[blindriver]

Kubrick’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.

[Hasu]

> Kubrick’s version was a failure because he missed the most important part and the last few pages of the book.

The American version of the book doesn't have the final chapter, and was the basis for Kubrick's film. He was aware of the final chapter but never considered using it, as he didn't agree with Burgess and thought it didn't make sense (this was also the opinion of the American editor who had the final chapter removed).

The movie does include the Ludovico technique and all the themes about free will and goodness vs the choice of goodness, it just leaves out the very unrealistic ending where Alex reforms.

I think the film is a masterpiece and the book's original ending is unrealistic nonsense. I hardly think it's the "most important part".

[awkwardpotato]

Modern American printings do now include the final chapter. Described on the back cover as "includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked"".

The "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" introduction is from November 1986. It covers the reasoning behind the shortened American edition[0], Kubrick's film, and his own feelings on the 21st chapter[1]. I think the final paragraph summarizes it well "Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty" (Burgess xv).

[0] "I needed money back in 1962, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance, and if the condition of the book's acceptance was also it's truncation - well, so be it" (Burgess x-xi)

[1] "There is no hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter. The boy is conditioned, then deconditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the operation of free and violent will. [...] The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation [...] The American version or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel" (xii)

[pookha]

One of the weirdest and most interesting things I've ever seen was how this crazy book created gang violence by illustrating dystopian gang violence...And I can guarantee you that some of the youth ("hooligans") in England that were committing Droog gang violence -- inspired by this book -- have reformed as elderly adults. It's not unrealistic. When you remove people out of cults and gangs and they begin to self-reflect -- away from their tribe -- their morals and behavior reintegrate with society at large...Not at all unrealistic as the book showed.

[stickfigure]

I think the key element there is "as elderly adults". I haven't read the book (tried, the Nadsat took effort) but the movie is one of my favorites. If the ending had Alex popping up from his bed shouting "I want to be good!" I would have filed the movie away as Spielbergian feelgood schlock (see also: AI).

I do think people change, but it happens slowly, not quickly. Kubrick's ending still leaves us with the ability to imagine an older, wiser, regretful Alex. But you can't credibly force that into his youth, and the movie is already 2 hours 15 mins.

[blindriver]

He didn’t wake up and decided he wanted to be good.

He just decided at one point that his current lifestyle was boring and he wanted a change. He didn’t turn into a good guy, he just decided to go a different way. Thats the point is that he made the choice himself.

[IshKebab]

Are you really suggesting that real gang violence was caused by a novel?

[miles]

The article itself does much more than merely suggest it:

> Kubrick himself, in response to a series of murder trials where the defendants explicitly mentioned his work, requested the withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange in the United Kingdom, where it could not be seen again until the director’s death in 1999.

[IshKebab]

That's silly. Just because a murderer mentions a book about murder doesn't mean it made them into a murderer. It just means murderers like books about murder.

[miles]

A Clockwork Orange has been cited in a murder case. It is not the first time[1] mentions a number of cases linked to the book or movie, including this one:

> Arguably the most notorious of all is Peter Foster, who the British press dubbed the ‘Clockwork Orange killer’.

> Foster would beat and torture women and was found guilty of murdering two of his former wives. A court heard how he would dress up as the film's protagonist, Alex, and become violent when he heard the film’s theme song.

[1] https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/a-clockwork-orange-ci...

[Apocryphon]

There's some precedence of pop culture has influenced criminal behavior. But it's usually superficial, by groups that were already engaged in the behavior. Mafia media from The Godfather onwards were reportedly popular with the mob and maybe influenced them to imitate the fashions and manner of speaking depicted on screen (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/movies/godfather-mafia.ht...). Hong Kong Triads youth did the same after John Woo's films with the Mark Gor Lau. Wall Street, and probably other financial thrillers to The Wolf of Wall Street and further also influenced brokers' styles, and sometimes behavior (https://slate.com/culture/2007/09/how-wall-street-s-gordon-g...).

You also hear examples of "suburban father tries to make meth because of Breaking Bad" but those are one-off individuals who are probably not of sound judgment.

[tacoooooooo]

i think pookha is saying their reformation was possibly inspired by the book

[Spivak]

This right here is the tension between "my work doesn't support <bad thing> the whole point is showing it's bad" while simultaneously portraying the bad thing in a positive light while the narrative does the condemning.

The problem with demonizing things is that demons are cool.

