I don’t mean Anthony Burgess, I mean the unnamed writer who is first Alex’ victim and later his tormentor. In the movie we see him talking to a political ally about how its brain-reprogramming of Alex proves the current government tyrannical, “It’s the thin end of the wedge . . . We’ve seen it all before, in other countries . . . Soon we’ll have the full apparatus of totalitarianism!”
Is he right or wrong? Is he just another screaming crank, or is this government really headed that way? Or is that simply meant to be left ambiguous?
All of the above is about the movie, but the same question applies to the book. From the one excerpt we see from his manuscript of A Clockwork Orange, the writer is some sort of libertarian or anarchist, also a very bad writer. Alex describes how at the beginning he lives in an apartment building, apparently government-funded, ornamented with elevating socialist-realist murals about the Dignity of Labour, with beautiful nudes going gravely about their jobs, which by now were all covered with naughty graffiti. (We see this in the movie, too.) When he gets home from prison, the murals are still there but the graffiti is gone. (I forget whether that’s in the movie.) Apparently law enforcement in general has gotten a lot stricter and more effective while he was away.
I’m going by memory, which is never a good idea. Cafe Society is surprisingly strict sometimes.
Prior to his imprisonment, Alex mentions a law that adults must “rabbit” or hold a job, which sounds at best like a symptom or parental socialism and at worst the sort of law a totalitarian state might make. I’m not sure if that’s mentioned in the film.
After his release, in both book and movie, Alex is cheerfully subjected to a beating by the police. This may have been due to a personal grudge against Alex as one of the officers was his old droog and betrayer, Dim. I had the impression, though, that beating suspects away from the public eye was not unusual.
I’d say that the author had a point. I wouldn’t say, though, that the police had become more effective. In the final chapter of the book, which occurs after the final scene of the film and which did not appear in all US copies of the book, Alex has returned to life as a gang leader. He pretty much comes full circle, except he’s bored.
I don’t think it takes a crank to be concerned about the government developing a behavior modification technique that causes people to become physically incapacitated when they have “undesirable” thoughts. Even if one believes the use of the Ludovico Technique is justified when it comes to unrepentant violent criminals like Alex, once this technique is proven effective it seems inevitable that it will be used on people who haven’t been convicted of violent crimes but are considered a threat by those in power for other reasons.
IIRC, this was in the movie as well. The writer did come off as a bit of a crank. Might’ve had something to do with having his brutally raped to the tune of Dancing in the Rain in front of his eyes, which turned her into a bodybuilder.
Huh? The writer character is named “F. Alexander” in the novel. Alex finds his completed book after he’s released and gotten his beating from Officers Dim and Billyboy, and has unwittingly staggered to the writer’s house for help.
Unless you’re referring to the fact that Anthony Burgess’s wife was actually gang raped at home during WWII, but he wasn’t even in the country at the time.
No, he meets one of his old droogs who has done that and decides to follow his example, and give up his life of crime on his own – not because he has been reprogrammed, not because he has been rehabilitated, but simply because he has outgrown it.
Yeah. Burgess wasn’t happy that it was dropped from the film. IMO, it’s a much weaker, less interesting work if you include it, but I understand Burgess’s argument (and think authors should have control of their work anyway, of course).
Burgess had originally agreed to dropping the final chapter when the book was published in America. He wasn’t happy about it, but was willing to do so to get paid. So IMHO he didn’t have much standing to complain when they decided to make the movie based on that version of the book.
I wonder if having such a screwed up boss had anything to do with “the writer’s” body builder assistant later turning to the dark side (at least in body if not in voice).
Its been a long time since I’ve read the book, but I seem to recall that he was driven insane by the actions of Alex and the gang. So, I would conclude he was somewhat of a “crank”.
He is “F. Alexander” in the book (“Good Bog, I thought, he is another Alex.”); in the film his caretaker addresses him as Frank.
There’s much more sense of this in the film than in the book. In the book there is no reason to doubt that Alex and his droogs are responsible for the death of Alexander’s wife; but the movie adds a suggestion that this may just be Alexander’s delusion. (He says something like, “The doctors told me it was pneumonia because it happened some months later, during a flu epidemic, but I know what it was!”)