When I was in college, I watched 'A Clockwork Orange' one afternoon, expecting, being the lascivious young lad at that impressionable age, it to be a racy skin flick. What it turned out to be, other than a few scenes of (it must be said) gratuitous nudity, including a particularly titillating scene of rape, was something that dashed all my hopes. I was even nauseated, eventually, by just how sick it all felt in aftermath and I resolved never to watch that film again, neither for sinful entertainment or for insightful enlightenment. I had enough satisfying options for both.
It was only in ripe adulthood that I did watch Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' with the now-mature perspective to discover a real, seminal classic of cinema. I have gushed about my experience in my review here and while I admired all the trademark Kubrick elements to be found in his other films, namely the deceptive emotional coldness and the stunning use of technique in audio-visual storytelling, what amazed me the most was its central argument: a cure for crime and depravity can be more criminal and depraved if it deprives a person of his soul and self-respect. More than being just an anarchic film, it was an experience that made me think.
I document these seemingly redundant and separate experiences of watching and understanding this radical film not just for nostalgia's sake. Rather, the point that I wish to make is that there is more to 'A Clockwork Orange' than just its strident cry of rebellion against the hollow concept of correctional therapy.
That additional dimension is what is evident, not in the film, but rather the source that inspired it in the first place. Written and published in 1962, Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange' was, like the cinematic adaptation, a shocker and sensation in equal terms. It was banned from many an American high school syllabus and yet it also elicited some of the finest praise for being a truly ground-breaking work of postmodern literature, at a time when that genre still needed to be defined in the real sense by the upcoming spree of American and English authors. Burgess himself dismissed as too preachy to be effective and was particularly critical of Kubrick's version of the story (something that I will come to later).
But both the book and the film continued to be legendary, albeit not only for the uncompromising portrayal of nihilism, violence and political manipulation rooted into a near-future urban society. A large part of its popularity and quotability is also attributed to the nearly suicidal yet ultimately spectacular linguistic trick that Burgess employed and that Kubrick (to give him further credit) followed slavishly. I am talking, of course, about Nadsat.
At one point, we, who have all been part of gangs at school and college, can relate to the idea that our choice of language and vocabulary in those days of latency period would have been our own to use and merely a trifle or amusement for the grown-ups around us. Burgess understood that perfectly when etching out his protagonist and narrator, the unforgettably flawed yet wonderfully endearing and ernest Alex, as a fifteen-year old teenager who, with his 'droogs' (Nadsat for 'friends'), sets out every night on a spree of 'ultra-violence', including mugging, physical assault, breaking-in and rape. The language that they banter in, called as Nadsat, is a fascinating, maddeningly heady blend of slightly tweaked Russian words, Cockney slang, schoolboy lingo, Biblical phrases and even an occasional dash of old English and even Arabic. And yet while the words themselves can be quite confounding to say the least (I would urge every novice to keep the dictionary of Nadsat handy), such is Burgess' mastery of a highly absorbing, atmospheric storytelling, especially his vivid sense of detail, both morbid and mesmerising, that you are going to read it all in a trice even if you do not quite get some words or the way they are used.
Naturally, it would have been a tall order to be so faithful to the source so as to even use Nadsat as the primary language in the film. But Kubrick, being Kubrick, did it nevertheless and the result is an unexpected success (I found myself saying frequently 'Appy polly logies', 'devotchka' and 'eggiwegs') both as an experiment and a path-breaking narrative device that sucks the viewer, as it did to the reader, into the morally twisted universe of Alex' world. It is also worthwhile to observe that Kubrick nails the dislocation of Alex from the rest of the world through the combined medium of language and music. None of the characters around him speak Nadsat as trenchantly as he does and at the same time, none of them even share his passion for music, especially the work of the maestro Ludwig Van Beethoven, which also puts him in a different league than the others, thus adding to his eventual predicament.
Much more than the fairly faithful loyalty to the book's major narrative and its central argument (though I do wish that Kubrick had given even a brief mention of the allegorical meaning of the title), it is always intriguing to see how Kubrick breathes life into the material. The film's visual palette, with low-angle spaced-out photography and flashes of orange and milk white to punctuate the bursts of violence and depravity, is almost stunning aesthetically while the use of slow-motion and orchestral swells to punctuate certain pivotal scenes is still unrivalled in sensory impact. And the writer-director also adds a new dimension to the penultimate climax of Alex' troubles- that of revenge, which is just implicit in the original novel.
It is at this point that the differences between the novel and the film should be mentioned for it is these detours that illustrate just why the source should be more or at least equally essential than the adaptation.