If you want your condemnation to be effective in fiction you have to make the characters doing it pathetic miserable losers. You can even have the narrative support them, they win in the end, and set it up so they were right and people will still come away with that they're bad.

[almatabata]

It is always fascinating how sometimes authors think they are creating a loser in their work but somehow the public still likes the character despite the flaws. Reminds me of the case of Rorschach in Watchmen (https://screenrant.com/alan-moore-on-rorschach-fans-watchmen...).

[DoItToMe81]

WTF, no. Media absolutely shouldn't be lowered to children's cartoons for adults. That's absurd. And nobody in the world who isn't already completely insane finds gang rape 'cool', nor does this book or movie portray it positively.

[Spivak]

You say lowered, I say writing in such a way that communicates what the author actually intends to communicate. If what you're trying to say doesn't land among your intended audience that's a you problem.

Having read the book and seen the movie adaptation I have to disagree. Alex is charismatic, popular, a feared leader, independent, and rebellious. The brutal rape scene while singing makes him look like an absolute badass (a la the Joker) existing well beyond the reach of society's rules and importantly, makes him look powerful. Ultraviolence sounds like an achievement in DOOM. When he's caught it's framed as a betrayal not "we finally got the bad guy." Then they make him sympathetic through the torture and weakening him and making him unable to defend himself to the point of being driven to suicide. It's harrowing, not the cathartic comeuppance of a terrible man. And then the police apologize, let him go and arrest the man he brutally beat to near death.

The narrative considers Alex to be horrible but the view as seen by the camera/reader thinks he's hot shit and a tragic victim of a dystopian society.

As another example, when you watch Dexter you're rooting for Dexter and the show makes him cool despite him ya know being a killer.

In a lot of ways I think it's actually a hallmark of media literacy that readers/viewers largely ignore the narrative as a source of moral judgment because it's fiction and we like compelling villains and instead finds it in how the characters are actually portrayed.

[rand846633]

Super interesting detail and kind wild and questionable that an authors work would be substantially changed by an editor.

[drewcoo]

That's what editors are supposed to do.

And authors gaining editorial control is why so many books later in a popular author's career are worse and worse - no one able to trim them.

As examples I'll pick Neal Stephenson and J.K. Rowling. Even the fans have to notice how their work has gotten bigger and sloppier.

[charles_f]

Trimming the book is one thing, and I agree with you 100% on both examples. Removing the conclusion in a way that completely alters the message is another.

[stonogo]

This happened with the Heinlein book "Podkayne of Mars" -- the original ending had one character dying and another character changing course because of it. The editor thought it too heavy for a kids' book and directed a rewrite where everyone lived.

Years later a new print included both endings and staged an essay contest to decide which is the "right" ending.

[gwbas1c]

Honestly, Neal Stephenson's later writings are awesome. I don't think he's gotten sloppier at all.

[JohnFen]

I don't know if he's gotten sloppier or just more verbose, but do find his later writings to be largely plodding and much less interesting than his earlier works. He pretty much lost me with The Baroque Cycle. Those books were a chore.

But I think that has to do with the clear change in his writing style, which has diverged from my personal tastes. So it's not a judgement call on his writing either way -- we've just grown apart.

[gwbas1c]

> He pretty much lost me with The Baroque Cycle. Those books were a chore.

I wouldn't call those "later writings," he's written quite a few excellent (and better) books since. Anathem, Seveneves, and Fall; or, Dodge in Hell were excellent. Termination Shock was a quick read.

I've since gone back and re-read Cryptonomicon. I don't know know if I'll redo the whole Baroque cycle, (Because it was so long,) but I do have fond memories. I suspect it's the kind of book that's better the 2nd time through.

BTW, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell ends the Baroque Cycle. Enoch Root is in that book and we figure out what he really is.

[FrustratedMonky]

I wouldn't frame it as early versus later works.

I think the Baroque Cycle was an outlier. It was long, and boring, and plodded.

Early works were good, later works were good. There wasn't a phase change and later works went downhill starting with Baroque.

Not everyone can bat a thousand.

[pests]

There's a quote from the author elsewhere in this thread stating he was broke and needed money and if that meant chopping off a chapter then so be it.

[JohnFen]

> I think the film is a masterpiece and the book's original ending is unrealistic nonsense.

I think the film is very good, but the book's original ending is is essential to the whole point of the story. The film is inferior to the book because it's missing.

But I'm not sure what you mean by "unrealistic". On one level, neither the book nor movie is very realistic anyway. On a deeper level, they both speak real truths.

