Kubrick’s version was a failure because he missed the most important part and the last few pages of the book.
In the book at the very end Alex decides out of his own free will to stop being violent. Which is the entire point of the book: free will vs being forced to do something. It’s so powerful, I don’t think any book affected as much as that did at the time.
Kubrick focused on the violence and the rapes and by leaving out the most important part, it was more soft core porn than anything else and an abject failure in my opinion.
> Kubrick’s version was a failure because he missed the most important part and the last few pages of the book.
The American version of the book doesn't have the final chapter, and was the basis for Kubrick's film. He was aware of the final chapter but never considered using it, as he didn't agree with Burgess and thought it didn't make sense (this was also the opinion of the American editor who had the final chapter removed).
The movie does include the Ludovico technique and all the themes about free will and goodness vs the choice of goodness, it just leaves out the very unrealistic ending where Alex reforms.
I think the film is a masterpiece and the book's original ending is unrealistic nonsense. I hardly think it's the "most important part".
Modern American printings do now include the final chapter. Described on the back cover as "includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked"".
The "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" introduction is from November 1986. It covers the reasoning behind the shortened American edition[0], Kubrick's film, and his own feelings on the 21st chapter[1]. I think the final paragraph summarizes it well "Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty" (Burgess xv).
[0] "I needed money back in 1962, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance, and if the condition of the book's acceptance was also it's truncation - well, so be it" (Burgess x-xi)
[1] "There is no hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter. The boy is conditioned, then deconditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the operation of free and violent will. [...] The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation [...] The American version or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel" (xii)
One of the weirdest and most interesting things I've ever seen was how this crazy book created gang violence by illustrating dystopian gang violence...And I can guarantee you that some of the youth ("hooligans") in England that were committing Droog gang violence -- inspired by this book -- have reformed as elderly adults. It's not unrealistic. When you remove people out of cults and gangs and they begin to self-reflect -- away from their tribe -- their morals and behavior reintegrate with society at large...Not at all unrealistic as the book showed.
I think the key element there is "as elderly adults". I haven't read the book (tried, the Nadsat took effort) but the movie is one of my favorites. If the ending had Alex popping up from his bed shouting "I want to be good!" I would have filed the movie away as Spielbergian feelgood schlock (see also: AI).
I do think people change, but it happens slowly, not quickly. Kubrick's ending still leaves us with the ability to imagine an older, wiser, regretful Alex. But you can't credibly force that into his youth, and the movie is already 2 hours 15 mins.
He didn’t wake up and decided he wanted to be good.
He just decided at one point that his current lifestyle was boring and he wanted a change. He didn’t turn into a good guy, he just decided to go a different way. Thats the point is that he made the choice himself.
The article itself does much more than merely suggest it:
> Kubrick himself, in response to a series of murder trials where the defendants explicitly mentioned his work, requested the withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange in the United Kingdom, where it could not be seen again until the director’s death in 1999.
That's silly. Just because a murderer mentions a book about murder doesn't mean it made them into a murderer. It just means murderers like books about murder.
A Clockwork Orange has been cited in a murder case. It is not the first time[1] mentions a number of cases linked to the book or movie, including this one:
> Arguably the most notorious of all is Peter Foster, who the British press dubbed the ‘Clockwork Orange killer’.
> Foster would beat and torture women and was found guilty of murdering two of his former wives. A court heard how he would dress up as the film's protagonist, Alex, and become violent when he heard the film’s theme song.
Exactly. The guy was a violent rapist and that’s WHY he was a fan of ACO. It’s honestly mystifying to me that some people don’t intuitively follow that obvious line of logic.
There's some precedence of pop culture has influenced criminal behavior. But it's usually superficial, by groups that were already engaged in the behavior. Mafia media from The Godfather onwards were reportedly popular with the mob and maybe influenced them to imitate the fashions and manner of speaking depicted on screen (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/movies/godfather-mafia.ht...). Hong Kong Triads youth did the same after John Woo's films with the Mark Gor Lau. Wall Street, and probably other financial thrillers to The Wolf of Wall Street and further also influenced brokers' styles, and sometimes behavior (https://slate.com/culture/2007/09/how-wall-street-s-gordon-g...).
You also hear examples of "suburban father tries to make meth because of Breaking Bad" but those are one-off individuals who are probably not of sound judgment.
This right here is the tension between "my work doesn't support <bad thing> the whole point is showing it's bad" while simultaneously portraying the bad thing in a positive light while the narrative does the condemning.
The problem with demonizing things is that demons are
cool.
If you want your condemnation to be effective in fiction you have to make the characters doing it pathetic miserable losers. You can even have the narrative support them, they win in the end, and set it up so they were right and people will still come away with that they're bad.
