In fact, these hard-fisted young toughs, called
Stilyagi, were after different prey. When the Burgesses wanted to leave the
restaurant, the Stilyagi courteously stepped aside, allowed them to pass,
then resumed their hammering. Burgess was struck by the Nabokovian
quality of the incident, the way in which their conduct reflected the ‘chess
mind’: ‘Even lawless violence must follow rules and ritual’.37
By describing this attitude in terms of “rituals”, Burgess recognized a

common trait of all the subcultures in those years38 but, at the same time,
he associated the “lawless violence” (most likely to be seen) in the UK,
to a subculture that originally was not violent. While a more aggressive
attitude became almost the trade mark of the subsequent subcultures in
the USSR,39 the Stilyagi (if we do not count yobs and criminals who just
adopted their aesthetic), were mostly victims of attacks and, sometimes,
they just paid the aggressors back in kind.40
Some elements of both novel and film are undisputedly British or, at
least, Western/European: from the role of the car to the description of
the Korova as a “Milk-Bar”: Richard Hoggart (one of the “Godfathers
of British cultural studies”), in his The Uses of Literacy denounced both
the loss of the working class popular culture and its replacement by mass
culture (then American, while nowadays we would rather refer to glob-
alization41 ).42 However, the Soviet/Russian influence on the setting of
the novel is strong. Burgess described it “as a sort of compound of my
native Manchester, Leningrad and New York”43 : in a sense we are in
a “Middle Earth”, that Burgess ironically emblazed with the newspapers
read by Alex and P.R. Deltoid, where they can spot advertisments for both
consumer goods (“There were more space-trips and bigger stereo TV
screens and offers of free packets of soapflakes in exchange for labels on
soup-tins, amazing offer for one week only”)44 and holidays in Yugoslavia
(“an advert in the gazetta […] a lovely smecking young ptitsa, with
her groodies hanging out to advertise, my brothers, the Glories of the
Jugoslav Beaches”).45 potentially possible in both worlds but more likely
to be western.46
Andrew Biswell has already compared Alex’s house47 with the descrip-
tion of the flat the novelist went to stay in while in Leningrad,48 with
its murals and bas-relief images appearing in both Burgess’ autobiog-
raphy49 and Honey for the Bears .50 In the latter Burgess observed how
the 1930s building was “sorry, stained, peeling, as anything built in
England during that flimsy period”,51 but also the brutalist style in A
Clockwork Orange (novel and film) was another common trait52 of both
the British public housing and Post Stalinist Soviet architecture. Domy,
using a Nadsat word,53 was a serious issue in those years.The Khrushchev
210 C. PASOTTI
Era saw a mass housing programme that allowed millions of Soviet citi-
zens to access separated apartments (otdel’naia kvartira), abandoning the
communal apartments (kommunal’naia kvartira), in which families had
their own rooms but shared bathrooms and kitchens with neighbours,54
sometimes sharing with up to thirty people55 : Alexei’s flat in Honey for the
Bears probably belonged to the latter model, while Alex’s Flatblock 18 is
definitively closer to the new post-war buildings, typical of the skyline of
big Soviet cities, and which might have influenced Burgess.56
Despite probably being influenced by Graham Greene’s characters such
as the Roman Catholic teenage gang leader Pinkie (from Brighton Rock)
or the Wormsley Common Gang (from the short story The Destruc-
tors ),57 by making Alex a fifteen year old gang leader, Burgess definitively
captured the USSR spirit, where teenagers were not the “consumers” of
the Western world and, at the same time, the lack of a proper teenage
culture projected them straight into adulthood. Moreover, Alex’s descrip-
tion of his parents working life, in a society with coercive labour laws, is
more than a clue of a Soviet inspiration:
I heard my papapa grumbling and trumbling and then ittying off to the
dyeworks where he rabbited, […] there being this law for everybody not
a child nor with child nor ill to go out rabbiting. My mum worked at one
of the Statemarts, as they called them, filling up the shelves with tinned
soup and beans and all that cal.58
This scenery is definitively closer to the Soviet Union than anything in

the western world, considering that since early 60s59 job avoidance (in
Russian Tuneyadstvo, literally “parasitism”) used to be a criminal offence
in the USSR. The Stilyagi often called, derogatorily, beloruchki (liter-
ally “white hands”, referring to the job avoidance)60 were sometimes
convicted of it.61 The choice from the Government “monitoring” Alex
at the end of the novel and recruiting violent youth as policemen, was
not that much different from the Soviet strategy against the Stilyagi,
monitoring them, entrusting the “dirty work” to the youth of the
Komsomol.
4 A Matter of Style and Music?

Both clothing and distinctive tastes in music are elements associating Alex
and his Droogs with the Stilyagi, but style was not just a matter of
clothing but other performative acts, including dancing, for both boys
and girls. The influential and iconic look of Stanley Kubrick’s film is
completely different from Alex’s description in the first part of the novel:
The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those days
was a pair of black very tight tights […]. Then we wore waisty jackets
without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (’pletchoes’ we
called them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real shoulders like
that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like
whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a
fork. We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for
kicking.62
This is incredibly similar to the look of the typical Stilyagi 63 who

used to exaggerate wide-shouldered jackets and tight trousers,64 eccentric
designed shirts and ties65 and, if not proper boots, shoes with platform
soles that could weigh up to two and a half kilograms.66 The inspira-
tion came from the last available American films,67 and this youthful and
perception of the American world.68 The passion for jazz was not merely
a question of black or white identity. Firstly, despite being banned due to
its Western origin, Jazz had a long tradition of musicians in the USSR.69
Secondly, many jazz lovers (among them, the famous bard70 Vladimir
Vysotsky) were influenced by the stilyagi without either indentifying with
or adopting the style.71
We can associate this distinctive taste in music (classical for Alex and
jazz for the Stilyagi) to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural
capital:72 that Alex inherited it from his author and the Stilyagi from
the Soviet elite they originally belonged to (and the system they were
supposed to integrate), just like in both the ending of A Clockwork
Orange and Aksyonov’s novel.73 Far from believing any theory about
the employment of Burgess by the Intelligence services,74 it is impos-
sible to ignore how prophetic was the choice of the (gloopy, according to
Alex) name “MELODIA” for the music store where Alex buys his clas-
sical music records.75 In fact, Melodiya is the name of the state-owned
record company of the USSR and its relevant record stores founded
in 1964, ironically famous abroad for the high quality of its classical
music recording and, later on, responsible for the release (if approved)
of western pop and rock music in the country.76 However, while Alex’s
distinction from the masses is easy to manage, the Stilyagi had to cope
212 C. PASOTTI
with the ban on jazz, and after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the lifting
of the ban, the unavailability of Western Music. This situation led to
the invention of an independent technology for copying music, the
homemade gramophone record and the phenomenon named “Dhzaz
na kostiakh” (literally “Jazz on bones”),77 being a black-market distri-
bution of records made from 7-inch cuts of discarded medical X-rays.
The group of beatnik/hipsters that Burgess met in Leningrad might have
been Stilyagi too, even if the novelist did not recognize them78 (prob-
ably mislead by the common perception of a subculture in terms of both
violence and aesthetic). In Honey for the Bears , Paul Hussey, Burgess’
alter-ego, describes their obsession for jazz and the imagined America:
The only dialectic these youngsters wanted was the dialectic of jazz.
[…]
“And how about this?” said Paul loudly, “Isn’t this opium too?”
It was not opium, he was told indignantly. This was proletarian, this
was: music of an enslaved race.
“Enslaved race my bottom”, said Paul rudely “A lot dead-beat, gin-
guzzling reefer-puffing layabouts” […] and commercial like everything
else,” Paul added He was a bit disappointed in these young Russians; he has
expected them to be rebels. But, of course, in a sense they were rebelling,
like all the young people of the world; the trouble was that the language
of rebellion was also, in the USSR, the language of the Establishment”
[…] “Look at your own tradition of Russian art – Tchaikovsky and
Mussorgsky. What about those, eh? Aren’t they better than this tripe?”79
In Burgess’s pessimism about the youth’s attempts to break from the

mainstream lies the paradox of coinciding with Antonio Gramsci’s (Italian
philosopher and one of the main supporters of the USSR in the 20th
century) positions on this struggle:
It implies the active consent of the subordinate group in creating and main-
taining its subordinate status […] In this way, subordinate groups actively
choose from the dominant group’s agenda, maintaining a semblance of
freedom while reinforcing the dominant group’s interest.80
Considering Burgess’s vision of both music and language, on one side,

and his pessimism about youth conformism on the other, it not surprising
that Alexei and his friends (by considering the language of jazz as a
battlefield for the class struggle) ended up indirectly quoting Valentin
Voloshinov, one of the most influential Marxist linguists of the USSR,

who theorized that signs were “an arena of the class struggle.”81
Burgess notoriously disliked both pop and rock music but he appre-
ciated jazz, having also introduced elements of the genre into his own
musical compositions,82 therefore his alter-ego’s harsh comment against
“commercial music” was probably against his hosts’ lack of interest for
classical music. However, Burgess mistakenly used a Western point of view
in judging this passion: while commercial exploitation of jazz was defini-
tively part of the Western establishment, the Soviet Establishment was the
one who offered the Stilyagi nothing more than classical and folk music
forbidding anything else. In terms of non-conformism, Alexei the Soviet
hipster is the next closest thing to Alex the Droog, while Alexei’s distinc-
tive taste for jazz is a perfect equivalent of Alex love for classical music: the
Stilyagi could only find American jazz through smuggling or clandestine
duplication, and their search was neither different nor less distinctive from
Alex’s in the “disc-bootick”, looking for classical record in a store filled
with pop records from singers or band with names, ironically, Russian
(like Johnny Zhivago and Goggle Gogol).
Considering the emergence of music as a “commodity”, it must be
remembered that its subcultural use can lead to a re-appropriation or
subversion of the meanings pre-assigned by the dominant culture.83
However, despite the potential for resistance in subcultural worlds, both
Alex the Droog and the Stilyagi were not attempting to subvert the
system: symbolically, they were rather trying to “drop out” from their
worlds.84
5 Conclusion: Language of the Pagans

In his essay Subkultura, the Russian critic Artemy Troitsky quotes Rock ‘n
Roll, Tom Stoppard’s play set in former Czechoslovakia, where he divides
the two main youth targets of the regime into “heretics” and “pagans”,
the first being the proper dissidents and the latter those who are apolitical
and antisocial, living their life outside the regime.85 Reflecting on which
of the groups is the biggest threat to the authorities in the Eastern Block,
the answer is not (as it might be obvious) the heretics, because “they
speak the same language”, while the Pagans do not.86 The Stilyagi were
definitively Pagans, and A Clockwork Orange, also being a novel about
language (considering style, music and violence as all different languages),
214 C. PASOTTI
slang is naturally a common denominator between both the Droogs and

the Stilyagi.
Burgess first considered using real teenage jargon and collected mate-
rial about it but, knowing the ephemeral nature of a subcultural and a
juvenile language, he opted for the Nadsat , in order to avoid the text
being out of date when the book appeared.87
As he began to study the language, it occurred to him that it might be

possible to write a novel narrated in an invented slang which would be
a hybrid of English and Russian, with elements of Romany, Lancashire
dialect and Cockney rhyming slang. He set about the task of compiling
a modified Russian vocabulary of about 200 words, with the intention of
brainwashing the reader into learning the basic of Russian.88
In the novel, Burgess confirms the basic idea behind Nadsat (“Odd
bits of old rhyming slang, said Dr. Branom, […] A bit of gipsy talk,
too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda Subliminal penetra-
tion”89 ). However, it is never been considered how the Stilyagi’s slang
was perfectly specular to the Nadsat , being described as a mixture of
Russian, Jewish and Jazz Jargon and Russified English words, and the fact
Burgess might have been exposed to it is far from being impossible90 :
while Alex prefers to use “Devotcha” rather than girl, the Stilyagi will
call her “Gerla”. Alex describe clothing as “platties”, while the Stilyagi
are keen in choosing the best “Klous ” (for instance their “trauzera”)91 :
obviously they respectively need “deng” and “monusky” or, maybe to pay
something to “peet” (or “drinkat’ ”) for themselves and, in case, for some
“starry” (or “Oldovy”).92
Revisiting the text through the screenplay that Burgess wrote might
become the basis for the analysis of the novel. He did not simply add
further gruesome details, or trim the controversial 21st Chapter himself,
he also extended the Nadsat and, most important, Burgess completely
changed the origin of the jargon,93 by having the doctor describing it
as: “A kind of gesture of solidarity with the young rebels on the other
side of the Iron Curtain. He uses Slav words. They use Anglo-American
words”.94 It is not by chance that this emerges when the system treats
Alex with Ludovico Technique, with the Ludovico Technique, because
conditioning him against classical music corresponds to an attack against
his distinctive taste and his language, as they represent the real threat to
the system.
In conclusion, Burgess throughout the script, consciously or not, both

indicated new methods for the interpretation of the novel and reaffirmed
that the only possible rebellion in a “heretical world” resides in being
“Pagan”, just like the Stilyagi, Alex and, in a sense, Burgess himself.
Notes
1. Jennings, R. (1974) “Playboy Interview: Anthony Burgess. A Candid
Conversation with the Visionary Author of A Clockwork Orange”, Playboy,
December issue.
2. Cf. Krämer, P. (2011) A Clockwork Orange, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, XI–XVII, 94–108, 111–124.
3. Cf. Savage, J. (2018) “Burgess, Kubrick, and Punk—The Enduring
Impact of A Clockwork Orange”, Document Seventeen (Design Manch-
ester), March issue, 16–21.
4. Cf. Ross, S. (2019) Youth Culture and the Post-war British Novel—From
Teddy Boys to “Trainspotting”, London: Bloomsbury, 67–99.
5. Cf. Jachimiak, P.H. (2008) “‘Putting the Boot in’: A Clockwork Orange,
Post-’69 Youth Culture and the Onset of Late Modernity”, Roughley,
A.R. (ed) Anthony Burgess and Modernity, Manchester: Manchester
6. Burgess, A. (1972) “Author Has His Say on ‘Clockwork’ Film”,
Los Angeles Times, February 13, original typescript, The International
Anthony Burgess Foundation Archive, Journalism Box C.
7. Burgess, A. (1993) “Stop the Clock on Violence”, The Guardian, 21
March.
8. Hobsbawm, E. (1995) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century,
1914–1991, London: Abacus, 325–328.
9. Fyvel, T.Y. (1963) The Insecure Offenders—Rebellious Youth in the Welfare
State (Revised Edition), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 188–196.
10. Cf. Ibid., 197–202.
11. Cf. Zukin, S. (1978) “The Problem of Social Class Under Socialism”, in
Theory and Society, Vol. 6, No. 3, 391–427.
12. cf. Matthews, M. (1978) Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite
Life-Styles Under Communism, London: Routledge, 104–130 and Pilk-
ington, H. (1994) Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors
and Constructed, London: Routledge, 248–249.
13. Fyvel, T.Y. (1963), 202–205.
14. Cf. Zubok, V. (2009) Zhivago’s Children, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1–22.
15. There is a reference in Burgess’ novel; Johnny Zhivago is the name of a
pop singer whose record is played in the Korova Milk Bar, cf. Burgess,
216 C. PASOTTI
A. (2012) A Clockwork Orange—Restored Edition, Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 33.
16. Aksyonov, whose family had been exiled by Stalin, was strongly influenced
by music, especially jazz. Published in English translation as both “Ticket
to the Stars” and “The Starry Ticket”, Zviozdny Bilet was a literary case
in the USSR, due to the use of juvenile slang and both the nonconformist
lifestyle and attraction toward the Western world of their characters. Aksy-
onov also wrote a dystopic novel in 1979, Ostrov Krym (“The Island of
Crimea”) that Burgess read in its English translation (the copy is archived
at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, in Manchester).
17. The Starry Ticket has does not have violence in its plot, but it shares with
A Clockwork Orange the references to contemporary subcultures and both
picaresque and bildungsroman as possible levels of interpretations. Just like
Alex, Dimka seems keen to start a more ordinary life at the end of the last
chapter. The novel has been adapted into a film, Moj mladshij brat (“My
little brother”), directed by Alexander Zarkhi in 1962.
18. Antisemitism was a legacy of the Czarist era. Cf. Tomasic, D. (1953)
The Impact of Russian Culture on Soviet Communism, Glencoe: The Free
Press, 18.
19. Cf. Koivunen, P. (2009) “The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating
a New, Peaceful Image of the Soviet Union”, Ilic, M. and Smith, J. (eds)
Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khruschchev, London: Routledge,
57 (46–65).
20. Cf. Starr, S.F. (1994) Red & Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union
(Revisited Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 215.
21. Cf. Stites, R. (1992) Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society
Since 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 116–121.
22. Cf. Neidhart, C. (2003) Russia’s Carnival: The Smells, Sights, and Sounds
of Transition, Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 49.
23. Cf. Pilkington, H. (1994), 66, 67 and 228.
24. Cf. Jefferson, T. (2006) “The Cultural Responses of the Teds”, Hall, S.
and Jefferson T. (eds) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post-war Britain (Second Edition), London: Routledge, 71–79.
25. Cf. Stites, R. (1992), 125.
26. Ibid., 143.
27. Cf. Zubok, V. (2009), 42.
28. Dalrymple, T. (2006) “A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece”, City
Journal, December. Accessed at: https://www.city-journal.org/html/pro
phetic-and-violent-masterpiece-12926.html.
29. Burgess, A. (2012), 18.
30. Like many other subcultures in the world, Stilyagi had their subgroups:
there were the mentioned privileged who did not need bootlegging in
order to access to the mentioned commodities, those who took many
risk as less privileged but keen in any forbidden form of art and music
or, on the contrary, those without musical or artistic passions, who just
cared about look and not taking risk at all. Cf. Troitsky, A. (2017) Subkul-
tura—Stories of Youth and Resistance in Russia. 1815–2017 , London and
Manchester: Home The New Social, 107.
31. Cf. Zubok, V. (2009), 44.
32. Ibid., 42.
33. Cf. Sherman, G. (1962) “Soviet Youth: Myth and Reality”, in Deadalus:
Youth Change and Challenge, Vol. 91, No. 1, 222 (216–237).
34. Cf. Biswell, A. (2005) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, London: Picador,
236–250 and Aggeler, G. (2003) “‘Humans Are Russian’: A Clockwork
Orange and the Russian Tradition”, Vernadakis, E. and Woodroffe, G.
(eds) Portraits of the Artist in “A Clockwork Orange”, Angers: Presses de
l’Université d’Angers, 2003, 79–92.
35. Cf. Burgess, A. (1986) Honey for the Bears , Harmondsworth: Penguin,
90–91.
36. Not surprisingly, the episode occurred in the favourite meeting place of
Leningrad’s Stilyagi, the Nevsky Prospect that they significantly renamed
“Broadway”.
37. Aggeler, G. (2003), 79.
38. The mentioned Resistance through Rituals is the significant new title one
of the most important collection of essays by the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, used for a new edition the book that had been originally
published in 1975 as Working papers in Cultural Studies.
39. We can find examples of this different attitude, including contacts with
the criminal underworld, in contemporary texts like Èduard Limonov’s,
Memoir of a Russian Punk (1983) or the recent Il Marchio Ribelle (“The
Rebel Brand”, 2018) by the Russian-Italian novelist Nicolai Lilin.
40. Cf. Zubok, V. (2009), 42.
41. Rob Spence suggested a correspondence between the views of Hoggart
on both mass culture and pop music and those of Burgess. Cf. Spence, R.
(2009) “Hogg, Hoggart and the Use of Illiteracy: Anthony Burgess and
Pop Music”, Jeannin, M. (ed) Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and
Literature in Music, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009,
37–43.
42. Hoggart, R. (1998) The Uses of Literacy, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Books, 189.
43. Quoted in Andrew Biswell, “Introduction”, Burgess, A. (2012), p. XXI.
44. Burgess, A. (2012), 47.
45. Ibid., 43, 44.
46. In fact, after Tito’s Yugoslavia split from the Eastern Block the Govern-
ment was keener on promoting international tourism from the West.
Cf. Tchoukarine, I. (2010) “The Yugoslavian Road to International
218 C. PASOTTI
Tourism: Opening, Decentralization and Propaganda in the Early 1950’s”,

Grandits, H. and Taylor, K. (eds) Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of
Tourism in Socialism (1950’s–1990’s), Budapest and New York: Central
European University Press, 107–139.
47. “In the hallway was the good old municipal painting on the walls – vecks
and ptitsas very well developed, stern in the dignity of labour, at work-
bench and machine with not one stitch of platties on their well-developed
plots.” Burgess, A. (2012), 37.
48. Biswell, A. (2005), 245.
49. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve had Your Time, London: Heinemann, 50.
50. Cf. Burgess, A. (1986), 129.
51. Ibid., 129.
52. For a comparative analysis of both Soviet and British public housing, Cf.
Andrusz, G.D. (1984) Housing and Urban Development in the USSR,
Albany: State University of New York.
53. Burgess, A. (2012), 43.
54. Cf. Harris, S.E. (2015) “Soviet Mass Housing and the Communist
Way of Life”, Chatterjee, C. Ransel, D. Cavender, M. and Petrone, K.
(eds) Everyday Life in Russia, Past and Present, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 181–202, 181.
55. Cf. Messana, P. (2011) Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the
Kommunalka, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 75–78.
56. Mere coincidence or not, Alex and the Droogs northbound itinerary from
the Korova, to the old cinema and the river, with the attack in front of
the public library reproduce, on the map of the Soviet period, the route
followed by Burgess from the Metropole restaurant (where he first met
the Stilyagi) to the Barrikada cinema, heading to the channels of the
Neva river and passing by the Saltykov Shchedrin National Library at the
corner, strolling on the Nevsky Prospect. Cf. Kann, P.J. (1976) Tre Giorni
a Leningrado, Moscow: Progress.
57. Cf. Pasotti, C. (2005) “Una Sonata per Alex—‘A Clockwork Orange’
di Anthony Burgess”, tesi di laurea in Lingue e letterature straniere,
Università degli Studi di Pavia, 25–26 and 97–102.
58. Cf. Burgess, A. (2012), 41–42.
59. Cf. Zhirnov, E. (2011) «Vnushit’ poleznyj strah», https://www.kommer
sant.ru/doc/1618579.
60. Fyvel, T.R. (1963), 194.
61. Cf. Starr, S.F. (1994), 240.
62. Burgess, A. (2012), 9.
63. Despite not being discussed in this chapter, girls had an important role
in the Stilyagi subculture. However, the description of the look of the
girls at the Korova Milk Bar in the same page and the female Stilyagi
has many similarities too, especially in the use of colours, make-up and
accessories. Cf. Field, D.A. (2007) Private Life and Communist Morality
in Khrushchev’s Russia, New York: Peter Lang, 23.
64. Cf. Starr, S.F. (1994), 237.
65. Cf. Neidhart, C. (2003), 49.
66. Cf. Fürst, J. (2010) Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-Wat Youth and
the Emergence of Mature Socialism, New York: Oxford University Press,
92.
67. Cf. Starr, S.F. (1994), 237–238. Tarzan’s saga was one of this cult and
Johnny Weissmuller’s became a model: in the episode of the Stilyagi in
Honey for the Bears, Burgess describes “a man with Tarzan-length hair”.
Cf. Burgess, A. (1986), 91.
68. The Russian cult film Stilyagi, a musical comedy-drama released in 2008,
ends with the return from the USA of one the Stilyagi, telling his friends
that their subcultures did not exist in America.
69. Cf. Gaut, G. (1991) “Soviet Jazz: Transforming American Music”,
Buckner, R.T. and Weiland, S. (eds) Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History
and Meanings of Jazz, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 60–82.
70. In the USSR, the term “bards” refers to poets/singers songwriters not
related to the Soviet establishment: they were mostly listened live and in
clandestine tapes (magnitizdat ).
71. C.f. Zubok, V. (2009), 44.
72. Cf. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction, London: Routledge, and Bourdieu,
P. (1990) In Other Words: Essay Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
73. Cf. note 13.
74. Cf. Biswell, A. (2005), 238.
75. Burgess, A. (2012), 48.
76. https://melody.su/.
77. Yurchak, A. (2006) Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The
Last Soviet Generation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 181–182.
78. In fact, Alexei’s look is no different from the typical Stilyagi’s, including a
jacket over padded at the shoulders, and both very coloured tie and shirt.
Cf. Burgess, A. (1986), 114.
79. Burgess, A. (1986), 139–141.
80. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notes of Antonio Gramsci,
edited by Quintin Hoare, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 253.
81. Voloshinov, V. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, London:
Academic Press, 23.
82. Cf. Phillips, P. (2014) A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Liter-
ature of Anthony Burgess, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
103.
83. Cf. Clarke, J., Hall, S., Jefferson, T. and Roberts, B. (2006) “Subcultures,
Cultures and Class—A Theoretical Overview”, Jefferson, T and Hall, S.
(eds) Resistance Through Rituals, London: Routledge, 42–43.
220 C. PASOTTI
84. On the concept of “dropping out” and on its practical and philosophical
differences between Western World and Eastern Block, cf. Fürst, J. (2017)
“To Drop or Not to Drop”, Fürst, J. and McLellan, J. (eds) Dropping
out of Socialism—The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc,
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1–20.
85. Cf. Troitsky, A. (2017), 101.
86. Ibid.
87. Cf. Burgess, A. (1986) But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? Homage to
QWERT YUIOP and Other Writings, New York: McGrow-Hill, 180.
88. Biswell, A. (2005), 237.
89. Burgess, A. (2012), 125.
90. Another clue to Alexei connection with the subculture might have been
the use of the word “pad” in a slang sense (“You know where to find
me and, sometimes, […] you might like to come to my pad” he looked
both shy and daring. “Pad. Is that the word?” cf. Burgess, A, (1986),
92 being another keyword of Stilyagi’s jargon. Cf. Fürst, J. (2006) Late
Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, London:
Routledge, 2006, 218.
91. Cf. Ball, A.M. (2003) Imagining America: Influence and Images in
Twentieth-Century Russia Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 186.
92. Vinicenko, I.V., Najmanhanova, Z.M., Stib, K.A. and Kurmanova, L.R.
(2013) “Otnosenie sovetskovo obsestva k poav1eniil a1’nernativnoj mody
(Soviet Society’s Attitude Towards Alternative Fashion)”, in Omskij
naucnyj vestnik (Omsk Scholarly Bulletin), Vol. 1, No. 115, 177–180.
93. By comparison, Terry Southern’s screenplay kept the same idea behind
Nadsat by just adding, to Branom’s description, “pieces of the late great
American spade tongue” in the list of influences on the Nadsat, Terry
Southern and Michael Cooper, A Clockwork Orange—First Draft, August
1966, at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester,
Scene 59, p. 95.
94. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange—First Draft, Undated, scene 260,
p .52. For the dating of Burgess’ script, see A. Biswell, The Real Life of
Anthony Burgess, pp. 337–338. Emphasis on the underlined pronouns is
from the original.
Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat,
Sinny and Cold War Brainwashing Scares
Joy McEntee
There was a fine irony in the notion of a teenage race untouched by

politics, using totalitarian brutality as an end in itself, equipped with a
dialect [nadsat] which drew on the two chief political languages of the
age [English and Russian…]. As the book was about brainwashing, it was
appropriate that the text itself should be a brainwashing device. The reader
would be brainwashed into learning minimal Russian. The novel was to be
an exercise in linguistic programming.1
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962—the

same year John Frankenheimer’s Cold Car, thriller (starring Frank Sinatra,
Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury) The Manchurian Candidate
was released. Both feature strange but apparently timely fantasies about
the possibilities of brainwashing. In the case of A Clockwork Orange,
these include both the Ludovico technique and the use of the invented
language nadsat. If Alex as a character is “brainwashed,” or perhaps more
accurately “conditioned” in the text of A Clockwork Orange, he may
“brainwash” or condition A Clockwork Orange’s readers through the way
J. McEntee (B)
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: joy.mcentee@adelaide.edu.au

