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'I should not have written 'A Clockwork Orange''
- teekert 3y agoI can understand how he feels. But haters gonna hate, criminals gonna crime. He threw some new thoughts into the world, he made people think. surely he did not demagnetize people's moral compasses. It reeks of illusions of grandeur. Sure it is a nice piece, but he overestimates the influence imho. Similar to William Gibson thinking he is the father of things Steam Punk ever. Edit: Indeed I meant cyber punk.
- vsnf 3y ago> Steam Punk Cyber Punk?
- flohofwoe 3y agoProbably a typo, but Gibson also co-authored The Difference Engine, which is as Steam Punk as it gets :) (and according to Wikipedia "...is widely regarded as a book that helped establish the genre conventions of steampunk.")
- danjoredd 3y agoIm going to have to read that now. Loved Neuromancer, and Steam Punk is one of my favorite genres
- justsomehnguy 3y agoAnother one of today's lucky 10000. It's a hard piece but overall I enjoyed reading it.
- flohofwoe 3y agoDifference Engine starts great but then towards the end kind of fizzles out (IIRC, maybe I should read it again).
- Apocryphon 3y agoIt was a Gibson-Sterling joint but you almost have to wonder if Stephenson ghostwrote the last bit.
- jjkaczor 3y ago... Well, I think many of the genre conventions were established enough that there was even one tabletop Steam Punk RPG that predated the publication of "The Difference Engine" (1990): Space 1889 - (first published in 1988/89) However - I think it was essentially just a convergence of cultural zeitgeist within about an 8-year period. (Myself, I preferred "Castle Falkenstein" (1994) - but that was because I liked just about anything Mike Pondsmith/Talsorian released)
- drakenot 3y agoWilliam Gibson is the father of Cyberpunk, not Steam Punk. Though if Gibson is the father, I might say Bester is the grandfather.
- bediger4000 3y agoAlfred Bester has fallen into obscurity for sure. How do you figure Bester and not Lem as the grandfather?
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoBester and Lem are amazing in their different ways, and it's tragic that both aren't better known. I wouldn't put one over the other, but I think Bester gets the call because his view was classic mid-century US, and was an obvious influence on Cyberpunk. Lem had a different more subtle aesthetic.
- flohofwoe 3y agoIMHO Lem's work has a lot of "cyber" but no "punk" in it ;) E.g. while Lem's future (in his science fiction books) isn't exactly a happy utopia, it's also not the depressing dystopia I would associate with "cyberpunk" - but maybe... "Peace on Earth" might qualify as "robopunk"? :)
- Apocryphon 3y agoJohn Brunner is closer to being a cyberpunk grandfather, imo
- drakenot 3y agoI just remember reading The Stars My Destination from Bester and noticing all these elements: * Mega-corporations with immense power and influence over all of society (Kodak of Kodak) * Drug dens offering synthetic designer drugs that made people feel as if they were various animals. * The protagonist receiving an upgrade to his nervous system, including a tooth-based switch that allowed him to 'speed up' for brief periods. * Status symbols of the ultra-rich, such as using the most elaborate physical conveyances in an era of effortless teleportation. I'm probably missing some, but it felt like such a prototype novel to something like Neuromancer and was written in 1956!
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- zer00eyz 3y ago>> Similar to William Gibson thinking he is the father of things Steam Punk ever. Great observation! Being a popular part of a zeitgeist is not the same as defining it. I have to wonder if, and the article does hint at, "if the movie was never made..." FTA: Burgess introduced a character “with a beard like Stanley Kubrick’s” who played Singin’ in the Rain with a trumpet — before being kicked off the stage.
- donatj 3y ago> The 2023 documentary Orange mécanique, les rouages de la violence (in English, A clockwork orange: the prophecy) I don't speak French, and yet something leads me to believe that's not a direct translation.
- stavros 3y agoIt's not, it's the English title of the documentary.
- jyunwai 3y agoA direct translation is: "A Clockwork Orange, the workings (machinery pieces [1]) of violence." An even more literal alternative is: "A mechanical orange, the machinery pieces of violence." [1] https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/rouage/69972 https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/rouage/69972
- abecedarius 3y agoI would've said the gears of violence (though French is a second language for me).
- throwaway98797 3y agosay one thing once and they will create a narrative out of 40 years later we are but beasts!