It is always fascinating how sometimes authors think they are creating a loser in their work but somehow the public still likes the character despite the flaws. Reminds me of the case of Rorschach in Watchmen (https://screenrant.com/alan-moore-on-rorschach-fans-watchmen...).
WTF, no. Media absolutely shouldn't be lowered to children's cartoons for adults. That's absurd. And nobody in the world who isn't already completely insane finds gang rape 'cool', nor does this book or movie portray it positively.
You say lowered, I say writing in such a way that communicates what the author actually intends to communicate. If what you're trying to say doesn't land among your intended audience that's a you problem.
Having read the book and seen the movie adaptation I have to disagree. Alex is charismatic, popular, a feared leader, independent, and rebellious. The brutal rape scene while singing makes him look like an absolute badass (a la the Joker) existing well beyond the reach of society's rules and importantly, makes him look powerful. Ultraviolence sounds like an achievement in DOOM. When he's caught it's framed as a betrayal not "we finally got the bad guy." Then they make him sympathetic through the torture and weakening him and making him unable to defend himself to the point of being driven to suicide. It's harrowing, not the cathartic comeuppance of a terrible man. And then the police apologize, let him go and arrest the man he brutally beat to near death.
The narrative considers Alex to be horrible but the view as seen by the camera/reader thinks he's hot shit and a tragic victim of a dystopian society.
As another example, when you watch Dexter you're rooting for Dexter and the show makes him cool despite him ya know being a killer.
In a lot of ways I think it's actually a hallmark of media literacy that readers/viewers largely ignore the narrative as a source of moral judgment because it's fiction and we like compelling villains and instead finds it in how the characters are actually portrayed.
Trimming the book is one thing, and I agree with you 100% on both examples. Removing the conclusion in a way that completely alters the message is another.
This happened with the Heinlein book "Podkayne of Mars" -- the original ending had one character dying and another character changing course because of it. The editor thought it too heavy for a kids' book and directed a rewrite where everyone lived.
Years later a new print included both endings and staged an essay contest to decide which is the "right" ending.
I don't know if he's gotten sloppier or just more verbose, but do find his later writings to be largely plodding and much less interesting than his earlier works. He pretty much lost me with The Baroque Cycle. Those books were a chore.
But I think that has to do with the clear change in his writing style, which has diverged from my personal tastes. So it's not a judgement call on his writing either way -- we've just grown apart.
> He pretty much lost me with The Baroque Cycle. Those books were a chore.
I wouldn't call those "later writings," he's written quite a few excellent (and better) books since. Anathem, Seveneves, and Fall; or, Dodge in Hell were excellent. Termination Shock was a quick read.
I've since gone back and re-read Cryptonomicon. I don't know know if I'll redo the whole Baroque cycle, (Because it was so long,) but I do have fond memories. I suspect it's the kind of book that's better the 2nd time through.
BTW, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell ends the Baroque Cycle. Enoch Root is in that book and we figure out what he really is.
I could not get through the Baroque Cycle, and hated Fall. The only other Stephenson book I've not made it through is Anathem, which I know is a heretical position to take, but I can't help it.
> I think the film is a masterpiece and the book's original ending is unrealistic nonsense.
I think the film is very good, but the book's original ending is is essential to the whole point of the story. The film is inferior to the book because it's missing.
But I'm not sure what you mean by "unrealistic". On one level, neither the book nor movie is very realistic anyway. On a deeper level, they both speak real truths.
> I think the film is a masterpiece and the book's original ending is unrealistic nonsense. I hardly think it's the "most important part".
I found the movie itself to be very unrealistic. Something in the way it looked (costumes and everything) and the way actors acted and talked made me not believe any of it. It felt more like comic movie then something that attempts to be realistic.
Talking about a mangled ending from the book, Fight Club is the same, they removed what I think was the critical part of the story. It was filmed and you can see find it on some dvd editions.
This take reminds me of how Stephen King considers Kubrick's The Shining a terrible film[1]. I had the misfortune of accidentally renting the Stephen King approved The Shining miniseries[2], and I have to say - it's worse in every way: slow, plodding, and forgettable. I can't comment how either compares to the book - I've never read it - but the Kubrick version is the superior film.
This is all a long way of saying that faithfulness to the source material is overrated in film. Some written works just don't work well when closely adapted to the screen. A few notable movies even manage to twist the original to express a completely different idea or theme (e.g. Starship Troopers). The original author is not some ultimate authority regarding the meaning of a work.
Stephen King is not a filmmaker. There used to be a running joke that you can judge the quality of a Stephen King adoptation by whether he liked it: if he liked it, it was likely trash; if he didn't, it was likely good.
The problem is that films are not books (shocking, I know) and what works in one medium of storytelling doesn't necessarily work in the other. As in actual translation, there has to be some liberty in how something is adapted from one form into another or else it will be very accurate but not very good.