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_11
222 J. MCENTEE
he teaches us to read his distinctive argot. Alex is both a victim of brain-

washing, in the form of the Ludovico technique, and its perpetrator, in
his deployment of nadsat. Burgess has it both ways: he deplores Alex’s
brainwashing, but through him “brainwashes” the reader of his book,
delivering a salutary lesson in the art of mind control.
In repudiating the Ludovico technique, Burgess claimed to be reacting
to B. F. Skinner, and denied that Soviet Bloc Totalitarian regimes were
implicated in his depiction of brainwashing or conditioning.2 However,
as Peter Krämer mentions in passing, larger contemporary narratives
about the subject were more ideologically complex, especially following
the problematic repatriation of Korean War POWs from Communist re-
education camps.3 This chapter expands the exploration of Burgess’s A
Clockwork Orange in the light of trans-Atlantic brainwashing scares and
discourses on behavioural conditioning that emerged in the 1950s and
1960s.
In his adaptation, Stanley Kubrick also delivers a meta-cinematic
commentary on the mind-altering powers of Sinny (cinema). These are
both visual and auditory. We are just as much at the mercy of “humble
narrator” Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in Kubrick’s film as in Burgess’s
novel. There are few moments of screen time that are not filtered through
his perceptions, so the film’s narration remains extremely restricted. He
still addresses us intimately and directly as “brothers” and “only friends,”
“thus implicating us in his world and his value system.”4 And of course he
provides the film’s charismatic and mesmerising voice, which contributes
mightily to the film’s effects on its spectators. Focusing on Alex’s voice,
this chapter addresses a gap in the literature on the soundtrack of the film,
which has so far been dominated by considerations of its music.5
Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange between 1960 and 1961.
However, most of his commentary on the novel post-dates Stanley
Kubrick’s 1971 film.6 Many of his post-hoc characterisations do not
represent the conditions which pertained a decade earlier, and several are
contradicted by the evidence of the novel. As Samuel McCracken says:
Life in a post-intentional fallacy universe ought to have prepared us for

a novelist who is a deficient critic of his own work; but since a careful
reading of the novel leads to an interpretation very nearly the opposite to
that which he now provides, Burgess seems unusually unsure of what he
was about.7
ALEX’S VOICE IN A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: NADSAT, SINNY … 223
This contradictoriness is true of nadsat. To start with that which

appears to be consistent: nadsat is the language of youth in Burgess’s A
Clockwork Orange: the word “nadsat” is the suffix used for the numbers
11–19 in Russian, so it is shorthand for “teen.”8 It is a fabricated language
that constructs a “reality that is at once near and distant,” at once of the
“now” and of the science fiction future.9 It is a kind of anti-language,
that is, a language that the droogs adopt in their oppositional stance to
society. As Robert O. Evans says, “Their parents, the police, the psychia-
trists know about it, but they cannot speak it.”10 However, the hierarchies
that pertain within users of that argot may mimic the structures of the
society the group opposes. Alex is by all means the most fluent user of
Nadsat, as contrasted, for example, with Dim, and he is also the leader
of the droogs, until Georgie’s coup.11 Fluency in nadsat is a criterion for
droog group leadership.
As for what nadsat consists of, Dr. Branom gives rather misleading
clues: “a bit of gipsy talk [,…] but most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda.
Subliminal penetration.”12 However, Burgess himself was inconsistent
and vague about the precise etymology or meanings of nadsat, and it
far exceeds Branom’s characterisation.13 In addition to “Russian-based
relexicalization of English,” which do constitute the largest category of
nadsat words, (e.g. “smecking”, “Horrorshow”), there is babytalk (e.g.
“eggiweg”), rhyming slang (e.g. “pretty polly”), truncated items (e.g.
“sinny” for cinema), and archaisms (e.g. “thee/thou/thine”).14 But the
argot as a whole exceeds these linguistic analyses. There is a kind of lexical
intoxication with the rhythm, and the thrust of Elizabethan speech. The
sentences are predicated on that kind of expansive, showy construction,
“performative” of what it is to speak freely in a generational street cant.
As Carla Sassi says, nadsat remains “a fascinating and elusive creation [,…]
a language that strives all the time to be ‘something else’—sound, music,
tangible object, visual image or performance.”15
Despite Branom’s account of nadsat’s etymology being insufficient,
what remains telling here is his characterisation of the way Alex has
learned it: via propaganda and subliminal penetration—of which there
is no evidence in the text. Robbie B. H. Goh questions whether nadsat is
a conditioning device at all, or another expression of Alex’s creativity.16
Burgess described Alex’s linguistic inventiveness as one of the three qual-
ities that represents his humanity at the beginning of the novel. (Burgess
“Condition”). Indeed, his name—Alex—is partly alludes to this quality,
224 J. MCENTEE
A lex: a law (unto himself); a lex(is): a vocabulary (of his own); a (Greek)
lex: without a law. […] Alex is a rich and noble name, and I intended its
possessor to be sympathetic, pitiable, and insidiously identifiable with us.17
But despite Burgess’s comments that Alex is “untouched by politics,”

this name also has political valences: “I gave him that name because of its
international character (you could not have a British or Russian boy called
Chuck or Butch).”18 Alex’s dexterity with language describes the begin-
ning of the novel, but Burgess also points to another valency of “Alex.”
“Ironically, his name can be taken to mean ‘wordless.’ […] He has […]
no word to say in the running of his community or the managing of the
state: he is, to the state, a mere object.”19 And as the novel goes on he
loses his language, “he is changed into the conquered—impotent, word-
less […;] he becomes a creature without a lex or lexicon.”20 Alex’s name,
and his language, are taken away from him when he enters state custody.
He becomes prisoner 6655321. Among the older prisoners his version
of nadsat ceases to yield him the power it did among his droogs, and he
is forced to deal with adults in standard English.21 While Burgess may
have retrospectively labelled nadsat a brainwashing device, and a symbol
of brainwashing, it may not operate that way in the novel. It may, in
fact, be representative of Alex’s unreconstructed state, and therefore be
associated with the antithesis of brainwashing.
Writing in 1971, Burgess said:
What my, and Kubrick’s, parable tries to state is that it is preferable to

have a world of violence undertaken in full awareness – violence chosen
as an act of will – than a world conditioned to be good or harmless. I
recognise that the lesson is already becoming an old-fashioned one. B. F.
Skinner, with his ability to believe that there is something beyond freedom
and dignity, wants to see the death of autonomous man. …. The wish to
diminish free will is, I should think, the sin against the Holy Ghost.22
There are two things to note here. The first is that this suggests
that Burgess was responding, at least retrospectively, to contemporary
discourses about “conditioning” as distinct from “brainwashing,” and
that he may have conflated the two in his characterisations of what he
sought to achieve through nadsat. This conflation is common in many
contemporary discourses on mind control. The second is that Burgess
is speaking anachronistically here, in that Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and
Dignity was not published until 1971, and so was not available to
him at the time when he wrote A Clockwork Orange (although it was

available to Stanley Kubrick when he made the adaptation). What was
available in 1961 when Burgess completed his typescript was Science
and Human Behaviour, and Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, to
which the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange may be a rejoinder.23 As
Andrew Biswell articulates, Burgess’s knowledge of Skinner appears to
have been at second-hand via Aldous Huxley’s 1959 book Brave New
World Revisited rather than via direct reading of Science and Human
Behaviour.24 Huxley, like Burgess, appears to have put “brainwashing”
and “conditioning” under the same banner.
But even as a critique of behavioural conditioning, A Clockwork
Orange is not particularly accurate. One of the ironies in Burgess’s
singling out Skinner is that Alex’s conditioning using the Ludovico tech-
nique is precisely not of the kind Skinner advocated. While Skinner
acknowledges the power of aversive conditioning such as that of the
Ludovico Technique, he was much more in favour of positive condi-
tioning, and explicitly critiqued state-sponsored punishment.25 Even
Burgess latterly acknowledged this, but his attacks on Skinner continued
unabated through 1985 and “The Clockwork Condition.”26 Rather than
reconstructing the influences that led him to write A Clockwork Orange
in its original early 1960s context, these texts show the marks of Burgess
attempting to keep up to date with current debates, so as not to appear
“old fashioned.” For example, Burgess says “We hear less of Pavlovianism
these days than of Skinnerism.”27 Despite this, in the same text, he cites
Pavlov as the source of his idea:
In Britain, about 1960, […]There were irresponsible people who spoke

of aversion therapy, the burning out of the criminal impulse at source. If
young delinquents could be, with the aid of electric shocks, drugs, or pure
Pavlovian conditioning, rendered incapable of performing anti-social acts,
then our streets would once more be safe at night.28
So the Russian Pavlov rather than the American Skinner is the source of
the Ludovico Technique, but how does nadsat operate in terms of such
conditioning? As Natasha E. Ravyse points out, there are positive and
negative reinforcements at play: the novel’s reader is motivated, or “pos-
itively reinforced,” to learn to read nadsat, which is a kind of intriguing
game. However, once one has learned to decrypt nadsat, the underlying
brutality of the narrated violence acts as a “negative reinforcer.” The
226 J. MCENTEE
result is that there is “a continuous oscillation between immersion and

repulsion” in reading A Clockwork Orange.29
Burgess also seems to have inherited from Huxley a general para-
noia about the threat to democracy of mind manipulation, and again
in this Huxley was also drawing more on Pavlov than on Skinner.30
Huxley, in turn, seems to have derived a lot of his ideas from William
Sargant, a psychiatrist who wrote Battle for the Mind about the possibili-
ties of Communist and religious brainwashing following on from Pavlov’s
experiments. Of Sargant, Dominic Streatfeild says that Huxley “parroted
Sargant’s […] theory to anyone who would listen.”31 Certainly, in terms
of the characteristics of the Ludovico Technique, Huxley appears to be
the source. The Ludovico Technique depends on drugs which make Alex
nauseous, then in vogue for treating alcoholism and “curing” homosex-
uality.32 Huxley notes that Pavlov demonstrated that illness made his
dogs suggestible, saying that “our dictator will therefore see that every
hospital ward is wired for sound,” which makes us reflect not only on
Alex’s Ludovico Treatment, but also on his eventual hypnopaedic cure.33
Huxley also says that a dictator might make use of drugs, as they are
used in the Ludovico technique.34 He discusses a subliminal program-
ming device known as the “tachistoscope,” which resembles a “magic
lantern” show, citing specific examples of its use in cinema, suggesting
Burgess’s sinny. Huxley says that his failure to anticipate such a develop-
ment in Brave New world was an omission which he would correct if he
were to rewrite the book, and it is possible that Burgess was attempting
just such an emendation in A Clockwork Orange.35 Finally, Huxley notes
that some of the notorious returning Korean War POWs, who had been
subjected to Communist re-education, attempted suicide, as Alex does.36
But most importantly for the status of A Clockwork Orange as a text,
Huxley insists on the importance of language: “In their anti-rational
propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources
of language in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into thinking,
feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them to think,
feel and act.”37 Nadsat would appear to be such a perverted use of
language. Despite the fact that Burgess asserts that he chose Russian
opportunistically because he happened to be planning a holiday there,
and Russian words blended better with English than other candidates,
while providing sufficient exoticism, the importance of his choosing
Russian for A Clockwork Orange cannot be overlooked.38 Burgess has
said that A Clockwork Orange was inspired in equal part by the observa-
tion of British and Russian youth gangs, and that he imagined Alex as a
youth “astride the iron curtain,” so despite the “irony” that Alex should
be “totally unpolitical,” the fact that Burgess is invoking Communism
cannot be escaped.39 Indeed, he characterised own theological setting
for the novel’s drama about freewill—the contest between Pelagian and
Augustinian tendencies—in terms of Socialism and Communism.40 He
acknowledged that his writing might have the effect of critiquing specific
states: “I have been derided and rebuked for expressing my fears of the
power of the modern state—whether it be Russia, China, or what we
may term Anglo-America—to reduce the freedom of the individual.”41
However, Burgess denied that the totalitarianism of the USSR was the
target of his novel:
[Nadsat] is no mere decoration, nor is it a sinister indication of the sublim-

inal power that a Communist super-state may already be exerting on the
young. It was meant to turn A Clockwork Orange into, among other
things, a brainwashing primer. You read the book or see the film, and
at the end you should find yourself in possession of a minimal Russian
vocabulary – without effort, with surprise. This is the way brainwashing
works. […] The lesson of the Orange has nothing to do with the ideology
or repressive techniques of Soviet Russia: it is wholly concerned with what
can happen to any of us in the West if we do not keep on our guard.42
One might well ask “among what other things?” Despite Burgess’s
protestations, Communism and Socialism would appear to be included.
But if A Clockwork Orange is as much about the West as the Soviet
Bloc, setting A Clockwork Orange in the context of contemporary trans-
Atlantic discourses on mind control is revealing. As Biswell remarks, the
early conception of nadsat involved the blending of American English
(rather than British English) and Russian (Burgess having equal contempt
for American Capitalism as for Russian Communism).43 Geoffrey Aggeler
notes that Burgess:
seems to have been directly influenced less by Skinner’s ideas in particular

than by accounts he had read of behaviourist methods of reforming crimi-
nals that were being tried in American prisons with the avowed purpose of
limiting the subjects’ freedom of choice to what society called “goodness.”
This struck Burgess as “most sinful.”44
228 J. MCENTEE
If Burgess was reacting to behaviourism’s Godlessness (its sins against

the Holy Ghost), he might also have been reacting to Communism’s
perceived Godlessness from an American perspective.45 Specifically, the
key American brainwashing scandal of the 1950s was the Korean War
veterans who refused to repatriate to the US after operations Big Switch
and Little Switch, having been “re-educated” in Communist POW camps.
This was accounted for in the writings of Edward Hunter, Joost Meer-
loo’s Rape of the Mind, and Robert Jay Lifton’s “Home by Ship,” and
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, among other texts.46
Paranoia about the influence of this indoctrination was dramatized in
Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and John
Frankenheimer’s 1962 film of the same name, which arguably had an
influence on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In The Manchurian Candi-
date, the Communist behaviourist Yen Lo (Khigh Diegh) brainwashes
a captured US patrol so that, when they are repatriated, one of them
includes a sleeper assassin (Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey).
Raymond is conditioned precisely to be a killer, by contrast with Alex,
who is programmed to be inhibited about acting on his violent impulses.
Returned to the US, Raymond is turned over to the control of his “Amer-
ican Operator,” who, in the acme of Momist hysteria, turns out to be
none other than his mother (Angela Lansbury).
The brainwashing scene itself is one of this surreal film’s set pieces. In
a violation of continuity editing principles designed to create a coherent
sense of cinematic space, the camera pivots 360 degrees to reveal a
space that changes as the scene unfolds: sometimes it is the conserva-
tory of a hotel, sometimes it is an austere surgical lecture theatre, like
that of the Ludovico sinny room in A Clockwork Orange. Sometimes
the audience consists of frilly ladies listening to a gardening lecture,
sometimes of Communist brass. Yen Lo appears sometimes as himself,
sometimes as Mrs Whittaker (Helen Kleeb), a woman the captives have
been “brainwashed” to imagine. Yen Lo’s cross dressing, his “camp”
performance, prefigures the film’s twist (that Raymond’s operator is his
mother), and signals the radical feminisation of the men whose minds
have been penetrated by behaviourism. This camp psychiatrist also prefig-
ures the gendering of torture in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, where
Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan), one of Alex’s tormenters, is a woman
(Branom is a man in the novel), as is one of the vengeful gang (Magaret
Tyzack) led by F. Alexander (Patrick Magee) in the film’s final third. What
A Clockwork Orange does not reproduce is The Manchurian Candidate’s
work with race. Khigh Diegh, born in Egypt, brought to the role of Yen
Lo a set of associations that “concatenated western conceptions of the
Evil Oriental with the sometime psychiatrist/indoctrinator.”47 He had
played this type before in in Time Limit (Karl Malden, 1957), where
he was a Korean POW camp Commissar supervised an indoctrination,
and in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), he played another sinister
psychiatrist. “Khigh Dhiegh’s star persona carried a freight of political
meaning through all three films: his roles connect psychiatry, indoctri-
nation and brainwashing with the foreign Other and specifically with
Communism.”48 In A Clockwork Orange, by contrast, behaviourist evil
is home-grown. Behaviourism may have its origins in Manchuria, China
or Russia, but its application is British. Burgess’ denial that his novel
was directed outward at other states’ regimes appears to have influenced
Kubrick’s film.
In The Manchurian Candidate, as in A Clockwork Orange, a demon-
stration of the subjects conditioning is called for. Raymond is commanded
to kill two members of his patrol, and does so, demonstrating the
effectiveness of his conditioning to the satisfaction of his high-ranking
audience. This is paralleled in A Clockwork Orange by the scene in
the auditorium when Alex demonstrates that he is no longer capable
of aggression. Despite these displays of behaviourism’s effectiveness,
McCracken explicitly contrasts The Manchurian Candidate with A Clock-
work Orange to discuss the matter of whether the novel’s Alex is
effectively brainwashed by the Ludovico Technique at all. He points out
that where brainwashing as it was practiced on Korean POWs implanted
new opinions and values, Alex is provided with no new ideas. Rather,
what is installed is a supplement to his old drives, so that when he is
motivated to violence, he feels nausea. He still has a choice: to act as
he has always done or to be sick, but he chooses to avoid sickness.49
I would counter with the observation that Raymond is explicitly asked
whether he has ever killed in combat, and answers in the affirmative, so it
is not that the killing is a new behaviour for him; rather, his conditioning
redirects it. So McCracken’s contrast may not hold at least as far as The
Manchurian Candidate goes (although it may hold for real life Korean
POWs). However, McCracken finds it hard to take seriously Burgess’s
claims that Nadsat was a brainwashing tool, and he doubts that the novel’s
readers have their integrity profoundly violated by learning a smattering of
Russian.50 Similarly, viewers have found The Manchurian Candidate hard
to take seriously. It is too hysterical, too paranoid, too camp, responding
230 J. MCENTEE
to it as a “nightmare comedy,” both like and unlike Dr. Strangelove, Or,

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, 1964) with
which Scarlett Higgins compares it, saying that Frankenheimer’s film has
less satirical bite than Kubrick’s.51 For contemporary audiences, it is hard
to recover the fear of brainwashing that beset the overheated Cold War
imagination.
Apart from the misuse of language in thought control, another thing
Huxley notes is the fact that returned Korean POWs had been made to
write confessions.52 These were universally agreed upon as a feature of
Soviet and Chinese indoctrination campaigns. As Lifton says, “whatever
its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements: confession, the
exposure and renunciation of past and present ‘evil’; and re-education, the
remaking of a man in the Communist image.”53 Is A Clockwork Orange
such a confession? The doubling of Alex and F. Alexander, both of whom
are creating books entitled A Clockwork Orange, suggests that the novel’s
Alex comes to us as a writer.54 The first third of A Clockwork Orange
may be an account of past evil, and it culminates with Alex providing a
fulsome account of his crimes to the police under what he describes as
torture.55 However, if A Clockwork Orange is a confession of crimes Alex
is not contrite about them. A more plausible and intriguing possibility
is that this is the kind of confession described by Susan L. Carruthers
in her account of returning Korean War POWs who were expected to
endlessly recount tales of the camps—of the men’s privations, and of
their re-education—which she describes in a section entitled “Tell us
about the brutality: representations of Communist atrocity.”56 This para-
phrases what F. Alexander says to Alex: “Tell me all about it.”57 This leads
to the account of Alex’s sufferings penned by F. Alexander—although
it will appear under Alex’s name.58 These two diegetic “confessions”—
one under “torture” and one to a sympathetic listener who has also
written a book entitled “A Clockwork Orange”—suggest that Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange might appear to be another.
If Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is a kind of confession, what is its
readership? Although Alex has addressed his readership familiarly from the
beginning of his “story”59 as his “brothers,” with this appellation itself
evocative of Communism or Socialism. However, Alex’s self-construction
as “Your Humble Narrator” does not appear until late in Part 1—in
chapter 6, during the attack on the Cat Lady, his first murder.60 He
does not refer to himself as “your story-teller” until Part 2. This is
also where the first direct appeal to the readers as Alex’s “only friends”
appears,61 with appeals to “my brothers” intensifying during this section.

This suggests that his self-conscious construction of the tale for a partic-
ular kind of readership does not begin until just before his arrest and
incarceration, like a POW confession. As Roger Fowler points out, Alex’s
audience is decidedly not speakers of nadsat, not his peer group. Many
nadsat words are helpfully glossed by Alex, so that “the impression is
given that speech antithesis can be mediated: the implicit dialogue is
cooperative rather than antagonistic.”62 Alex also adopts standard English
with alacrity when necessity dictates (e.g. for gaining admission to victims’
homes, or for negotiating with the representatives of the state).
Kubrick’s adaptation, which has the advantage of a soundtrack, draws
contrasts between Alex’s plebeian accent and those of his victims, which
are, as Pauline Kael points out, “upper-class accents a mile wide.”63
Malcolm McDowell’s accent is contrasted by the more polished, stan-
dard English of authority figures like P. R. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris),
the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp), and the prison governor
(Michael Gover) (not to mention the standard “respectable working
class” accents of the Pee [Philip Stone] and Em [Sheila Raynor] and Joe
the lodger [Clive Francis]). Nadsat as spoken by Malcolm McDowell is
a deliberately, highly cultivated mode of resistance to all things English
(other than the anachronistic weaponisation of Elizabethan speech). With
the film’s emphasis on speech, the motif of writing, and possibly the motif
of confession, disappears from Kubrick’s film.64 Where Alex of the novel
says “If I had snuffed it I would not be here to write what I written
have,”65 Alex of the film says “If I had snuffed it, I would not be here to
tell what I have told.”66
Kubrick modifies Burgess’s language—his nadsat—cutting or trans-
lating a lot of it for ease of audience comprehension.67 Despite Kubrick’s
cuts, enough remains for Vivian Sobchack to remark:
In all American SF cinema, only one film has seriously attempted to give us
a spoken [language] equivalent to its wondrous visual images […] Nadsat,
particularly as spoken by Alex […] is more than a futuristic tongue, a sign
of linguistic change, a gimmick; it is a song and an attitude […T]he success
of that language in the film is its sound, its being spoken aloud by a human
voice which can […] lighten it, shade it, darken it with menace. What is
significant about the language of the filmed Clockwork Orange […] arises
from the fact that it is not read, but spoken and heard as a truly wondrous,
part-human, part-alien tongue.68
232 J. MCENTEE
The timbre of Malcolm McDowell’s charismatic, mesmerising voice,

then, is crucial. As Robert P. Kolker says, “[Alex’s] voice is present in
every sequence of the film. He is the focus of our perception.” The
film’s “energy comes from the way Alex talks. His loquacious, rhythmic,
image-filled language […,] his insistent, seductive, cajoling, conspirato-
rial, jolly, threatening, self-pitying, and always ironic voice, becomes part
of the film’s mise-en-scene.”69 Michel Chion reminds us that the voice
is easy often overlooked in analyses of cinema.70 Alex is, of course, a
homodiegetic narrator, one whom we see, one of Chion’s interesting cases
who is neither “entirely inside nor clearly outside” the diegesis.71 He is
also narrating in retrospect. This is a circumstance in which the voice
becomes acousmatic:
Often in a movie the action will come to a standstill as someone, serene and
reflective, will start to tell a story. The character’s voice separates from the
body, and returns as an acousmeter to haunt the past-tense images conjured
by its words. The voice speaks from a point where time is suspended. What
makes this an ‘I-voice’ is not just the use of the first person singular, but
its placement—a certain sound quality, a way of occupying space, a sense
of proximity to the spectator’s ear, and a particular manner of engaging
the spectator’s identification.72
Chion particularly discusses the application of close miking, with its

lack of reverberation, as “putting the character’s voice in our ear,” so
to speak. This is true of the diegetic utterances of the characters in
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.73 However, the application of rever-
beration to Alex’s voice-overs marks the quality of this narration being
“in his head,”—and therefore not in ours.74 Despite the many ways in
which A Clockwork Orange brings Alex close to the spectator, a certain
aural distance is kept in his voice-over narrations. This contrast between
close-miking of diegetic voices and reverberation in first-person voice-over
also characterises Lolita (1962), although it is less exaggerated.75 Susan
Kozloff contrasts the homodiegetic first-person narration of Lolita and
A Clockwork Orange with the hetero-diegetic narration of Barry Lyndon
(1975).76 However, despite the fact that Michael Hordern’s narration
is hetero-diegetic, his voice so resembles that of Lord Hallam (Anthony
Sharp) that it is possible to confuse the two, suggesting an ironic collapse
of proximity and distance, as occurs with Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
This closeness and distance have implications for our ethical engage-
ment with the violence in the novel and the film.77 Alex appeals to us,
both in terms of how he addresses us and in terms of his general attrac-
tiveness, and yet his actions are deplorable. Kubrick moderated the some
of the novel’s violent transgressions to forefend troubles with the censors
and with the filmgoing public.78 He also found cinematic analogues for
the novel’s nadsat’s distanciation of readers from the violence depicted.79
This particularly applies to violence perpetrated by Alex. Ricks says that
the film cossets Alex, drawing a high contrast between Alex’s stylised
violence and that meted out to him by his former droogs as policemen.80
Stuart Y. McDougal observes that there is a similar contrast between
Alex’s violence and the violence depicted in the Ludovico Treatment
room’s sinny: “Alex too must become a film viewer, as part of his treat-
ment, without the aestheticizing effects that Kubrick provides for his
viewers in the first part of the film.”81 McDougal also remarks that “the
Ludovico treatment becomes a metafictional moment that forces us to
reflect on our own activity as film viewers.”82 So how closely Kubrick’s
extra-diegetic spectators identify with Alex when he is strapped in the
Ludovico chair? Peter Krämer asks:
If the films Alex watches help to provoke calculated responses from him
and to insert a sensual, emotional and behavioural programme into his
brain, what might the film A Clockwork Orange be doing to us? Does the
film turn us all into clockwork oranges?83
Does Kubrick, like Burgess, seek to brainwash us, or condition us, in

his own deployment of sinny, including Alex’s voice? Kubrick denied that
“people can be corrupted by a film” on the grounds that post-hypnotic
suggestion is limited in its effects.84 Rather, he likened the effect to
the state of dreaming, in which one is liberated of the inhibitions of
conscience.85 Despite this, Krämer reports on a number of Kubrick’s
correspondents’ reactions, which included audience members who were
“sickened” as Alex is sickened, which “would imply that A Clockwork
Orange is in itself part of an aversion therapy against violent thoughts,”
and those who responded to the film as “mass psychotherapy,” designed
to enable the audience to purge itself of violent impulses.86 This should
be contextualised against the reports of copycat violence that dogged
the film, suggesting that purgation was the opposite of what some spec-
tators experienced. Rather, contemporary moral panics surrounding the
234 J. MCENTEE
film focussed on certain easily inflamed audience members, who might be

incited to violence.87 However, to return to the subject of brainwashing,
or conditioning, one woman wrote “‘I have never enjoyed the feeling of
being manipulated but when I walked out of the theatre and realized that
you had tampered with my brain real “horrorshow” I had a good laugh
and then was frightened.’”88
So how conscious was Kubrick of the discourses on brainwashing
into which he entered? He said that he had read Beyond Freedom and
Dignity, and denied, like Burgess, that his film was a “political tract.”89
Beyond this, Penelope Houston asked Kubrick what research he had
done into brainwashing. He responded that, uncharacteristically, he had
not done voluminous background preparation for A Clockwork Orange:
“I had certainly read about behavioral psychology and conditioned-
reflex therapy, and that was about all that was required in terms of
any serious technical background for the story.”90 Christopher Ricks
observes, however, that neither the novel nor the film is above a little
brainwashing.91 As Burgess has it both ways in presenting us with a
“brainwashing primer” that is and isn’t about Russia, so Kubrick has it
both ways in presenting us with a hoodlum with by whom we are seduced
against our ethical principles, in no small measure because of his voice,
and “whose treatment by the state is morally repugnant.”92
The great moral crime that the state perpetrates against Alex is not, in
novel or film, his deprivation of nadsat, although that does occur. It is the
deprivation of his joy in classical music—in the film, his forced inability to
listen to Beethoven’s ninth. This is certainly not a product of his condi-
tioning, but an aspect of his unreconstructed character. It is Burgess’s
and Kubrick’s gift to him. However, this appreciation of classical music
by a moral monster it is surely a wrong-footing of the film’s spectator.
As Kolker says, “the civility of the classical score, and the movie tune we
all love, is used to surround the brutality of the modern world, much
as the Nazis used classical music to mask their violence.”93 A Clockwork
Orange’s musical score functions together with the pop art and cartoon
stylisation of Alex’s violence to complicate our reaction. The spectator
who objects to Kubrick’s “using Ludwig van like that” resembles of the
Cat Lady, who, complains about Alex’s misuse of a “very important work
of art.” As Robert Hughes remarks, “this pathetic burst of connoisseur’s
jargon echoes in a vast cultural emptiness. In worlds like this, no work of
art can be important.”94
To conclude: in developing nadsat from English and Russian for A

