Dissecting a Clockwork Orange

"A Clockwork Orange" is the story of a young and disturbed man who, in order to avoid his prison sentence, subjects himself to a controversial new treatment to correct his unlawful behavior. Stanley Kubrick, the film 's creator, uses Beethoven 's music to penetrate the complexity of the main character 's actions and emotions. Beethoven 's music acts as his salvation, providing him with pleasure and relief from the violent lifestyle he created, but in the end it becomes the force that tears him apart.

Linking the fundamental conflict between individual identity and societal identity with musical imagery in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange creates a lens through which one can recognize the tendency that violence has to destroy an individual’s identity. Although Alex clearly associates violence with his own individual identity and sense of self, he consistently reveals the impossibility of remaining an individual in the face of group-oriented violence. Images drawn from the realm of music parallel the destruction of Alex’s identity, either through conformity to a group’s style of violence or through failure to embrace the homogeneity of group actions

The novel A Clockwork Orange is littered with ideologies regarding social and political messages and allegorical imagery supporting Anthony Burgess’ pessimistic approach to life during his later years. The coldness of reality, the societal ‘need’ for revenge and the importance of free will all play a large role in the philosophies given in the book. The

A Clockwork Orange, a novel written by Anthony Burgess in the 1960’s takes place in dystopian future in London, England. The novel is about a fifteen year old nadsat (teenager) named Alex who along with his droogs (friends) commit violent acts of crime and opts to be bad over good. In time, Alex finds himself to be in an experiment by the government, making him unable to choose between good and evil, thus losing his ability of free will, and being a mere clockwork orange. A “clockwork orange” is a metaphor for Alex being controlled by the government, which makes him artificial because he is unable to make the decision of good verses evil for himself and is a subject to what others believe is right. In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess’s novel, A Clockwork Orange, presents a struggle between animalistic urges and mechanistic society by way of the motif of a clockwork orange. Many would agree that a clock and an orange share little in common other than the fact that they may both be round. However, the organic nature of an orange combined with the precision and mechanics of a clock curiously imitates the way people respond to everyday influences. Anthony Burgess capitalizes on the differences between these two seemingly unrelated objects to present the connection between morality and conformity within the confines of the novel’s narrator, Alex. Throughout the three parts of the novel, it becomes more apparent that every seemingly harmless life can be manipulated by the clockwork of society. Alex is a young boy living in the near future, whose obsession with the brutality of the world around him causes him to act violently. The portrayal of the character Alex as both a protagonist and an antagonist highlights the psychological turmoil associated with conforming to society by sacrificing either morality for individuality or individuality for morality.

The novel revolves around what happens when a person’s free will is taken away (Novelguide, 2015:2). Alex asserts his free will by choosing a course of wickedness, but he is subsequently robbed of his self-determination by the governments implementation of the Ludovico Technique upon him (Sparknotes, 2015:1). By making Alex a ruthless and wicked criminal, Burgess argues that humanity must, at any cost, insist that individuals be allowed to make their own moral choices, even if that freedom results in depravity (Sparknotes, 2015:1). When the government removes Alex’s power to choose his own moral course of action, Alex becomes nothing more than a thing, something like a machine, something as unnatural as a clockwork orange (Novelguide, 2015:2). It is suggested that Burgess believes that an evil Alex is a human Alex, and therefore he prefers the evil Alex to an Alex who has been programmed to deny his own nature (Scaruso, 2015:1). The chaplain presents the Christian concept of morality, and sums up Burgess’s position very concisely, when he explains to Alex that: “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man” (Burgess, 2013:169). F. Alexander echoes this sentiment from a different philosophical viewpoint, however, when he tells Alex that the treatment has: “Turned him into something other a human being. He has no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially accepted acts, a little machine capable only of good” (Burgess, 2013:173). Burgess’s novel ultimately supports the conception of morality as a matter of choice and determination and argues that good behaviour is meaningless if one does not actively choose goodness (Sparknotes,

In the novel/film “A Clockwork Orange” written/directed by Anthony Burgess/Stanley Kubrick, we are thrown into a futuristic dystopian world of England. In this world we are thrown into a society where a 15 year old boy named Alex narrates his life through this area. Alex, the Faustian protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, and a sadistic and depraved gang leader preys on the weak and innocent. Alex’s society/neighborhood consist of a lot of youth violence and corruption within the state. The film stays devoted to the novel produced in the United Sates omitting the final chapter produced in England. The novel addresses the fundamental issues of human nature and morality, such as existence of good and evil and the importance of free will. A Clockwork