I see this with anime and manga adaptations all the time, where the studio is trying to capture the inner monologue and action scene that works fine in the manga because it's about how many panels can you use to depict a simple sword dodge. Then the anime adaptation tries to stay so faithful that you end up seeing panels with slight movement, which results in running gags such as "talking is a free action", and Namek's 5 minutes.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with “talking is a free action” in anime versions of manga. I agree it doesn’t work in live action unless they commit to being stylized in a way that most directors aren’t comfortable.
Stephen King is a filmmaker because he does have one professional credit as a director. [0] The debate remains that Stephen King is probably not a good filmmaker.
He's a filmmaker in the sense that he has made films. He's not a filmmaker in the sense that he thinks of films as films and understands the art form. You can argue that's enough to technically qualify as a filmmaker but most people would argue that having received professional credit as something once while having made something else your entire career is not the same as that thing being your primary career, even if the English language lacks the appropriate grammatical structures to represent this difference.
English has lots of axes to represent this difference, I offered two in my post:
amateur versus professional: King was paid so he's a professional filmmaker.
bad/unskilled versus good/talented: King showed himself to be a aesthetically bad/unskilled filmmaker.
You are offering a third axis:
"one-off" versus "career": King so far has not made a career of filmmaking and only made the one film.
In English yeah, we do tend to assume the first axis (amateur versus professional) as the "default" axis. I think this is a very useful axis to use as the default: it's the least gatekeeping and the least subjective. Have you been paid anything to do that job? Congratulations, you are a professional at it. You've done the job. Otherwise, you are an amateur, keep trying you'll get there some day.
"one-off"/"career" is an axis with more subjective judgments. (How many films does it take to call it your career? 2? 14? If you deeply and academically study films your whole life but only make one masterpiece, is that not a career effort?) I shouldn't need to explain how good/bad, skilled/unskilled are deeply subjective.
Books and films have different pacing. They each tell slightly different things in different ways. It isn't really possible for a movie to be faithful to the book because one uses images and the other uses words, with every reader making different images inside themselves. It took Dune to get that through to me. I loved the book, but realized it would take a 100 hour long movie to cover what the book covered. Some people hate that movie because it left out so much, or it had to compress things.
I find that I'm less disappointed if I watch the film before I read the book. Frequently because if I read it first, then I always dislike the director's choice of actors. Or their choice of locations. I'm such an annoying critic.
Oh read the book please, listen to an audiobook or something. It’s so good. It does such a better job of putting you inside the mind of Jack. The horror of a fundamentally broken man being absolutely devoured by the entity that is the hotel is just… it’s a gigantic story.
Or take Tarkovsky: both Stalker and Solaris are based on books, but only loosely. Stalker, for example, was a short sci-fi / horror story, if I remember correctly, and in the movie this is just a remote backstory, setting the scene to more serious topics and mysticism.
Stalker is based on Roadside Picnic, basically a scifi novella. Tarkovsky heavily condenses the story to its most basic structure, the story itself is actually a masterpiece in understated commentary on society, class, individual will, and the human response to the unknown. All of this shows up in Tarkovsky’s film albeit in very sparse and intentional ways. As a filmmaker myself, I have realized that to adapt a story into a film it must be radically altered in order to fit the language of cinema because to merely transfer the plot, etc, starts to be more like theater than cinema
I actually believe that it was the right decision from an artistic perspective. The last chapter of the book removes all moral ambiguity or provocation, and is instead leaving you with the moral of the story as explicit. Without it, you are left to ponder the question of morality.
Not "not given a functioning moral code". Not raised by capable parents, not educated, not offered a place in a society which abandoned them. And then society used them: authoritarians can't exist without an enemy to simultaneously fear and insult; if necessary, they will make their own enemy.
Those who make progress impossible make revolt inevitable.
> Not raised by capable parents, not educated, not offered a place in a society which abandoned them.
The usual complete and utter disregard of the actual victims (the woman raped, for example) and the victimization of the actual criminals (the rapist, for example).
It's always been the signature of intellectuals and I believe it is the reason of many things that are wrong in society.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
(encourage by intellectuals, who intellectualize everything, including murder and rape)
I strongly disagree, having read the book and seen the movie.
The “point” of the book is irrelevant; chapter 21 is disconnected from the main text, set at some remove from the events in the previous chapters, and utterly banal. It’s an extended internal monologue of the most boring sort where the author states his moral.
But the best works of literature, in my opinion, transcend simple morality tales and touch something a bit more universal and hard to define in language. If your point can be summarized in a short essay, all you’ve done is illustrate an essay at length. “This novel could’ve been an email.”
What is captivating about _Clockwork_ is precisely its depiction of violence, its almost sympathetic glorification of the id. The protagonist’s unapologetic thirst for violence is what makes the novel (and movie) interesting. It’s reminding us that violence and aggression are part of the human condition, and part of the reader, too: you may recoil, but you also identify with Alex — it’s a first person account so that’s natural.