Clockwork Orange, Burgess set out to write a meta-fictional brainwashing
primer without inflecting it politically, but placing the novel in the
context of contemporary Cold War brainwashing scares and discourses
on behavioural conditioning reveals that no such political agnosticism
was available. Kubrick, similarly, and more convincingly, repudiated the
suggestion that his adaptation was inflected by Cold War politics, but
seems equally to have been concerned with delivering meta-cinematic
lessons about the possibilities of conditioning and mind control, and
particularly the dangers of listening to a seductive voice.
There remain a number of questions. First, there is the question of
whether Alex is finally set free by his hypnopaedic reprogramming, or
simply made into a different kind of conditioned beast: “our beast.”95
Steven M. Cahn asks, in fact, whether Alex has ever been free, observing
that Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange offers a “dramatization of behav-
iorism,” but that it is not restricted to the Ludovico treatment. Rather,
the spectre of conditioning extends to the entirety of Alex’s life, including
his life before treatment:
Like the famed Pavlov dogs, Alex learns responses that satisfy his needs,
and he performs them again and again. For instance, when he is with his
parents, he reacts as their conditioning has taught him to react, by bullying
and lying. […] Kubrick implies that the Ludovico conditioning technique
is merely a concentrated version of what goes on every minute of every
human being’s life. […] Kubrick is suggesting, no human being is free at
any time in his life. The implication is that […] conditioning is inescapable.
This is the same view that B. F. Skinner has promulgated […] in Beyond
Freedom and Dignity.96
So is Kubrick presenting us with the horrors of brainwashing as Burgess

purported to do? Or conditioning? Or with the horror that we, as specta-
tors of A Clockwork Orange, are being brainwashed in our seats? Or with
the horror that we are always already conditioned?
But is all this all now old hat? In their emphasis on brainwashing, both
Burgess’s novel and Kubrick’s film reveal themselves as products of their
age, which may now appear “alien” or “dated.”97 This question might
be set against another question: Was there ever such a thing as brain-
washing at all? Was it just all a product of the paranoia of the high Cold
War era? Streatfeild and Albert D. Biderman suggest that there was no
236 J. MCENTEE
such thing.98 But finally, if there was, Ricks wonders “Is this film worried
enough about films?”99 About their effects, about their potential as mind-
altering experiences? Not as much as Burgess’s novel, Ricks suggests, and
not enough.
Notes
1. Burgess, A. (1990) You’ve Had Your Time, London: Vintage, N. Pag.
2. Burgess, A. (2013a) “Clockwork Marmalade,” in A. Biswell (ed). A
Clockwork Orange, London: Penguin, pp. 224–230, p. 227.
3. Krämer, P. (2011a) A Clockwork Orange: Controversies, Houndsmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 66.
4. Kozloff, S. (1988) Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American
Fiction Film, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California
Press, p. 4.
5. See for example Rabinowitz, P. J. (2003) “‘A Bird of Like Rarest Spun
Heavenmetal’; Music in A Clockwork Orange”, in S. Y. McDougal (ed).
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, N. Pag.; Gengaro, C. L. (2003) “‘Using Ludwig van Like
That’: The Shift of Autobiographical Presence and Perspective in the
Novel and Stage Versions of A Clockwork Orange,” in G. Woodroffe (ed).
Anthony Burgess, Autobiographer, Angers: Presses de l’Universite d’Angers,
pp. 153–163.
6. McDougal, S. Y. (2003), N. Pag.
7. McCracken, S. (1972) “Novel into Film: Novelist into Critic: A Clockwork
Orange…Again,” The Antioch Review 32(3): 427–436, 428.
8. Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2017) “The Language of A Clockwork Orange:
A Corpus Stylistic Approach to Nadsat,” Language and Literature 26(3):
247–264, 248.
9. McDougal, S. Y. (2003), N. Pag.
10. Evans, R. O. (1971) “Nadsat: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony
Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange”,” Journal of Modern Literature 1(3):
406–410, 409.
11. Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2017), 252; Kohn, L. (2008) “Antilanguage
and a Gentleman’s Goloss: Style, Register, and Entitlement to Irony in A
Clockwork Orange,” eSharp (11): 1–27, 1–2, 4–5.
12. Burgess, A. (2013b [1962]) A Clockwork Orange, London: Penguin,
p. 172.
13. Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2017), 249.
14. Vincent, B. and Clarke, J. (2017), 254–255, 258–259; Burgess, A. (2011
[1972]) “The American A Clockwork Orange,” in M. Rawlinson (ed). A
Clockwork Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. 143–147,
143–144.
15. Sassi, C. (2008) “Lost in Babel: The Search for the Perfect Language
in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange,” in Roughley, A. R. (ed).
Anthony Burgess and Modernity, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
pp. 252–269, 255.
16. Goh, R. B. H. (2000) “‘Clockwork’ Language Reconsidered: Iconicity
and Narrative in Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’,” Journal of
Narrative Theory 30(2): 263–280, 264.
17. Burgess, A. (2013c [1978]) 1985, London: Serpent’s Tail, 80.
18. Burgess, A. (2012 [1973]) “The Clockwork Condition,” The New Yorker,
4 June, Available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/
06/04/the-clockwork-condition, accessed 25 May 2021.
19. Burgess (2013a), 247–248.
20. Burgess (2012).
21. Kohn (2008), 1–2; Vincent and Clarke (2017), 256–257.
22. Burgess (2013a), 227. Emphasis in original.
23. Biswell, A. (2005) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, London: Picador,
p. 257; Biswell, A. (2013) “Introduction”, in A. Burgess (ed). A
Clockwork Orange, London Penguin, pp. 13–27, 16.
24. Biswell (2013), 16.
25. Skinner, B. F. (2002 [1971]) Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Indianapolis:
Hackett.
26. Burgess (2013c), 76–77; Burgess (2012).
27. Burgess (2013c), 76.
28. Burgess (2013c), 78–79.
29. Ravyse, N. E. (2014) “Nadsat: The Oscillation Between Reader Immer-
sion and Repulsion,” Literator 35(1): 1–5, 1–2.
30. Huxley, A. (2004 [1959]) Brave New World Revisited, London: Vintage,
p. 123.
31. Streafeild, D. (2006) Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control,
London: Hodder, pp. 19–20.
32. For a discussion of the likely drugs, see Servitje, L. (2018) “Of Drugs and
Droogs: Cultural Dynamics, Psychopharmacology, and Neuroscience in
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange,” Literature and Medicine 36(1):
101–123.
33. Huxley (2004), 9–10.
34. Huxley (2004), 43–49.
35. Huxley (2004), 101–103, p. 110.
36. Huxley (2004), 85.
37. Huxley (2004), 136.
38. Burgess (2013a), 230.
39. Biswell (2005), 241–242; Burgess, A. (2001a [1987]) “Origins and Adap-
tations,” in M. Rawlinson (ed). A Clockwork Orange, New York and
London: W. W. Norton, pp. 170–173, 170.
238 J. MCENTEE
40. Burgess, A. (2011b [1962]) “Pelagian Versus Augustinian,” in M. Rawl-

inson (ed). A Clockwork Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton,
pp. 135–138, 136.
41. Burgess (2012).
42. Burgess (2013a), 230.
43. However, the Americanisms did not make their way into the final novel.
See Biswell (2005), 257.
44. Aggeler, G. (1987) “Pelagius and Augustine,” in H. Bloom (ed). Anthony
Burgess, New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, pp. 101–
132, 115.
45. Dunne, M. W. (2013) A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing
and Postwar American Society, Amherst and Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, p. 54.
46. Hunter, E. (2012 [1958]) Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied
It, London: Forgotten Books; Meerloo, J. (2016 [1956]) The Rape of the
Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing,
San Diego, CA: Progressive Press; Lifton, R. J. (April 1954) “Home by
Ship: Reaction Patterns of American Prisoners of War Repatriated from
North Korea,” American Journal of Psychiatry 110(10): 732–739; Lifton,
R. J. (1989 [1961]) Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A
Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China, Chapel Hill and London: University of
North Carolina Press.
47. McEntee, J. (2018) “The Camp Psychiatrist in American Horror and
Thriller Movies: From Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate to M.
Night Shymalan’s Split,” Screening the Past 43. Available online: http://
www.screeningthepast.com/issue-43-first-release/the-camp-psychiatrist-
in-american-horror-and-thriller-movies-from-psycho-and-the-manchurian-
candidate-to-m-night-shymalans-split/, accessed 29 May 2021.
48. McEntee (2018).
49. McCracken (1972), 428–430.
50. McCracken (1972), 432.
51. Higgins, S. (2018) “Purity of Essence in the Cold War: Dr. Strangelove,
Paranoia, and Bodily Boundaries,” Textual Practice 35(2): 799–820.
52. Huxley (2004), 83.
53. Lifton (1989), 5; see also Streafeild (2006), 4, 11–12; Meerloo (2016),
20; Sargant, W. (1957) Battle for the Mind. Prabhat Books, p. xx.
54. Estournel, N. (2013) “The Relevance of Voice for Understanding
Ethical Concerns Raised by Nabokov’s Lolita and Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange,” Opticon1826 15(11): 1–8, 4–5; McDougal (2003), N. Pag.
55. Burgess (2013b), 112–116.
56. Carruthers, S. L. (2009) Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and
Brainwashing, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 191.
57. Burgess (2013b), 217.
58. Burgess (2013b), 223.

59. Burgess (2013b), 7.
60. Burgess (2013b), 100.
61. Burgess (2013b), 85.
62. Fowler, R. (2011 [1981]) “Anti-language,” in M. Rawlinson (ed). A
Clockwork Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. 230–234,
232.
63. Kael, P. (2003) “A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Strangelove,” in S. Y.
McDougal (ed). Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, N. Pag.
64. McDougal (2003), N. Pag.
65. Burgess (2013b), 183.
66. Kubrick, S. (2000) Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Southwold,
Suffolk: Screenpress Books, N. Pag.
68. Sobchack, V. (2001) Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film,
New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 147–149.
Emphasis in original.
69. Kolker, R. P. (2003) “A Clockwork Orange … Ticking,” in S. Y.
McDougal (ed). Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Kindle edition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, N. Pag.
70. Chion, M. (1999) The Voice in Cinema. Trans. C. Gorbman, New York:
Columbia University Press, p. 1.
71. Chion (1999), 4.
72. Chion (1999), 49.
73. Kubrick, S. (2001a [1972]) “Modern Times: An Interview with Stanley
Kubrick” Interview by P. Strick and P, Houston, in G. D. Phililips
(ed). Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
pp. 126–139, 132–133.
74. Chion (1999), 51–53.
75. A Clockwork Orange offered Kubrick the opportunity to explore such an
unreliable narrator, but with freedom in terms of the censorship of sexual
themes he had not enjoyed in Lolita. See Krämer (2011), 77–79.
76. Kozloff (1988), 111.
77. Estournel (2013), 2.
78. Krämer, P. (2015a) ““What’s It Going To Be, Eh?” Stanley Kubrick’s
Adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange”, in T. Ljujic, P.
Krämer, and R. Daniels (eds). Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, London:
Black Dog, pp. 218–235, 229; Kael (2003), N. Pag.
79. Burgess (2013a), 249; Burgess (2002), N. Pag.; Burgess, A. (1986)
“A Clockwork Orange: Resucked,” in M. Rawlinson (ed). A Clockwork
Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. v–xi; Elsaesser,
240 J. MCENTEE
T. (2011 [1976]) “Screen Violence and the Audience,” in M. Rawl-

inson (ed). A Clockwork Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton,
pp. 338–346, 343–344; Kolker (2003), N. Pag.; Krämer (2015a);
Krämer, P. (2015b) “The Case of A Clockwork Orange,” Pure Movies.
Available online: https://www.puremovies.co.uk/columns/the-case-of-a-
clockwork-orange/, accessed 25 May 2021; Kubrick, S. (2001b [1971])
“Kubrick Country”, interview by P. Houston, in G. D. Phililips (ed).
Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
pp. 108–115, 111; McDougal (2003), N. Pag; Schlossman, B. (2008)
“Burgess/Kubrick/A Clockwork Orange (Twenty-to-One),” in A. R.
Roughley (ed). Anthony Burgess and Modernity, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, pp. 279–282, 281; Vincent and Clarke (2017), 248.
80. Ricks, C. (2011 [1972]) “Horror Show,” in M. Rawlinson (ed). A Clock-
work Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. 311–320, 313,
316.
83. Krämer (2011a), 27.
84. Kubrick, S. (2001c [1972]) “Kubrick’s Creative Concern,” Interview by
G. Siskel, in G. D. Phililips (ed). Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, pp. 116–125, 124.
85. Kubrick, S. (2001 [1971]) “Mind’s Eye: A Clockwork Orange,” Interview
by J. Hofsess, in G. D. Phililips (ed). Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, pp. 105–107, 106–107.
86. Krämer, P. (2011b) “‘Movies That Make People Sick’: Audience
Responses to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange,” Participations:
Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8(1): 416–430, 418, 423.
87. Krämer (2011b), xi–xxiv.
88. Krämer (2011b), 423.
89. Kubrick (2001b), 118.
90. Kubrick (2001b), 109–110.
91. Ricks (2011), 312.
92. Strange, C. (2010) “Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as Art Against
Torture,” Crime Media Culture 6(3): 267–284, 278.
93. Kolker (2003), N. Pag.
94. Hughes, R. (2003 [1972]) “The Decor of Tomorrow’s Hell”, in S.
Y. McDougal (ed). Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, N. Pag.
95. Kolker (2003), N. Pag.
96. Cahn, S. M. (2011 [1974]) “Freedom,” in M. Rawlinson (ed). A Clock-
work Orange, New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. 302–304,
303.
97. Carruthers, S. (2001) “Past Future: The Troubled History of Stanley

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange,” National Forum, 81(2): 29–33, 30, 33.
98. Streafeild (2006); Biderman, A. D. (1962) “The Image of ‘Brain-
washing,’” The Public Opinion Quarterly 26(4): 547–563, 550.
99. Ricks (2011), 319.
A Clockwork Orange in 21st Century
A Thing Living, and Not Growing
Ajay Hothi
1 Introduction
In both the book A Clockwork Orange and its film adaptation, Alex,
the story’s protagonist, exercises the limits of control. To reflect upon
his relationships and interactions—with his family, his friendship group,
his flings, his correctional officer, and his prisoners—is to see Alex push,
force, manipulate, and coerce everyone to his own will.
Alex has a near-unshakeable confidence in his own abilities, both
mental and physical. Indeed, when he agrees to undergo the Ludovico
Technique—the behaviour-steering procedure that enacts the story’s
central narrative pivot—it is done as a matter of his own choice, with
the unassailable belief that it will have no effect upon him. Alex is the
archetypal ‘autonomous man’, whose world is shaped around him and
him alone, and which has regrettable, but necessary, victims. For Alex,
the world itself is victim to his desires. There may be the argument made
that the structures of Alex’s society and environment (indeed, our own;
A. Hothi (B)
Department of Critical and Historical Studies, Kingston School of Art,
Kingston University, London, UK
e-mail: a.hothi@kingston.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_12
246 A. HOTHI
science-fictionalised) are constricting, that they suffocate the individual.

That Alex’s self-determined exceptionalism is a matter of admiration. The
question then becomes a moralistic or ethical one.
This chapter will examine the nature of autonomy and free will in rela-
tion to behaviour-altering technologies. It will consider the contemporary
practice of biotechnology and, using A Clockwork Orange as a cautionary
tale, speculate on the ramifications of technology and artificial intelligence
upon the ‘real’.
Commenting on his novel, Anthony Burgess summarised the central
theme as “[t]he forced marriage of an organism to a mechanism, of
a thing living, growing … to a cold, dead artefact – is that solely a
concept of nightmare?”1 Nevertheless, A Clockwork Orange presupposes
that which is now being writ real: an epochal shift driven by the joining
of ‘bio-’ to ‘-technology’.
2 The Anthropocene
Anthropocenic inquiry is an indistinct terrain. It is probably more suited
to philosophy and the humanities rather than the natural sciences;
from a geological perspective, the Anthropocene is a theory—a work-
in-progress—rather than a defined epoch. As a critical concept, the
Anthropocene allows humans to instigate and investigate varieties of epis-
temic systems relating to their own place in both the environment and in
history.
Nature has always been shaped to human need. David Orr writes of
the “mythic condition of [a return to] ecological innocence. No such
place ever existed.”2 Denouncing the contribution of the human hand
to the destruction of nature is phatic; the natural form of the human
impulse is expansionist. Under the human hand, nature has been polluted,
domesticated, packaged, and managed. There are potential solutions for
the protection and preservation of the earth’s ecology. Traditionalists ask
that we allow nature to fully reclaim part of the earth; ‘ecomodernists’
argue for the “decoupling [of] human development from environmental
impacts.”3 Both of these examples are absolute, and more polemical than
realistic. Active solutions towards ecological sustainability tend to incor-
porate forms of ‘human-centred design’. This is the implication that in
order to be sustained—even in its present, vastly reduced state—nature
must be regulated to human requirement.
A THING LIVING, AND NOT GROWING 247
That humans are separate to nature is a view that descends from the
concept of exceptionalism, which itself is related to the practice of expan-
sionism. An often-overlooked aspect of the anthropocenic is how nature
is manifest within the human—that is, the biology and ecology of the
human body. Ethical and moral considerations of human intervention
with the environment are positioned in a significantly different manner
to the ethical and moral considerations of human interventions with their
own evolution. In geological terms, the Anthropocene is an environment
concept, but the biological human form is an inherently anthropocenic
concern.
The biologist Carl R. Woese speculated on a pre-Darwinian moment
and positioned his paper ‘A New Biology for a New Century’ within
that gap in knowledge.4 Physicist Freeman Dyson (who, incidentally, had
contributed to the unused documentary prologue section of Kubrick’s
film 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]) effectively summarised one of Woese’s
key narratives by describing a proto-stage that existed before natural
selection took place, where
a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so

that clever tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be
inherited by them all.5
What Woese explicates is a ‘horizontal gene transfer’ (a practice which

only became accepted as provable in the late 1980s) taking place hundreds
of millions of years before thought possible. Dyson presents a close
reading of this pre-Darwinian horizontal gene transfer, noting in this
period that the “basic biochemical machinery of life evolved rapidly
during the first few hundred million years…and changed very little in
the following two billion years [of the Darwinian era] of microbial evolu-
tion.”6 He states that, following Woese’s speculations, we must undertake
a reconsideration of what biology means to humans, including its moral
and ethical dimensions. He writes how now, in the twenty-first century,
‘the Darwinian era is over,’7 and:
…when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorga-

nize the biosphere…cultural evolution replaced biological evolution as the
driving force for change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures
spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance…In
the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated.8
248 A. HOTHI
Dyson gives examples of do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, home-

operated gene transfer kits for breeding new varieties of flowers; biotech
games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than images
on screens. He points towards genetic engineering creating an explosion
of biodiversity. His meaning is that humans now have the ability to alter
evolutionary courses across the entire natural ecosystem—including for
themselves.
The terms ‘biotechnology’, ‘genetic engineering’, and the alteration
of human bio-evolution evoke a dystopian vision of the man reliant on
the machine. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse coined the term ‘Tech-
nological Rationality’. The concept drew from an analysis of the Third
Reich, which he called “a form of ‘technocracy’: the technical consider-
ations of imperialistic efficiency and rationality supersede the traditional
standards of profitability and general welfare.”9 The war economy of the
Nazi regime instituted technologies that were rational in wartime but
irrational in peacetime. When these technologies became widespread, the
irrational becomes normal. Influencing human biology is by no means
a new practice—prostheses have been discovered dating back to Ancient
Egypt.10 Today, extended forms of human enhancement are known as
‘Transhumanism’.11
Human enhancement beyond the ordinary faculties is a staple in liter-
ature, science fiction or otherwise. Arnold Bennett wrote in 1909 of
The Human Machine, whereby personal betterment could be achieved
by thinking about the mind as an organised machine; that in order to
be in control of oneself, one has to make the habit of controlling one’s
brain. Far from being a science fiction narrative, The Human Machine was
a self-help book—a study guide. The key concept of L. Ron Hubbard’s
Dianetics (1950) is that “the problem of the human mind was a problem
of engineering and that all knowledge was surrender to an engineering
approach.”12 Hubbard was famously a science fiction novelist himself,
and rebranded Dianetics within the fictional narrative Battlefield Earth
(1982). In science fiction, transhumanism is translated through cyber-
netics, that is embodied systemic processes, and represented visually
through robotics or cyborgs. And this is where we come to a fork in
the road.
As with nature, the human manages, tends, and domesticates tech-
nology according to requirement, however nature is placed at arm’s
length—it is ultimately subject to its own biology, separate to human
biology. Advancements in technology—particularly biotechnology—allow
humans to demonstrate an exceptionalism beyond the reach of nature

itself. The question then is how far does the human accept technolog-
ical innovations into their own biology? To negotiate an answer to this
question, we can return to science fiction.
In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), workers are integrated into the
technology of industry—they are a mechanism by which industry func-
tions. Ostensibly a dystopian vision, with the workers living and working
in subterraneous chambers, it is nevertheless representative of Taylorism,
named for its theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, which analysed efficiency
workflows in factories. The study of human labour processes, Taylorism
effectively argued for the worker’s actions to be mechanised—reduced to
a few core actions that they could be intensively trained in. In Brave New
World (1932), Aldous Huxley described genetic engineering in the womb
and youth indoctrination for the aim of creating a balanced society. Soma,
a drug that induces happiness without the reduction of faculty, is adminis-
tered in order to keep workers working efficiently. In both of these cases,
society is divided between those ‘mechanised’ and those subject to their
own free will. E.M. Forster provides a similar vision in his 1909 short
story The Machine Stops; H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) provided
an analogous example with the Eloi and the Morlocks.
This chapter began with the Anthropocene but suggests that the nature
of that inquiry has developed at a rate that extends beyond just the
boundaries of the human and the ecologies with which it intervenes.
Complex biotechnologies are normal in today’s world. Pacemakers, for
instance, were once considered exceptional in how they delivered elec-
trical impulses to irregular heartbeats. Today, they are commonplace.
Bionic limbs are being provided to amputees. They can be faster, stronger,
and more powerful than biological limbs—smaller, lighter, interchange-
able. ‘More human, than human’, as Eldon Tyrell states of his Nexus
5 cyborg in Blade Runner (1982). Modern bionic limbs often utilise
myoelectric; these are the electric properties of existing muscles within
the biological limb, which are then activated and powered by external
batteries. A more contemporary approach is osseointegration, whereby
the prosthetic is integrated skeletally through the residual limb, thereby
providing greater stability and weight-bearing, allowing bone and muscle
to generate around the integrated skeletal implant, and provides less
of a reliance on the battery-operated motor. As Freeman Dyson specu-
lated, the path to domesticated biotechnology is clearing. Gene editing
is currently being tested—the most well-known being CRISPR-Cas9, a
250 A. HOTHI
genome-editing biotechnology that makes bioengineering possible. The

technique, which first successfully edited human embryos in 2017,13 is
being considered as the engine that is driving therapy and reductions of
cancers, sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases currently,
with the potential for all diseases in the future. Known as ‘germline
engineering’, DNA alterations made in the embryonic stage of human
development would become inheritable traits.
Writing in 2002, Francis Fukuyama called for the government regula-
tion of biotechnology, arguing: “by tinkering with the genetic constitu-
tion of humans we risk undermining the ideal of personal autonomy and
destroying the basis of moral equality.”14 Marcuse as well argued for the
case in his essay on technological rationality: “…we may define the indi-
vidual as the subject of certain fundamental standards and values which
no external authority was supposed to encroach upon.”15 To foreground
the words that follow, it is worth quoting Marcuse at length:
The individual, as a rational being, was deemed capable of…his own

thinking and, once he had acquired freedom of thought, of pursuing the
course of action that would actualize them. Society’s task was to grant him
such freedom and to remove all restrictions upon his rational course of
action.
The principle of individualism, the pursuit of self-interest, was condi-
tioned upon the proposition that self-interest was rational, that is to say,
that it resulted from was constantly guided and controlled by autonomous
thinking. The rational self-interest did not coincide with the individual’s
immediate self-interest, for the latter depended upon the standards and
requirements of the prevailing social order…Men had to break through
the whole system of ideas and values that conformed to their rational
interest. They had to live in a state of constant vigilance, apprehension,
and criticism…This, in a society which was not yet rational, constituted
a principle of permanent unrest and opposition. For false standards still
governed the life of men, and the free individual was therefore he who
criticized realization.16
The Ludovico Technique in both the novel A Clockwork Orange

and its film adaptation17 takes up a remarkably short amount of space
within the broader plot, despite its position as the central plot device for
the overall narrative arc. The technique, which involves drugging Alex,
binding him to a seat, clamping his eyes open, and forcing him to watch
a cinema of ultraviolence, has the aim of reconfiguring his brain activity to
find horror in violence rather than joy. Yet, for all its brevity, this chapter
will argue that it provides the viewer with the tools to negotiate the core
concepts of the novel/film. The technique suggests that the novel and
film are works of science fiction and, as such, present contemporaneous
analyses of social systems and processes. Looking back at A Clockwork
Orange from our present-day perspective can provide more precise critical
insights into the social problematics of allowing the interjection of tech-
nologies into human biology. It allows us to speculate upon the moral
and ethical problems of the contemporary situation at arm’s length.
The framework for this analysis began with the Anthropocene, and if
that concept suggested that human interventions into the natural envi-
ronment have been a deciding factor in the behaviour of the broad
environmental ecology, the legacy of the Anthropocene is one where
domesticated, packaged, and managed technologies are accelerating the
effects of human control over the natural state of being. The Ludovico
Technique is a case study for what we can consider the post-Anthropocene
to be: the Technocene—and Alex becomes the participant in an experi-
ment for the future of man.
3 The ‘Technocene’
To understand the effects of the ‘Technocene’, we can first undertake a
short analysis of how both Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick demon-
strate this evolution. The use of language in A Clockwork Orange can be
thought of as a system by which we, the reader, measure the values of each
character. It is a method used to great effect by Vladimir Nabakov in the
novel Lolita (1955). The reader can, if not forgive, often forget the primal
barbarity of Humbert Humbert’s actions by virtue of the eloquence with
which he narrates his story (not a dozen sentences into the novel he
gives this abstract self-reflection: “You can always count on a murderer
for a fancy prose style.”18 ) It’s not a trope that Stanley Kubrick actively
lifted in his 1962 adaptation of the novel. His Humbert, played by James
Mason, often aborts his speech, left stilted in the presence of Dolores
Haze. The linguistic acrobatics are more prominent from the film’s main
antagonist, Clare Quilty, played by Peter Sellers (who, at one point, even
accuses Humbert of being overly repetitious in his ineloquent speech).
Kubrick was famously enamoured by Sellers’ improvisational skills (“He
was also the only actor I ever knew who could really improvise,”19 he
told biographer Roger Lewis), and this was made clear in the publication
252 A. HOTHI
of Nabakov’s original script for the film Lolita, which significantly limits
Quilty’s dialogue. For all of his directorial prowess, Stanley Kubrick was
not known for writing dialogue that showcased a character’s inner being.
Certainly, Alex ‘The Large’ chooses his language deliberately—
obtuse, with his own poiesis—a truly original concoction of words.
The reader/viewer doesn’t know whether those combinations of words
have ever been used before in those precise sequences, if those words
are a common currency, or whether Alex is making up some of them
on-the-spot.
Ben Masters describes Anthony Burgess as “an aesthete, in the broadest
sense, and [how] aesthetic appreciation is the best way in [to his use
of language].”20 Masters goes on to note how the theme of free will
and moral choice recurs through Burgess’s works and that his exam-
ination of this theme is probed through ‘style’, notably in wordplay.
Alex’s mastery of language—switching imperceptibly between nadsat and
Queen’s Register English—we can place firmly as Burgess’s work. The
novelist often reflected upon Alex’s exceptionalism, as we will come
to see, and it is never made explicitly clear in either the book or the
film whether other gangs speak nadsat as proficiently, consistently, or as
eloquently as Alex.
Alex is a character of excess. His language—in narration or conver-
sation—is verbose. His descriptions bilious with visceral detail. Here,
describing bringing himself to orgasm:
Then, brothers, it came. O bliss, bliss and heaven, oh it was gorgeous-

ness and georgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under
my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise, silver-flamed
and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again,
crunched like candy thunder. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal
or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now. As
I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures. There were veeks and ptitsas
laying on the ground screaming for mercy and I was smecking all over
my rot and grinding my boot into their tortured litsos and there were
naked devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a
shlaga into them.21
For Burgess, high moral values were predicated on linguistic particu-

larity and wordplay. Though he alludes towards physical, sexual violence,
his descriptions are vivid—sumptuous. This is further evidenced in later
works, including Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeares Love Life
(1964), M/F (1971), and Earthly Powers (1980). The individual’s use
of language was a means for existing in and traversing through the diffi-
culties of moral social choice. Alex’s social morality is skewed towards
the self—defiantly anti-social—and yet he is often defined as an ‘anti-
hero’, though there is little evidence that his actions can be taken in any
way as ‘heroic’. For Burgess, a baroque literary style related intimately to
questions of free will.
At the beginning of the book and the film, Alex is a human being
endowed, perhaps overendowed, with three characteristics that we regard
as essential attributes of man. He rejoices in articulate language and even
invents a new form of it.22
Burgess here expressly states that nadsat (at least Alex’s individual form
of the subcultural language) is Alex’s own invention. In his language,
Alex plays with his own form of personal autonomy; his speech is unre-
stricted by the structured elements of formal language, and therefore of
the restrictions of formal society. He is free to create language—he is
articulate enough to create his own society—and he relishes the oppor-
tunity to both manifest that freedom through his language and through
the society of droogs that he leads.
Stanley Kubrick selected Malcolm McDowell for the role of Alex
based upon seeing the actor in director Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968),
in which McDowell played a revolutionary lower-sixth schoolboy at an
English public boarding school. That character, Mick Travis,23 like Alex,
suffers the establishment as a behemoth that must be fought. Like Alex,
Mick trades heavily on natural charisma to achieve his goals. Much of
these characters ‘successes’ lie in how much they are able to negotiate
relationships with those among them. When Alex is visited at home
by his probation officer, P.R. Deltoid, his language recedes away from
his flowery, tribal lexicon to one that is formal and readily understood.
In doing so, he places himself at a level alongside Deltoid, as a peer
rather than as his charge (at one point calling Deltoid ‘brother’, before
correcting himself to say ‘sir’, dealt with a rather patronising smile by
McDowell in the film version). Alex’s formal articulation enrages Deltoid
because he knows the insincerity with which it is delivered, yet that formal
articulation is a barrier that Alex erects because he knows that Deltoid—
and others within mainstream society—cannot overcome it. For Alex, this
254 A. HOTHI
formal articulation is a form of lower-level engagement and mainstream

