The American Dream A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 
the Letter of Anthony Burgess' Los Angeles Times I saw A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick in New York I had to do to get elbowed as everyone else. It seemed to me that the show deserved a lot of crowd: it is in every way a Kubrick film, technically brilliant, witty, precise, poetic, able to open up new perspectives to the spirit. I managed to watch the movie as a total reconstruction of my novel, and not as a simple interpretation, it is not exaggeration to say that it is of the 'Orange mechanics of Stanley Kubrick, "and this is the greatest tribute I can make the skill of the director.
But the fact remains that the film came from a book, and I think a few comments about the movie inevitably relate to me. In terms of philosophy and theology, the orange of Kubrick is the fruit of my tree.
Clockwork Orange wrote long ago, in 1961, and I have some difficulty in giving guidance on what the writer that far away now, having to earn a living, had come to produce five novels (including this one) in fourteen months . The title is the easiest thing to explain. In 1945, when returning from the front, in a London pub I heard a cockney octogenarian said of someone who was "busted as a Clockwork Orange". I became curious expression for the odd mix of vernacular and surreal.
For nearly twenty years I wanted to use it as a basis for some of my work: I've had the opportunity then when I conceived the project of writing a novel about brainwashing.
The British press had spoken with a certain persistence of the increase in crime.
What do these guys? Prison reformers do not or worse, so why not save taxpayers' money by subjecting them to an easy-conditioning, a kind of therapy disgust, to generate in them an association between acts of violence and discomfort, nausea or even evocations of death? So many to adopt this proposal (which at the time was not a government proposal, but merely an idea expressed by individual theorists, as influential).
Clockwork Orange would be a kind of manifesto, or even a sermon on the importance of being able to choose from. My hero, or antihero, Alex, is truly evil, to a level unthinkable, but his evil is not the product of a theoretical or social conditioning - it is his personal business, which has embarked on full brightness. Alex is bad, and not only misguided, so in a properly organized society like his evil deeds must be punished.
But his evil is human: we can see potential in aggressive acts in us, that the citizen does not materialize in the war criminal, social iniquity, the evil that is practiced in the family, dreams that are grown in their own little corner . Alex is humanity in three ways: it is aggressive, loves beauty, uses of language.
It is ironic that his name can be understood as "speechless" as he has invented an entire vocabulary, its staff, a group of jargon. Yet even he does not spend a word for what concerns the management of the community, or organization of state: for him this last is but a mere object, a thing far away as the moon, even if less passive.
From a theological point of view, evil is not measurable. Yet I believe in the principle that an 'action may be more of an evil' other, and that the last act of evil is the dehumanization and murder of the soul - which brings us back to talk about the choice of good deeds good and bad. Requires an individual can only be good and just, and kill his soul in the name of the alleged good of social stability. My dish
Kubrick and want to say that it is preferable to a world of violence knowingly taken - such as voluntary choice - in a world conditioned, programmed to be good or harmless.
In the film, as well as in the book, the evil done by the state, doing the brainwashing of Alex, is quite spectacular. Alex loves Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and used as a stimulus to her dreams of violence. This was his choice, but nothing would prevent him from using the music as a mere consolation, or take it in the image of the divine order. The fact that when conditioning starts he has not yet made the best choice, does not mean it never will.
But due to the disgust of therapy that Beethoven associated violence, this choice is precluded him forever. It is a punishment that acts on the involuntary, and is equivalent to rob a man - act stupid and irrational - of his right to rejoice in God's vision.
What upsets me is that Kubrick, and that some readers and viewers of A Clockwork Orange claim to having found a free pleasure in portraying the violence, which turns the work of "social message" to a mere pornography.
Certainly, without the violence would have been nicer, but the story of Alex amendment would lose power if it had not been able to see what it was correcting. For me, portraying the violence had to be a cathartic and charitable act together, because my wife was the victim of a cruel and reckless violence in London in 1942, at the time of the bombing was raped and beaten by three American deserters. Perhaps readers of my book will recall that the author of the work entitled A Clockwork Orange is a writer whose wife was raped.
Some viewers of the film have been disturbed by the fact that Alex, despite his cruelty, it is still worthy of affection. But if we have to love the human race, we still love Alex as a member representative. If
Clockwork Orange, as well as in 1984, falls into the category of literary health warnings - or film - the indifference, the feeling morbid and excessive confidence of the state, then this will have some value.