The last chapter ruins it though with petty moralizing. The voice of Alex the psychopath is far better than that of Burgess the moralist, and the novel is better for having its terminal essay removed.
To hear Burgess talk about his book, one would never realize that it is a comedy.
The book is extremely funny, darkly funny obviously, but still uproariously absurd and filled with set pieces that possess the structure of comedy. The subject of humor is usually Alex’s misfortunes and the consequences he reaps from his terrible choices. He is a sort of George Costanza figure painted in shades of ultraviolence.
Burgess behaves as though he thinks he has written a very serious book. Of course it is possible to create a humorous satire that also has a message, e.g. Veerhoven’s Starship Troopers, but whenever I read Burgess’ commentary on Clockwork I am left with the sense that this isn’t what he was trying to do. Which leaves me thinking that he, like many creators, doesn’t actually understand why his creation was good.
I stopped talking to people about the film because I discovered that most of them didn't see it as satire or think the book (which they read as teens) was proto-fascist.
The movie is an obvious satire. I've never understood how people get proto-fascism from the book. Even assuming it isn't a satire itself (and I could be convinced either way) it dwells on the military in a conservative society but the society it describes is also a democracy that doesn't even let active-duty military members vote.
I don't think it's fair to judge how good a movie is based on how faithful it is to a book. They're different media entirely and you don't have time in a movie to get into the substance of a book. Movies usually leave fans of the original work disappointed, series are much better at that cause they can take the time to develop characters and go into multiple arcs. On a less philosophical example, Reacher is a good example to me of a movie that has nothing in common with the book apart from some names, and a series that is spot on.
On top of that, it's another piece of art. Directors should be allowed to provide an opinion. Take Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship troopers as an example, which is widely a critic of the source material. They're both different stories in their own right. I enjoy both of them differently, and I'm glad Verhoeven didn't go out of his way to relay the message that militaristic dictature is the way to go.
For all of Kubrick's talent he was always more interested in the villains than their victims and this manifests in a lens that gives sympathy to the villains while portraying the victims as mere two-dimensional canvases. The Shining is another perfect example for this and from what we know about his treatment of the actors/actresses this sentiment seems to have also influenced his direction on set: he felt the lead actress would need to feel abused and exhausted and terrified to play the part but the actor just got to be a natural menace.
Morally, I'd say it's fair to call many of his great works failures: even Full Metal Jacket failed at being an anti-war movie even though it is still referenced as such. But artistically they're interesting and, if you ignore the supposed intentions and the moral implications of his failure, indeed very good.
I've always interpreted the movie differently, and in relation to the other Kubrick movies (for example Barry Lyndon). I think Kubrick was fascinated by the relationship between violence and success- a nihilistic view of humans as eternally engaged in a violent struggle to subdue each other.
A Clockwork Orange is not about a happy ending in which a young, violent and brilliant teenager finally decides to get an apartment and a job; it's about that teenager realising that he can channel his violence in a much more productive way. Or to put it more clearly: the minister that spoon-feeds him at the end is a psychopath possibly worse than Alex- but one in a suit, with vast resources and power, because he uses violence in a more covert and clever way. So the growth of the main character that we expect at the end of a good story is there, it's just not a happy ending (for us).
I’m gonna hard disagree with you here. Having read the novel and seen the movie, Kubrick was 100% right to leave the last chapter out.
With the last chapter intact, the story is no longer about Alex. It’s about some hypothetical futuristic society where ultraviolence is the norm and is just considered to be some coming of age rite of passage, that you eventually grow out of. It takes the violence in the story and makes it mundane and pedestrian, to the point where we have to come up with insane torturous methods like the Ludivico Technique, just as we prescribe kids Ritalin or Adderall, only we would do so just to attempt to keep things under control. It’s a story that is, frankly, ridiculous in its hyperbole, to the point that it bears little resemblance to anything but science fiction.
Kubrick and Burgess’s American editor were absolutely right to leave off the last chapter, thereby transforming the novel into the portrait of an irredeemable sociopath. A sociopath who has been enabled to a far greater extent by a simultaneously far more lenient and vindictive society than our own, yes, but therein lies the warning. While we want to redeem those criminals who are victims of circumstance, what happens when we take it too far?
By apologizing for Alex as a victim of society and circumstance, who only owes his psychopathic tendencies to said circumstances, Burgess’s novel falls flat as a criticism of society at Large (get it?)
Don’t get me wrong—I greatly enjoyed the novel, and recommend it to anyone who liked the movie. But I honestly believe the last chapter would have been best left unwritten.
I disagree with the disagreements. We look naturally at the shock value of the violence but harshly reject the shock of a character turning around out of the blue. We never give "good" the privilege of irrationality.
Presumably because we see the actions and consequences attached to him deciding to be bad. If the good is only contained in one cursory final chapter, there's no substance to it. Might as well save it for a sequel.