society is ill-equipped to manage Alex at his highest form of self.
Kubrick has McDowell perform this scene in near-nudity, wearing just
a pair of Y-Fronts, against P.R. Deltoid’s full suit, shoes, and overcoat.
A visual representation of the differences in power within formal social
structures, and of how, in this scene, Alex remains close to his primal self,
despite his unnatural shift in communication. McDowell recalls speaking
to Lindsay Anderson of his casting by Stanley Kubrick for the film ‘Clock-
work Orange’ and asking for advice on playing a character with some
similar attributes to Mick Travers. McDowell remembers how Anderson
reminded him of a scene from if… where Mick has the camera approach
him in close-up and he sees, off-screen, the fact that he’s about to
be severely beaten. He delivers then “…that smile. That sort of ironic
smile.”24 McDowell goes on to say that was all the direction that he
needed to develop Alex into his own character, and it’s a smile that is
almost permanently on Alex’s face, at least throughout the first act of the
film, and again in scenes at the film’s climax.
In his analyses of social order, Max Weber describes charismatic
authority as one in which certain individuals are set outside of the
everyday social order by virtue of characteristics that endow their person-
ality with a sense of almost superhuman or specifically exceptional powers
or qualities.25 That smile is a knowing smile, easy to Alex’s lips; a smile
that he uses to lure girls from the record shop to his bed, and that remains
(albeit briefly) as Deltoid—disappointed and angry at Alex’s false promises
to be ‘good’—blankets it with spit in the face. It’s a smile that comforts
F. Alexander, when Alex enters his home and his arms—cold, beaten,
wet, and destitute—years after his first visit. It’s a smile that betrays the
violence that he and his droogs enact upon the tramp that is their first
victim in the film. There are multiple instances of Alex flashing a ‘zooby
smile’ in the book, but often the smile is a cover for Alex’s insincerity.
Even the Minister of the Inferior (sic) highlights how “Prison taught
him [Alex] the false smile.”26 Certainly, that is the case for Malcolm
McDowell’s Alex, but the film version offers something more: that smile
is a sign of pure enjoyment, of sheer thrill of living, of being one’s own
charge. Weber goes on to note how one aim of leadership is to demon-
strate positive influence and autonomy of action.27 That is a smile that is
uniquely McDowell’s Alex.
The success of any film adaptation of a novel relies on the director
selecting actors that can embody the attitude of a character that has
previously only been described. The confidence that Alex projects in

the novel is manifested by his language. Kubrick retains much of that
language, often word-for-word, but the screen version of Alex inhabits
McDowell’s body. Alex is a character that both repels and appeals to
audiences precisely because of the confidence that Alex projects. He
struts and strolls through every scene; always the centre of attention.
He jumps, shifts, prowls, tap dances between secondary characters (in
A Clockwork Orange, every character is second to Alex). Every situation
is his to manipulate. When the Secretary of the Interior is inspecting the
prison grounds, despite the fact that Alex is one of many prisoners lined
up, in uniform and to attention, he assures that his presence is heard.
When first arriving in prison, upon being told to empty his pockets,
he saunters to the desk before being barked back behind the oche. He
feigns insouciance as he then hands over his personal items one-by-one.
Burgess defines Alex by his mastery of communication; Alex lives through
Malcolm McDowell’s body. He is elevated, stylish. If Stanley Kubrick’s
films ever shared a common criticism, it was that the dialogue in his films
was often mannered (hence his reliance on charismatic or crazed leads:
Peter Sellers, Jack Nicholson, Kirk Douglas—even the easy charm that
William Sylvester brought to Heywood Floyd in 2001: A Space Odyssey
or Matthew Modine to Pvt. Joker in Full Metal Jacket (1987). Kubrick
himself was the great visualiser—never the great writer.
Alex (as a character, not a creation) feels designed. Imbued, and there-
after empowered, with a sense of the linguistic, a conversationalist of not
necessarily great intellect but of great instinct, and somebody who under-
stands that power comes from the mind but is demonstrated through
forceable action. His family life is thoroughly ordinary, working class,
little by way of opportunity to climb the social ladder. The society of
the novel and of the film is non-meritocratic. If it were, Alex displays all
of the qualities to reach the very top. But society doesn’t interest Alex,
only satiating the self. In the film, he dresses in a bowler hat, engorged
codpiece, bully-boy boots, and trousers, shirt, and braces of the whitest
white, barely noticeable, as though it were his own skin. Over one eye is
a false eyelash.
At the end of the eighteenth century, a phenomenon called the “Great
Male Renunciation” occurred in western society. A sartorial trend, the
adorned, embellished, and beautified clothing that had defined aristocratic
male fashions hitherto began to fall out of fashion, in favour of functional
civic garments (also, revolutionary clothing). Prior to this, male clothing
256 A. HOTHI
of the upper classes were used to flaunt one’s wealth, stature, and social
autonomy. The macaroni, as a figure, was described as
…a kind of animal, neither male nor female a thing of the neuter gender,
lately [c.1770] started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without
meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides
without exercise, it wenches without passion.28
The macaroni was a flamboyant, extroverted character; a sartorial

parody of the fashions of polite eighteenth century society. The macaroni
was the immediate precursor to the dandy: the modern, fashion-oriented,
clean, formal, bright, showy mode of style as evidenced by London
socialite Beau Brummell. Brummell would famously spend hours daily
cleaning his teeth, shaving, bathing, and dressing. At Eton, he wore a gold
buckle on the school uniform cravat. While studying at Oxford University,
he designed his own clothes and left after a little over a year. In soci-
eties of strict social structure, to be autonomous of one’s own decisions is
rare. Autonomous actions require some kind of freedom—economic, for
instance. By his own admission, Alex neither needs nor cares for wealth
because everything he desires he can take and then discard and then take
again. Alex takes great pride in his mind and in his body. His desires
emerge from lack (social lack) and his knowledge that he has both the
mental and physical abilities to feed his desires. He is marginalised within
his society, but it’s a self-actualised alienation. He demonstrates little-to-
no remorse for the well-being of his fellow citizens, only what he can take
from them to feed his own strengths. He has no desires to be a promi-
nent, upstanding member of society because he would be then subsumed
by the structures of that society and have his behaviours governed by it.
In a society in which one suffers from alienation, the only things one
has is their mind and their body. Alex’s style is so important because it
is his mode of representation: his style is the manifestation of a process
of design used to politicise his body. The fake eyelash is a throwback to
the ‘feminine’ male styles of the pre-Enlightenment era. The bowler hat
an artefact of city bankers. The boots, proto-Oi! punk. In writing on
the punk movement, sociologist Dick Hebdige draws upon the example
of the swastika. In the hands of the punks, the swastika became a very
powerful and complex symbol. Hebdige notes how the symbol of the
swastika was made available to young generations through its associ-
ated uses in popular culture (via, for example, the fascistic imagery of
David Bowie and Lou Reed), which thereafter allowed its appropriation
by the youth. For the punks, the symbol of the swastika had been wilfully
removed from its association with Nazi Germany. Writes Hebdige:
within an alternative subcultural context, its [the swastika’s] primary value

and appeal derived precisely from its lack of meaning: from its potential
for deceit. It was exploited as an empty effect.29
Hebdige asserts that the punks used the symbol of the swastika in
order to find a ‘relative autonomy’, by acting in an anti-social manner and
by manifesting contradictory symbols. Alex, too, finds his autonomy by
exploiting his own self in various manners. Creating language that isolates
himself from society; wearing clothing that variously alludes to styles asso-
ciated with gender, wealth, and class. For the punks, Hebdige notes that
“[t]he key to punk style remains elusive. Instead of arriving at the point
where we can begin to make sense of the style, we have reached the very
place meaning itself evaporates.”30 If we were to align this with Alex, we
can begin to see how all the manifest signs of personal autonomous action
may have actually—to the mainstream—had the opposite effect than that
which he desired. The dress, language, and actions of an independent
body and mind made him free of his society’s hegemonic structures; an
independent mind and an independent body. “Enterprising, aggressive,
outgoing. Young. Bold. Vicious.” The perfect candidate for a new kind
of biomedical behavioural correction technique.
Theories of the Technocene evoke a practical, day-to-day nightmare
of insidious social engineering: The black box of technology controlling
the relationships of groups and individuals. The realities are different. In
addition to the examples of surgical biotech outlined above, we, every
day, continue to use technology as self-monitoring devices. We check
the time on our phones and watches; we use FitBits to count our steps
and calories; we set alarms to make sure we’re on time for our Teams
meetings; we coordinate on Slack. Depending on one’s own perspec-
tives, these are either self-determining processes or they are the future
of workers predicted in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis almost a century. The
philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote extensively on personal freedoms and
their relationship to technology, and warned of encroachments on free
will—warned of the tyranny of technology—but maintained the view
that regulated technology would enhance human society to absolute effi-
ciency.31 This perspective takes at its core the same position posited
258 A. HOTHI
by Herbert Marcuse, as noted above. The difference in these perspec-

tives is that Ellul posits towards the constructed technological society
where Marcuse negotiates between the development of a technological
society and man’s self-interests during that process of construction. If
we encounter the present moment between the Anthropocene and the
Technocene, we see ourselves as positioned somewhere between the two
perspectives.
We manage and maintain our own efficiency and, in this sense, we do
to ourselves what factory owners did to workers. But if the pandemic has
taught us anything, it is that present social orders are unsustainable for the
majority and we have to examine our own self-interests in the contexts of
social interests in order to design new futures. Donna Haraway writes of
the cyborgian nature of contemporary society, “social reality [being] lived
social relations….we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids
of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs,”32 each knowing
self only being a partial identity that is fragmented, joined, and stitched
among others and other technologies. She warns of its dangers, asserting
that modern modes of technological production make “the nightmare of
Taylorism seem idyllic.”33 The identity of the self is one of auto-bricolage,
determined by what society deems important. A cyborgian future may, to
many, appeal—particularly those who can benefit from surgical biotech-
nology. It provides an equity of embodied experience. The danger—that
danger first identified in The Time Machine—is to what extent mechani-
sation of humans will make redundant human faculties. Secondarily, the
perspective put forth by, for instance, L. Ron Hubbard, who proposed
that “the problem of the human mind was a problem of engineering and
all that knowledge would surrender to an engineering approach,”34 which
evokes the image of a ‘cult’ of the engineered, in awe of the engineer.
The proposition of these concepts is that there is a glorious, shared
future for mankind that technology can attempt to attain, that tech-
nological interventions into the biology of humans can extend faculties
(perhaps even life itself), and that this is a utopian project. The impli-
cations are that there are desirable human traits and that there are
undesirable human traits, and biotechnology can be utilised to remove
the undesirable traits. Around the same time as the publication of The
Time Machine, German physician Max Nordau published Degeneration
(1892), with the premise that the decline of European civilisation is due
to the cultural and physical decline of its peoples, quoting ‘degenerate
art’ and the industrial revolution as the main causal factors. He identified
collapse in society through means including physiognomy, for instance.

Also around this time, Sir Francis Galton, the British scientist and cousin
of Charles Darwin, produced scientific papers promoting eugenics, social
Darwinism, and inherited intelligence. Galton also noted the collapse of
moral society at the hands of the ‘corrupted’, pointing evidence towards
those with degenerate social principles and low genetic worth.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that tech-
nology can be used to exacerbate poverty; how technology can highlight
wealth disparity, literacy, personal and independent space. Alex, as a
willing subject to the Ludovico Technique, asserts the strength of his
own independent mind and body to resist any form of aversion therapy.
His first mistake is to underestimate the power in the apparatus of state-
instituted violence. The eugenic programmes suggested by figures like Sir
Francis Galton indeed would encourage individuals to defer autonomy to
the state, all for the greater good of society. And, indeed, Alex enters
the process of independent body and mind, and leaves it mentally and
physically poorer. Both Burgess and Kubrick highlight this fact. When
faced with threatening behaviour, Alex crumples into himself, a wretched
figure, belching away, without control of his bodily functions. The usually
erudite and manipulative young man, when faced with the fact that his
parents have rented out his bedroom to a lodger, unable to sweet-talk or
subject them to emotional blackmail, Alex is left without his words. He
attempts a return to violence, only to be stopped by an involuntary phys-
ical revulsion. By virtue of being physically unable to do anything ‘bad’,
Alex has become ‘good’.
Advances in technology and biomedical research have led to a recon-
sideration of eugenics in the twenty-first century. The ethicist Nicholas
Agar argues for the rebranding of certain, technology-based, eugenics
programmes not as ‘eugenics’ itself (a term deeply-rooted in western
culture by its usage in human experimentation by the Nazis and Japanese
during World War II) but as ‘life plans of future persons’,35 or simply
as ‘liberal eugenics’. To underline his assertions, he notes support in
the subject by figures including James Watson (who, along with Francis
Crick proposed the double helix structure of the DNA molecule), among
others. Writes Agar,
I argue that respect for the life plans of future persons can constrain
parental choice in a way that sharply distinguishes the new eugenics from
its ugly ancestor…A eugenics program appropriately sensitive to the range
260 A. HOTHI
of potential life plans of future persons will not seek to enhance capacities
with any one life plan in mind.36
His definition here is that eugenics can be wilfully removed from

the state apparatus; precisely the opposite of Francis Fukuyama’s call
for biotechnology to be regulated. Agar and Fukuyama see personal
autonomy as being driven from different positions.
Agar’s technocracy has gathered support—even the United Nations
International Bioethics Committee updated their position on the human
genome and human rights to reflect that technological advancements
in genetics means that ‘new’ eugenics should not be subject to the
same ethical standards as those from the twentieth century.37 It is worth
remembering here that Dr. Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in
1949 for his development of psychosurgery, specifically cerebral angiog-
raphy and prefrontal lobotomy, as a cure for (perceived) mental illness,
the perpetration of violent acts being one such example.
Despite being the central plot device, the Ludovico Technique is
quickly rubbished by both Burgess and Kubrick. As noted above, this is
demonstrated by Alex’s mental and physical regression, but also through
his treatment by others. Almost immediately, he is subject to violence
by otherwise ‘good’ people—the community of tramps, protecting the
honour of one of their kind previously beaten by Alex and his droogs;
his beating by Dim and Billy Boy, in the book, George in the film,
now policemen (enforcers of the state apparatus); and his torture by
F. Alexander and his cronies. The difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’
is negated. Violence can be—and is—perpetrated indiscriminately. The
Ludovico Technique itself is of little-to-no value.
4 Conclusion
What the technique demonstrates is Burgess’s assertion that ‘good’
cannot be enforced upon people. Burgess refers to his religious beliefs.
Raised into Roman Catholicism, Burgess later considered himself lapsed,
but nevertheless continued to identify with the religion throughout his
life—it being a theme consistent in his works. In a 1973 essay for The
New Yorker, he cites Catholic theology as centrally one of free will:
“Catholicism rejects a doctrine that seems to send some men arbitrarily to
Heaven….Your future destination [i.e.. the afterlife]…is in your hands.”38
It is in this essay that the paradox of free will and predestination converge,
Burgess states that the parallel narrative ‘needs some explaining’. At

length:
Sean O’Faolain, in his autobiography, records an inability to reconcile

man’s free will with God’s total knowledge which was resolved—in a
sudden magical or miraculous flash of insight—one day before a taxi ride
in Manhattan. O’Faolain put it to himself this way: Any action of man
remained a free action until it was performed. Once performed, it became
something God had willed. He and the taxi-driver got drunk on this
discovery […] What I do suggest is that religion, and such secular or
anthropocenic disciplines as philosophy, psychology, and sociology, have
something in common, and that is an awareness of the abiding fact of
man’s unhappiness. And it would seem that certain words of ancient prove-
nance – like ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘free will’, even ‘original sin’ – do not have to
be superseded by pseudo-scientific terminology just because they happen
to derive from a God-centred approach to man.39
For early proponents of behavioural clinical therapies, a process like

eugenics was actively adopted by western religion as a way to return
to a ‘God-centred approach to man’, one that demonstrated the excep-
tional nature of man, in God’s image, of genetic purity and its potential
influence on social reform. ‘Scientific’ approaches to genetic reorgan-
isation were actively encouraged (though this author argues that if
lobotomies were invented in the concentration camps, they would never
have achieved social recognition). There lies the rub. The categorisation
that hereditary issues are scientific concerns, where this author argues that
they are technological, and therefore dependent on cultural appropria-
tion of technologies and those technologies’ intended and unintended
social consequences, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan.40
Sciences—even pseudo-sciences—are relevant until not, but they remain
under constant development of research. Technologies are subject to
similar cycles, but technologies (through objects and processes) interject
directly into everyday life. With every technological intervention, there
is a rupture from one way of living into the next. The Technocene has
normalised these ruptures, and we won’t be as lucky as Alex to be able to
return from where we came.
262 A. HOTHI
Notes
1. Burgess, A. (2012) ‘The Clockwork Condition’, The New Yorker. Accessed
13 June 2018 at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/
the-clockwork-condition.
2. Orr, David W. (2002) The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human
Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 11.
3. Asafu-Adjaye, John, et al. (2015) An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015)
[online]. Accessed 6 April 2021 at: www.ecomodernism.org.
4. Woese, Carl R. (2004) ‘A New Biology for a New Century’, in Microbi-
ology and Molecular Biology Reviews [online]. Accessed 6 April 2021 at:
https://mmbr.asm.org/content/68/2/173.
5. Dyson, F. (2005) ‘The Darwinian Interlude’, in MIT Technology Review
[online]. Accessed 6 April 2021 at: https://www.technologyreview.com/
2005/03/01/274577/the-darwinian-interlude-2/.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Marcuse, H. (1941) ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, in
Arato, A. & Eike, G. (eds.) (1982) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,
New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 139.
10. Anon. (2012) ‘Egyptian Toes Likely to Be the World’s Oldest Pros-
thetics’, The University of Manchester [online]. Accessed 6 April
2021at: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/egyptian-toes-lik
ely-to-be-the-worlds-oldest-prosthetics/.
11. A key difference between ‘standard’ enhancement technologies (pros-
thetics, plastic surgery, pacemakers, even spectacles) and transhumanism
is that the latter considers enhancements that go beyond natural human
faculty.
12. Hubbard, L.R. (1950) Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
California: Bridge Publications.
13. Conner, S. (2017) ‘First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.’, in MIT Tech-
nology Review [online]. Accessed 6 April 2021 at https://www.technolog
yreview.com/2017/07/26/68093/first-human-embryos-edited-in-us/.
14. Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotech-
nology Revolution. London: St. Martin’s Press, 29.
15. Ibid., 8.
16. Ibid., 140.
17. For the purposes of this piece of writing, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ will refer
to the novel by Anthony Burgess, ‘Clockwork Orange’ to the film by
Stanley Kubrick, drawn from the original theatrical poster, which used the
same title.
18. Nabakov, V. (1955) Lolita. London: Penguin.
19. Lewis, R. (1995) The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. London: Arrow.
20. Masters, B. (2017) ‘The Higher Morality: Anthony Burgess and the Busi-
ness of Moral Choice’, in Novel Style: Ethics and Excess in English Fiction
Since the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 28.
21. Burgess, A. (1962) A Clockwork Orange. London: Penguin.
22. Burgess, A. (2012) ‘The Clockwork Condition’, The New Yorker, 4–11
June issue.
23. The character Mick Travers reappears in later Lindsay Anderson films
O Lucky Man’ (1973) and ‘Britannia Hospital’ (1982), not with the
same characteristics but as a Zelig type character, whose personality adapts
according to the needs of the story.
24. Ryan, P. (2004) Malcolm McDowell. BFI Interviews. Interview transcript.
07 November 2004 [online]. Accessed 6 April 2021 at: https://web.arc
hive.org/web/20081121175939/http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/int
erviews/mcdowell.html.
25. Weber, M. (1947) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 369.
26. Burgess, A. (1996) A Clockwork Orange. London: Penguin, 74.
27. Ibid., 328.
28. Twadell Shipley, J. (1984) The Origins of English Words: A Discursive
Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. USA: John Hopkins University Press,
143.
29. Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Rout-
ledge, 117.
30. Ibid.
31. Ellul, J. (1954) The Technological Society. New York: Vintage.
32. Haraway, D. (1991) ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, 149–181.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 11.
35. Agar, N. (1998) ‘Liberal Eugenics’, in Public Affairs Quarterly. Vol. 12,
No. 2, 137.
36. Ibid.
37. United Nations International Bioethics Committee (2015) Report of the
IBC on updating its reflection on the Human Genome and Human Rights.
02 October 2015 [online]. Accessed 6 April 2021 at: https://unesdoc.
unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000233258.
38. Ibid., 21.
264 A. HOTHI
39. Burgess, A. (1973) “The Clockwork Condition” The New Yorker,

reprinted in May 2012 [online]. Accessed 31 August 2021 at: https://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/the-clockwork-condition.
40. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. London: Routledge (2nd
edition, 2001).
A Clockwork Orange and its Representations
of Sexual Violence as Torture: Stanley
Kubrick and Francis Bacon
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
1 Introduction
The British artist Francis Bacon and American director Stanley Kubrick
were contemporaries. They might never have met, although they lived
not far from each other in the UK. When speaking about people who
influenced their work, filmmakers such as David Lynch, David Cronen-
berg and Terrence Malick mention their names in one breath. Bacon
and Kubrick fueled the imagination of their audiences in the twen-
tieth century with dark pictures of humanity and found visualizations of
human suffering, depicted conflict and agony of individuals, isolated in
a hostile world. Hardly any image of visual torture is more iconic that
Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) being forced to watch violent staged
movie content of women being raped, the bloody beating of civilians,
Nazi propaganda and then documentary photographs of the victims of
the Holocaust with his eyes clamped open in mechanical contraptions.
K. A. Ritzenhoff (B)
Department of Communication, Central Connecticut State University, New
Britain, CT, USA
e-mail: Ritzenhoffk@CCSU.edu

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_13
266 K. A. RITZENHOFF
Alex screams in pain while the psychiatrists, doctors, politicians and prison
officials watch him remorselessly in the back of the auditorium, studying
the felon as a guinea pig who needs to be brainwashed into submission to
be “cured” from violence. The strategy of exposing the human subject to
violent imagery to “heal” the urge to commit those violent acts himself is
devastatingly ironic. Francis Bacon lived a lifestyle of violence and trans-
gression (contrary to Kubrick, famously described as having embraced
peaceful domesticity at Childwickbury Manor). Bacon’s male muse and
lover, George Dyer, died of suicide in Paris in 1971 (the year of A Clock-
work Orange’s release), and was found slumped on a toilet seat in a
hotel, shortly before the vernissage of Bacon’s prestigious retrospective
at the Grand Palais. In a plot twist that could have been featured in a
Kubrick horror movie like The Shining , the owner of the French hotel
agreed to keep the death secret until the opening was over, delaying the
announcement of the scandal that caused much public stir. Bacon devoted
a “Triptych, May–June 1973” that depicts George’s death. Joan Acocella
describes the reaction to this series of paintings in a New Yorker Magazine
article in the May 24, 2021 issue, “Art Made Flesh: The Life of Francis
Bacon,” “as Bacon’s most formidable painting, because it is so bluntly
what his work is said to be: horrific”.1
Alex’s open-mouthed screaming face during the Ludovico treatment
resembles the gaping mouths in Francis Bacon’s horror visions of Pope
Innocent X, mouth aghast, teeth showing, frozen in an existential cry.
Bacon was inspired by the Spanish artist Velázquez to portray the Holy
Father
In full papal regalia: cape, cap, lace-trimmed cassock (in some versions you
can even see the throne.) And then, in place of the calm, even crafty face
that Velázquez gave the seventeenth-century Pontiff, we see a screaming
mouth, with a full set of sharp, vicious teeth. This is Bacon’s familiar
hybrid of menace and suffering, expanded now by a mixture of shock and
formality.2
While Kubrick dresses this “real horror show” and “ultra-violence” in

a mantle of dark comedy, audiences expressed similar reactions as they
did when watching Bacon’s visions: horror and disgust. As Alex states in
an infamous quote about the flow of images during the Ludovico Exper-
iment, “it’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really
real when you viddy them on the screen”. One announcement regarding
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS … 267
the re-release of A Clockwork Orange in 2019 stated about the movie,

“it is a violent masterpiece born of a violent world”.3 Carolyn Strange
compares the actual act of consuming the film with torture: “reactions
were polarized from the moment of ACO’s release. More than one critic
described the experience of watching its brutal beatings, rape and frenzied
murder, all narrated with pleasure and panache by the chief perpetrator,
as torture”.4
The representation of an existential scream is also a central image in
the death of the Catlady (Miriam Karlin) in A Clockwork Orange. Rather
than show the destruction of her face, after being brutishly clubbed by
the sculptured phallus (originally designed by Herman Makkink), Kubrick
cuts to a pop art painting of a female mouth aghast. All of the pop art
works in the Catlady’s boudoir as well as Alex’s bedroom are painted by
Corenlis Makkink, brother of the sculptor. The painting of the mouth has
two sets of lips and two sets of teeth, and is a violent and sadistic depiction
of a female death scream. The correlation between violence and represen-
tation will be explored later in this chapter to illustrate Kubrick’s strategies
of showing human suffering and sexual violence as torture by a tortured
protagonist. Parallels with the work of Francis Bacon will be established
by comparing the construction of the segment in the Catlady’s boudoir
with the visual iconography of Bacon’s triptych of Lucian Freud from
1969. Kubrick also staged a triptych with still photographs and produc-
tion shots during the shooting of The Shining , a direct visual homage to
Bacon’s “Studies from the Human Body” in 1970. There, Kubrick stages
three scenes next to each other with Jack Nicholson as “Jack Torrance”
in the center, replicating the visual narrative of one of Bacon’s famous
triptychs.5 Drawing on a comparative discussion of Bacon and Kubrick’s
mutual depiction of the scream, this chapter aims to present a discussion
of the representation of sexual violence in A Clockwork Orange and the
image of the scream as a response to trauma.
Both Kubrick and Bacon, depictors of the traumatized (and sexualized)
scream, died 7 and 15 years prior to the first use of #MeToo and over
20 years before the emergence of the #MeToo movement, a collective
scream in response to the violation of the female body in the Holly-
wood film industry, both on and off the screen—we may argue that,
retrospectively, Kubrick’s satirical depiction of Alex clubbing the Catlady
with a gigantic phallus sculpture in the face to shut her up forever takes
on wider cultural and contemporary resonance. It is an equally enduring
iconic image of a violent act against an “old lady,” “this old ptitsa”, or
“dirty old soomka,” as she was labeled in Burgess’s novel.6 However,

while many scholars argue that Kubrick’s depiction of excessive violence
in the rape and murder scenes in A Clockwork Orange are indicative of
his continued interest in characterizing and debunking toxic masculinity,
the mere fact of the display of unrelenting brutality against women needs
to be addressed. The chapter will focus particularly on the representa-
tion of sexual violence committed toward two ageing female bodies in A
Clockwork Orange: Mrs. Alexander (Adrienne Corri) and the Catlady.
2 Home Invasions and Sexual Assaults

The representation of sexual violence in A Clockwork Orange continues to
evoke unease because it combines the pleasure of music with physical pain.
As Alex is circling the Catlady, she waves a Beethoven Bust at him, trying
to hit him over the head. Meanwhile Alex teases her with the oversized
phallus statue. The victim does not have any control over her assassin
who threatens her before using the “art work” to destroy her face and
(although not seen on screen) thereby violates the ageing female body.
He does not rape her or further dismantles her studio but is satisfied to
destroy her looks, supposedly punishing the Catlady for her open display
of sexual desire that seems to be highlighted not only due to her age
but also her role as the female consumer of erotica. Alex owns a similar
painting of a naked woman in his bedroom who stretches her legs, but it
looks more acceptable on the wall of a teenage male than an old, single
woman. Mrs. Alexander is being raped and assaulted as Alex is singing the
Broadway musical song, “Singing in the Rain,” timing every kick in her
abdomen with the beat of the lyrics.
Both successive cases of home invasion and sexual assault in the film
depict Alex as a perpetrator who cannot be stopped either by threats
or active resistance. Whereas the Catlady is characterized as a sexualized
being who enjoys provocative erotic art and keeps a gigantic phallus as
an art object in her collection, Mrs. Alexander is framed as a domestic
woman, a well-educated, well-read house-wife. The Catlady is taken out
of the context of male pleasure and is ambushed to death like an animal.
Mrs. Alexander’s assault occurs while her husband (Patrick McGee) is
forced to watch. In the case of the Catlady murder, the audience is
assuming a role similar to that of the husband’s subjective point-of-view
(via camera placement), being part of the murder as an active viewer in
the circling death dance.
After Alex has been “cured” from his violent urges in the Ludovico
experiment, he is confronted with a naked, young female body (during
the sequence in which the success of the experiment is demonstrated in
front of an audience of bureaucrats) which causes him nausea. The two
bodies of the violated older women were not depicted in the context of
male desire; rather the Droogs assault these female bodies simply because
they can.
A Clockwork Orange features a variety of violent assaults upon women:
there are two explicit rape scenes, one murder, and several segments
showing nudity. In addition to women being shown as sexualized objects,
Kubrick also relies on the female form from the outset of the movie when
the Droogs are relaxing at the Milk Bar before venturing out in their
nightly transgressions. Their drinks are filled out of women’s nipples,
the glasses rest on tables made out of women’s slender bodies, featuring
neon-colored wigs and pubic hair.
3 Attack on the Catlady

