A Clockwork Orange

Just received Kubrick's DVD movies in the mail and immediately watched Clockwork Orange again. Anthony Burgess wrote the book in '62 & I read it at the U. of Michigan in the late '60s. I was blown away by the linguistic genius of adopting Russian slang into standard Cockney cadence. Indeed, "queer as a clockwork orange" is an old Cockney rhyme-slang saying, though Burgess served in Malaya during the bloody uprising and may have based it on the Malay word "orang" as in "orangutan" meaning "man," thus "mechanical man."


The book was one chapter longer in the UK than in the US, and Kubrick made the book on the US version, which leaves out the happy ending [in the UK version, the Catholic Burgess has Alex walking into Christmas shops and realizing that evil is stupid and a teen-age phase and something to grow out of. In the US version of the book on which the movie is based, Jewish Kubrick leaves out the "New Testament" last chapter and leaves Alex "unredeemed" and back in thrall to his old ways.] The movie is a sort of pinnacle of Kubrick's crazy numerological obsessive-compulsive world which he had more or less created in all his films. My own apotheosis came when I saw it in France and was wearing the same underwear Alex wears in the movie, while the numbers 23, 114, & 258 figure in the movie, as they were figuring again and again in my own life at the time. Then I got a computer, ran the three numbers back to back and then did the square root, which came out to 337.9, or the 338 that had occurred in Hong Kong earlier and that added up 3 X 38 = 114. Kubrick also was particularly obsessed by that number. Alex is given Experimental Serum 114, a phonetic play on the CRM-114 radio seen in Dr. Strangelove. The number 114 also appears in other films by Stanley Kubrick, including Eyes Wide Shut and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The people who made the movie said that Kubrick insisted on particular numbers in everything he did, including the number of the haunted hotel room in Shining, which was the number of Marilyn's boss, Sen. Sarbanes. Kubrick also was adamant about Alex's prison number 655321, which I haven't figured out yet! Although the two former-droogs, now-police at the end of the movie are numbers 665 $ 667 dragging
Alex between them. You figure it out!

The crazy thing is that Burgess originally wrote the book as the result of his first wife's brutal rape, as a sort of catharsis, something I only learned from an accompanying DVD with Damien Hirst, Camille Paglia, and other film greats and Brit govt functionaries explaining how the film spilled over into real life afterwards.

When stalkers began to walk up to Kubrick's farm in Hertfordshire north of London and try to give him their own connection to the film [I'm not nuts enuf to do that!], Because Kubrick was a certified paranoid, among other aspects of his genius, he asked Warner to yank the film from British distribution or showings in any form until after his death, though many commentators thought he also did this to heighten the mystery surrounding the notoriety of the film.

Yet during these years, the film was shown and distributed in the rest of the world. This is the only time that has ever happened, according to movie critics and historians.

Every critic does agree on one thing, A Clockwork Orange is a great film that could not be made today, with all the PC pieties one must now observe and all the special interests and constituencies one must satisfy [such as the disabled Patrick Magee being vicious in his revenge on Alex]. And the film influenced dozens of films after Clockwork Orange, such as Reservoir Dogs, which was close to a direct copy, and Taxi Driver [which also had consequences in real life, as a nutjob tried to kill President Reagan to "impress" Jodie Foster].

Warner is sending out DVDs of Kubrick's films, however I only received five of the advertised ten films in the $60 promotion on www.rottentomatoes.com. Still waiting for Killers, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, and Dr. Strangelove.