They made me watch it in Highschool. So, "they" were right, schools subversively expose pupils to porn.
According to the votes, on the one hand it's not pornography, but on the other hand it is. It just isn't when you want to point it out as being soft porn, but if you want to critique the movie vs the book, it's okay to critique it as soft porn... hrrrm
I feel like the moment you put any idea out there you have the potential to influence people unexpectedly, and be at peace with that.
I saw a youtube interview of an addict who said he started taking painkillers regularly because he saw House doing it. Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid in suburban America up for addiction by giving him that mannerism
The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people. Sure, some people will misinterpret it, but it should be pretty obvious that if you make a heroically brilliant protagonist dismissive of an opioid addiction that some people are going to think that's cool, especially if you're portraying that on TV. That's why Burgess wrote:
> I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation...
Kubrick's film (disclaimer: I've only read the book, I've never seen the movie) has apparently made this problem worse for Burgess. Similarly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a deeply flawed protagonist, which readers of his books would see, but I believe that the way the character was portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the recent film/series adaptations similarly disguised those flaws and had a strong potential for some misinterpretation and more negative impacts.
> The whole point of publishing an idea or art piece is to influence people.
As an author, I throughly disagree with this statement. Humans like to tell stories and entertain each other.
My primary goal for publishing my stories is for people to find them enjoyable. Some of my stories have a secondary goal of showing less common perspectives for the purpose of introducing people to ideas they may not have considered.
Any idea can influence someone, but does not mean all ideas are published to influence.
I would agree with you if one takes "influence" to mean something ulterior like propaganda or social programming.
But I also can't help but think of art and literature as a bit like a radio transmission. It depends on your being in tune enough to influence the receivers, or no signal comes across at all.
Not only that, House was the inspiration for a whole generation of drug addicts by providing a character that they could empathize with. The same way that Wall Street created a whole generation that wanted to become crooked stock operators.
Despite the book's quite unflattering depiction of Wall Street firms and many of the people who worked there, many younger readers were fascinated by the life depicted. Many read it as a "how-to manual" and asked the author for additional "secrets" that he might care to share
I'm serious, "Wall Street" with Michael Douglas was a big hit in the 80s. And these are not the only examples. Another is "Wolf of Wall Street", which depicts the life of a criminal stock operator. The real guy now makes a living as a "coach" and has inspired countless others to follow his steps (while hopefully avoiding jail).
My what a boring media landscape it would be if all characters were goodie little “Mary Poppins” types.
Just because a minority wrongly take inspiration from an ill behaved character is no reason to temper a fictional character actions. Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lead to an increase in bank and train robberies?
I think that arguably Mary Poppins was so popular because she was incredibly mean and acerbic in the books (if memory serves from reading them as a kid.)
The movie Disnified the character just like so many Grimms tales.
I think about this topic regularly, the question of how responsible a person should be for the unintentional effects of their actions.
In general society agrees that people are responsible for unintentional effects to their actions when they're obvious and predictable, such as involuntary manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk. A reasonable person should understand the risk of that and take it into account before deciding to drive after having a number of drinks.
Where it gets more complicated and divisive is when the unintentional effects become less obvious or easily attributable.
I feel there are lots of behaviors that we're able to show empirically have negative impacts on the world yet aren't immediately obvious or unavoidably attributable, and because they're not intuitably, at-first-glance attributable there begin to be people who dismiss them despite empirical evidence proving their cause. Things like chemical dumping into rivers as an externality of an industrial process causing health impacts to surrounding communities come to mind as an example.
Where it gets even fuzzier is when impacts are social and diffuse.
A place I see a lot of discussion related to this topic is in the comedy world. You regularly see people criticize comedians for their jokes being harmful or hurtful. In my opinion these criticisms are sometimes accurate, and sometimes are inaccurate due to mistaking the topic of a joke as being the butt of it (a good example highlighting the difference I feel is Shane Gillis' jokes about autism from his standup https://youtu.be/ly14Pr2RLys, vs him calling out Andrew Shultz for jokes on the same topic but done in a derogatory manner: https://youtu.be/ENpTQ6ws3P8?t=954).
The general retort from comedians to people criticizing them is that "The intent of the joke isn't bad, it's all about the intent." I feel this is partially true, but it completely ignores the potential unintended consequences of the things they say, and the potential responsibility people have for the them.
I think this area and ones like it, involving the question of to what degree people with cultural influence should be held accountable for the unintentional impacts of their influence is really interesting and complex. I don't have much more to say beyond that I find it interesting and nuanced.
It is indeed all about the intent and like a dog knows the difference between being kicked and tripped over, we instinctively know the intent. If in our social outrage, we decide to ignore our instinct, then we are essentially just looking for excuses to grandstand our outrage. This grandstanding has the unintended consequence of polarizing a social debate to the point of demonizing and arbitrary adherence on both sides.