Alex recounts the beginning of the home invasion in Burgess’s novel after
he manages to enter the home of the Catlady through a window in her
dark mansion.
Then I saw the stairs going down to the hall and I thought to myself that I
would show these fickle and worthless droogs of mine that I was worth the
whole three of them and more. I would do all on my oddy knocky. I would
perform the old ultra-violence on the starry ptitsa and on her pusspots if
need be, then I would take fair rookerfuls of what looked like real polenzy
stuff and go waltzing to the front door and open up showering gold and
silver on my waiting droogs. They must learn all about leadership.7
This quote establishes Alex in the scene as wanting to prove his domi-
nance and control over the Droogs through “ultra-violence.” He frames
the assault on the Catlady as a form of display, threatening his gang
members into accepting his superiority and “leadership.” In Burgess’s
original text, the Catlady also lashes out toward Alex with a Beethoven
bust in self-defense as she is seen doing in Kubrick’s adaptation of the
scene (in the novel and in the Burgess and Terry Southern screenplays
the character is not referred to as Catlady rather, an old lady). As the
“Humble Narrator” explains she tries to malign him as a “wretched little
slummy bedbug” for “breaking into real people’s houses”.8 Alex recounts
the duel when “the old forella started to fist me on the litso, both of us
being on the floor, creeching: ‘Trash him, beat him, pull out his finger-
nails, the poisonous young beetle’”.9 He calls her “you filthy old soomka”
shortly afterwards and recounts that he “upped with the little malenky like
silver statue and cracked her a fine fair tolchock on the gulliver and that
shut her up real horrorshow and lovely”.10 Contrary to Kubrick’s version
of the scene, the Catlady remains alive, “she’s been nastily knocked but
she’s breathing’ and there was loud mewing all the time”.11
At the outset of the scene, Alex mentions in Burgess’s text that “in the
room you could viddy a lot of old pictures on the walls and starry very
elaborate clocks, also some like vases and ornaments that looked starry
and dorogoy”.12 As Vivian Sobchak explains in her 1981 analysis “Décor
as Theme: A Clockwork Orange”:
Certainly, the filmmaker’s act of decoration may be one of the most creative
in the adaptive process. No novelist – however detailed his descriptions of
places and objects – can ever capture in linear prose the continual density,
complexity, and simultaneity of the physical world. As a result of this
literary limitation the filmmaker must visualize and concretize the world
of the novel far beyond the material the novelist has provided.13
In Burgess’s text there is no mention of female erotica or paintings

that display women’s body parts in pop art fashion. Sobchak contests that
Kubrick changed three locales dramatically from Burgess: the mise-en-
scene of the initial Billy Boy rape scene, the décor of Alex’s bedroom and
most significantly the art work in the Catlady scene. “Indeed, in this last
instance of alteration, the works of art themselves play a much larger part
in the action than they do in the novel; the art becomes forcefully, visually,
implicated in the violence”.14
Kubrick establishes in his filmic adaptation a direct correlation between
the erotic sexually evocative art on the walls of the Catlady and her char-
acter. It is his way of articulating Burgess’s label of a “filthy old soomka”
and translate it into paintings and art. Here we may draw a link between
Bacon’s art work and Kubrick’s visual imagery.
The sexual violence that Bacon experienced already as a child is
morphed in his work as an adult painter into tableaus of contorted human
heads and bodies. The link between violence, sex and the display of power
and superiority is also articulated in Bacon’s visual trajectory. The human
scream is of central importance to Bacon. He even studied “oral cavities”

as a favorite body part. Joan Acocella points out that Bacon bought a
medical volume in Paris where the “glitter and color” of the inside of
a mouth and its “glistening membranes” were shown. “He bought the
book and cherished it all his life. He said that he always hoped he could
paint the mouth as Monet had painted sunsets”.15 Stanley Kubrick uses
a painted mouth, gaping open in agony in the moment of death, in the
Catlady’s murder scene. Maybe he did not manage to infuse this climax
of the murder with the beauty of a Monet sunset, but Kubrick creates a
moment of human pain and torture by choosing to show the abyss of the
mouth’s cavity.
The combination of erotic imagery with auto-eroticism and destruc-
tion can be traced in the Catlady scene and resembles Bacon’s represen-
tation of human decay and suffering in his human portraits and triptychs.
The choice to show the Catlady in the film adaptation initially in a wide
shot, surrounded by cats and workout equipment establishes a different
tone to the description in the Burgess’s novel. Kubrick introduces the
Catlady in a tight-fitting green yoga outfit with white leggings and no
shoes. She lies on her back with the legs lifted in a stretch, supported by
her hands on her hips. The audience cannot see her face and initially
does not know her age or her rather petite frame. In the wide shot,
eleven cats are lingering around, mostly with white fur. The figure of the
Catlady is isolated and pictured as if she were not only in her own sanc-
tuary but somewhat of a self-imposed prison—similar to Bacon’s own
imagery, figures (like the screaming Popes) imprisoned within boxes or
frames. Another visual continuity between Kubrick’s and Bacon’s imagi-
nary interior spaces is that the walls and floor are visible and blend into
each other. In Bacon’s triptych of Lucian Freud (1969), the artist sits
on a single stool in the middle of a yellow room, surrounded by what
looks like a cage made out of glass. The body of the figure is distorted
and bent into unusual shapes, similar to the yoga poses of the Catlady
at the outset of the segment. Bacon shows the subject isolated from any
other human interference, taken out of context of time. The flesh of the
face of the subject is scrambled as if destroyed by an intense blow on
impact. The figure in Bacon’s triptych is dully dressed, the attire is unre-
markable. Another similarity between the two visual scenes (the triptych
resembles a set of still images and indeed frozen frames of a movie) is
that Bacon’s narrative shows the same figure in different contorted poses
and within different angles, almost identical to the visual representation
of the Catlady. The pain in Bacon’s images seems self-inflicted or part of

a legacy of violence that preceded this moment in time. The overall feel
of the visual representation of human figures communicates duress, fright
and anxiety.
Bacon is providing tormented images that create discomfort in the
viewer, destabilizing the spectator’s point of view by changing the
perspective, shifting the figure only slightly within the chosen space. It
looks as if the flesh of the subject is bursting open. The nose, mouth
and eyes are lifted out of their sockets and are assembled in a volup-
tuous mosaic of skin tones. Eyes are hollow, noses expanded, the mouth
is disfigured. While the arms and legs are contorted but do not seem to be
subjected to harm, the face has been turned into a messy pulp of colors.
The terror comes from within, it seems, because no bystander is being
visible. However, the body of the Catlady will be mutilated with violence,
exerted by Alex as the sole perpetrator.
The sexual violence is more explicit in Kubrick’s tableau than in
Bacon’s. While Alex adds rape to his beatings in the violation of Ms.
Alexander, his interactions with the Catlady are deprived of any erotic
advances. The male protagonist mocks the sexually arousing artwork as
being “filthy”. In the logic of the scene, the Catlady has surrounded
herself with nude pictures of women in explicit sexual poses but does
not need a lover to translate those visual provocations into real physical
sex. In that way, it seems as if she symbolizes a combination of age and
auto-eroticism that is no longer motivated by intercourse with a male (or
female) lover. In Burgess’s novel, Alex and the Droogs also assault and
intimidate an old man coming out of the “Public Biblio” with a book
called The Miracle of the Snowflake; they accuse him of being a pervert,
destroying his book. While this scene did not make it into the final cut,
its presence is also felt in the Catlady scene, in the juxtaposition of old
age and sexuality.
Contrary to many of the other sexually explicit scenes in A Clockwork
Orange, her consumption of nudity is not linked to anything masculine.
This seems to be the main driving point for Alex’s hateful acting out of
violence. If he cannot have sex with a woman, he does not see any reason
for her existence or value to live. Either he can draw pleasure out of a
woman’s body or he will punish her violently. The lack of a feasible reason
for his beating of the Catlady is disturbing. Even though she attacks him
with the Beethoven bust, his original motivation for exerting violence,
according to Burgess, is to impress his fellow Droogs and reestablish
his “leadership” as the lead assassin with unprovoked “ultra-violence”.

Sobchak explains the death scene as follows,
Alex kills the Cat Lady with a visually-dominating sculpture of a penis

— and instead of using the bust of Ludwig Van as the passive object of
Alex’s desire, Kubrick has the Cat Lady wield it as her weapon. The death
of the Cat Lady is metaphorically rather than graphically represented on
the screen by an accelerating montage of details from the various erotic
paintings hung about the room, linked together by the recurrent image of
an open mouth from one of them which seems to be visually screaming in
paroxysms of orgasm and death.16
Sobchak concludes that “Art and Violence spring from the same
source; they are both expressions of the individual, egotistic, vital, and
non-institutionalised man”.17 She states that the Catlady as well as Mr.
Alexander use the art in their lives—“music and books and statues and
paintings”—eventually as weapons.18 Representations of desire/sexuality
and violence are thereby intimately linked. Margaret DeRosia revisits the
theme of “home” that is invaded and destroyed, both in the Catlady scene
and the destruction of the Alexanders’ inner sanctum in her chapter An
Erotics of Violence: “This final set of sequences is in some ways the film’s
most disturbing because it dispenses with the other - women, older men,
intellectuals, or the rival gang - and situates the violence within the space
that was supposedly safe”.19
If the Catlady resembles Bacon’s distorted humans, captured in large
open spaces then similar to Bacon’s interiors, the Catlady has few items
as furniture and strange large workout equipment that clutters the space.
The walls of the Catlady’s room are covered with four large-sized paint-
ings (arranged in a similar fashion to the panels of Bacon’s paintings), all
featuring women in the nude, displaying their private parts and buttocks
provocatively to the viewer. The most remarkable can be seen on the
back wall where a blond woman seems to masturbate with her left hand
while holding a male puppet in her outstretched right arm. She wears red
stockings that reach to her crutch. All four paintings depict the women
as Caucasian with pink flesh and pastel background colors. Also visible
are several small pieces of vintage furniture, some workout equipment,
and tall vases that adorn a fireplace on the left. The “murder weapon,”
the phallus, sits on a rococo table in the back of the room. The Catlady
dominates the center of the screen.
As part of her stretching exercises she folds the legs over her head,
toward the camera and then broadens her legs wide to display her bottom.
Then, the scene cuts to her leaving the room to answer the locked,
majestic oak door where Alex is claiming to need access to her telephone
to call an ambulance for his injured friend. The Catlady is standing by
the door and her face is still concealed by her red hair. She has hardly
any breasts; she holds in her abdomen and belly and looks well trained
while talking in a deep masculine voice. Contrary to the young women
in Kubrick’s films or the furniture women-turned-table in the Korova
Milk Bar, the Catlady looks androgynous and queer. She tells Alex to
seek help elsewhere and calls the police, explaining that she worries about
a home invasion, similar to the one, the Alexander’s had experienced.
During the phone call, the other half of her studio is being shown in a
wide shot, revealing three more pornographic large-sized paintings. One
depicts a woman who touches the nipple on the breast of another woman
with her tongue. Yet another one displays a woman whose breasts are cut
out from a garment, similar to the look that Alex creates when he cuts
the red jumpsuit of Ms Alexander’s and reveals her bare chest. A third
image shows another white woman, naked with long hair who is standing
in a shallow puddle of water with her bottom turned to the observer.
The Catlady has a phone placed on an antique desk, lit by three modern
lamps, right next to a wooden climbing wall; another workout bike can be
seen in the corner of the room. A complicated installation in the center
of the sanctuary with weights seems to allow for further exercises. The
floor is covered with expensive looking carpets; the walls are decorated
with flowery wallpaper, undermining the modern looking erotic pop art,
and the ceiling is painted in a conventional sage green. This postmodern
mixture of styles indicates the Catlady’s eclectic and unusual taste. Rather
than futuristic (as the mise-en-scene in the Alexander house indicates),
this décor is retro-chic: antiques are combined with the pornographic
paintings in a pastiche of past and present.
Meanwhile, Alex and the Droogs quietly navigate the mansion and
break in through the window. When the Catlady sees Alex enter her inti-
mate space, she threatens him verbally. The entire murder scene lasts only
several minutes. Alex approaches the Catlady, gets scolded for touching
her invaluable sculpture, the penis, and gets threatened in return with a
bust by Ludwig Van Beethoven that the Catlady waves at him. They circle
one another until Alex gains the upper hand. Kubrick insisted to do the
handheld camera work himself and in a production shot, the director can
be seen lying on the floor while Malcolm, the actor, stands directly over
him with the phallus.
In one of the shots during the death dance, Alex can be seen holding
the phallus in front of him, while the camera’s subjective point of view also
pictures the Pinochio like extended nose mask that he was wearing when
assaulting Ms. Alexander. The Catlady is swirling around him, trying to
reach him with the Beethoven bust. At one point she lifts the sculpture
while he still taunts her with the white phallus. Behind them, excerpts of
the erotic paintings can be seen, combining violence with the represen-
tation of highly sexual content. This correlation between erotic art and
brutish violence is playful despite its murderous outcome. Eventually, the
camera displays the shot that Kubrick practiced with Alex/Malcolm and it
looks as if the tip of the white phallus sculpture was hitting the audience
in the face. The low angle shot of Alex shows his clown mask, his cod
piece and the phallus while he cries out. In the next shot, the Catlady
is shown with a grimaced and frozen face on the floor. Her arms are
stretched out as if she was Jesus on the cross. Her red mouth is large, her
nostrils have flared up and her eyes with heavily applied make-up are wide
open, staring at the sculpture. The camera view looks distorted as if shot
with a lens that heightens the face. Then, the scene cuts to her scream
(see Fig. 1). The mouth is wide open and the arms can no longer be seen
as the lens has now zoomed into her gaping teeth and the dark hole of
her larynx. Rather than show the impact of the blow, Kubrick cuts to a
painting of the teethed double mouth. The painting shows four rows of
white teeth and two sets of lips that are surrounded by an orange circle.
The mouth is reminiscent of one of the pop culture paintings, introduced
at the outset of the scene. The brute force of the blow of the phallus and
the energy Alex employs to administer the assault must have turned the
face of the Catlady into pulp.
This fascination with a human scream in conjunction with suffering,
reminiscent of Christ on the cross, is also a visual parallel between Kubrick
and Bacon. The British painter is said to have found his calling in 1944
when he painted a triptych that was named “Three studies for Figures
at the Base of a Crucifixion”. Acocella explains in the New Yorker that
“with this picture, Bacon said, ‘I began.’ That is, he had found his artistic
core—a reigning emotion of suffering and menace”.20 In the triptych, no
Madonna is being shown. Instead, “the creature in the middle panel is
an ovoid shape, seemingly trapped in the corner of a room. Its long neck
sticks out to the side, terminating not in a head, exactly, but just an open
Fig. 1 The Catlady scream, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick,
1971
mouth, with two rows of threatening teeth, and a dripping bandage where
its eyes might be”.21 An additional, vaguely female figure, is shown, also
with a mouth open, “ready to eat us”.22
This piece may be the most disturbing painting produced in Britain in the
twentieth century. Executed when Bacon was thirty-four, it was the first
one, apparently, that truly satisfied him. In any case, he did not destroy it.
Eric Hall, his respectable older boyfriend at the time, bought it before it
could be exhibited.23
Kubrick decided not to show the marred face of the Catlady. Instead
he simply showed the gaping mouth, similar to Bacon’s vision not only
“with two rows of teeth” but four and thick red lips. In the case of the
rape of Ms. Alexander, her entire naked body was exposed, contorted in
agony because she was being held by one of the Droogs before Alex had a
chance to violate her. The Catlady is shown while she dances around Alex
but none of her gestures is erotic or visually enticing. Even in the gang
rape of the young woman at the outset of the Droog’s violent night, the
nude body of the victim is in long display. Why does Kubrick decide not
to show the nude body of the Catlady? Why is her figure androgynous?
The face of the Catlady before the debilitating blow is disfigured into
an unnatural grimace. The face looks indeed like one of the distorted
paintings by Francis Bacon. The dimensions of her face are surreal and
show that her mouth is much bigger than the rest of her head.
This visual parallel to Bacon’s imagery of human suffering in his alle-
gory of a Crucifixion can be interpreted two ways: first, the Catlady is
depicted in a similar fashion as Jesus on the Cross as an iconic image
of human suffering, independent of gender. Secondly, the violence that
Alex is exerting on her face and body is based in the paradox of Chris-
tianity and the Crucifixion where human sacrifice is linked to violence
and purity. Through the way the Catlady is bludgeoned to death without
obvious reason, Kubrick represents an abject violence, connected to sexu-
ality, similar to the way that Bacon’s views of humanity are correlated with
religion.
The scream of the Catlady can also be compared to the scream of Alex
when he is straightjacketed on the torture chair of the Ludovico Treat-
ment (see Fig. 2). He screams in despair, howling like an animal, begging
to be released. The representatives of the government agencies, similar
to the institution of the church that had such power over humans, are
failing to rescue Alex. Instead, he is subjected to even more pain. Bacon
captured the paradox of religion and pain in his portraits of the Pope. His
subject’s agonized face is distorted in a blur as if exposed to an electric
current. In this way, religion and suffering are intimately linked as is the
repression of (homoerotic) sexuality and gratification.
4 The Rape of Ms. Alexander

The rape scene of Ms. Alexander that precedes the murder of the Catlady
is structured differently. Rather than a solo performance, Alex operates in
conjunction with the Droogs who all participate in violating the interior
space of the postmodern Alexander mansion, destroying the furniture,
tipping the desk of the writer and the book shelves, while shutting the
Alexanders up by inserting a little bouncy ball into their mouths and then
taping them up with duct tape, playfully creating carnage in the affluent
household. The four-minute-segment starts with an outside establishing
shot as the Droogs are approaching the modern, large and extravagant
house in the dark.24 The architecture of the house is contemporary and
Fig. 2 Alex’s scream, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971
there is an elaborate garden path with tiles that the Droogs are mean-
dering on. “The exterior of ‘HOME’ is a Paul Litchfield design called the
Japanese Garden in Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire. The raked
pebble garden was part modeled after the Ryoan-ji zen temple garden
(Temple of the Dragon at Peace)”.25
The natural sound of chirping insects is overshadowed by Rossini’s
“The Thieving Magpie”. Then we see the quiet inside of the house with
a slow pan from Mr. Alexander’s desk where he is crouched over a large
red manual IBM typewriter in front of filled bookshelves to the main hall
of the home. Ms. Alexander is nestled in an open, futuristic looking so-
called retreat pod and reads quietly while her husband works.26 When
the doorbell rings, she gets up, walks toward the back of the house over
a set of open stairs and then around the corner into a large tunnel like
wood paneled corridor with several mirrors that twice reflect her image.
She is wearing a comfortable red body suit, red stockings, high healed red
shoes, and a shiny belt.
At first, she refuses to let the Droogs in and is still protected by a flimsy
chain and lock from the intruders. Her husband encourages her to open
the door, “I suppose you better let him in,” thinking that there is only one
person on the doorstep, needing to use their telephone. Once she releases
the chain and lets the Droogs in, it is immediately obvious that they are
violent. Alex pushes her forward, then one of the other men shoulders her
and carries her back to the living room, where Mr. Alexander is brutally
kicked down, also by Alex as the leader of the Droogs, and ends up
bloodied on the floor. The majority of the scene is shot from two different
camera angles and also a handheld camera. One camera remains on the
ground, revealing Mr. Alexander’s point of view (and also providing close-
ups of his contorted face) and one on eye level, showing the destruction
and violent behavior of the Droogs. Alex is the most active perpetrator,
donned with a mask that has a protruding phallic nose. The scene takes
place in front of a large floral painting that covers most of the living room
wall and stands in stark contrast to the brutal ambush. It is a painting by
Christiane Kubrick, entitled “Seedbox”.27
Alex takes a pair of scissors and cuts holes into the red jumpsuit while
singing. Then, he slices open the legs and lets Ms. Alexander stand in
front of every man in the room naked, only her red stockings somewhat
awkwardly remain untouched. Her slender body is still young looking
although she is middle aged. There are no references to children or grand-
children anywhere such as toys or picture frames. Not only is her body
bent backwards, held with force by another Droog, but Alex is also shown
undressing himself. He takes her belt off, then his cod piece and his
belt. He pulls down his pants and underwear and then leans semi-naked
down to Mr. Alexander in mockery. Although the rape is not shown up
close, it is suggested by looking at the husband’s horrified eyes, paralyzed
by his inability to come to his wife’s rescue. Meanwhile, Ms. Alexander
throws her head backwards. One can assume that Alex is violating her.
The camera close-up of Mr. Alexander on the ground is similarly distorted
as the close-up of the Catlady when she is about to be ambushed.
The sheer abundance of the violence is suffocating. Alex kicks and beats
and smacks Ms. Alexander to the beat of his own song. He turns to Mr.
Alexander and kicks him repeatedly. The violence is performed as if the
Droogs were on a stage, similar to the earlier rape of a young woman by
a rival gang. The combination of sex and violence and suffering is remi-
niscent of Bacon’s depiction of human figures in agony. Mr. Alexander
is forced to watch the rape of his wife up close. The viewer is provided
with a wide shot of the entire act as if they were part of an invited audi-
ence of a theater play. The stage of the rape and beating is framed by the
contours of the house. This provides the semblance of enclosure, similar
to Bacon’s captive people, caught in cages. Rather than provide secu-
rity and comfort, the Alexanders experience a terrifying violation of their
privacy and intimate, privileged existence. The framing of their house is
turned into a prison where they are unable to move or even scream. They
are silenced and have to endure the violation of their bodies helplessly.
Alex seems to enjoy all of the violent and haphazard acts, destroying
property but most importantly violating people’s bodies. Again, this can
be described as a “familiar hybrid of menace and suffering,” similar to

Francis Bacon’s representation of the Pope. Acocella expands this idea
and states that Bacon showed the portrait of the tortured Pope “expanded
now by a mixture of shock and formality”.28 Indeed, Kubrick also deals
with similar narrative devices of shock, menace and suffering. This world
that the Alexanders are forced to experience in their home, is deprived of
any mercy. It is a godless and meaning-deprived violent joyride.
In the context of Bacon, Acocella concludes that:
Bacon is working something out, getting George’s death out of his system,
as he himself acknowledged. In the Popes on the other hand, the terrible
thing seems to come from nowhere, both controlled and spontaneous,
ineluctable. You could be the Pope and not be able to stop it.29
Even though Acocella writes about the art of Francis Bacon, her
account could be used to describe this scene that Kubrick has created. You
could be Mr. Alexander on the floor, an esteemed writer (who supposedly
is laboring on a draft for A Clockwork Orange) and not be able to stop
“the terrible thing,” the rape of his wife.
Even though the work of Francis Bacon focuses on male subjects and
the two scenes discussed here show the violation of female bodies, the
underlying theme of torture and violence in combination with sex is
comparable. What did Kubrick want to “work out” by showing the rape
and abuse? Why is it still painful to watch, even though fifty years have
passed since the movie was released? Again, Acocella could potentially
offer an explanation, even though she is talking about Bacon:
Yet the spark that had always been in him still flared up sporadically. He
himself spoke of the ‘exhilarated despair’ that underlay his paintings, accu-
rate words to describe the sheer vigor — you could even call it delight
— with which he produced his grim visions. The Pope might be screaming,
but, oh, that purple and gold, and even the wit, or at least surprise, of the
painting. You’re not the only one screaming about life; so is the Pope.30
Kubrick captured a violent world in A Clockwork Orange and made it

even more repulsive with the two main murder and rape scenes of the
Catlady and Ms. Alexander that seem arbitrary but provide a disturbing
element of joy to the perpetrators. The fact that the victims are middle
aged and old does not distract from the vulnerability of the women. If
they do not consent to sex, they will be forced or killed. Kubrick uses
a similar visual language to Bacon’s painting. However, the fact that

he illustrates human transgressions predominantly by abusing the female
body grotesquely normalizes violence against women on the screen.
Notes
1. Acocella, J. (2021) “Art Made Flesh: The Life of Francis Bacon”. The
New Yorker Magazine, 24 May.
2. Ibid.
3. Burke, K. (2019) “The Real Horror Show: The Return of A Clockwork
Orange”, Headstuff , 30 March, accessed 21 May 2021 at: https://www.
headstuff.org/entertainment/film/a-clockwork-orange-irish-rerelease/
4. Strange, C. (2012) “Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as Art Against
Torture”. In Flynn, M. and Fernandez Salek, F. (eds.). Screening Torture:
Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination. New
York: Columbia University Press.
5. See Ledbetter, B. (2011) “Did Kubrick channel Bacon?” accessed at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/benledbetter-architect/5616191299.
6. Burgess, A. (1962/2011) A Clockwork Orange: A Norton Critical
Edition, W.W. Norton Company.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Sobchack, V (1981). “Décor as Theme: ‘A Clockwork Orange.’” in Litera-
ture/Film Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1981): 93. Accessed May 25, 2021. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/43795811.
14. Ibid, 95.
15. Acocella, J. (2021).
16. Sobchack, V. (1981).
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. DeRosia, M. (2003) “An Erotics of Violence. Masculinity and (Homo)
Sexuality in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.” in McDougal, S.
Y. (ed.), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Boston: Cambridge
20. Acocella, J. (2021).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. C.f. Benson, P. (2017) “The Film Sets and Furniture in A Clockwork
Orange: a ‘real horror show’ Part I.” in Film and Furniture. Accessed
21 May 2021 at https://filmandfurniture.com/2017/10/film-sets-and-
furniture-clockwork-orange-part-1/. “The interiors were shot somewhere
else altogether – at Skybreak, Radlett, Hertfordshire – a home designed in
1965–1966 by a group of architects called Team 4. Within the four walls
of this outstanding yet somewhat clinical architectural space, Alex and
his Droogs reap havoc, attacking and paralysing Frank Alexander (Patrick
Magee) and raping his wife (Adrienne Corri) all whilst Alex sings ‘Singin’
In The Rain’”.
25. Benson, P. (2017).
26. C.f. Benson, P. (2017) “Kubrick did not choose his furniture pieces for
mere aesthetics. The concept behind the pod as seen in A Clockwork
Orange, echo themes in the story. The pod acted as a kind of dry floata-
tion tank where, according to Martin Dean, ‘One can contrive to cut
oneself off from the world. The Pod simulates conditions which are in
some ways similar to brainwashing. Because the Pod is sound and light
proof and has a soft fur interior to minimise touch, it disconnects you,
and that’s a state in which you are most receptive to propaganda, or self-
determined indoctrination via tape recorders, projectors, light effects, and
so on. You could take your mind from a state of near sensory deprivation
right through to sensory chaos.’ This could almost be a description of
the Ludovico treatment Alex undergoes later in the film”.
27. “The large (5, x 10ft) painting on the wall of a tranquil garden is by
Kubrick’s wife Christiane, titled “Seedbox”. A similar painting also by
Christiane Kubrick is seen in Eyes Wide Shut.” (Benson, 2017).
28. Acocella, J. (2021).
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
Music and A Clockwork Orange
Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel,
Film, and Play A Clockwork Orange
Christine Lee Gengaro
In all versions1 of A Clockwork Orange, music is a crucial element of the

story. The protagonist, Alex, is a self-professed lover of music, and he
undergoes an experimental rehabilitation treatment that uses music as an
“emotional heightener.”2 The resultant inability to listen to music reflects
and illuminates the inhumanity of the treatment, arguably symbolizing the
loss of Alex’s free will. Music’s role is more complex than simply func-
tioning as the symbolic side effect of Alex’s treatment, and it performs
specific functions that are dependent on the medium in which the story
is told. Music described in a novel is experienced differently than music
heard as part of a film score. Anthony Burgess’s novel (1962) describes
musical experiences throughout, but they can only be heard in the imagi-
nation of the reader—especially in the cases of fictional works. In Stanley
Kubrick’s film adaptation (1971), music exists both within the diegesis
and as underscore. It is present for the film viewer as a sensory experi-
ence, and it fulfills the same basic functions as most film music, but also
serves as part of the narrative. Music in a musical, as in Burgess’s 1986
C. L. Gengaro (B)
Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: gengarcl@laccd.edu

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_14
286 C. L. GENGARO
stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, has its own functions that are
unique to the genre, allowing for soliloquies in song or collective singing
and dancing.
Furthermore, music has its own history, its own structures, and its own
symbols. How these interact with the story is also an important consider-
ation. Burgess and Kubrick both understood music’s dramatic potential,
but their personal experiences with it, both in their versions of A Clock-
work Orange, and in other works, speak to different uses of this potential.
While this is partially due to their preferred medium, it also underlines
some significant differences in their approaches. In this chapter, I aim
to look specifically at the music of A Clockwork Orange to analyze its
functions and to begin to contextualize these functions in the oeuvres of
both Burgess and Kubrick and in the larger areas of classical music in the
literature and film.
Anthony Burgess, a prolific author and self-taught musician and
composer, was passionate about music. It was a hobby he enjoyed, and
it was a preoccupation he turned to, sometimes regularly, but also specif-
ically in between writing projects. Burgess once explained that musical
composition was a way for him “to cleanse my mind of verbal preoccupa-
tion….music was a kind of therapy.”3 While some of his musical endeavors
were more like solitary exercises he did as one might do a daily crossword
puzzle,4 he eventually composed more public works, like the Symphony
(no. 3) in C (1974) and Blooms of Dublin, an operetta based on Joyce’s
Ulysses (1980).5 Music also appears as a recurring theme in many of his
literary works. Composers are featured characters in A Vision of Battle-
ments (written in 1949, published in 1965), Beds in the East (1959),
Earthly Powers (1980), and Byrne (1993). Characters who play music
appear in Any Old Iron (1989) and The Pianoplayers (1986), while histor-
ical musical figures appear in Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991). Musical
forms and structures (something we will look at in greater detail below)
were also important to A Clockwork Orange and Napoleon Symphony
(1974).
As Burgess produced enormous amounts of both music and prose,
he often found himself considering if and how the two art forms were
connected. In This Man and Music (1982), an exploration of topics
related to Burgess’s own musical history, as well as music’s connection
to poetry and literary structures, Burgess poses the question: “Can music
teach anything to the novelist?”6 But this question for Burgess was not
new. A little over a week before A Clockwork Orange was first published
TRANSFORMING VARIATIONS: MUSIC IN THE NOVEL … 287
in May of 1962, a piece by Burgess appeared in the Listener called “The

