A Clockwork Orange, a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess . The final scene also involves Beethoven. “My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book, and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy.” Without that morally redeeming ending, it’s as if Burgess suspects he’s played the role of pornographer more than novelist. The ending of A Clockwork Orange is very cut and dry for Kubrick, with the use of music and final shots bringing everything to an easy to understand close. There are three particular scenes in Kubrick’s film that situate us squarely in Alex’s corner, something the novella never particularly tries to achieve. It’s one of Kubrick’s great mozg-fucks. So, when the Minister of the Interior or Inferior, who approved Alex for conditioning and sat front row during that humiliating showcase, carves and forks steaky wakes into Alex’s sardonic rot, we viewers smile all over our litsos in delight at the tables having flipped. When he bumps into his former droog Pete, who is now married, working, and settling down, Alex begins imagining that kind of life for himself. “He grows bored with violence and recognizes that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction,” explained Burgess. Once the glassy-eyed, diabolical incarnation embodied by Malcolm McDowell stared the camera down and delivered that first voiceover in the Korova Milkbar atop Wendy Carlos’ humanity-stripping synths in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation, Burgess’ fate was fixed. A Clockwork Orange is a novel by Anthony Burgess that was first published in 1962. In fact, this is the only chapter where our protagonist-narrator experiences growth, or more profoundly, personal transformation. According to Burgess, it was a jeu d'… It is set in a dismal dystopian England and presents a first-person account of a juvenile delinquent who undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior. Probably the most important thing to understand is how Kubrick uses Beethoven’s 9th symphony throughout the film. Chapter 21, by comparison, offers a far tamer cure. The 1971 movie A Clockwork Orange is one of Stanley Kubrick’s most impressive and controversial cinematic works. Or maybe, it's that the twenty-first chapter isn't optimistic at all—perhaps the society that's forcing Alex to grow up and settle down is, in fact, just a more pervasive kind of Ludovico technique? Perhaps the optimism of the twenty-first chapter is at odds with the rest of the work. By entering your email address you agree to receive emails from Shmoop and verify that you are over the age of 13. And, although Kubrick attracts conspiracy theories like Beyonce attracts paparazzi, this isn't a theory perpetuated by A Clockwork Orange… but it's similar to what happens at the end of the movie. The ending, or the twenty-first chapter of the book, provides closure to the book for some readers. What's even more interesting is that Stanley Kubrick's famous film adaptation of the book was modeled after the twenty-chapter version. Without that final chapter, we’re left with a hopeless, deeply pessimistic story where, as Burgess described it, “evil prances on the page and, up to the very last line, sneers in the face of all inherited beliefs.”. Burgess wasn’t ignorant of that last appeal. Kubrick’s film ends with true victims discarded and forgotten, political cockroaches surviving the fallout, and our Humble Narrator free to resume life as his terrible self. Anthony Burgess, 1962, A Clockwork Orange. What's Up With the Ending? So Much For His Happy Ending One of our all-time favorite conspiracy theories states that Avril Lavigne died and was replaced by a doppleganger . Here, Ku. Ending: Paths Of Glory. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat", which takes its name from the Russian suffix that is equivalent to '-teen' in English. The novel was … Novelists can’t choose how they’ll be remembered — that is, which of their creations will be favored after they’ve, to borrow a phrase, snuffed it. Burgess’ only real gripe with the film — one that seemed to fester over the years — came over the final scene in which Alex, now deconditioned, recoups in a hospital, cuts a cushy deal with the Minister of the Inferior, and declares, “I was cured alright.”. The colors, settings, music… everything in A Clockwork Orange is designed and measured to the very millimeter. It’s this desire, I suspect, that makes viewers agreeable to the film’s ending — that would make them shrug off or altogether reject Burgess’ intended conclusion had it appeared on screen. It was more problematic for Burgess, though. “It seems piggish or Pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers,” he confessed. Burgess’ wishes for letting A Clockwork Orange fade from public memory had less to do with Kubrick’s interpretation and more with the shortcomings he associated with the work, namely that the novella is “too didactic to be artistic.” He’s overly harsh in his self-critique, but there can be little argument that characters like the prison charlie, Dr. Branom, and at times even Alex are little more than mouthpieces for the story’s moral lesson. