The half-hour principle

A Clockwork Orange.

I remember when A Clockwork Orange was released and the frisson which surrounded it. My parents went to see it, but this was adults-only territory. I didn’t see the film until Kubrick died and it was shown in UK cinemas. I went to see it mainly because I wanted to see whether it was worth all the hysteria.

I’ve come to note that films often try to hook the audience in the first half an hour. That’s generally when you’ll see the gratuitous artistically justified topless scene. In A Clockwork Orange, that’s where all the controversial material is after which the rest, as far as I recall, was dull and insipid.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), because I’ve never read the book, I feel that I’m out of my depth discussing this dilemma which focuses on four points:

• the emotional violence of the nuclear family
• the economic violence of capitalism
• the anarchic violence of hooliganism
• the organised violence of modern science

As the book notes, violence for Alex and his droogs is just like an ordinary job from which come similar material trappings.

SparkNotes (A Clockwork Orange) have some useful background material:

Burgess's novels address fundamental issues of human nature and morality, such as the existence of good and evil and the importance of free will… His portrayal of human beings as inherently predisposed toward violence, for example, reflects his acceptance of the Catholic view that all human beings are tainted by original sin.

Burgess may have had something to say, but the religious angle invalidates it for me. A similar issue came up in a previous dilemma where humans as killer apes (the Luddite view) was contrasted with humans as social and co-operative animals. Burgess seems to have preferred to view humans as killer apes.

Burgess was inspired to write A Clockwork Orange during a visit to Leningrad in 1961. There, he observed the state-regulated, repressive atmosphere of a nation that threatened to spread its dominion over the world… Burgess regarded communism as a fundamentally flawed system, because it shifts moral responsibility from the individual to the state while disregarding the welfare of the individual. Burgess’s deeply internalized Catholic notions of free will and original sin prevented him from accepting a system that sacrifices individual freedom for the public good. A Clockwork Orange may be seen in part as an attack on communism, given the novel's extremely negative portrayal of a government that seeks to solve social problems by removing freedom of choice.

But there’s more to the book than just a critique of the old Soviet Union “because the dystopian world of the novel draws just as much on elements of English and American society that Burgess detested.” He didn’t like the British pursuit of social stability in favour of the individual or American apathy. He was also satirising behaviourism; that is, the conditioning of humans or animals in response to stimuli. In the film, Alex is conditioned to resist his violent impulses and sexual urges, but he eventually breaks his conditioning to become an individual again.

Burgess’s view seems a little too pessimistic and may have been conditioned, (yes, I’m being ironic; no, I didn’t notice until a few minutes after I wrote this sentence; behaviourism? geddit?) by World War II just as much as his lapsed Catholicism.

Anyway, tomorrow we’re…

“Hold on a tick. What about the ethics?”

Oh, yeah, ethics. Well, I guess because of all the slaughter the Roman Catholic church is responsible for (the Crusades; the Conquistadors; Thirty Years’ War etc.), then Catholics, even the lapsed ones, should STFU about ethics.

“I don’t think that’s an answer.”

No, you’re right, but I did say I was out of my depth on this one.

“Fair enough. Now what?”

Tomorrow, the global village and the stats of inequality or iniquity.