Writer and Music.” In it, Burgess introduced an idea he would revisit in
various contexts:
“I still think that the novelist has much to learn from musical form: novels
in sonata-form, rondo-form, fugue-form are perfectly feasible. There is
much to be learnt also from mood-contrasts, tempo-contrasts in music: the
novelist can have his slow movements and his scherzo. Music can also teach
him how to modulate, how to recapitulate; the time for formal presentation
of themes, the time for free fantasia.”7
The connection between music and literature became the basis for two
sets of lectures he gave in the spring and fall of 1980. The first set given
at Eliot College at the University of Kent was titled: “Blest Pair of Sirens:
Thoughts on Music and Literature.” A few months later, he gave a related
series of lectures called “Disharmonious Sisters: Observations on Litera-
ture and Music.”8 These lectures formed the scaffolding for This Man and
Music, but even a full book couldn’t provide a definitive answer. Burgess
again revisited the interconnectivity of music and the literature in a 1988
piece for the Listener, returning to an old title, this time turning it into a
question, “Blest Pair of Sirens?”.9
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange has proven to be an important part of
this intellectual journey for Burgess, as it may be the best example of
his meshing of music and the literature. Not only can it be interpreted as
reflecting a musical structure (see below), it contains music—and love and
appreciation for music—as a central issue in the narrative. In the intro-
duction to the 2012 restored edition of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess
biographer Andrew Biswell outlines the “earliest surviving plan” for the
novel—one of a series of stories set in the future.10 In Burgess’s dystopian
version of 1980, a criminal would undergo a new brainwashing therapy
to commute his prison sentence. Burgess envisioned a 200-page novel
divided into three sections of equal length. It has not escaped notice
that this tripartite form is roughly analogous to the sonata form Burgess
referred to in 1962 (although it must be noted that the original notes
do not expressly mention music). It has also been compared to another
ternary musical form from Baroque opera, the da capo form.11
Sonata form grew out of the norms established in the Classical
period for music (roughly the 1730s through the beginning of the nine-
teenth century) and exemplified by the work of Wolfgang Mozart and
288 C. L. GENGARO
Joseph Haydn. The form was usually found in the first movements
of symphonies, sonatas, strings quartets, and—with slight variation—
concertos. There are three main sections, exposition, development, and
recapitulation. The main thematic material is introduced in the expo-
sition; this often takes the form of two ideas with transitional material
between them. The second theme usually moves to a new key area. Once
the themes are established, the development provides an opportunity for
the composer to subject the themes to any number of musical processes:
variation, truncation, elongation, etc., and may move through various
key areas. A “retransition” prepares the listener for a return of the main
themes, which occurs in the recapitulation. There is a great deal of simi-
larity between this section and the opening section, although here, the
second theme remains in the original key, leading to a more tonally unified
whole. The movement may end here, or there may be a final section called
a coda. In the era of Mozart and Haydn, codas could be quite short, but
in the time of Beethoven, a coda could last much longer and introduce
new thematic material.
The da capo form was an important aspect of Italian baroque opera,
with an opening section (A) establishing the character’s current situation.
The (B) section modulates to a new key and provides a musical contrast
representing a change in attitude or perhaps a realization by the char-
acter. The returning A section allows the singer to embellish the opening
section with vocal ornaments. This was one of the primary draws in Italian
baroque opera: the opportunity to see a singer improvise and show off
vocal virtuosity in that final section. From a dramatic standpoint, the da
capo aria is often static, landing the singer in a similar emotional space as
they were at the beginning of the song.
Both sonata form and da capo form are characterized by similarities
between the first and third section. Burgess begins the first and third
parts of A Clockwork Orange with similar passages, signaling that we have
reset back to the beginning. The ending, however, is different, just as it
is in sonata form. In his book on the music of Anthony Burgess, Paul
Phillips describes in detail the musical analog within the structure of the
novel, A Clockwork Orange: “The three parts of the novel correspond
to exposition, development, and recapitulation, respectively, with the last
chapter of Part Three forming the coda.” Phillips then goes on to identify
recurring motifs throughout the novel and prominent themes, resulting
in a detailed analysis of the novel through the lens of sonata form.12
In addition to the musical structure of sonata or da capo form super-

imposed upon the novel, music is an important part of the protagonist’s
life. Burgess painted Alex as an appreciator of music. In his gang of
droogs, he alone is knowledgeable about the music of real composers like
Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but also Burgess’s fictional composers of
Geoffrey Plautus and Friedrich Gitterfenster.13 In considering an article
about “civilizing” Modern Youth through an appreciation of the Arts,
Alex counters: “Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers,
and made me feel like old Bog himself.”14 Far from being the calming
influence, music instead provides Alex with inspiration to cause harm.
In addition to enjoying music for himself, Alex also sees himself as
its protector. In an early scene, the droogs end their evening at the
Korova Milkbar, where a woman sings a bit of an opera aria in between
jukebox songs. When this is met with a dismissive raspberry by Dim, Alex
responds quickly.15 The ensuing punch causes tension within the group.
The resulting fracture splits Alex off from the rest of the group, leading to
his arrest and incarceration. During the experimental Ludovico treatment,
Alex is forced to watch violent films which are accompanied by music.
The use of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. In this context is extremely
distressing to Alex, who calls it “a filthy unforgivable sin.” When asked
what he means, Alex explains: “Using Ludwig van like that. He did no
harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.”16
After the treatment, Alex feels sick when he wants to be violent, but
also when he hears certain music. The negative feelings do not accompany
all music, as Alex describes it: “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.”17 After being used
by the government and tortured into a suicide attempt, Alex’s Ludovico
treatment is undone. The reader is not clued in as to how this is achieved,
but when Alex wakes up, he can both indulge in violent behavior and hear
classical music without any ill effects.
Because Alex’s ability to enjoy this music was damaged by the treat-
ment and later undone, we may come to equate Alex’s free will with
his ability to listen to music. It is also an element of identification. The
reader may find Alex’s love of music something that they have in common
with him, perhaps the only thing. It humanizes him, to a certain extent.
Burgess’s identification with the character was not just in the musical
element, but in writing he saw an opportunity to fantasize about a life
290 C. L. GENGARO
unfettered by morality and guilt: “My own healthy inheritance of orig-

inal sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by
proxy.”18 Yet the final chapter, in which Alex considers settling down,
perhaps becoming a husband and father, represents growth and matu-
rity. The character’s musical choices also change a bit, as he comes to
appreciate German Lieder (“just a goloss [voice] and piano, very quiet
and like yearny”19 ) over stentorian orchestral music. Because of these
new elements, one might view this as an analog to the coda section of
sonata form, especially a Beethovenian coda. Burgess’s shifting sense of
identification with the character seems to continue through his musical
adaptation of the story.
In 1987, Burgess published his musical adaptation in part to “stem the
flow of amateur adaptations that I have heard about though never seen.
It is to provide a definitive actable version which has auctorial authority.”
And it furthermore, unlike Kubrick’s film, adapts the final chapter.20 A
careful reading of this “play with music” also reveals a few other notable
elements, chief among them, a shift from the first-person narrative of Alex
to a third-person observation of events. The result is emotional distance
and detachment from the protagonist, which is emphasized by the use of
music in this version. Music in the novel and film reflects Alex’s power
of choice—he chooses to listen and to use it as inspiration to violence.
Music in the play, however, is shared by all characters. Alex does not
choose it for himself; it is simply ubiquitous, and therefore his connection
to it is weaker. Furthermore, a musical soliloquy—the song “She Was All
Things to Me”—for the character F. Alexander (the widowed victim of
Alex and his gang) fosters a sense of sympathy and emotional connection
to this character that does not exist in the earlier versions. This sympa-
thetic portrayal chips away at the audience’s sympathy for Alex. It may
be that Burgess, a man approaching 70 at the time he adapted the work,
may have found his sympathies shifting to the older character, or it may
have been Burgess’s attempt to emphasize the differences between Alex
and F. Alexander.
Additionally, the prevalence of the music of Beethoven in the musical
is telling. Paul Phillips categorizes the music of the play thusly: “orig-
inal music by Beethoven, original music by Burgess, and re-workings
of Beethoven by Burgess.”21 While Beethoven is a “major presence”22
in the novel, he is not the only composer mentioned. Bach, Mozart,
Mendelssohn are all also mentioned by name, although their music is of
secondary importance.23 Beethoven’s singular importance in Kubrick’s
film centers him in the narrative: the tagline mentions Beethoven by

name,24 and the film refers to no other composers (popular artists are
named). Even more specifically, in the film Alex’s adverse reaction to
“music” is truly only a reaction to Beethoven’s Ninth.25 It could be
argued that the extensive use of Beethoven is something Burgess inherited
from Kubrick. In the preface to the play, Burgess states: “It is appropriate
that the music chosen for the setting of my harmless little lyrics should be
derived from Beethoven. There are three numbers which call for music
of my own, or somebody else’s, but the Beethoven spirit must be here—
the spirit of the mature creative mind which can reconcile the creative
and the destructive.”26 If indeed the imprint of Kubrick’s version influ-
enced Burgess, the effect did not end there. At the very end of the play,
the stage directions indicate that “a man bearded like Stanley Kubrick”
walk on stage playing “Singin in the Rain” on a trumpet. Per the stage
directions: “He is kicked off the stage.”27
Burgess continued to explore ideas of music, composers, musical forms
throughout his career. He also wrote about many other topics, and he
produced books, essays, articles, and musical works seemingly tirelessly
until his death in 1993. The popularity of A Clockwork Orange would
go on to dwarf his many other works. Kubrick’s removal of himself
from conversations about the film and its supposed “copycat” crimes,
allowed Burgess to be the de facto mouthpiece on the film; something
that brought him wealth, publicity, and opportunities, yet pulled focus
from his other work.28 In 1974, Burgess published Napoleon Symphony, a
large-scale attempt to create a novel modeled on the form of Beethoven’s
Symphony No. 3 “Eroica,”. Despite any mixed feelings he might have
subsequently had about Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and
issues therein, Burgess named Kubrick (who was collecting information
for a film on Napoleon) a dedicatee of the book.29
To understand the functions of music in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation
of A Clockwork Orange, it is useful to look at the shift in scoring choices
that took place in the films previous. Although Kubrick’s first four films
were scored in the traditional way, with a single composer (Gerald Fried)
writing newly composed cues for each film, with each subsequent film,
Kubrick moved toward a model where preexistent music and arrange-
ments became more prominent. Kubrick’s reliance on preexistent music
would come to dominate the scores from 2001: A Space Odyssey through
Eyes Wide Shut . A few newly composed cues played a secondary role to
preexistent cues in most instances. The four films that made arguably the
292 C. L. GENGARO
most provocative use of preexistent music were 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968), A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining
(1980).
The music of the first of these films, 2001: A Space Odyssey, gained
notoriety because Kubrick rejected a bespoke score by Alex North in favor
of preexistent cues. While a popular version of the story goes that Kubrick
created a “temp” track for a rough cut of the film using preexistent cues,
subsequently falling in love with the music, it’s unclear as to whether
Kubrick ever intended to consider North’s score.30 The musical choices
became inseparable from the images for Kubrick. North, who was aware
of the temp track pieces, had attempted to create cues with similar musical
elements, but he was kept in the dark about Kubrick’s process. A note
from Kubrick to North from January 26, 1968, (the film was released in
early April of that year), states that Kubrick was still editing and therefore
unable “to determine what, if any, further music requirements exist.”31
When North attended the premiere of the film, he took note that none
of his music had been used.
The soundtrack release for 2001 peaked at No. 24 on Billboard’s Top
LPs after 18 weeks on the chart,32 and it was so profitable that it spawned
a “Music Inspired by…” release (1970, MGM). On an artistic level,
the music of 2001 seemed to unlock for Kubrick a new understanding
of music’s potential power and influence. In an interview with Playboy
magazine in 1968, Kubrick foresaw a new way to connect to the audience:
I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeon-

holing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and
philosophical content….I intended the film to be an intensely subjective
experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just
as music does.33
Kubrick’s behavior with North, however, made other composers wary

of working with him. In pre-production for Barry Lyndon, Kubrick was
more careful to be upfront about his needs for the film. In the Stanley
Kubrick archive held by the University of the Arts in London, corre-
spondence with various composers and arrangers explicitly explains the
director’s desire to use primarily music of the depicted period instead of
a newly composed score. According to letters from the archive, Kubrick
offered over $30,000 to André Previn to “conduct and orchestrate the
score.” Too busy to take the job, the next offer went to Italian composer
Nino Rota. Through translator Riccardo Aragno, Kubrick’s camp allowed

for the possibility that some original compositions might be needed,
but the letter clearly states that Rota’s main duty would be to arrange
and orchestrate the director’s choices. Rota ultimately declined, in part
because of what had happened with North’s score for 2001.34
It is an oversimplification to suggest that Kubrick’s desire for total
control of all aspects of his films led to the use of primarily preexistent
musical cues. He likely cultivated the practice out of a need to understand
the musical choices at a much earlier stage than one would expect with a
newly written score. And after the issues with North’s score, it seems to
have become more important to clarify expectations with any composers.
Kubrick never abandoned the idea of collaborating with living composers,
and indeed collaborated with a few in the films after 2001. The interac-
tions between Kubrick and Wendy Carlos on both A Clockwork Orange
and The Shining , for example, show an open and collaborative process.35
Although Kubrick considered a couple of different projects after 2001:
A Space Odyssey (including the never-made Napoleon36 project), he
finally settled on A Clockwork Orange. It was a smaller production than
2001, filming mostly in existing locations.37 Pre-production focused on
creating the unique look of the film, while the source material’s focus
on music allowed Kubrick to indulge in his preference for preexistent
cues. Although Burgess’s novel suggested many existing works, Kubrick
did not use them. He instead chose cues by English composers Henry
Purcell and Edward Elgar, as well as an opera overture by Rossini and two
movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The choice and prevalence
of the latter composer is reflected in the tagline for the film: “the adven-
tures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence,
and Beethoven.”
The grouping of rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven is certainly meant
to intrigue the prospective viewer, prompting the question: what kind of
person likes both violence and classical music? In the viewing of the film,
the audience sees music tied into his Alex’s feelings of power, forming
a significant part of his violent rituals and fantasies. It is also some-
thing seemingly unique to him. Alex did not begin to like classical music
because his parents enjoyed it, or because his friends enjoy it. Other char-
acters seem to like pop music, but he’s the only one who seems to care
about art music (“music that was like for the emotions” is how Alex of
the book describes it). Even highly educated people, as represented by
Dr. Brodsky and associates, think of music only as a way to enhance the
294 C. L. GENGARO
Ludovico treatment. Alex, in both film and novel, is the only character
for whom art music is special and worth protecting. The reader or viewer
is left to speculate how and why music became intertwined with Alex’s
violent thoughts and actions.
From a cinematic standpoint, the music in Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange performs numerous functions. It provides elements of setting.
From the very first moment of the film, we are not greeted with tradi-
tional orchestral sounds, but rather the sounds of a Moog synthesizer—in
the hands of one of its most important pioneers, Wendy Carlos. The
Moog, which had appeared in a few film and television scores since the
mid-1960s came to wide public consciousness with Carlos’ landmark
recording Switched-on Bach (1968).38 Despite the popularity and easy
listening of Switched-On Bach, the timbres of the synthesizer remained
strange and novel to many listeners, especially when used in more avant-
garde contexts. The opening sounds and the timbre of the Moog used
in various points within the film intentionally evoked a different set of
expectations than a classic orchestral score or even a pop score.
The Moog fits perfectly as an element of the world of the film, yet it
was not Kubrick’s original intent to use it. Carlos was nearly finished with
an original work, Timesteps, when she and Elkind learned that Kubrick was
making A Clockwork Orange. Journalist Chris Twomey explained: “Car-
los’s retro-electronica was perfect for Burgess’s dystopian work….The
anti-hero of this controversial film was a big fan of the heavenly music
of Ludwig van and here was Carlos with Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’
already recorded and ready to be sent for Kubrick’s consideration.”39
Principal photography on the film was complete by the time Carlos and
Elkind shared Timesteps and the realization of the fourth movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. These excerpts proved intriguing enough
to Kubrick to merit an invitation to London.40
Working with Wendy Carlos on the score to A Clockwork Orange was
a unique experience, because it allowed Kubrick to use the preexistent
music he wanted for the film, and still have access to a creative voice
that could manipulate the retro-futuristic timbres of the Moog as he saw
fit. Carlos explained: “we were able to suggest that we could do alternate
versions of the beloved temp track pieces….He still had the original thing
that he was secure with, but he also had these neat new sounds, so he was
getting his cake and eating it too.”41
Both Timesteps and the realization of the fourth movement of

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony were included in the film right away. Subse-
quently, Carlos created Moog versions of Purcell’s Funeral Music for
Queen Mary, the second movement of the Ninth Symphony, and Rossini’s
Overture to Guillaume Tell. Creating Moog realizations was extremely
time-consuming, and some desired cues could not be completed in time.
Kubrick also opted not to use other original music provided by Carlos.
In the liner notes to the 1998 release Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original
Score Clockwork Orange, Chris Nelson explains that the collection on the
album is “the music you heard—and did not hear—in Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange.” There is a brief retelling of how Carlos and Elkind
came to be involved in the production, and then a description of what’s
included:
“In this album, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind have brought together
all the music that Wendy suggested, arranged and/or composed for this
remarkable film…[H]ere is The Thieving Magpie (“As we would have done
it, had there been time”) and a startling piece of original music, Country
Lane. This latter piece…utilizes motifs from The Thieving Magpie plus the
medieval religious theme of Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), which is also heard
in the title music…plus a suggestion of Singin’ in the Rain.”42
The liner notes also contain a lengthy essay by Carlos providing a bit
of context for each cut on the album including the unused original works:
Orange Minuet, Biblical Daydreams, and Country Lane.
The film opens with a Moog realization of Henry Purcell’s (1659–
1695) Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (1694), a piece composed
to mourn the monarch, who had succumbed to smallpox. In addition
to signaling to the audience that the forthcoming narrative takes place
in a realm of sound where synthesizers may have supplanted (or exist
alongside) acoustic instruments, it adds to the aesthetic of a world some-
what like our own, but different enough (in language and dress) to be
the near future. This piece also performs a structural function, as Kubrick
changes title cards at structural points in the music. Furthermore, Purcell,
an English composer, and the music, mourning an English Queen, may—
to those who know the piece—evoke thoughts of the Crown, monarchy,
government, and authority.
Connection to this latter point, authority, is evidenced by the circum-
stances of the cue’s appearance throughout the film. It opens the film
296 C. L. GENGARO
and is the music we hear as Alex’s face first fills the frame. Alex, holding
court in the Korova Milkbar, is in control of everything—the leader of a
band of apex predators. The cue starts up again, as Alex and the droogs
prepare to rape a woman in her home while her husband watches. The
scene ends, but the cue continues as the gang returns to the bar for a
nightcap. It pauses just as a fellow bar patron sings and returns as Alex
asserts authority over another member of his gang. As Alex walks home,
he whistles the tune, the cue entering in perfect sync with him. In the
second half of the film, Purcell’s music appears as Alex’s “cure” is tested.
A topless woman stands over Alex, who is kneeling on the floor. He wants
to grab her but cannot even get up. Subsequently, Purcell’s music appears
just as Alex recognizes that his former friends are now the police. The cue
continues as Georgie and Dim take Alex to a secluded place in the woods
to beat and torture him. Carlos added percussive hits to match the blows
from Georgie’s billy club.43
In addition to serving the narrative as a comment on the main char-
acter or society, the music, to Kubrick, suggested movement and dance.
The rhythms of the music often inspired Kubrick’s editing, and Carlos’s
interpretations allowed alterations in tempo to better match the mood of
the scene. The music also allowed Kubrick to stylize sex and violence,
acting as a buffer to the violent images by making them more dance-
like or comedic. In this way, it takes on a similar function to that of the
Nadsat language in the novel. Burgess explained this concept at a talk in
1972 by saying: “in describing violence, by using a strange language, a
language compounded of Russian and English—here was a thick curtain
coming down which kept the violence at bay. Which kept the violence
from obtruding too much, which kept it from being too immediate an
experience.”44 In other words, because our translation of the words is
not instantaneous, we are spared the gut reaction we might otherwise
have. Similarly, because the score allows us to see the images on screen as
dance-like, or comedic, they are easier to accept.
Beethoven’s music in the film—Carlos’s Moog realizations of the
second and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Ninth—becomes a unifying
theme, holding a place of central importance. The Ninth Symphony cues
call upon the work’s own complex history. In the more recent past,
Beethoven’s Ninth has been famously analyzed by musicologist Susan
McClary as an exemplar of an artwork that articulates “the contradictory
impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlighten-
ment.”45 Interestingly, Kubrick said in an interview about 2001: A
Space Odyssey that “to ‘explain’ a Beethoven symphony would be to

emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and
appreciation.”46 Fitting then to have Beethoven’s Ninth represent Alex’s
unbridled id, and the loss of it akin to impotence, both sexual and other-
wise. The finale of the symphony also marks the final moment of the film,
when Alex declares that he’s been cured. McClary describes the violent
end of the piece: “Beethoven simply forces closure by bludgeoning the
cadence and the piece to death.”47
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has been played at many politically-
charged events like a concert celebrating the reunification of Germany
in 1989 (conducted by Leonard Bernstein).48 It also made appearances
at Hitler’s birthday concert of 1937 and in 1942 as the Führer took
direct command of the Nazi armed forces49 (both concerts conducted
by Wilhelm Furtwängler).50 The connection between the music of
Beethoven and the Nazis is made explicit in A Clockwork Orange during
the Ludovico treatment. In the novel, during Alex’s second day of the
Ludovico treatment, Alex describes images from the Second World War:
“It opened with German eagles and the Nazi flag with that like crooked
cross….Then you were allowed to viddy lewdies being shot against walls,
officers giving the orders, and also horrible nagoy plotts left lying in
gutters, all like cages of bare ribs and white thin nogas.”51 It is just
then that Alex realizes the soundtrack to the film is Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony. Extremely distressed by this, Alex explains to Drs. Brodsky
and Branom that the use of Beethoven in this context was “a sin”. “He
did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.”52
In the film, the first Ludovico film is accompanied by an excerpt of
Carlos’s Timesteps. The cue starts with atmospheric sounds that play
as Alex is being strapped into the viewing chair. Gradually the sounds
become more intrusive, with gongs and other computer-generated sounds
banging away at seemingly random intervals. When the quick, rhythmic
section of the piece begins, the film starts. The frenetic pace of the music
and the unpredictable changes of tempo and rhythm suit the action in the
film, which depicts a vicious beating and a gang rape. On the second day
of treatment, Carlos’s music is gone and in its place is the Alla marcia
section of the Ninth Symphony’s fourth movement.
The Alla marcia section of the symphony had previously accompanied
a scene of Alex having a wonderful day, walking through the colorful
record store, meeting the two women with whom he would engage in
a menage a trois (to Carlos’s sped up realization of Rossini’s Overture
298 C. L. GENGARO
to Guillaume Tell ). The second occurrence accompanies clips from Nazi

propaganda films. The practitioners of the Ludovico treatment use the
music of Beethoven to make the experience more emotionally impactful.
Alex experiences this within the diegesis, but it is also something that the
viewers of the film are experiencing. The music of the score—and indeed,
this is a central function of film music in general—creates more emotion-
ally impactful scenes. The doctor’s choice of Beethoven seems completely
coincidental, and Alex condemns their appropriation of Beethoven for
this experimental procedure. Alex’s own use of Beethoven was problem-
atic as well. As viewers, we may even take issue with Kubrick’s use of
Beethoven, although this is a much larger question that warrants a more
in-depth study.
Kubrick’s next two films Barry Lyndon and The Shining would
continue his exploration of preexistent art music, allowing him the oppor-
tunity to create fascinating and provocative scores for these projects.
He would enlist the help of many people in his search for the perfect
musical cues to fit the visual, including arranger Leonard Rosenman
(Barry Lyndon) and music supervisor Gordon Stainforth (The Shining ).
Kubrick’s collaboration with Wendy Carlos also continued during pre-
production and production on The Shining.
Music’s functions in the novel, play, and film A Clockwork Orange
are multifarious. Both Burgess and Kubrick had interesting histories with
music, and A Clockwork Orange seems to have given both artists an
opportunity to experiment with a music-laden narrative. Music in the
novel is an important part of the story, and it performs a mostly symbolic
function since it cannot be heard. The score of the film adheres in some
ways to the conventions of film music, yet in others transcends these tradi-
tional roles. The music of Burgess’ play diffuses the power of music by
allowing all characters to share in music-making. All characters sing, from
the protagonist to the Minister of the Interior to F. Alexander. The loss
of the special connection between Alex and his beloved music is perhaps
the best evidence of how important music is to the integrity of Alex’s
character. A Clockwork Orange, in all of its iterations, provides a useful
case study of an art work transformed across media, highlighting the ways
music can function within and beyond the original narrative, feeding back
into a loop where each version illuminates the others.
Notes
1. Anthony Burgess’s novel was published in 1962, Stanley Kubrick’s
film was released in 1971, and the first of Burgess’s stage adaptations
premiered in 1986 and was published in 1997. (Other stage adaptations
followed, but this chapter will not refer directly to them).
2. Burgess, A. (2012), A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, New York:
W.W. Norton, 124.
3. Burgess, A. (2020), This Man and Music, Manchester: Manchester
4. In Paul Phillips’ book on the music of Burgess, he quotes Burgess’s
preface to David W. Barber’s book, Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music
History As It Ought To Be Taught. Burgess recounts the genesis of his
A minor fugue by explaining, “I got up at five this morning because
my cough was keeping my sleeping partner awake….As any musician will
tell you, there is only one thing to do when you wake at five, and that
is to compose a fugue.” Phillips, P. (2010) A Clockwork Counterpoint:
The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 212n.
5. A list of compositions is included at the end of the first chapter of This
Man and Music, found on 57–61 in the 2020 Irwell Edition to This Man
and Music. The examples given here are from 60–61.
6. Burgess, A. (2020) 216.
7. Burgess, A. (1962), “The Writer and Music” in Listener, 3 May, 61–2.
8. See the Introduction to This Man and Music, 1–3. Transcrip-
tions/recordings of most of these lectures are available in the International
Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.
9. Burgess, A. (1988) “Blest Pair of Sirens?” in Listener, 14 July, 4–5.
10. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, viii.
11. In the 1981 article “Sonata Form in Tremor of Intent,” James I. Bly
explains how the musical structure is reflected in Burgess’s 1967 novel.
In 1986, Philip E. Ray discusses the tripartite ABA form of the novel as
it relates to sonata form and the Baroque-era da capo aria form. “Alex
Before and After: A New Approach to Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.”
Both essays appear in Aggeler, G. (1986), ed. Critical Essays on Anthony
Burgess, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. Bly’s essay previously appeared in
Modern Fiction Studies 27 (1981): 489–504.
12. Phillips, P. (2010) 88–90.
13. Fictional composers in the novel also include Otto Skadelig, Adrian
Schweigselber, and Claudius Birdman. For commentary on the possible
symbolism of the names, see Phillips, P. (2010), 84–85.
14. Burgess, A. (2012) 48.
15. Ibid., 33–34.
300 C. L. GENGARO
16. Ibid.,124.
17. Ibid., 152. Emphasis mine.
18. Burgess, A. (1986) “A Clockwork Orange Resucked” in A Clockwork
Orange, New York: W.W. Norton, 1986, ix. This essay accompanied the
1986 American paperback version, which included the final chapter for
the first time in the U.S.
19. Burgess, A. (2012), 199.
20. Author’s preface to Anthony Burgess (1998), A Clockwork Orange: A Play
With Music, London: Methuen Publishing Ltd., ix.
21. Phillips, P. (2003) “Alex in Eden: Prologue and Music to Burgess’s
Dramatization of A Clockwork Orange” in Vernadakis, E. and Woodroffe,
G. (eds), Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange, Angers: Presses
de l’Université d’Angers, 115.
22. Ibid., 115.
23. In the novel, Beethoven is mentioned eight times in the text to Mozart’s
four and Bach’s three.
24. The tagline that appeared on movie posters read: “the adventures of
a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence, and
Beethoven”.
25. In the film at about 1:56, Alex answers a question from a journalist who
asks, “So now you have the same reaction to music as you do to sex and
violence?” Alex answers, “No missus, you see it’s not all music, it’s just
the Ninth”.
26. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange: A Play With Music, x.
27. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange: A Play With Music, 50–51.
28. Phillips, P. (2010) 147.
29. Under a dedication to his wife, Burgess added “Also to Stanley J. Kubrick,
maestro di color…” Burgess, A. (1974) Napoleon Symphony, London:
Jonathan Cape Ltd. np.
30. See Merkley, P. (2007) “‘Stanley Hates This But I Like it!’: North vs.
Kubrick on the Music for 2001: A Space Odyssey,” in The Journal of Film
Music 2, no. 1: 1–34; Heimerdinger, J. (2007) “I Have Been Compro-
mised. I Am Now Fighting Against It.’: Ligeti vs. Kubrick and the Music
for 2001: A Space Odyssey”, in The Journal of Film Music 2, no. 1;
and McQuiston, K. (2011) “‘An Effort to Decide’: More Research into
Kubrick’s Musical Choices for 2001: A Space Odyssey” (145–154) in The
Journal of Film Music 3, no. 2.
31. Letter in the Alex North Papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences Archive at the Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles CA.
32. https://www.billboard.com/music/soundtrack/chart-history/TLP/2
33. Norden, E. (1968), Interview with Stanley Kubrick, Playboy, September
issue, reprinted in https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/10/02/playboy-
interview-stanley-kubrick/, accessed 2 October 2016.
34. Correspondence with André Previn and Nino Rota, SK/14/4/1/2,