It seems that the desire to grandstand our outrage has exploded as we all now have access to our "15 minutes of fame" via our new global social platforms. Like children finding their ability to speak, society as a whole is still in a dadaistic phase. I hope that, with much time and troubles, we eventually learn to speak in a more mature way.
>I think this area and ones like it, involving the question of to what degree people with cultural influence should be held accountable for the unintentional impacts of their influence is really interesting and complex. I don't have much more to say beyond that I find it interesting and nuanced.
Well said and agreed. In our complex social web, the unintended consequences of every nuanced thing we do makes it very hard for the wise to be sure of the societal value of our beliefs and resultant actions. There are very few topics where I am comfortable fully embracing a side.
> How responsible a person should be for the unintentional effects of their actions.
This is already enshrined in law as "negligence" and "reasonable person". It's not helpful to hold people responsible for not considering every possible outcome of what they say, including perspectives that aren't well known.
For example, I'm bipolar. Almost every media representation of bipolar individuals is reinforcing a stereotype that is actively harmful to me. I don't think the average reasonable person would be aware of this.
Bipolar is not limited to mania and depression. I call it the grab bag of issues. My brain went to the grocery store of mental illness, stuck out an arm across a shelf on aisle 3, and swept everything into the cart, like a snow plow clearing a highway.
> Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid
I'm going to disagree with this. Music, movies, and TV have been proven to be very effective at influencing. While the writers may not have intended to promote drug use, they had to expect that the wrong idea might be taken away from it. Is their fault, hell no. Does it mean that a writer should take pause before writing something? Maybe, but now we're on the verge of recommending pre-censoring content. My contention is that someone putting something out for mass consumption should not be surprised by anyone coming back later and saying they were influenced by that work as it has been demonstrated time and time again. You think Salinger thought his work was going to influence serial killers?
House drew a lot of inspiration from Sherlock Holmes - both get cases nobody else can solve, Wilson / Watson are their close companion who are essential to solving many cases, etc. It's something acknowledged in interviews by people involved in the show.
The drug use is another thing - Sherlock used cocaine and morphine. House used Vicodin. Morphine and Vicodin are both opioids.
If they had him abuse cocaine, it would be too unrealistic. If they had him abuse Adderall, it might not be obvious to audiences that he has a substance abuse problem - people could write it off as him using it to focus. A prescription opioid is something audiences understood were abused at the time, and maintains the Sherlock connections the writers were going for.
Plus it gives plenty of plot hooks to explore the effects and consequences of addiction to someone we believe to be very successful (success is happiness, right?) in season 1
Sherlock Holmes did not use opium. Watson once described him as appearing as someone under the influence of opium, but discarded the suggestion. In another story ( The Man with the Twisted Lip ) Watson discovers Holmes in an Opium den, but Holmes is on a case and in disguised.
The cocaine habit is probably exaggerated. Watson does not give a frequency of his usage and reports Holmes as saying that he only uses it when he doesn't have a case to occupy his mind. Whether this means he uses it a few times a week or a few times a year is not stated.
It's strongly implied that Holmes used morphine for recreation as well by the fact that Watson had to ask which habit he was indulging in The Sign of the Four.
"Which is it today," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
"It Is cocaine," he said, "a seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?..."
"Your teeth look good, have you made any diet changes?" - Dentist
"Yeah, I don't eat poppy seed bagels anymore, don't want to lose my job. Oh, and no novacaine, same reason. Just get started until I pass out from the pain."
There's a huge difference between popping pills and having a local anesthetic. To even attempt to compare the two is being disingenuous at best. It's not even something prescribed to take home.
To me it was character development. His whole persona is this independent persona - his genius puts him above normal people, rules, and his team is merely there to execute his ideas and bounce ideas off of (like his ball).
Despite all of that, he has crippling pain and a painkiller addiction that he’s utterly dependent on. It brings him back down to earth.
Closer to the end of the series, he basically loses his mind and is destructive to himself and others. An entire plot line was House hallucinating that he had quit and recovered from withdrawals (among other imagined or altered events) only for it to be revealed that he was using more than ever.
So, he canonically has more problems with drugs than social disapproval.
House was at least in part based on Sherlock Holmes who infamously had his 7% Cocaine solution. It's not entirely unreasonable to think the writers of House would update that to be pills.
How would "hey we can include your product in our TV show" be a "vast conspiracy"? It's done all the time, with no one hiding any aspect of the business.
I hadn’t heard this point of view before but it doesn’t seem too unlikely. The homage to Holmes is an effective way to hide it. That’s some good plausible deniability.
I remember when, in our high-school english class, the teacher asked us to reflect on Chapter 21 of A Clockwork Orange and a girl in the back of the class interjected "but there's only 20 chapters in my book!". Turns out the school had both the English and American editions co-mingled.
