Clockwork Orange was a linguistic treat, especially for anyone educated in Russian as well as English, and with an appreciation for classical music. It was easily on par with other dystopian classics like Brave New World and 1984. It correctly predicted a rise in teenage violence fed by drugs. The MK/Ultra-Skinner-style behavior modification described in the book had already been well under way for a decade when the book was released in 1962.
The author had been trained in music and was an avid composer in the classical style before becoming a writer, and only began a writing career after a lifetime of service as a civil servant for the collapsing British Empire. Although his military career had been blighted by minor insubordinations, he had remained an ardent monarchist and abhorred anything smacking of socialism.
The book was inspired by an earlier event after his pregnant wife Lynne was robbed and raped by deserters from the US Army in London during the Battle of Britain blackout. He was denied leave to comfort her and she miscarried shortly after.
Burgess was already 45 when he wrote the book, and the beatnik counterculture was just beginning to evolve into the hippies. This culture was certainly not to his taste. The racist and violent skinhead movement would not emerge for a few years, and that was possibly infiltrated and encouraged by her Majesties Secret Services from birth, as it would have been the logical foil to pit against non-violent peaceniks. Anything smacking of world peace is the military-industrial-complex’s worst nightmare. The book influenced skinhead fashion, white shirts, black boots and suspenders, a style invented by street ruffians known as Bovver Boys in the early sixties. Their style exploded soon after the book’s release.
As a scholarly investigation into mind control, as well as creation of a new slang, the book was a smash hit, although it was considered by many as unfilmable. But then so was Lord of the Rings. At the time, disaffected youth were routinely subjected to electric shock, something many feared as much as reform school as the treatment was a legal form of torture.
I’m confident the film would have far more appeal to millennials today if the soundtrack of mostly Beethoven were switched out with death metal or gangsta rap. Burgess falsely believed the most intelligent skinheads of the future would, like himself, prefer the great German classics when zonked on meds, but how wrong he was. Had he been a bit more in step with the times, he might have realized the loudest and most angry music playable by teens will always have the most appeal to a violent subculture, and certainly not anything as refined as Beethoven.
Some today blame Burgess for creating the violent skinhead movement, but Bovver Boys were already emerging as a Mod spin off. Most of the Mods were living on speed. Disaffected teen living on speed typically turns out bad for someone because speed creates violence. The Rockers, on the other hand, drank beer and detested uppers, downers, and/or stoners. The Rockers looked exactly like our Elvis-loving, duck-trailed, rockabillies, and rode cafe racers, while the Mods stuck with the more affordable Vespas.
Eventually, Big Pharma figured out a way to wrap the speed in time-release capsules and began handing it out like M&Ms to toddlers for imaginary illnesses. Smart users eventually learned how to crush it to get the full dose immediately, turning it into a proper Bovver Boy delight.
And then a wave of teen violence swept across the country, which is where we are today.
coda:
My suggestion to change the music for the re-make so it can be more easily digested by GenZ drew ire from several who love the current film just as it is. If the movie were made today, it should not slavishly follow Kubrick in any way, but use skinhead metal or gangsta rap instead, depending on the racial profile of the main character.
In regards to questions of morality, I found myself thinking of another Kubrick masterpiece, Lolita, which also deploys an unreliable and mentally disturbed narrator. The book seemed inspired by Sally Horner’s abduction by a 50-year-old mechanic. Sally was 11 at the time. Nabokov denied that claim and produced an unpublished 1939 short story about a child molester checking into a hotel with a victim. However, the parallels between Sally and Lolita are striking in many details.
Death in Venice is also about an old writer obsessing over a young boy, very similar to the way Humbert obsesses over Lolita. And the obsession also ends in death. But the more talented Nabokov went for humor and Humbert and Quilty are comic characters who are also monsters, and Lolita, a victim of their carnal desires.
Nabokov positively hated Thomas Mann’s writing, calling it “plodding and cliche-ridden.” Humbert is given almost heroic status because he can love no one but Lolita. In reality, child abusers are serial predators who seek new victims all the time. Think Jeffry Epstein. Mann’s character is a repressed and closeted gay man near the end of his life who sadly never knew who he really was.