Stanley Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts London.
35. See Gengaro, C. (2013), Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His
Films, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 186–190, for further information
on Kubrick and Carlos’s collaborative process for The Shining.
36. Kubrick’s extensive notes and collected materials for a proposed film on
Napoleon were shown as part of the traveling Kubrick exhibition that
began at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt in 2004. For further
information about this project, see Magel, E. M. (2007) “The Best Movie
(N)Ever Made: Stanley Kubrick’s Failed Napoleon Project” in Stanley
Kubrick, Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 156–167.
37. LoBrutto. V (1999), Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, New York: Da Capo
Press, 344–345.
38. See Sewell, A. (2020) Wendy Carlos: A Biography, New York: Oxford
University Press, 54–55.
39. Twomey, C. (1998) “Wendy Carlos – Still Switched On”, in Exclaim,
December 98/January 99 accessed from http://www.wendycarlos.com/
twomey.html
40. This timeline is mentioned in various places including the liner notes
to Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score to A Clockwork Orange,
Minneapolis, MN: East Side Digital, 1998 and Sewell, Wendy Carlos,
74–78.
41. Bond, J. (1999) “A Clockwork Composer: Wendy Carlos” Film Score
Monthly, 4, no. 2: 21.
42. Nelson, C. (1998) Liner notes to Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score
Clockwork Orange, Minneapolis, MN: East Side Digital.
43. In the liner notes to Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score Clock-
work Orange, the composer explains: “[My original piece] Country
Lane…worked very well in the scene in which Alex meets his old friend
and receives a nasty beating by them. Kubrick wanted something much
more literally brutal, so we provided him with a track of impact effects
that he edited to fit the scene.” East Side Digital, 1998.
44. Burgess, A. (1972) “Language as a Fictional Character” The University
of Rochester, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in Rush
Rhees Library, 10 November, 17–18.
45. McClary, S. (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 129. Burgess
addresses the same idea in the preface to the musical by mentioning that
Beethoven’s spirit represents “the mature creative mind which can recon-
cile the creative and the destructive.” A Clockwork Orange: A Play With
Music, x.
46. Norden, E. (1968).
302 C. L. GENGARO
47. McClary, S. (1991), Feminine Endings, Minnesota: University of

Minnesota Press, 129.
48. Buch, E. (2003) Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, Richard Miller,
trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 260.
49. Buch, E. (2003), 205.
50. Shirakawa, S. H. (1992) The Devil’s Music Master, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 271–279. See also Applegate, C. and Potter, P. (2002)
“Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,” in Apple-
gate, C. and Potter, P. (eds) Music and German National Identity,
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1–35.
51. Burgess, A. (2012), 124.
52. Ibid., 124.
David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two
Sides of the Same Golly
Sean Redmond
1 Introduction
In this chapter, I explore the significance of A Clockwork Orange to David
Bowie’s oeuvre. I analyse the ways that both the novel and the film found
their way into his live performances, music videos, album covers and
various star personae, including “Ziggy Stardust”, “Aladdin Sane” and
“Halloween Jack”. I also explore song lyrics that either directly reference
the novel and film, or allude to their urban imagery and violent encoun-
ters. The article draws upon media interviews, commentaries and on the
performances, songs and music videos where A Clockwork Orange is
quoted or referenced. I argue that Bowie’s fascination with the novel and
the film speak to his sense of being an alien outsider, to his fearful attrac-
tion to violence and to the dystopian visions that haunt a great deal of his
music. I also suggest that A Clockwork Orange provides Bowie with the
S. Redmond (B)
School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne,
Australia
e-mail: s.redmond@deakin.edu.au

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_15
304 S. REDMOND
fashion and behaviour codes to be a rebel poseur, resistant to heteronor-

mativity. A Clockwork Orange gifts David Bowie with a “fiction” that
simultaneously terrifies and attracts.
The chapter is written thematically. It begins by addressing the star
personae influenced by the novel and film. The chapter then explores the
song lyrics and music videos that directly quote, allude to, or build upon
the violent landscapes of A Clockwork Orange. Finally, I conclude with
a brief exploration of the fan paratexts that connect Bowie to novel and
film, showing how the two fictions (“Bowie” and A Clockwork Orange)
have been creatively brought together.
A note: in interviews and commentaries it isn’t always clear whether
David Bowie is drawing on the novel, the film or both. Where it is clear,
I draw the distinction.
2 Dressing and Posing like a Droog

One can see the direct influence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
on one of David Bowie’s most memorable characters, Ziggy Stardust. In
an interview for the Rolling Stone, Bowie recalls how the film influenced
the design of the album cover for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
(1972):
We did the photographs outside on a rainy night, Bowie continues. And

then upstairs in the studio we did the Clockwork Orange lookalikes that
became the inner sleeve. The idea was to hit a look somewhere between
the Malcolm McDowell thing with the one mascaraed eyelash and insects.
It was the era of Wild Boys, by William S Burroughs. That was a really
heavy book that had come out in about 1970, and it was a cross between
that and Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape
and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become.1
The album’s front cover has Bowie/Ziggy dressed in a blue jump suit,
leg raised and with his high purple boot resting on a pile of cardboard
boxes which have been left littering the rain-soaked pavement. High key
light falls onto his blonde hair and the guitar that hangs off his shoulder.
In the wider setting, we see Ziggy closed in by the concrete urban streets,
houses and apartments; the night sky heavy with rain clouds; and a line of
parked cars resting menacingly on the road. Ziggy is flamboyant, “matter
out of place”, in this industrial, neo-noir setting. The urban, gritty setting
DAVID BOWIE AND A CLOCKWORK ORANGE … 305
implicitly connects him, the album cover, to the way brutalist architecture
is used to carry menace and the environmental signifiers of youth alien-
ation in the film version of A Clockwork Orange, where “the brutality
of the official system to which Alex falls victim is embodied in the cold
austerity of the design style”.2
The costumes that Ziggy Stardust wore when performing live over this
two-year period (1972–4) also drew upon the film’s spectacle of mascu-
line excess, in which the clothes perversely sexualize the male form and
transgress gender binaries. While the Droogs in Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange wore bowler hats, white, collar-less shirts, braces and trousers,
big, black “bovver boots” and over-sized cod pieces that cover and exten-
uate their crotches, their manhood, Ziggy is seen to wear red high-laced
boots, all in one floral and sparkly jump suits that tightly fit around his
genitals. Ziggy and the Droogs also share a visual aesthetic when it comes
to wearing eye make-up: playing with masculine and feminine binaries as
they do so. Of course, the sexual undertones of Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange are also found in the film’s explicitly laden mise-en-scene where
dildos, nudes and sexualized graffiti are found populating a number of
key scenes.3
Ian Chapman places Ziggy within the context of Glam rock which
promised its fans:
An escape from the confinement, drudgery and physical, mental and

emotional restrictions of the inner city and suburbia. The wider reinven-
tive promise of glam rock was that one could transcend one’s immediate
physical, social and even sexual environment to construct a new idealized
version of the self.4
This is a wish fulfilment and ontology that Alex also embraces. His
costuming resists authority, challenges conformity, opens up the self
to a transcendent experience, albeit one connected to “ultraviolence”.
Costume designer, Milena Canonero, responsible for the Droogs costume
in the film, consciously drew upon London street style of the era.5
The bovver boots and “grandad shirts” were worn by working-class
teenagers at the time, the braces were apart of skinhead culture, while
the bowler hats were adorned by working-class youth to aestheticize
and ironize their look, taking and transcoding the convention from
white, male middle-class, white-collar attire.6 By contrast, Ziggy Star-
dust’s costumes were designed by Kansai Yamamoto who “approached
306 S. REDMOND
Bowie’s clothes as if I was designing for a female. Notice there is no

zipper in front”.7 Yamamoto, a Japanese fashion designer, drew upon the
art concept of Basara, which roughly translates as “to dress freely”, to
present a joyful, exuberant vision through costume and performance.8
There is an important ideological aspect to understanding Ziggy
Stardust’s representational hybridity. On the one hand, his drooginess
connects him to working-class culture, to social realism and to the
violence that defined youth masculinity. It also connects him to “Bowie’s”
milieux: to where he grew up and to what he knew of London and
the small-world, closed-in urban environments he lived in. On the other
hand, the connection to the dystopian science fiction of A Clockwork
Orange, and the incorporation of Basara into the costuming, links Ziggy
to the exotic, to the different, and to a boundary-less form of celebrated
gendered embodiment. Ziggy is an alien messiah figure,9 and so this
seeing beyond the earthly takes him out of the urban and out of regulated
social life.10
It should also be noted that this hybridity is an essential part of
Alex’s character. Alex’s costume transgresses cultural norms, moves across
class positions, undermining and opposing the working-class masculinist
cultures it draws upon. Alex is not happy in/with his social and economic
circumstance and resists the social order, al-be-it through his love of
violence: a “real satisfaction”. Ziggy and Alex, then, share and express
fantasies of difference and find joy in their own transgressive perfor-
mances. They are both types and forms of counter or rebellious science
fiction. As Bowie himself commented:
You have to try and kill your elders… We had to develop a completely
new vocabulary, as indeed is done generation after generation. The idea
was taking the recent past and re-structuring it in a way we felt we had
authorship of. My key ‘in’ was things like Clockwork Orange: that was our
world, not the bloody hippy thing. It all made sense to me. The idea of
taking a present situation and doing a futuristic forecast, and dressing it to
suit: it was a uniform for an army that didn’t exist.11
Dressing up is important or central to Alex and Ziggy—and to Bowie

more generally—because of the way they use it to strike a pose, to
fashion themselves as active poseurs. Alex dresses in the “heighth of
fashion”, hangs out in the most popular bars and speaks in Nadsat—
a stylized Russian-English Cockney dialectic to which only the coolest
“modern youth” employ. Ziggy holds the stage “like a leper messiah” and
undertakes costume changes while performing. As Yamamoto observed:
I’d never seen a performance like it. When the show started, he came down
from the ceiling, wearing clothes I had designed. Then there was a move-
ment that often occurs in kabuki, which is called hikinuki, where somebody
is wearing one costume and it is stripped off, immediately revealing what
is underneath. It was very dramatic.12
In the film version of A Clockwork Orange, Alex and his Droogs are
shot in slow motion, as they strut besides the canal bank, while their
appearances at the Korova Milkbar are marked by swagger and pose.
Judith A. Peraino writes that:
Posing … insists on self-awareness, image, and surface and keeps in place

the temporal and material positions of “original” and “copy,” and … func-
tions within an interaction among creator, spectator, and the object of the
gaze— an interaction that is already saturated with implications of power
and desire. Importantly, to “strike a pose” is to stop the action of the body,
to allow the viewer to become absorbed in visual pleasure and desire, and
also to allow the poser the pleasure of inhabiting the object position.13
Alex and Ziggy are objects of desire and desiring objects: they seek
to be gazed at, noticed, to be revered and reviled. David Bowie’s own
star image is, of course, in part built on striking poses, being a poseur,
an embodiment enmeshed in his constant character, costume and perfor-
mance changes. However, posing is often a form of sexualized resistance,
predicated on opening up the poseur to a non-binary queer gaze. Bowie’s
interest in A Clockwork Orange is likely to do with the perverse ambiguity
that the character Alex offers him, and a form of otherness which marks
his own renown:
… human and flawed (visibly so with a damaged eye) as well as extraor-

dinary in appearance, demeanour and projected self- belief. The ethereal
aspect central to Bowie’s star persona and epitomized in many of his
characterizations – Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and so
on – overtly embraces the ‘otherness’ of the outsider.14
The album cover to Aladdin Sane (1973) takes up Bowie’s indebted-

ness to the stylish otherness he sees and feels in A Clockwork Orange.
308 S. REDMOND
The sleeve art featured the airbrush work of Philip Castle, who had
designed the posters for Kubrick’s film. Castle was responsible for the
single teardrop that forms on Sane’s milky collarbone. The album title, a
play on “a lad insane”, is inspired by Bowie’s half-brother, Terry, who had
been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. It is reported that Bowie was haunted
by his own fears of suffering mental illness.15 Alex may well then be a
version of a lad insane, attracting Bowie because of how close to home
the character feels.
This empathetic attraction extends to the book and film’s narrative
detail. While in prison, Alex volunteers for an experimental programme
that would allow him to leave as a free person within two weeks. In
this experimental programme, called the “Ludovico Technique”, Alex
undergoes behaviour modification through the pairing of an injected
nausea-inducing solution, while watching violent movies. This immer-
sion therapy results in him becoming violently ill when witnessing or
even thinking about, violence. Behaviour modification techniques were
heavily used for treating schizophrenia in the 1970s, something that
Bowie was acutely aware of. Much later in his career, during 1992–1993,
Bowie visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, Austria, and
interviewed and photographed its patients, who were famous for their
Outsider art. This research was drawn upon for the 1.Outside album
(1995), where one of the songs, “I’m Deranged”, was directly influenced
by one of the inmates Bowie had interviewed at the hospital.16 However,
the lyrics also conjure up the ghost of Alex who ultimately sees no way
out from the life he leads:
No return, no return
I’m deranged
Deranged, down, down, down
When Bowie performed as Ziggy Stardust during this period he would

“enter the stage to the strains of Wendy Carlos’ futuristic synthesizer score
for A Clockwork Orange”,17 and his shows would open with Beethoven’s
Symphony No. 9 (Second Movement), also an explicit reference or allu-
sion to the film. In the film, Alex describes the piece as “bliss and heaven”
as it plays over a montage where various acts of violent murder take
place. In this murderous montage, we intermittently see Alex’s leering
face sprayed with blood. Bowie’s attraction to, repulsion of, violence is
something that I will now turn to through an exploration of his music

and lyrics.
3 Bowie’s Version of Ultraviolence:

Say Droogie don’t Crash Here!
David Bowie’s first direct musical reference to A Clockwork Orange is
found in the track Suffragette City, with the line “Say droogie don’t crash
here!”. The song captures the desire or longing for a woman, told from
the point of view of a man in a homosexual relationship. The song
is a ball of agitation, the frenzied thoughts and speech of someone who’s

sure he’s going to get laid if only things would work out for him, if his
deadbeat roommate would just get the hell out of the house for once, or if
his boyfriend wouldn’t mind if he just brought this chick over for a bit.18
We of course witness Alex recall such desiring sex acts and scenarios in
A Clockwork Orange:
But I wanted it back home on my stereo to slooshy on my oddy knocky,

greedy as hell. I fumbled out the deng to pay and one of the little ptitas
said: “Who you getten, bratty? What biggy, what only?” These young
devotchkas had their own like way of govoreeting…Then an idea hit me
and made me near fall over with the anguish and ecstasy of it, O my
brothers, so I could not breathe for near ten seconds….What was actually
done that afternoon.19
Both Suffragette City and A Clockwork Orange are immersed in the

hedonism of sub-cultural life as it was imagined to be at the time, and
yet they are also both future tense, full of the shock of the imagining of
tomorrow. As Bowie recalled in 1993, A Clockwork Orange provided him
with a template “to anticipate a society that hadn’t happened”.20
Very often we find that the present and future tense of Bowie’s music
is violently orientated: it seems to be compositionally, narratively, lyri-
cally enmeshed across his oeuvre.21 For example, the arrangement of
the track Warszawa is meant to capture the “very bleak atmosphere”
that he felt surrounded by in the war-torn and divided city of Warsaw,
which he visited in 1973. He wanted the piece to be “emotive, almost
religious”.22 However, it is the lyrical arrangement that owes a debt to
310 S. REDMOND
A Clockwork Orange and its composite language, Nadsat. In the song

Warszawa, Bowie invents his own fictional language:
The rather strange lyrics and the distinctive vocal melody in the middle
part of the song are based upon a recording of a Polish folk song. The
vocal part was recorded slowly three semitones lower. When restored to
the correct tempo and multi-layered, it sounds like a Balkan youth choir
singing with a harsh trebly tone.23
When we hear Warszawa, we are reminded not only of the made-up

discourse of A Clockwork Orange, but the films own use of music to
anchor the violence that runs through it. For example, when Alex rapes
and then murders a yoga instructor, he sings and moves to Singin in the
Rain. This utopian musical number (originally sung by Gene Kelly) is
translated into a horror show. Similarly, in the novel, Alex describes this
act of violence like a waltz:
And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz--left two three,

right two three--and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two
curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side
of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. Down this blood poured
in like red curtains.24
The violence of A Clockwork Orange enters Bowie’s music in another

central way. Murderers, fantasists and serial killers make a recurring
appearance in his songs and videos, as if Alex’s pathology has been trans-
lated and transplanted across his works. For example, Running Gun Blues
(1970) is about a US soldier who has returned from the Vietnam War and
indiscriminately kills people. Video Crime (1989) imagines a narrator who
has become hooked on video “slash horror” nasties and at night stalks
potential victims. In this song, there is of course a direct connection to
A Clockwork Orange and the thesis that violent media breeds violence in
society. The track Valentine’s Day (2013) re-imagines the 2008 Univer-
sity shooting in Northern Illinois that took place on February 14, where
Steven Kazmierczak, a graduate student in the school of social work,
opened fire on 120 people at a lecture hall, killing five other students and
injuring 17 others, before killing himself. The song depicts the actions of
a character named Valentine, who jealously admires/loathes the “teachers
and football stars”, and who has an “icy heart”. While the gun he carries
is never explicitly mentioned, it is the invisible ‘it’ of the song: ‘it’s in his
scrawny hands’.
In terms of setting, the music video to A Valentine’s Day directly draws
upon the brutalist modernism found in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It
opens in a wide shot, with the camera tracking down the concrete pillars
of the abandoned Red Hook Grain Terminal in the Red Hook neighbour-
hood of Brooklyn, New York. We then enter the terminal through rusted
barred windows, the composition ensuring that the lines, shapes, shadows
and hard material of the building impresses upon the scene. It registers in
a similar way to the underground tunnel scene in A Clockwork Orange,
where Alex and the Droogs set upon the alcoholic tramp. This homage to
the film’s brutalism is amplified by Bowie: at times in the video he appears
as a moving blur, or the shadows that are thrown onto the concrete wall
behind him, turn him into a figure that is holding a rifle, rather than the
guitar that he clearly strums (See Fig. 1). Shallow focus and chiaroscuro
lighting are also used to similar effect in the underground tunnel scene in
A Clockwork Orange, presenting the ghost of the Droogs into this song’s
message system.
Two of David Bowie’s albums are particularly indebted to the dystopic
landscapes of A Clockwork Orange: Diamond Dogs and 1. Outside.
Fig. 1 It’s in his Icy Hands: Valentine’s Day meets A Clockwork Orange (A still
from Valentine’s Day, dir. Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri and Markus Klinko)
312 S. REDMOND
Diamond Dogs began as an extensive adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984

(1948) which had to be abandoned because of copyright issues. However,
its central character, Halloween Jack, and the post-apocalyptic “Hunger
City” that the album’s fiction is partly set in, draws upon the iconography
of the Droogs, and the brutalist, decayed Thamesmead South Estate
where Stanley Kubrick shot A Clockwork Orange.
The album’s opening track Future Legend begins with a distorted
dog howl and features Bowie describing a post-apocalyptic Manhattan,
renamed Hunger City. He describes “fleas the size of rats” and “rats the
size of cats”, corpses that “lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare”, and
he compares the “humanoid” inhabitants to “packs of dogs”. These dogs
are essentially the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange and the cityscape
imagined is drawn from the pages of the novel and the night scenes from
the film. On the cover to Diamond Dogs , Halloween Jack is positioned as
if he is lying naked on a carnival stage, with two female-like empusae or
vampiric demons standing either side of him. These are the famed crea-
tures that folklore suggest seduce men in order to feed on their flesh and
blood.25 Jack is depicted as half human, half animal: his human upper
torso carries forward the androgynous red hair and painted lipstick of
his previous personae, including Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, while
the lower part of the torso shows him to be a de-sexed dog. Jack is the
embodiment of the text, “the strangest living” curiosity that runs down
the side of the façade he lies underneath on this album cover. It draws to
mind the excessive mise-en-scene of the Korova Milkbar, with its “blow-
up” doll inspired chairs, but also of the way that Alex is defined as both
human and animal, who has a “thirst for transgression”, and “the thrill of
the taboo”.26
1. Outside is also set in a dystopian future and is “narrated” by Nathan
Adler, a government agent tasked with investigating the phenomenon of
Art Crime. In this future, the murder and mutilation of bodies is used
as the canvass for art, some of it sanctioned by the State. Adler has to
decide what is legally acceptable as he investigates the fractured, episodic
events leading up to the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl (Baby Grace).
The violent and torturous landscape of 1. Outside is again indebted to A
Clockwork Orange but on this album the whole of society is now impli-
cated in the ethics of violence—it is as if Alex’s value system has become
dominant, all prevailing. In 1. Outside:
The world of Nathan Adler is a cruel, bloody and empty one. Fourteen-
year old girls are eviscerated for art; Mark Rothko delicately slashes his
wrists; mothers go missing, children are snuffed out. The young pierce and
ink themselves, unconsciously following ancient tribal rituals but lacking
the religious transformations those rituals had enabled; they merely believe
that their bodies are the only sacred thing left to them. There are severed
limbs, diamond-studded umbilical cords, webs of intestines, bloodstained
tissues hung on wires. The galleries are full of bleeding men and the
bisected corpses of cows.27
1. Outside is also closely related to A Clockwork Orange because of

their jointly critical, complex assessment of high and low culture, their
mediations on the pretentious of art and its commodification; and the way
the State is seen to weaponize art. Adler and Alex “narrate” their respec-
tive texts to collapse or confuse the demarcations of low and high culture;
and there is as much state-sanctioned violence in A Clockwork Orange,
through the way the Doctors and therapists sadistically treat Alex, as there
is in the “filthy heart” of 1. Outside where ordinary people become the
carcasses of the art elite. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange explicitly uses art
to show its violent pretentions, for example:
Venture inside those punishing exteriors and there is no escape from the
violence in a visceral orgy of 1970’s post-modernist kitsch. None is played
out more prevalently than in Alex’s flat where gold wallpaper, bulbous
chrome-cladded walls and JH Lynch paintings rise-up to bite you on
every corner. The banality of a mid-century credenza resting against a wall
only adding to the violence of saturated colours on account of its mere
presence.28
The “diary” for 1. Outside, titled “The Diary of Nathan Adler, Or

the Art Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A Non-Linear Gothic Drama
Hyper-Cycle”, which appears in the album’s sleeve notes, alongside many
of the song lyrics, was reportedly assembled through the use of the Verba-
sizer, a computer application that Bowie had developed. The Verbasizer
randomizes sentences, breaks them down and re-assembles them so “what
you end up with is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns
and verbs all sort of slamming into each other”.29 One can again see
the influence of Nadsat on his thinking and working processes, inventing
new “languages” as he goes about his work. There is something clin-
ical in this process, however, a working purity that seems to allow the
314 S. REDMOND
“machine” to take control of the writing process. This sense of being

unfeeling, distant, may also relate to Bowie’s interest in the book and the
film: to how closely he connects with Alex’s own pure sense of unfeeling.
As Bowie commented:
I’m a pretty cold person. A very cold person, I find. I have a strong lyrical,
emotional drive and I’m not sure where it comes from. I’m not sure if
that’s really me coming through in the songs. They come out and I hear
them afterward and I think, well, whoever wrote that really felt strongly
about it. I can’t feel strongly. I get so numb. I find that I’m walking
around numb. I’m a bit of an iceman.30
This sense that Bowie connects with Alex, a character that seems to be
beyond good and evil, is something that fans pick-up on, and translate,
in their own fanwork.
4 A Clockwork Bowie: Who

the Fuck’s Gonna Mess with Me?
Jackie Furby persuasively argues that,
Images of violence and death are commonly found in David Bowie’s

music and film art. This can be violence felt by him, violence he directs
against himself, violence that he offers to others, and the violence of others
directed toward him.31
This violence is connected to, or enmeshed with, forms of embodiment

which aestheticizes, embraces and eroticizes perversity: there is a willing
masochism found across Bowie’s personae. This violence, then, makes it
relatively easy to see Bowie in A Clockwork Orange, taking part in its
lashings of ultraviolence, taking on the role of Alex. In two pieces of fan
art, we see Bowie as Alex: the first, a medium shot, has him dressed like
a Droog, with bowler hat, braces and white shirt. The words, “Rebel
Rebel”, have been added to the hat; the lightning bolt from Aladdin
Sane is found on his cheek; and his unmistakably different coloured eye
pupils adds both realism and otherness or strangeness to the composite
image. Bowie/Sane/Alex grin maniacally, as if they are waltzing, dancing
to violence that is taking place off-camera. In the second piece, Bowie has
been airbrushed into the rape scene from the film: he is foreground in the
shot, wearing Alex’s bowler hat, and with eye lash extensions, but without
trousers. The background of the scene has also been altered: a painting of
Andy Warhol is found on one wall, while the (Warhol designed) “banana”
album cover by the Velvet Underground is positioned next to it. The
banana is framed as if it is entering the naked and bound yoga instructor
who is held by one of the Droogs in front of it. The play with the image
here is complex: it extends the film’s debt to pop art, and Bowie’s own
relationship to the movement (and to his friendship with Lou Reed, lead
singer of the Velvet Underground). Bowie, however, is taking on the role
of Alex and so is implicated as rapist. He stares at the camera—at the
viewer—with an empty expression. He seems to be beyond good and evil.
Bowie, of course, was allegedly involved in having underage sex with two
female fans during the 1970s and was reported to be both promiscuous
and polygamous. The fan art here picks up on the troubling politics of
book and film, and of the perverse stardom of David Bowie.
Bowie remained influenced by A Clockwork Orange right to the end
of his career. It is named in his “list of top 100 must-read books”
(2013). However, Bowie is indebted to the work of Anthony Burgess
more broadly:
Away from Burgess’s direct influence on Bowie’s music and lyrics, there
are connections between Bowie’s reading list and Burgess’s own attempt
to document his favourite books, Ninety-Nine Novels (1984). A significant
influence that appears on both lists is George Orwell’s novel Nine-
teen Eighty-Four. Burgess’s novel 1985 is a direct response to Nineteen
Eighty-Four, and engages with Orwell’s text in inventive ways, including
a non-fiction examination of the role of dystopian fiction in portraying
the present-day world. Bowie, thinking along similar lines, endeavoured
to write a stage musical inspired by Orwell’s novel. This never came to
fruition as Orwell’s estate refused to grant permission, but some songs,
including ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’, appeared on his 1974 album Diamond
Dogs.32
Nonetheless, it is through music where these connections are cemented

or cremated. The track “Girl loves Me”, found on his final album, Black-
star (2016), is littered with Nadsat phrases such as, “You viddy at the
Cheena” and “Devotchka watch her garbles” (which translates to “You
see the woman” and “watch this woman’s balls/testicles”, don’t you
know?). However, it is the vocal delivery which carries the power of the
lines to the listener:
316 S. REDMOND
A single verse is chanted more than sung—Bowie harping on one note until
the end of each phrase, when he moves up first by a third (“this-malchik” )
and ultimately an octave, by almost yodeling the last note (“say-ay” “da-
aay” ). The verse lines have a tumbling consonance (“diz–zy–s natch,” “po–
po bl ind to the pol-l y”) and a rhythm of chasing short-held notes (“chee-
na”) with slightly longer ones (“so sound”). Momentum builds as Bowie
crams in more syllables with each line.33
Girl Loves Me immerses itself in hedonism and marginal subcultures: it

is populated by drag queens, cops, drug deals, illicit sex. It is a copy of
Alex’s world in A Clockwork Orange, and someone you are not going to
fucking mess with. However, the track is also a mediation on time. When
the mortally ill Bowie sings the line, “where the fuck did Monday go?”, it
is a deeply self-reflective looking back. Life has flown by and there is very
little time for him left. At the end of A Clockwork Orange (novel version,
outside of the USA edition), Alex also mediates on time passing, as he sees
himself anew: growing up, settling down, getting married. Alex may be
accepting a life of regulation and order. In a sense, the roles reverse here:
Bowie rages against the dying of the light, Alex may well be welcoming
docility in. But they are, nonetheless, two sides of the same golly. I read
Bowie as both attracted to and repulsed by the cool, youthful violence in
A Clockwork Orange. The science fiction that this chapter is concerned
with, then, is not one of space operas and alien visitation, but a critical
dystopia where the present-future reeks of despair and decay. And yet
perversely, the violence is desired or desirable, and the darkness it throws
is reached into, shaping Bowie’s lyrics, performances and personae. Bowie
is not simply influenced by A Clockwork Orange but embodied by it.
Notes
1. Sinclair, D. (1993) “Station to Station: an interview with David
Bowie”, Rolling Stone Magazine New York, 10 June. Avail-
able at: https://paola1chi.blogspot.com/2019/09/station-to-station-int
erview-by-david.html (accessed 10 March 2021).
2. Melia, M. (2013) “Altered States, Altered Spaces: Architecture, Space and
Landscape in the Film and Television of Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell”,
Il Cinema E Le Altre Arti, 6 (12) 139–152.
3. Anderson-Ramshall, C. (2015) “Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange: Brutalism
in exteriors, interiors and a quilt”, Film and Furniture, 4 June. Avail-
able at: https://filmandfurniture.com/2015/06/kubricks-clockwork-ora
nge-brutalism-exteriors-interiors-quilt/ (accessed 10 March 2021).
4. Chapman, I. (2015) “Ziggy’s Urban Alienation: Assembling the Heroic