[watwut]

> I think the film is a masterpiece and the book's original ending is unrealistic nonsense. I hardly think it's the "most important part".

I found the movie itself to be very unrealistic. Something in the way it looked (costumes and everything) and the way actors acted and talked made me not believe any of it. It felt more like comic movie then something that attempts to be realistic.

[ta988]

Talking about a mangled ending from the book, Fight Club is the same, they removed what I think was the critical part of the story. It was filmed and you can see find it on some dvd editions.

[AlexandrB]

This take reminds me of how Stephen King considers Kubrick's The Shining a terrible film[1]. I had the misfortune of accidentally renting the Stephen King approved The Shining miniseries[2], and I have to say - it's worse in every way: slow, plodding, and forgettable. I can't comment how either compares to the book - I've never read it - but the Kubrick version is the superior film.

This is all a long way of saying that faithfulness to the source material is overrated in film. Some written works just don't work well when closely adapted to the screen. A few notable movies even manage to twist the original to express a completely different idea or theme (e.g. Starship Troopers). The original author is not some ultimate authority regarding the meaning of a work.

[1] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-stephen-king-hated-stanley-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(miniseries)

[hnbad]

Stephen King is not a filmmaker. There used to be a running joke that you can judge the quality of a Stephen King adoptation by whether he liked it: if he liked it, it was likely trash; if he didn't, it was likely good.

The problem is that films are not books (shocking, I know) and what works in one medium of storytelling doesn't necessarily work in the other. As in actual translation, there has to be some liberty in how something is adapted from one form into another or else it will be very accurate but not very good.

[jhbadger]

>Stephen King is not a filmmaker.

You haven't seen Maximum Overdrive then. You fortunate, fortunate person.

[Arisaka1]

I see this with anime and manga adaptations all the time, where the studio is trying to capture the inner monologue and action scene that works fine in the manga because it's about how many panels can you use to depict a simple sword dodge. Then the anime adaptation tries to stay so faithful that you end up seeing panels with slight movement, which results in running gags such as "talking is a free action", and Namek's 5 minutes.

[jncfhnb]

I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with “talking is a free action” in anime versions of manga. I agree it doesn’t work in live action unless they commit to being stylized in a way that most directors aren’t comfortable.

[WorldMaker]

> Stephen King is not a filmmaker.

Stephen King is a filmmaker because he does have one professional credit as a director. [0] The debate remains that Stephen King is probably not a good filmmaker.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091499/?ref_=nm_knf_t_1

[hnbad]

He's a filmmaker in the sense that he has made films. He's not a filmmaker in the sense that he thinks of films as films and understands the art form. You can argue that's enough to technically qualify as a filmmaker but most people would argue that having received professional credit as something once while having made something else your entire career is not the same as that thing being your primary career, even if the English language lacks the appropriate grammatical structures to represent this difference.

[WorldMaker]

English has lots of axes to represent this difference, I offered two in my post:

amateur versus professional: King was paid so he's a professional filmmaker.

bad/unskilled versus good/talented: King showed himself to be a aesthetically bad/unskilled filmmaker.

You are offering a third axis:

"one-off" versus "career": King so far has not made a career of filmmaking and only made the one film.

In English yeah, we do tend to assume the first axis (amateur versus professional) as the "default" axis. I think this is a very useful axis to use as the default: it's the least gatekeeping and the least subjective. Have you been paid anything to do that job? Congratulations, you are a professional at it. You've done the job. Otherwise, you are an amateur, keep trying you'll get there some day.

"one-off"/"career" is an axis with more subjective judgments. (How many films does it take to call it your career? 2? 14? If you deeply and academically study films your whole life but only make one masterpiece, is that not a career effort?) I shouldn't need to explain how good/bad, skilled/unskilled are deeply subjective.

[Tangurena2]

Books and films have different pacing. They each tell slightly different things in different ways. It isn't really possible for a movie to be faithful to the book because one uses images and the other uses words, with every reader making different images inside themselves. It took Dune to get that through to me. I loved the book, but realized it would take a 100 hour long movie to cover what the book covered. Some people hate that movie because it left out so much, or it had to compress things.

I find that I'm less disappointed if I watch the film before I read the book. Frequently because if I read it first, then I always dislike the director's choice of actors. Or their choice of locations. I'm such an annoying critic.