To begin with, even as 'A Clockwork Orange' does not refrain from depicting almost all of the sexual violence and brutality portrayed in the book, there is a difference in how the author and the director approach the same. Burgess' portrayal of the anarchy is gritty, incisive and grim, with little room for cynical laughter; Kubrick, on the other hand, delivers it as a form of amusement and even, and this is troubling, thrilling entertainment. And this is not just about how the film posits Alex almost as a twisted image of the archetype action hero, especially in his brawl with rival Billyboy, but about how it amplifies the sleaze to an almost gratuitous level.
The evidence of this is not just the rape scenes that exaggerate the nudity involved to guiltily exciting levels (the film has more scenes of bare breasts and bodies than the book) but also the often-overlooked scene in which Alex seduces two young girls from a record store into engaging into a threesome with him. Kubrick's version is purely an experiment of technique, the scene shot in frenetic sped-up rate so as to bluff the demanding censors and blur the details of the actual activity; in any case, the situation in the film feels positively consensual and even sexually normal. In the novel, however, the same scene is much more macabre, with Alex drugging these girls and forcing them to submit to his own wild sexual impulses, clearly then a case of indirect rape. There is nothing even remotely pleasurable about it in the book while, in the film, the same thing becomes merely a fanciful joke.
While it is far-fetched to call the director emotionally indifferent, his sympathies in 'A Clockwork Orange' are so single-mindedly with the brash exploits of Alex that the overall emotional heft feels distinctly one-dimensional. Burgess took care to make Alex a more believably world-weary youngster from the start, a slightly skeptical prankster who only comes in his element when listening to his favourite music; he is also more sympathetic towards his parents and even willing, in a genuine way, to improve his wicked ways. The film, on the other hand, revels comfortably in the unabashed nihilism of Alex. Sure, Malcolm McDowell's spectacular, utterly slimy yet searingly honest performance is impossible to fault but Kubrick lets us sympathise with him only after his fate has been dealt out. That, too, is an incredible trope of masterful emotional manipulation.
But let's not forget the most pivotal difference.
Most fans of the film, who would have read the novel either before or after watching it, opine that Kubrick did the right thing by excising the controversial 21st chapter from the original British edition of the novel. For novices, I would like to explain that this chapter serves as an epilogue to the happy conclusion of Alex' struggles for sanity and self-respect. In this, Alex is back on the streets as a freewheeling creature of the night as before but he is getting, inevitably, disillusioned and even disgusted by the futility of his activities even after he has been 'cured' of all the side effects of the Ludovico Technique. He even goes to the extent of leaving his new group alone and, on meeting his old mate Pete, who is now married and totally reformed for good, even contemplates marriage and rearing children as an inevitable outcome of growing up.
For Burgess, this final chapter makes complete sense. And one has to agree because it enriches its cry of protest against behavioural conditioning with a conclusion in which Alex is not forced anymore to be good or responsible but rather he himself makes a conscious choice to leave behind his adolescence. This itself establishes firmly the gist of the story, that goodness and virtue cannot be imposed by force on even the most flawed human soul.
It also extends on the original meaning of the title superbly.
'A clockwork orange', as explained by Burgess, is just an old phrase for a person originally full of juice or personality transformed into a soulless clockwork machine and expected to live according to an imposing routine. From what happens to Alex, all that is evident. But in this epilogue, the author tosses his biggest surprise. Alex muses, in one of the most evocative paragraphs of the book, that the wildness and impulse of youth itself makes a human being a clockwork toy without a sense of direction and purpose and that youth serves no purpose if it is spent without being devoted to some artistic or practical initiative.
Kubrick's justification for the omission of this chapter is a bit of a miscalculation in two ways. Firstly, the director claimed that he had based his script from the American edition, the one that excised totally the final chapter with the publishers complaining to Burgess that it did not just fit into the overall narrative. In his foreword, the author mused that the American reading public wanted a Nixon-style perspective of morality and evil rather than the Kennedy-like opinion that every human being is capable of goodness and initiative if they are not enforced upon him or her.
Secondly, Kubrick justified the omission by agreeing to the general American opinion that it did not just fit into the narrative. For all his brave insistence of amping up the anarchy and ensuring that Alex remained as wicked as always in the end, he missed up a grand chance to bring in an unexpected dimension of perspective into the narrative. Both the book and film are about the vitality of freedom to choose either good or evil, regardless of the pre-conceived notions of the same laid down by some authority or a society. But for all the marvels of Kubrick's adaptation, it is Burgess' novel that really reveals the infallible truth that a person can be productive, responsible and virtuous and still be happy as long as he or she is not compelled to be a 'clockwork orange' by extremes of both youthful, infantile impulses or by a domineering state.
No comments:
Post a Comment