Outsider”, in Cinque, T., Moore, C. and Redmond, S. (eds) (2015)
Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory New York, Blooms-
bury, 35.
5. Lazic, E. (2019) “A Clockwork Orange and fashion: Why the
droogs never go out of style,” BFI News, 4 April. Avail-
able at: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/sta
nley-kubrick-clockwork-orange-fashion (accessed 7 March 2021).
6. Ibid.
7. Mallon, J. (2018) “Designer Kansai Yamamoto talks all things David
Bowie”, Fashion United, 22 May. Available at: https://fashionunited.uk/
news/fashion/designer-kansai-yamamoto-talks-all-things-david-bowie/
2018052129750 (accessed 7 March 2021.
8. Sloane, I. (2017) “The Father of Basara, Kansai Yamamoto, on his Louis
Vuitton Collab”, Fashion Magazine, 20 November. Available at: https://
fashionmagazine.com/style/basara/ (accessed 6 March 2021).
9. Ndalianis, A. (2018) “Bowie and Science Fiction/Bowie as Science
Fiction”, Cinema Journal, 57 (3) 139–149.
10. Chapman, I. (2015).
11. Wigley, S. (2019) “How A Clockwork Orange set the scene for punk”,
BFI Features 3 April Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/clo
ckwork-orange-stanley-kubrick-punk (accessed 4 February 2021).
12. Garratt, S. (2016) “David Bowie’s style legacy: ‘He stole ideas from
everywhere’”, The Guardian, 12 January 2016. Available at: https://
www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-style-icon-fas
hion-legacy-aladdin-sane?page=with:img-2 (accessed 7 March 2021).
13. Peraino J.A. (2012) “Plumbing the Surface of Sound and Vision: David
Bowie, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Posing”, Qui Parle: Critical
Humanities and Social Sciences, 21 (1) 151–184.
14. Hunt, K. J. (2015) “The Eyes of David Bowie”, in Cinque,
T., Moore, C. and Redmond, S. (eds), Enchanting David Bowie:
Space/Time/Body/Memory, 178.
15. Rebecca F. (2017) “David Bowie: the Art of Mental Illness”. Rock
Wolk. Available at: http://www.rebeccaf.com/id/david-bowie-the-art-of.
html (accessed 17 March 2021).
16. See: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/outsider_art_stunning_
pics_of_bowie_eno_visiting_mental_patients_in_austria (accessed 4
February 2021).
17. Heller, J. (2016) “Anthems for the Moon: David Bowie’s Sci-Fi Explo-
rations”, Pitchfork, 13 January. Available at: https://pitchfork.com/fea
tures/article/9787-anthems-for-the-moon-david-bowies-sci-fi-explorati
ons/ (accessed 9 June 2021).
318 S. REDMOND
18. Anon. ‘Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, Song by Song’.
Available at: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/suffra
gette-city/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CSuffragette%20City%E2%80%9D%20is%
20a%20ball,chick%20over%20for%20a%20bit. (accessed 4 February 2021).
19. Burgess, A. (1962) A Clockwork Orange, William Heinemann, UK.
20. Pike, D. (2018) “Soundtracking… A Clockwork Orange”, Bido Lito! Issue
87. Available at: https://www.bidolito.co.uk/feature-soundtracking-a-clo
ckwork-orange/ (accessed 25 March 2021).
21. Furby, J. (2018) “New killer Star”, Cinema Journal, 57 (3) 167–174.
22. Pegg, N. (2016) The Complete David Bowie Titan Books, 249.
23. Ashworth, D. (2015) Making Music with David Bowie, Music teacher,
Rheingold Publishing, UK. Available at: https://www.rhinegold.co.uk/
wp-content/uploads/2015/10/MT0416-scheme-KS4_David-Bowie.pdf
(accessed 7 February 2021).
24. Burgess, A. (1962).
25. See: https://mythus.fandom.com/wiki/Empusa (accessed 17 March
2021).
26. Macris, A. (2013) “The Immobilised Body: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork
Orange’”, Screening the Past, 13:37. Available at: http://www.screen
ingthepast.com/issue-37-aesthetic-issues-in-world-cinema/the-immobi
lised-body-stanley-kubrick%E2%80%99s-a-clockwork-orange/ (accessed
17 March 2021).
27. Anon. Pushing Ahead of the Dame, David Bowie Song-by Song. Available at:
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/diary-of-nathan-adler/ (accessed
21 March 2021).
28. Anderson-Ramshall, C. (2015).
29. Braga, M. (2015) “The Verbasizer was David Bowie’s 1995 Lyric-Writing
Mac App”, Vice. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xygxpn/
the-verbasizer-was-david-bowies-1995-lyric-writing-mac-app (accessed 17
March 2021).
30. Ferris, T. (1972) “David Bowie in America—The Iceman, Having Calcu-
lated, Cometh”, Rolling Stone, available at: https://www.rollingstone.
com/music/music-news/david-bowie-in-america-56227/ (accessed 21
March 2021).
31. Furby, J. (2018), 167.
32. Foster, G. (2019) “The Reading Lists of David Bowie and Anthony
Burgess”, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 8th January.
Available at: https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/the-reading-
lists-of-david-bowie-and-anthony-burgess/ (accessed 9 June 2021).
33. Anon. “Pushing Ahead of the Dame”. Available at: https://bowiesongs.
wordpress.com/tag/girl-loves-me/ (accessed 17 March 2021).
Afterword
I was born just over two weeks after A Clockwork Orange opened in the
United Kingdom. I am, therefore, too young to appreciate fully the film
nor its impact at the time of its release. I first saw the film on a bootleg
video bought in Amsterdam with Dutch subtitles at some point in the
1990s. I only saw it on the big screen when it was released following
the director’s death in 1999. By that point, its visual and verbal allusions
had long infiltrated popular culture and influenced the films I grew up
watching in one way or another.
Kubrick’s film has been analysed from a variety of perspectives and this
book adds some new ones, but one which I think deserves further atten-
tion is how Kubrick married two genres that were becoming increasingly
popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s—violent films about violence
and musicals.
Anthony Burgess’s novel was filled with references to music as was
his own adapted screenplay from 1996. As Matt Melia points out in
the chapter “Scripting A Clockwork Orange”, in his own 1969 screen-
play for the film Burgess envisaged “a harsh mathematical music which
symbolises the technological society which is the true enemy of the story”.
But Kubrick took this one step further to make the film into a musical.
Kubrick’s innovative use of music in his films has been much discussed
and does not need to be rehashed here, but what is less appreciated is
Kubrick’s love of dancing. Kubrick adored to dance, and was a great
dancer, his widow Christiane recalled. “He liked waltzes very much”, she
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 319
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7
320 AFTERWORD
added. He inserted dances sequences into his movies whenever the oppor-
tunities arose, escalating in intensity as his film-making matured—Killer’s
Kiss (1955), Paths of Glory (1957) and Lolita (1962) all have dancing,
whether ballroom, ballet or even the cha cha and even the planes perform
a mating “dance” in the opening sequence of Dr. Strangelove (1964).
This reached a whole new level by 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
In the beginning of the film, during the Dawn of Man segment, the apes
(some of whom were in reality dancers) perform a primitive dance to
Also sprach Zarathustra; then the Orion III Spaceplane floating and Space
Station V waltz to the strains of The Blue Danube; the space hostess,
“clad like a Berkeley showgirl”, performs an ungainly “dance” as she
walks through the space plane to catch a floating pen. Frank’s parents
sing “Happy Birthday” and HAL even gets his own number, singing
“Daisy Bell” (1892). In the psychedelic final sequence, Ligeti’s “Atmo-
sphères” and the Kyrie of his Requiem are heard almost in their entirety
producing what Alex Ross called “a seventeen-minute avant-garde concert
with visual elements added”.1
Indeed, it predated the modern concerts of U2, Jean Michel Jarre or
Kraftwerk in which the visuals were as much an element of the show as
the music. One critic has perceptively labelled it a “modernist musical”.
By making 2001 a musical, it fit into an era of Oliver!, Funny Girl (1968),
which Kubrick had enjoyed seeing on Broadway back in 1964, and The
Producers (1968, possibly inspired in part by Strangelove), all of which
won Oscars (Carol Reed beat Kubrick to best director for Oliver!).
And then along came A Clockwork Orange. In Kubrick’s hand,
Burgess’s book on screen became a parody of West Side Story, or “Jerome
Robbins gone mad”, in the words of John Weightman in Encounter
magazine. Alexander Walker, writing in the same journal, referred to the
“ballet” of the gang fight and the “vaudeville” of the assault-and-rape
to the melody of “Singin’ in the Rain” (directed by Kubrick’s friend,
Stanley Donen). By concluding the film on that same tune, A Clockwork
Orange continued the musical trend which was continued by such classics
as Fiddler on the Roof in 1971. Indeed, as if starring in an MGM produc-
tion (ironically the studio that backed 2001 and initially Kubrick’s failed
Napoleon project that preceded A Clockwork Orange), Alex struts into
the writer’s house with a cane and bowler hat, as if about to perform a tap
routine. He does a soft-shoe dance, orchestrating the action, but punctu-
ating it with choreographed movements. At one point, he even gets down
on one knee like Al Jolson. It was, for Stephen Mamber, “obvious musical
AFTERWORD 321
comedy parody”.2 When he toys with the Catlady, again the circular
motions suggest another dance routine, as does the speeded-up sexual
encounter with the two girls Alex takes home.
By orchestrating most of the violence to the Overture to Rossini’s
The Thieving Magpie (1817) and locating it in theatrical settings (liter-
ally on stage in at least two sequences), as well as within films within the
film, the immediate effect was to the film the quality of a Hollywood
musical. Scholars have discussed the “stagedness” of the film, anticipating
the tableau vivant of the orgy of his final film Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.3
As Joseph Darlington perceptively points out here, the deserted theatre
that appears early in the action is an old music hall that has been long
abandoned by a theatregoing public is repurposed by entertainment for
Billy Boy and his gang and then Alex and his droogs for their own self-
designed entertainment—highly choreographed sex and violence.
Kubrick explained to Joseph Gelmis in Newsday:
I wanted to find a way to stylize all this violence and also to make it as
balletic as possible. The attempted rape on stage has the overtones of a
ballet. The move around the stage. The speeded-up orgy sequence is a
joke.4
In another interview, he added:
In a very broad sense you can say the violence is turned to dance, although
it is in no way any kind of formal dance. But in cinematic terms, I should
say that movement and music must inevitably be related to dance, just as
the rotating space station and the docking Orion spaceship in 2001 moved
to the ‘Blue Danube.’ From the rape on the stage of the derelict casino,
to the super-frenzied fight, through the Christ figures cut, to Beethoven’s
Ninth, the slow-motion fight on the water’s edge, and the encounter with
the cat lady where the giant phallus is pitted against the bust of Beethoven,
movement, cutting, and music are the principal considerations—dance?5
This collection, marking the film’s fiftieth anniversary, is a trove for

critical enquiry, pursuing as many or more perspectives as do the films
themselves. The essays that follow wind their way through the spaces of
A Clockwork Orange: its meanings, creation, reception and exploitation.
They interpret and honour this important, if controversial, film.
322 AFTERWORD
Notes
1. Ross, A. (2013) “Space is the place”, New Yorker magazine, 16 September.
2. Weightman, J. (1972) “The Light and the Dark,” Encounter, 38; Walker,
A. (1973)“The Case of the Vanishing Bloodstains,” Encounter, 43; Rabi-
nowitz, P.J. (2003) “A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal: Music
in A Clockwork Orange,” in McDougal, S.Y. (ed.), Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 129n16;
Falsetto, Kubrick, 150; Mamber, S. (1996) “A Clockwork Orange,” in
Mario Falsetto, (ed.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G.K.
Hall, 1996), 178.
3. Krämer, P. (2011) A Clockwork Orange, London: Palgrave, 28 and
Matthys, W. (2013) “Observe All: On the Staging of Fundamental Fantasy,
Jouissance, and Gaze in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, American
Imago 70(2): 225–247, 225.
4. LoBrotto V (2018) “The Old Ultraviolence: A Clockwork Orange”
[Online] Accessed: 31/08/2021.
5. SK, in Hughes, Complete, 173; Houston, “Kubrick Country,” 111.
Nathan Abrams is a professor of film studies at Bangor University in

Wales. He is the founding co-editor of Jewish Film and New Media: An
International Journal, and he is also the author/editor of three books on
Stanley Kubrick, including Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual
(2018), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film
(2019, with Robert Kolker) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley
Kubrick (2021, with IQ Hunter). He is currently working on a biography
of Stanley Kubrick with Robert Kolker.
Index
A 169, 205, 222, 225, 231, 235,

Absurdism, 140 245, 250, 251, 254, 269–271,
A Clockwork Orange, 1–11, 13–19, 285, 286, 290, 291, 312
25–43, 45, 47–50, 54–56, 60, Ageing, 18, 268
61, 63, 65, 69–75, 89, 90, 93, Aladdin Sane (1973 album), 303,
95, 96, 100, 102, 103, 112, 117, 307, 312
118, 121–123, 126, 127, Alex, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 15, 17, 18,
133–138, 141, 142, 145–147, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 40, 49, 56,
150, 151, 155–157, 159, 167, 61, 63, 75–80, 83–89, 95, 96,
168, 170, 172, 175, 178–180, 107–113, 117, 118, 121–127,
185–187, 190, 200, 206, 209, 134–149, 151, 157, 159, 160,
211, 213, 215, 216, 220–223, 162, 164, 167–173, 178,
225–230, 232–240, 245, 246, 189–199, 201, 205, 208–211,
250, 251, 255, 262, 263, 213–216, 218, 221–235, 245,
267–269, 272, 280, 285–288, 246, 250–257, 259–261,
291–294, 297–300, 303–307, 266–270, 272, 274–279, 282,
309–316, 318 285, 289–291, 293, 294,
A Clock-work Orange 296–298, 300, 301, 305–316
(stageplay/musical), 9, 19, 36,
Animal Farm (Novel), 56
69, 90, 291, 319–322
Anthropocene, 17, 246, 247, 249,
Adaptation, 1, 3, 8, 13–15, 17–19,
251, 258
31, 35, 36, 40, 41, 49, 51, 59,
69–74, 77, 79, 88, 95–102, 104, Any Old Iron (Novel), 286
105, 108, 112, 113, 118, 127, Architectural theory, 13
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 323
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7
324 INDEX
Architecture, 87, 88, 150, 155, 159, Brave New World, 226
161, 169, 172, 174–176, 178, Brave New World Revisted, 225
179, 208, 209, 277, 305 Brideshead Revisited, 56
Archival material, 14 Brighton Rock (1948), 88
Archival research, 90 Brutalism, 162, 164, 173–179, 311,
Archives, 4, 7, 14–17, 47, 48, 50, 52, 316
70, 73, 74, 77, 84, 174, 292 Buñuel, Luis, 133, 141
Art history, 139 Burgess and Kubrick relationship to
Artaud, Antonin, 16, 193 book and film, 3
Artificial Intelligence, 17, 246 Burgess, Anthony, 1–20, 25–65,
Art theory, 15 69–78, 95, 100, 102, 117, 127,
Authority, 31, 87, 118, 123–125, 133, 149, 155, 157, 161,
231, 250, 254, 295, 296, 305 165–173, 177, 179, 186–189,
Authorship, 3, 13–15, 69, 70, 73, 77, 191–193, 195, 196, 199, 205,
90 206, 208–215, 220–231,
Avant-garde, 134, 137–140, 144, 233–236, 240, 246, 251–253,
147, 149, 150, 294 255, 259–262, 268–272,
A Vision of Battlements (novel), 286 285–291, 293, 294, 296,
298–300, 315
Burgess Film Script, 71–72, 73–75,
B 77, 79, 81–88
Bacon, Francis, 18, 265–267, 277, Burgess Kubrick relationship, 3, 13
280 Byrne (Novel), 286
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 289, 290
Balázs, 98
Barry Lyndon (1975), 232, 292, 298 C
Beds in the East (Novel), 117, 286 Canonero, Milena (Costume
Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 27, 78, 82, Designer), 84, 88, 206, 305
86, 87, 89, 112, 135, 138, 145, Carlos, Wendy, 82, 293, 294, 298
148, 193, 234, 268, 269, 272, Cinema, 2, 4, 9–11, 17, 27, 28, 35,
273, 275, 288–300 36, 52, 60, 71, 72, 82, 96–98,
Berkeley, Busby, 320 100, 105, 107, 110, 113, 133,
Behaviourism, 55, 228, 229 138, 139, 150, 151, 165, 172,
Bellmer, Hans, 141, 145, 146 184–186, 189–191, 195, 196,
Biswell, Andrew, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14, 39, 208, 218, 222, 223, 226, 231,
70, 72, 75, 83, 90, 128n16, 209, 232, 250
225, 227 Clockwork Condition, 4, 14, 20, 37,
Blackstar (2016 album), 315 45, 47, 49–53, 56–58, 60, 62,
The Blue Pencil Script’ (Kubrick), 70, 64, 69, 93, 181, 225, 237,
73, 76, 77–79, 80–81, 83–84, 262–264
88–90 Clockwork Orange Clubs, 11
Bowie, David, 11, 19, 257, 303, 304, Clockwork Testament , 38, 55, 59, 60,
306–316 61, 62, 69
INDEX 325
Cold War, 3, 13, 17, 128, 230, 235 The Enemy In The Blanket (Novel),
Collins Associates, 48–63 117
Collins, Thomas P., 48–63 Eyes Wide Shut (1999), 2, 139, 291,
Connolly, Cyril, 56 321
Control, 15, 17, 50, 54, 55, 124,
125, 149, 158, 187, 192, 197,
222, 224, 227, 228, 230, 235, F
245, 248, 251, 257, 259, 268, Fellini, Federico, 31, 133
269, 280, 293, 296, 314 Film scores, 285
Controversies, 4, 9, 10, 34, 37, 38, Four Quartets (Novel), 56
40, 69, 100, 102, 147, 151 Frankenheimer, John, 17, 118, 221,
Cooper, Michael, 71–72 228, 229, 230
Counter-culture, 2, 88, 133 Freud, Lucien, 267, 271
Freud, Sigmund, 140–142, 144, 145,
Free will, 2, 15, 17, 27, 49, 55, 56,
D 60–62, 137, 246, 249, 252, 253,
Dada (and Dadaist Artists), 15, 136, 257, 260, 261, 285, 289
138–147 Full Metal Jacket (1987), 37, 255
Defensible Space, 156–165 Funny Girl (1968), 320
Devils, The, 2, 28 Futurism (and Futurists), 148–150
Diamond Dogs (1974 album), 312,
315
Divine Comedy / Dante, 49–50, 57 G
The Doctor is Sick, 51, 74 Genre, 100, 117, 126, 146, 150, 207,
Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to 213, 286
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb George, Peter, 72
(1964), 72, 141, 147, 230, 320 Gothic, 85–86
Droogs, 1, 5, 7, 17, 32, 75, 76,
78–81, 83–85, 88, 89, 108, 110,
111, 123, 124, 127, 142, 144, H
159, 160, 164, 167, 172, 178, Honey For The Bears (novel), 17, 208,
187, 188, 195, 205, 210, 213, 209, 212
218, 223, 224, 233, 253, 254, Huxley, Aldous, 14, 149, 225–226,
260, 269, 272, 274, 276–279, 230, 249
282, 289, 296, 305, 307, 311,
312, 315
I
I.R.A, 28
E Indexing Terms, 53
Earthly Powers , 19, 253, 286 International Anthony Burgess
Edelman, Maurice, 29, 38 Archive, 3, 4, 14, 39, 47, 48, 50,
Enderby, F.X., 38, 55, 59–61, 69 63n2, 70
326 INDEX
J Makkink, Herman, 136, 139, 267

Jackson, Peter, 101 Malaya, 2, 5, 50, 117, 118, 120, 127
Jacobs, Jane (Architect), 156–157, Malayan Triology (novels), 5, 15,
161, 164–165, 179 118, 119, 228
Jean-François Lyotard, 101 Manchester, 3, 16, 83, 119, 165–166,
Jolson, Al, 320 169, 209
Joyce, James, 12, 35, 52, 159, 288 Manchurian Candidate, 17, 49, 118,
Jung, Carl, 53, 63 221, 228–229
McDowell, Malcom, 1, 26, 27, 48,
100, 118, 167, 186, 194, 199,
K 231, 232, 253–254, 304
Kael, Pauline, 30, 96, 107, 112, 113, McLuhan, Marshall, 52–53, 187, 261
231 #MeToo, 3, 13, 18, 267
Killer’s Kiss (1955), 146 Mozart and the Wolf Gang (Novel),
Kurosawa, Akira, 133 286
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 287–290
Municple Modernism, 163–174
L Music, 13, 18, 19, 26, 50, 53, 71,
Language, 2, 5, 12–15, 19, 27, 62, 82, 83, 85, 86, 112, 118, 127,
71, 75, 96–98, 101–103, 107, 137, 142, 148, 150, 159, 165,
108, 117–124, 127, 138, 142, 173, 205, 207, 208, 210–214,
144, 149, 189, 205, 212–214, 222, 223, 234, 268, 285–298,
221, 223, 224, 226, 230–232, 303, 304, 309–311, 315
251–253, 255, 257, 281, 295, Musical Structure, 287–290
296, 310, 313 Musicals, 9, 19, 51, 53, 62, 69, 77,
Linguistics, 2, 15, 96, 102, 120–125, 82, 84, 90, 145, 160, 234, 268,
172, 221, 223, 231, 251, 252, 285–293, 298, 309, 310
255 Mythologies, 4, 5, 14
Literary theory, 16
Lolita (novel), 102, 127, 251
Lolita (1962 film), 102, 127, 232, N
252, 320 Nadsat, 2, 5, 12, 15, 17, 26, 32, 89,
Loog Oldham, Andrew, 75–76 96, 102–105, 107–113, 118,
Ludovico Technique, 2, 16, 17, 86, 119, 121–124, 138, 149, 167,
123, 171, 179, 188, 189, 191, 171, 172, 209, 214, 221–226,
195, 214, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 231, 233–235, 252, 253,
229, 245, 250, 251, 259, 260, 296, 306, 310, 313, 315
308 Napoleon (1970), 6, 7, 8, 26, 51, 59,
Lynch, Joseph H., 135 72, 291, 293, 320
Neo-dada, 139
Newman, Oscar (Architect), 156,
M 157–159, 161, 165, 166, 168,
Makkink, Cornelius, 135 177, 179
INDEX 327
North, Alex, 292 R

Novel, 1–19, 25, 27, 30–33, 35–38, Ray, Man, 138, 141, 143, 145
40, 41, 47–51, 54–64, 69–74, Reception of A Clockwork Orange,
76–78, 81–83, 85–90, 92, 9–12
96–98, 102, 112, 117–123, 126, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
127, 133, 138, 155, 156, 160, and the Spiders from Mars (1972
167–171, 173, 177, 186, 188, album), 19, 304
205, 207, 209–211, 213–216, Rolling Stones, 71, 75, 93, 95
222–225, 227–231, 233–236, Russell, Ken, 2, 25, 28, 74–75, 93
238, 246, 250, 251, 255, 262,
268–272, 285, 287–291, 293,
294, 296–300, 303, 304, 310, S
312, 316 Sade, D.A.F. Marquis de, 141–142,
194
Saint Augustine, 60–61, 73, 227
Screenplays, 40, 70, 72–77, 78, 82,
O
86–88, 90, 91, 96, 105, 214,
Odino, Simone, 13
220, 269
Oliver! (1968), 320
Scripts, 4–7, 14, 35, 70, 72, 73,
Olivier, Laurence, 34
76–81, 87, 89, 90
Orwell, George, 7, 62, 149, 172, Scum (BBC, 1977 / 1979), 89
187, 189, 190, 312, 315 Seconds (1966), 229
1.Outside (1995 album), 308, 311, Sexual violence, 18, 138–147,
312–314 267–281
The Shining (1981), 266, 267, 292,
293, 298
P Singin’ In The Rain (song), 36, 295,
Paths of Glory (1957), 320 320
Pavlov, Ivan, 54, 171, 172, 225, 226, Shakespeare, William, 34, 35, 38, 60,
235 98, 122, 159
Perko, Manca, 13 Skinner, B.F., 14, 53–56, 64, 65, 157,
The Pianoplayers (Novel), 286 170–172, 181, 222, 224–227,
Politics, 77, 117, 221, 235, 315 235, 237
Pop art, 15, 71, 139, 234, 267, 270, Social engineering, 16, 171, 176,
274, 315 179, 257
Pornography, 15, 35 Society, 16, 27, 33, 38, 54, 84, 102,
Previn, Andre, 292 110, 118, 137, 140, 149–151,
Prison, 54, 56, 135, 171, 174, 175, 157, 162, 175, 207, 210, 223,
191, 231, 255, 266, 271, 279, 245, 249, 253–259, 296, 309,
287, 308 310, 312
The Producers (1968), 320 Southern, Nile, 71, 72
Psychoanalysis, 138–141 Southern, Terry, 6, 7, 14, 70–72,
Purcell, Henry, 293, 295–296 113, 271
328 INDEX
Southern/Cooper Script, 72, 75–78, Violence, 2, 10, 12, 15, 18, 26–40,
81, 87–88, 90 54, 59–61, 71, 86–89, 102, 113,
Soviet Union, 171, 210 118, 133, 134, 137, 138, 141,
Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA), 3, 4, 142, 147, 149, 150, 155, 160,
7, 8–11, 15, 70, 75, 77, 84, 155, 164, 169, 171, 178, 187, 191,
174, 292 192, 205, 206, 208, 212, 213,
Stilyagi (Soviet Youth Subculture), 17, 224, 225, 229, 233, 234, 251,
171, 206–215 252, 254, 259, 260, 266–268,
Surrealism (and Surrealists), 15, 82, 270, 272, 273, 275, 277,
138–147, 149 279–281, 289, 290, 293, 296,
Switched on Bach (album, 1968), 294 303, 306, 308, 310, 312–314,
316
T
Theatre, 36, 60, 98, 133, 145, 150,
159, 160, 165, 228 W
This Man and Music (Novel), Walker, Alexander, 10, 146, 230
286–287 Wanting Seed, The (novel), 7, 69, 73,
Time For A Tiger (Novel), 15, 119, 76
121, 123–124, 127 Warhol, Andy, 95, 113, 315
Time Limit (1967), 229 Warner Bros., 25, 26, 34, 36, 40
Tolkien, J.R.R, 101 Whitehouse, Mary, 10, 11
Torture, 16, 137, 142, 145, 186, Wilson, Llewella “Lynne”, 5
196, 228, 230, 260, 265, 267,
271, 277, 280, 289, 296
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 2, 6, 7, Y
10, 13, 25, 72, 78, 147, 159, You’ve Had Your Time, 12, 36, 48,
247, 255, 291–293, 320, 321 74
Youth subcultures, 10, 17, 28
U
Unquiet Grave (Novel), 56, 58
Z
Unmade, 5
Ziggy Stardust, 303, 304–308, 312
USSR, 206–212, 216, 219, 227
1984 (novel), 7, 30, 62, 169, 189,
312, 315
V 1985 (novel), 7, 62, 69, 168, 171,
Vinyl (1965), 95, 113 225, 315

Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

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Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN

ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Sharon Cooper/Getty Images

Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

Language and Adaptation

“Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’

20th Century Contexts: Architectural, Art Historical and

20th Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange and the Cold

A Clockwork Orange in 21st Century

Music and A Clockwork Orange

Biswell Andrew is a professor of Modern Literature at Manchester

Dr. Gengaro Christine Lee has taught in the music department at

he convened the conference Ken Russell: Perspectives, Reception and

Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020), Grammatical Dreams (Green Integer,

research on Kubrick has been presented in several international confer-

Scripting A Clockwork Orange

‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem Really Real

Fig. 4 Instances of droog(ie) taken from the film in order

Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art in

Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange

Fig. 13 Location research slides from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley

A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual

David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides of the

Matthew Melia and Georgina Orgill

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

indulging in mindless, opportunistic “Ultraviolence”. Written in a fabri-

The anniversaries of Stanley Kubrick’s film also form part of a cele-

In the late 1960s, the dramatic liberalisation of film-industry self-regulation

Alongside Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), A Clockwork Orange

independent studies, up to now there has been no single study or collec-

Burgess’s lost “sequel” to A Clockwork Orange: The Clockwork Condition.

3 Novel and Film

Much has also been made regarding Burgess’s alleged misdiagnosis

Filippo Ulivieri discusses this further in the second chapter of this

also gives credence to the possibility that Kubrick was researching it at

I first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London

The name of the central character, Alex was a comic derivation, so he

Kubrick displayed if not the same, then a similar disenchantment with

4 Novel and Film: Reception

Writing in The Observer in 1962, novelist Kingsley Amis also praised

However, John Garrett’s review in the Times Literary Supplement, was

The publishers promise an “easily digestible feats of picaresque villainy

5 This Book: Structure and Organisation

relationship; and his relationships with the (living) authors he adapted.

5.1 Part 1: Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony

5.2 Part 2: Language and Adaptation

5.3 Part 3: Twentieth-Century Contexts: Architectural, Art

“Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange”, sees Joe

5.4 Part 4: Twentieth-Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange

considers Anthony Burgess’s formative trip to Leningrad in 1961 and

5.5 Part 5: A Clockwork Orange in Twenty-First Century

5.6 Part 6: Music and a Clockwork Orange

6. Burgess, A (1972) Copy-typed script by Burgess on the relationship

30. Perko, M. (2019) Voices and Noises: Collaborative Authorship in Stanley

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

2 Here Beginneth Twenty Years of Tribulations

Alex is potentially a human being. He is violent, which human beings are.

Such an “odyssey of an embryonic human being” was perfectly

One has to be thankful that an intelligent director took it over. It might

Following a widespread view on Kubrick’s cinema, one of the critics

Maurice Edelman, a Labour MP who proudly coined the catchy phrase