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. At this point, we recognize that there is truly no joy or purpose left for Alex in this life. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange accomplishes something that Burgess’ does not: the film version actually leads us to root for Alex the thug, Alex the rapist, Alex the murderer, who performs all his wicked misdeeds with unabashed alacrity and zeal. In the US publication, this twenty-first chapter was left out of all published versions of A Clockwork Orange. The film strikes a small victory for the individual, repugnant as he may be, in a sterile, callous world that strives for order and uniformity, but it offers no hope for a more humane tomorrow. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain. When we talk about the missing chapter of A Clockwork Orange, it’s not a matter of the book or film being better. Hence, in the film, we get “I was cured alright,” slooshy Beethoven’s 9th blaring from speakers, and viddy Alex’s depraved fantasy of giving a devotchka with horrorshow groodies the old in-out in-out. But we aren’t clockwork oranges. We have both book and film and Bog or God’s gift of choice when it comes to which to read or viddy. This masterful, dystopian film, based on the groundbreaking novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess, deals with some extremely difficult and graphic material. The film owes nothing to those particular conventions of literary fiction. Each ends as it must. Edward Elgar's Pomp … Below Her Mouth Movie (2016) - Erika Linder, Natalie Krill, Sebastian Pigott A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It also helps that the pace is quick, that Burgess (in Alex) gives us an engaging narrator, the Nadsat is easy to pick up on and the philosophical arguments remain terrifyingly potent today. It then belongs to others, who, if sales are strong, will reimagine those stories — those very intimate and specific ideas — a million times over in infinitely different ways. Finally, we have the unintended side effect of the Ludovico Technique, which has conditioned Alex against the music he loves and causes him to try to leap to his death and snuff it when F. Alexander seeks revenge via surround sound. While both endings are strong and pose questions to the reader long after they’ve finished the text. A Clockwork Orange What's Up With the Ending? Thematically, it comes full-circle, starting off with the same question and description combination as chapter one in part one of the book, but closing the loop with Alex rejecting the person he was at the commencement of his journey and looking forward to a new kind of life.That would be the easy interpretation. Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning. © 2021 Shmoop University Inc | All Rights Reserved | Privacy | Legal. To some readers and filmgoers, the choice between endings may seem merely a matter of preference. “The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction,” he noted, “an art founded on the principle that human beings change … The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.”, Burgess is right, of course. This belief provides the central argument of A ClockworkOrange, where Alex asserts his free will by choosing a courseof wickedness, only to be subsequently robbed of his self-determinationby the government. A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. Without this epilogue, A Clockwork Orange ends on a truly black note. Burgess has a stake in A Clockwork Orange as a novella. Everyone should use it. Visually, you’ll be fascinated and captivated from the beginning. Kubrick was able to create a movie where he left his personal seal. The allure that Kubrick taps into is the fascinating playfulness of Burgess’ Nadsat (the hybrid English-Russian slang sprinkled here in italics); the timeless appeal, however perverted and twisted here, of brotherhood and a night out on the town; a Huxleian distrust of authority; and the chance to vicariously indulge in the very dark, but also very real, human desire to have whatever and whoever we want whenever we want. But all hope of that wish being respected had vanished the moment he let loose his little Alex “the Large” on unsuspecting readers in 1962. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Burgess penned A Clockwork Orange with the intention that it would run 21 chapters, a number significant in that it was the age of legal adulthood at the time. During his visit to Leningrad, Burgess encountered the stilyagi, gangs of thuggish Russian teenagers. There are only three specific scenes that were built as sets: The … Going by a small handful of interviews, Burgess seemed to have admired several aspects of Kubrick’s film, particularly how the director and McDowell used “Singin’ in the Rain” as the aural link that tips off writer F. Alexander to Alex’s previous misdeeds. He’d forever be associated with droogies, ultra-violence, and all that cal. Different endings leave Stanley Kubrick's film with a different meaning than the novel.