The omission of that chapter in the American book and Kubrick's adaption undercuts the whole point of the story in my opinion. When the film ended, I felt like my time had been wasted and that I'd been dragged back to the beginning all over again.
I think the most important aspect of "A Clockwork Orange" is it's use of language as a literary tool. It's also key to its misunderstanding, as it tends to lead towards secondary interpretations (i.e. Kubrick's film) more than the text itself.
In addition to freewill being a key theme in the book, the nadsat language is used to disassociate the reader from the actions and events partaken in by the narrator. Alex describes in clear detail the fact that he's beating the crap out of old ladies in the book, but you, the reader, don't interpret it that way. Those acts are hidden behind a language that doesn't hold the same connotations to you, the reader, so you don'tt look at Alex the same way because of it.
Conversely when his punishment and "re-education" begins you view that as harsh and inhumane, because those things are expressed in more familiar terms simply because the reader is more comfortable with the language Alex uses. Worse, he had something that he loved taken away from him (his classical music), which you understand wholeheartedly as the reader.
The fact that Alex punishment was arguably justified (if not grotesque in it's own way), is something that's missed because language disassociates the crime and amplifies the impact of the punishment. It makes you question the humaneness of criminal punishment, because it's expressed from a perspective rarely portrayed.
All of these things are completely lost once the story is taken into any visual medium. The idea of making it a film was flawed before Kubrick even touched the project, and any other director would have struggled to have the same impact as the book. I genuinely think that the project attracted Kubrick for the wrong reasons and he was far more interested in making something provocative, which "A Clockwork Orange" had plenty of opportunities.
If you haven't read "A Clockwork Orange", I strongly recommend you do, and I strongly recommend reading it as quickly and in as short a timeline as possible. Understanding the language is key, and it makes it a slow read at the start. The quicker you can become familiar with it, the easier the rest of it goes.
Then after you're done reading it, reread it again. Being familiar with the language from the start makes some of the more graphic scenes at the start really stand out in a way that they don't the first read through.
Kubrick played his own tricks to dissociate the viewer from the onscreen violence. For example, the way the gang fight is set to classical music, in an abandoned theater, with cartoonish violence. And that fight is preceded by a gang rape staged like a ballet. It's the same technique in a different medium.
I'm not entirely sure that those were all Kubrick's tricks though. Classical music is used throughout the book as a way to humanize Alex playing on stereotypes that someone who would've been more refined and upstanding than Alex's character was. While I can't remember what was in the book, it's entirely possible that Alex's narration of the the fight had mentions of music.
I also would argue that Kubrick's tricks weren't all that effective, in that they didn't really humanize Alex or pull the viewer into Alex's perspective, but rather just made the film into more of spectacle.
A lot of the visual elements of the movie struck me as very cartoonish in a way that wasn't conveyed at all in the book. The book is not all that descriptive of aesthetics and visuals in terms of fashion and architecture/decorations. I feel like those are some areas where Kubrick took the most liberties (because there wasn't as much to go off of) and I just found it distracting.
To me, really, the novel spent a great deal of time pointing out the fickleness of the UK Government, the idea that it was prone to fads, and that people simply went along with it. Only a handful swim against the tide. Even Alex's parents are reprogrammed more or less at will by the media. Burgess has touched this material before in The Wanting Seed, with what was acceptable lashes back and forth.
That came through sufficiently in the movie that I feel like this delivery was fine.
Similarly, the free will issue came through fine. Alex lacks the capacity to dwell on the subject. It falls to a prison chaplain to even ask. Nobody cares, of course, this is about results, not reformation. If Alex and other recipients of the Technique must stagger through society wearing invisible chains, that's fine as far as Government is concerned. Again, well-conveyed.
These two themes collide at the end, wherein the Government changes its mind and finds it politically expedient to restore (or just re-re-program) him to his original and savage state. ("I was cured alright.") Twenty-one, incidentally, is the terminal age in the novel for Logan's Run; youth violence and an age divide was certainly on the minds of some.
I felt like Alex himself was almost, well, not irrelevant, but simply a ball upon which multiple dogs had set their sights.
Here's a quote from one of the greats that comes to my mind whenever
an author says "I regret creating that" (and that includes you Sir Tim
Berners-Lee)
"You know, Nietzsche didn’t, you know, from his drawing room give
birth to a century of cannonade, slaughter, concentration camps,
CIA subterfuge, the raping and the murdering of nuns, the bombing
of continents, the despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet!
Four or five pedants do not have that much power, and never have."
- R. Roderick
Clockwork Orange (and the lesser Kubrick film) was what it was. It's
still powerful and relevant today.
In fact I watched it recently to steal a sample for a track I'm
working on... "When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man"
my dad bought ACO when it first came out (we sold that first ed. for a reasonable amount of money after his death) and i read it at the time, i was about 10, and thought it was brilliant.