[mock-possum]

Oh read the book please, listen to an audiobook or something. It’s so good. It does such a better job of putting you inside the mind of Jack. The horror of a fundamentally broken man being absolutely devoured by the entity that is the hotel is just… it’s a gigantic story.

[haspok]

Or take Tarkovsky: both Stalker and Solaris are based on books, but only loosely. Stalker, for example, was a short sci-fi / horror story, if I remember correctly, and in the movie this is just a remote backstory, setting the scene to more serious topics and mysticism.

[baerrie]

Stalker is based on Roadside Picnic, basically a scifi novella. Tarkovsky heavily condenses the story to its most basic structure, the story itself is actually a masterpiece in understated commentary on society, class, individual will, and the human response to the unknown. All of this shows up in Tarkovsky’s film albeit in very sparse and intentional ways. As a filmmaker myself, I have realized that to adapt a story into a film it must be radically altered in order to fit the language of cinema because to merely transfer the plot, etc, starts to be more like theater than cinema

[westmeal]

I haven't seen Solaris but Stalker really really sucked.

[youngNed]

I knew if I stuck around the Internet long enough I would find someone who agreed with me. Dear lord, Stalker is an awful film.

[javier123454321]

I actually believe that it was the right decision from an artistic perspective. The last chapter of the book removes all moral ambiguity or provocation, and is instead leaving you with the moral of the story as explicit. Without it, you are left to ponder the question of morality.

[JoeAltmaier]

A book is not about some apology patchup line tacked onto the end. It's about everything between the covers.

It was about disaffected youth acting out immorally because they were not given a functioning moral code? And that's what the movie showed.

[dsr_]

Not "not given a functioning moral code". Not raised by capable parents, not educated, not offered a place in a society which abandoned them. And then society used them: authoritarians can't exist without an enemy to simultaneously fear and insult; if necessary, they will make their own enemy.

Those who make progress impossible make revolt inevitable.

[TacticalCoder]

> Not raised by capable parents, not educated, not offered a place in a society which abandoned them.

The usual complete and utter disregard of the actual victims (the woman raped, for example) and the victimization of the actual criminals (the rapist, for example).

It's always been the signature of intellectuals and I believe it is the reason of many things that are wrong in society.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

(encourage by intellectuals, who intellectualize everything, including murder and rape)

[dsr_]

It's interesting what you leap to accuse me of.

Please read my words more carefully.

[ryandamm]

I strongly disagree, having read the book and seen the movie.

The “point” of the book is irrelevant; chapter 21 is disconnected from the main text, set at some remove from the events in the previous chapters, and utterly banal. It’s an extended internal monologue of the most boring sort where the author states his moral.

But the best works of literature, in my opinion, transcend simple morality tales and touch something a bit more universal and hard to define in language. If your point can be summarized in a short essay, all you’ve done is illustrate an essay at length. “This novel could’ve been an email.”

What is captivating about _Clockwork_ is precisely its depiction of violence, its almost sympathetic glorification of the id. The protagonist’s unapologetic thirst for violence is what makes the novel (and movie) interesting. It’s reminding us that violence and aggression are part of the human condition, and part of the reader, too: you may recoil, but you also identify with Alex — it’s a first person account so that’s natural.

The last chapter ruins it though with petty moralizing. The voice of Alex the psychopath is far better than that of Burgess the moralist, and the novel is better for having its terminal essay removed.

[mordymoop]

To hear Burgess talk about his book, one would never realize that it is a comedy.

The book is extremely funny, darkly funny obviously, but still uproariously absurd and filled with set pieces that possess the structure of comedy. The subject of humor is usually Alex’s misfortunes and the consequences he reaps from his terrible choices. He is a sort of George Costanza figure painted in shades of ultraviolence.

Burgess behaves as though he thinks he has written a very serious book. Of course it is possible to create a humorous satire that also has a message, e.g. Veerhoven’s Starship Troopers, but whenever I read Burgess’ commentary on Clockwork I am left with the sense that this isn’t what he was trying to do. Which leaves me thinking that he, like many creators, doesn’t actually understand why his creation was good.

[hindsightbias]

> Veerhoven's

I stopped talking to people about the film because I discovered that most of them didn't see it as satire or think the book (which they read as teens) was proto-fascist.

[0xBDB]

The movie is an obvious satire. I've never understood how people get proto-fascism from the book. Even assuming it isn't a satire itself (and I could be convinced either way) it dwells on the military in a conservative society but the society it describes is also a democracy that doesn't even let active-duty military members vote.