“A Clockwork Orange” deals with the narrator of the book, Alex, and his “droogs” (friends) who perform acts of the so called “ultra-violence.” With the betrayal of his friends, Alex gets caught and is send to prison where he gets conditioned with the Ludivico Technique. Throughout the entire novel literature qualities are a prominent feature. By exploring the themes, motifs and symbols the book can easily be regarded as a literature piece. Firstly let’s start out with the themes in the novel. “Order in Society vs. Freedom of Choice,” the freedom of an individual to make a choice becomes problematic when that choice starts to weaken the safety and stability of society, and in A Clockwork Orange, the government is willing to safeguard society by taking away the liberty of choice and substituting it with prescribed good behaviour. In Alex’s world both the unrestricted power of the individual and the unrestricted power of the state demonstrate danger. Alex steals, rapes, and kills only because it feels decent,

A difference and slight similarity between Kubrick’s Film and Burgess’ novella is the narration. In both, Alex is the narrator and uses Nadsat vocabulary to describe his acts of violence, however, the film narrative is perceived as less powerful as the novella. In the book, Alex’s narration accentuates his cruelty, pleasure, and lack of remorse. His pleasure is highlighted in the book displaying his dark thoughts, making the novella A Clockwork Orange appear to be a more grotesque piece in language than the film. This is evident in an act of violence, the raping of two ten-year-old girls. In the film, Alex has what appears to be consensual sex with two women around or a few youngers than himself, that the met in a record store. In the novel, he meets two ten-year-old girls instead and purchases them some food in addition. He then convinces them to come with him where they become intoxicated and he rapes them. Alex in the novella narrates the aftermath,

A war film like Full Metal Jacket, does not aim to glorify war, but to show the distortion of morality in it, the romanticizing of violence to the point of blurring the lines between profane and holy. With the analysis of the film’s plot, the ideas it chooses to enforce, the visual, and narrative techniques he used, one gets the impression that Kubrick, focuses on the image of a man – being and becoming a killer machine. This again is a repeated trope that is a main narrative point in A Clockwork Orange. In both stories a man is being re-constructed by the establishment with the purpose of good for the society. While a notable parallel between both films, in Full Metal Jacket this trope is reversed.

What are the consequences of a negative demeanor when they are in a society that has no limits? In the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess the main character Alex is a perfect example that portrays the outcome of being a corrupted sexually sadistical youth in a community that is in dystopia. According to the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental health V by the American Psychiatric Association a sexual sadist may be a person who over the period of at least six months has had “a recurrent and sexual arousal from the physical or psychological suffering of another person as manifested by fantasies, urges, or behavior” (695). This is shown in Burgess’ work when Alex lies on his bed listening to music and fantasizes a scenario where

In the movie, Alex goes through this procedure, watching video of violence and rape, and is later shown to be incapable of assaulting a man who belittles him and is violently

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange focuses on the violent and destructive tendencies of the narrator, a fifteen year old boy named Alex. By enlisting Alex as the narrator of his own story, Burgess gives the reader a firsthand account of everything leading up to Alex being captured and imprisoned, first in a jail and then in an institution for the mentally unsound. By including his accounts of what life was like before and after his incarceration, Alex’s character makes social commentary on several issues that were relevant at the time of the novel’s publication, 1963, and remain relevant even in the present, such as rehabilitation in prisons and the treatment of patients in psychiatric institutions. When Alex details his assault on an older, professor-type man, “The old veck began to make sort of chumbling shooms- ‘wuf waf wof’- so Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have

In her book titled Film Theory and Criticism, Laura Mulvey presents the male gaze by describing the modern culture as a “patriarchal culture” in which women represent the male’s “other” (804). This culture creates an environment where the man is the master while the woman is subject to exist as nothing more than a sexualized object whose purpose is to serve for pleasure of the male audience. The male gaze is found in films, art, and literature. It is in these cultural objects that the audience is exposed to seeing the world and, more specifically, women through the male perspective. This is especially depicted in

The result of this research shows that the sexualization of female characters is activated and well in popular motion picture content, this result fits the Freud’s views of scopophilia (Stacy 2013). Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the constituent instincts of sexuality which occur as drives very independently of the erotogenic zones, the mainstream cinema present a hermetically sealed world which unties magically neutral to the presence of the spectator, producing for them a feeling of separation and impacting on their voyeuristic phantasy (Mulvey 1975, p. 8). According to the Feminist film theory’s argument, women are inevitably reduced to the objects of a male gaze in mainstream cinema (Humm 1997, p. 39). Mulvey claimed ‘through this privileged gaze, film audiences, regardless of their actual gender, are treated as masculine subjects’, she also figures cinema as irreducibly shaped by sexual difference, the film is constructed around looks or gaze, it shapes editing and narrative, that these looks are entirely those of men looking at women (Humm 1997, p. 17). The art historian John Berger had succinctly pointed out that ‘the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’ (Berger, 1972).