I can understand how he feels. But haters gonna hate, criminals gonna crime. He threw some new thoughts into the world, he made people think. surely he did not demagnetize people's moral compasses.
It reeks of illusions of grandeur. Sure it is a nice piece, but he overestimates the influence imho. Similar to William Gibson thinking he is the father of things Steam Punk ever.
IMHO Lem's work has a lot of "cyber" but no "punk" in it ;)
E.g. while Lem's future (in his science fiction books) isn't exactly a happy utopia, it's also not the depressing dystopia I would associate with "cyberpunk" - but maybe... "Peace on Earth" might qualify as "robopunk"? :)
Bester and Lem are amazing in their different ways, and it's tragic that both aren't better known.
I wouldn't put one over the other, but I think Bester gets the call because his view was classic mid-century US, and was an obvious influence on Cyberpunk.
>> Similar to William Gibson thinking he is the father of things Steam Punk ever.
Great observation! Being a popular part of a zeitgeist is not the same as defining it.
I have to wonder if, and the article does hint at, "if the movie was never made..."
FTA: Burgess introduced a character “with a beard like Stanley Kubrick’s” who played Singin’ in the Rain with a trumpet — before being kicked off the stage.
... Well, I think many of the genre conventions were established enough that there was even one tabletop Steam Punk RPG that predated the publication of "The Difference Engine" (1990):
Space 1889 - (first published in 1988/89)
However - I think it was essentially just a convergence of cultural zeitgeist within about an 8-year period.
(Myself, I preferred "Castle Falkenstein" (1994) - but that was because I liked just about anything Mike Pondsmith/Talsorian released)
Tangential: I remember reading a criticism about the South Park ginger episode leading to redheads getting bullied. I was curious (and still haven't wrapped my head around) what blame can be placed, if any.
1. Shitty people had latent bullying and cruelty instincts and South Park gave them the idea of diverting that to redheads
2. People were just chilling until South Park taught them to be cruel and bully gingers
It is hard to know. My old work colleague took great efforts to keep his son from watching any TV, films or cartoons - they did loads of art, listened to music and went to the theatre a little. He was a pretty chill kid when I met him.
One day his son played at a friend's house when he was 3, nearly 4, and ended up watching a hulk cartoon. He spent the next 3 weeks running around the house screaming 'hulk smash' and hitting things with pillows.
Did the cartoon make him that way, or just tell him it was OK to act that way?
The cartoon makes children act a certain way, then the parents teach them that it's not OK to imitate what they see on TV.
If that kid was kept from watching TV for nearly 4 years, he never had a chance to learn that copying things from TV is wrong, so really it was both the TV at their friend's house and the previous lack of TV at his house that made him act that way.
For adults this shouldn't matter, because they are responsible for their own morality. If you showed a Hulk cartoon to an adult member of a previously uncontacted tribe, they probably won't hulk smash obnoxiously for three weeks.
The world has loads of shitty, stupid people who will embrace something without understanding nuance or "good humor". South Park deserved blame for that because they operated as if everyone was in on the joke, when there are loads of people who took it literally as a message that it was "fair game" and targeting people was socially acceptable. Another reply notes that kids are cruel, and this simply isn't generally true: Kids are cruel in an environment where cruelty is their "in", or where they think cruelty will save themselves from cruelty. Having an easy, socially prevalent way to target some subgroup is a lazy option to be cruel, and South Park helpfully served one up.
There are loads of situations like this where people have an over the top rhetoric that is based upon the notion that everyone is in on the joke, when some subsection of the population simply isn't.
We have been a household without TV ads for a little over a decade. My wife and I have not seen an ad really at all - certainly not within our home - during this time. Maybe one or two at a dentist visit or something when they play the TV, but nothing on a regular basis. Not even YouTube ads (yay adblockers and pihole!)
To save some money, we decided to go to an ad supported tier of Peacock, and within 2 weeks my wife noticed she was spending more money than usual on shopping (I don't watch Peacock shows, so I had little to no exposure).
Despite both of us trying to inoculate ourselves to marketing, some subliminal thing worked, at least in her case. We both decided that it was worth going to the ad free tier again. We haven't bought anything on Amazon for 3 months since.
Neither of us are 100% certain what to make of this experience.
Sadly, it's probably the first one. Awful people were bullying others for all sorts of reasons before that episode, and have done so for all sorts of other reasons afterwards too. If someone wants to be a bully, they'll find something to bully others about regardless of how their victim looks or acts.
On a related note, it's interesting that folks in the US tie the anti redhead thing to South Park, given it's been an unfortunate prejudice here in the UK (and presumably other commonwealth countries) for decades. I guess that episode ended up importing a prejudice from one country to another?
I wouldn't place the blame on South Park. Kids are cruel. If they didn't pick up on the ginger joke, they would latch on to somebody else for some other innocuous reason.