- zer00eyz 3y agohttps://archive.is/5Owom https://archive.is/5Owom
- schwartzworld 3y agoEh, it's one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book anyway.
- paradox460 3y agoPretty much the case with everything Kubrick did
- simmerup 3y agoI feel like the moment you put any idea out there you have the potential to influence people unexpectedly, and be at peace with that. I saw a youtube interview of an addict who said he started taking painkillers regularly because he saw House doing it. Surely the writers didn’t know they were setting up some kid in suburban America up for addiction by giving him that mannerism
- bonton89 3y agoAlways seemed odd to me that House was even able to think clearly while high all the time, much less do his job at such a high level.
- nradov 3y agoThere are a lot of highly functional opioid addicts out there. You would be surprised to find out what some of the people you work with are taking.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoThere are also a lot of addicts who believe they're high functioning and really aren't. I strongly suspect mandatory opioid and cocaine testing in politics - never mind finance and law - would be a very good thing.
- dgfitz 3y ago"Your teeth look good, have you made any diet changes?" - Dentist "Yeah, I don't eat poppy seed bagels anymore, don't want to lose my job. Oh, and no novacaine, same reason. Just get started until I pass out from the pain." C'mon.
- dylan604 3y agoC'mon? There's a huge difference between popping pills and having a local anesthetic. To even attempt to compare the two is being disingenuous at best. It's not even something prescribed to take home.
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- BlueTemplar 3y agoOof, I didn't know that the sexual violence bit was autobiographical...
- sevagh 3y agoTangential: I remember reading a criticism about the South Park ginger episode leading to redheads getting bullied. I was curious (and still haven't wrapped my head around) what blame can be placed, if any. 1. Shitty people had latent bullying and cruelty instincts and South Park gave them the idea of diverting that to redheads 2. People were just chilling until South Park taught them to be cruel and bully gingers
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- danjoredd 3y agoI wouldn't place the blame on South Park. Kids are cruel. If they didn't pick up on the ginger joke, they would latch on to somebody else for some other innocuous reason.
- ljf 3y agoIt is hard to know. My old work colleague took great efforts to keep his son from watching any TV, films or cartoons - they did loads of art, listened to music and went to the theatre a little. He was a pretty chill kid when I met him. One day his son played at a friend's house when he was 3, nearly 4, and ended up watching a hulk cartoon. He spent the next 3 weeks running around the house screaming 'hulk smash' and hitting things with pillows. Did the cartoon make him that way, or just tell him it was OK to act that way?
- blindriver 3y agoKubrick’s version was a failure because he missed the most important part and the last few pages of the book. In the book at the very end Alex decides out of his own free will to stop being violent. Which is the entire point of the book: free will vs being forced to do something. It’s so powerful, I don’t think any book affected as much as that did at the time. Kubrick focused on the violence and the rapes and by leaving out the most important part, it was more soft core porn than anything else and an abject failure in my opinion.
- mc32 3y agoThey made me watch it in Highschool. So, "they" were right, schools subversively expose pupils to porn. According to the votes, on the one hand it's not pornography, but on the other hand it is. It just isn't when you want to point it out as being soft porn, but if you want to critique the movie vs the book, it's okay to critique it as soft porn... hrrrm
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- dgfitz 3y agoHave you read it?
- dr-detroit 3y ago[dead]
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y agoI don't need to read the book to tell you that movie was not a failure.
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- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
- mycodendral 3y agoI've never met anyone who has interpreted either the novel or film to glorify violence.
- spillguard 3y ago> I've never met anyone who has interpreted either the novel or film to glorify violence. From the article: "Kubrick himself, in response to a series of murder trials where the defendants explicitly mentioned his work..."
- mycodendral 3y agoI meant personally. I'm not saying psychopaths don't exist. It would make sense that psychopaths would identify with the story, as it's about them. I'm saying the story is not a call to violence for normal individuals.
- euroderf 3y agoHardly the first case of presumption/accusation of inciting copycats.
- zabzonk 3y agomy dad bought ACO when it first came out (we sold that first ed. for a reasonable amount of money after his death) and i read it at the time, i was about 10, and thought it was brilliant.
