Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange

This chapter offers a survey of the archived script material for A Clockwork Orange. By focusing on the screenplays and the revisions of three different authorial voices, the chapter proposes to consider and chronicle the production histories and adaptive processes of these scripts in relation to both their original source material and Kubrick’s final film. It aims to offer a critical and comparative survey of the changes, revisions and decisions made in turning the novel into a screenplay across three independently authored approaches: Anthony Burgess’s own film script from 1969, its treatment of the author’s own novel and the intersections and divergences from and between other script adaptations including the earlier Terry Southern/ Michael Cooper screenplay (1966) and the ‘Blue Pencil’ script (1970)—Stanley Kubrick’s annotated final draft of the script. In taking this approach, the chapter hopes to offer a detailed understanding of the differing and convergent authorial approaches to adapting the novel. It will be particularly interested in script annotations, aspects of adaptation that were considered but not carried through, and what they reveal about the film as an adaptation.

A Clockwork Orange is notable in both its original textual and adapted cinematic forms for its linguistic invention. Both versions prominently feature ‘Nadsat’, an invented anti-language through which the narrator and protagonist Alex conveys his story and communicates with others, including the reader. Drawing on our past research in the field, ‘Nadsat’ is composed of different categories which draw on different word-formation principles. We bring corpus (linguistic) techniques to bear and investigate the ways in which Kubrick approached the challenge of bringing Nadsat to the screen. This essay offer an analytic and linguistic study of the film’s appropriation of ‘Nadsat’, and we will show that, while Nadsat remains a prominent aspect of the film, the proportion of unfamiliar core Nadsat items is greatly reduced in an attempt to ensure that the language of the film retains its distinctive flavour without overburdening the audience with unfamiliar items.

Since its publication in 1962 (and Stanley Kubrick’s transposition in 1971), the dystopic universe of A Clockwork Orange, has intrigued generations of readers and viewers, and Alex’s “Nadsat” has embedded into popular imagination the Anglo-Russian slang of the “Droogs”. Anthony Burgess himself declared that, during his journey through the USSR, he was surprised to discover that there were local youth subcultures just as in the western world. In the USSR, Anthony Burgess met the Stilyagi, the rebel members of a youth subculture, keen on both clothes and music from the western world: how much of them can we find in Alex’s droogs? Taking as a starting point, this subculture developed in the communist Eastern Bloc and using material from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the Stanley Kubrick Archive (specifically Burgess’s own notebooks and correspondence as well as archived film scripts) the chapter analyzes affinities and difference between Alex’s world and Stilyagi’s USSR.

This paper offers a discussion of A Clockwork Orange through the comparative lens of the imagery of both Stanley Kubrick and the British painter Francis Bacon and their representations of the human scream. Screaming imagery is ubiquitous in the work of both and this chapter considers how the scream functions in the film as a response to trauma and sexual violence. It considers the representation of sexual violence committed toward two ageing female bodies: those of Mrs Alexander (Adrienne Corri) and the Catlady (Miriam Karlin) and in doing so also views the film through the prism of the twenty-first century #MeToo movement. The chapter considers the relationship between art and (sexual) violence in both film and novel taking into detailed consideration the adaptive strategies Kubrick took toward the treatment of sexual violence in Burgess’s novel (the ageing of the two young girls at the record store for instance) and by extension reconsider the representation of sexual violence and assault in the novel from a comparative contemporary perspective.

A Clockwork Orange came into existence as a novel written by Anthony Burgess published in 1962. Nine years later, this story was brought to the screen by Stanley Kubrick. Fifteen years after that, Burgess adapted his novel for the stage in a so-called “play with music”. Music is a crucial element in all of these versions, yet it functions differently in each of them. It is an important part of the novel’s narrative, but forms a mostly symbolic function since it cannot be heard; the score of the film conforms in some aspects to the conventions of film music, yet in others it transcends these; the music of Burgess’ play diffuses the power of music by allowing all characters to share equally in music-making. In this chapter, I analyze music’s genre-specific functions and contextualize these in the oeuvres of both Burgess and Kubrick, and in the larger areas of classical music in the literature and film.

In this chapter, I explore the significance of A Clockwork Orange to David Bowie’s oeuvre. I analyse the ways that both the novel and the film found their way into his live performances, music videos, album covers and various star personae, including Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Halloween Jack. I also explore song lyrics that either directly reference the novel and film, or allude to their urban imagery and violent encounters.