[euroderf]

Absolutely. The satire was lost on those who needed it most.

[javier123454321]

Yeah, 100% agreed. It felt like art for all the chapters until the end, then it turns to propaganda for the final pages.

[charles_f]

I don't think it's fair to judge how good a movie is based on how faithful it is to a book. They're different media entirely and you don't have time in a movie to get into the substance of a book. Movies usually leave fans of the original work disappointed, series are much better at that cause they can take the time to develop characters and go into multiple arcs. On a less philosophical example, Reacher is a good example to me of a movie that has nothing in common with the book apart from some names, and a series that is spot on.

On top of that, it's another piece of art. Directors should be allowed to provide an opinion. Take Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship troopers as an example, which is widely a critic of the source material. They're both different stories in their own right. I enjoy both of them differently, and I'm glad Verhoeven didn't go out of his way to relay the message that militaristic dictature is the way to go.

[hnbad]

For all of Kubrick's talent he was always more interested in the villains than their victims and this manifests in a lens that gives sympathy to the villains while portraying the victims as mere two-dimensional canvases. The Shining is another perfect example for this and from what we know about his treatment of the actors/actresses this sentiment seems to have also influenced his direction on set: he felt the lead actress would need to feel abused and exhausted and terrified to play the part but the actor just got to be a natural menace.

Morally, I'd say it's fair to call many of his great works failures: even Full Metal Jacket failed at being an anti-war movie even though it is still referenced as such. But artistically they're interesting and, if you ignore the supposed intentions and the moral implications of his failure, indeed very good.

[robertlagrant]

> Which is the entire point of the book: free will vs being forced to do something

And the film. He's conditioned one way, but reverts to himself.

[throw310822]

I've always interpreted the movie differently, and in relation to the other Kubrick movies (for example Barry Lyndon). I think Kubrick was fascinated by the relationship between violence and success- a nihilistic view of humans as eternally engaged in a violent struggle to subdue each other.

A Clockwork Orange is not about a happy ending in which a young, violent and brilliant teenager finally decides to get an apartment and a job; it's about that teenager realising that he can channel his violence in a much more productive way. Or to put it more clearly: the minister that spoon-feeds him at the end is a psychopath possibly worse than Alex- but one in a suit, with vast resources and power, because he uses violence in a more covert and clever way. So the growth of the main character that we expect at the end of a good story is there, it's just not a happy ending (for us).

[mzs]

Whoa I read it in the US and it omitted that chapter!

[zoky]

I’m gonna hard disagree with you here. Having read the novel and seen the movie, Kubrick was 100% right to leave the last chapter out.

With the last chapter intact, the story is no longer about Alex. It’s about some hypothetical futuristic society where ultraviolence is the norm and is just considered to be some coming of age rite of passage, that you eventually grow out of. It takes the violence in the story and makes it mundane and pedestrian, to the point where we have to come up with insane torturous methods like the Ludivico Technique, just as we prescribe kids Ritalin or Adderall, only we would do so just to attempt to keep things under control. It’s a story that is, frankly, ridiculous in its hyperbole, to the point that it bears little resemblance to anything but science fiction.

Kubrick and Burgess’s American editor were absolutely right to leave off the last chapter, thereby transforming the novel into the portrait of an irredeemable sociopath. A sociopath who has been enabled to a far greater extent by a simultaneously far more lenient and vindictive society than our own, yes, but therein lies the warning. While we want to redeem those criminals who are victims of circumstance, what happens when we take it too far?

By apologizing for Alex as a victim of society and circumstance, who only owes his psychopathic tendencies to said circumstances, Burgess’s novel falls flat as a criticism of society at Large (get it?)

Don’t get me wrong—I greatly enjoyed the novel, and recommend it to anyone who liked the movie. But I honestly believe the last chapter would have been best left unwritten.

[FranOntanaya]

I disagree with the disagreements. We look naturally at the shock value of the violence but harshly reject the shock of a character turning around out of the blue. We never give "good" the privilege of irrationality.

[zoky]

Because it’s not that interesting. Bad guy decides being bad is boring, and starts being good? Like, okay, but… why?

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

How is that any more boring than the opposite?

[Apocryphon]

Presumably because we see the actions and consequences attached to him deciding to be bad. If the good is only contained in one cursory final chapter, there's no substance to it. Might as well save it for a sequel.

[longcrab]

Partly because complex empathy for others is built with experience, so the teenage main character eventually grows up.

[mc32]

They 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