- at_a_remove 3y agoTo me, really, the novel spent a great deal of time pointing out the fickleness of the UK Government, the idea that it was prone to fads, and that people simply went along with it. Only a handful swim against the tide. Even Alex's parents are reprogrammed more or less at will by the media. Burgess has touched this material before in The Wanting Seed, with what was acceptable lashes back and forth. That came through sufficiently in the movie that I feel like this delivery was fine. Similarly, the free will issue came through fine. Alex lacks the capacity to dwell on the subject. It falls to a prison chaplain to even ask. Nobody cares, of course, this is about results, not reformation. If Alex and other recipients of the Technique must stagger through society wearing invisible chains, that's fine as far as Government is concerned. Again, well-conveyed. These two themes collide at the end, wherein the Government changes its mind and finds it politically expedient to restore (or just re-re-program) him to his original and savage state. ("I was cured alright.") Twenty-one, incidentally, is the terminal age in the novel for Logan's Run; youth violence and an age divide was certainly on the minds of some. I felt like Alex himself was almost, well, not irrelevant, but simply a ball upon which multiple dogs had set their sights.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoHere's a quote from one of the greats that comes to my mind whenever an author says "I regret creating that" (and that includes you Sir Tim Berners-Lee) "You know, Nietzsche didn’t, you know, from his drawing room give birth to a century of cannonade, slaughter, concentration camps, CIA subterfuge, the raping and the murdering of nuns, the bombing of continents, the despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet! Four or five pedants do not have that much power, and never have." - R. Roderick Clockwork Orange (and the lesser Kubrick film) was what it was. It's still powerful and relevant today. In fact I watched it recently to steal a sample for a track I'm working on... "When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man" Still potent stuff.
- tsujamin 3y agoI remember when, in our high-school english class, the teacher asked us to reflect on Chapter 21 of A Clockwork Orange and a girl in the back of the class interjected "but there's only 20 chapters in my book!". Turns out the school had both the English and American editions co-mingled. The omission of that chapter in the American book and Kubrick's adaption undercuts the whole point of the story in my opinion. When the film ended, I felt like my time had been wasted and that I'd been dragged back to the beginning all over again.
- polygotdomain 3y agoI think the most important aspect of "A Clockwork Orange" is it's use of language as a literary tool. It's also key to its misunderstanding, as it tends to lead towards secondary interpretations (i.e. Kubrick's film) more than the text itself. In addition to freewill being a key theme in the book, the nadsat language is used to disassociate the reader from the actions and events partaken in by the narrator. Alex describes in clear detail the fact that he's beating the crap out of old ladies in the book, but you, the reader, don't interpret it that way. Those acts are hidden behind a language that doesn't hold the same connotations to you, the reader, so you don'tt look at Alex the same way because of it. Conversely when his punishment and "re-education" begins you view that as harsh and inhumane, because those things are expressed in more familiar terms simply because the reader is more comfortable with the language Alex uses. Worse, he had something that he loved taken away from him (his classical music), which you understand wholeheartedly as the reader. The fact that Alex punishment was arguably justified (if not grotesque in it's own way), is something that's missed because language disassociates the crime and amplifies the impact of the punishment. It makes you question the humaneness of criminal punishment, because it's expressed from a perspective rarely portrayed. All of these things are completely lost once the story is taken into any visual medium. The idea of making it a film was flawed before Kubrick even touched the project, and any other director would have struggled to have the same impact as the book. I genuinely think that the project attracted Kubrick for the wrong reasons and he was far more interested in making something provocative, which "A Clockwork Orange" had plenty of opportunities. If you haven't read "A Clockwork Orange", I strongly recommend you do, and I strongly recommend reading it as quickly and in as short a timeline as possible. Understanding the language is key, and it makes it a slow read at the start. The quicker you can become familiar with it, the easier the rest of it goes. Then after you're done reading it, reread it again. Being familiar with the language from the start makes some of the more graphic scenes at the start really stand out in a way that they don't the first read through.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoKubrick played his own tricks to dissociate the viewer from the onscreen violence. For example, the way the gang fight is set to classical music, in an abandoned theater, with cartoonish violence. And that fight is preceded by a gang rape staged like a ballet. It's the same technique in a different medium.
- ben7799 3y agoLet me just praise the well reasoned and civil discussion here. I don't have a lot to add but I'm impressed at the level of discourse. I have read both versions of the book and seen the movie several times, there are lots of interesting ideas presented here at HN.