In the genre of drama, what is read on a page is also seen on the stage: dialogues and soliloquies are meant for both the reader and viewer, words dance the same way the actors do and vice versa. But the case of a novel adapted for screen is and has been curious and complex. The narrative that an author weaves carefully one strand after another and with a careful hand at places that the reader can only feel through the words on the page, often gets tangled when tried to be presented on stage; imagination manifested rarely does justice to the process of imagination as well as the talent of the weaver of the images, for when the medium changes, so does the style.
A Clockwork Orange, if you do not read the novel, is a flawless movie, at least by the standards of movies made in the 70s. But if you have experienced the original, the adaptation will seem lacking in places. Unlike the adaptations of Huxley’s Brave New World and Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower -movies that ate up the majority of the matter and manner of the books that made up their foundations and pillars, A Clockwork Orange preserves the heart of the book. It was only in a few moments that I hoped that the viewers of the film would have read the original text to know what they were missing out on.
Admittedly, the film drew an accurate and eerie and therefore effective image of the evil streak that Burgess wanted the reader to draw. Other areas like background music, performance of the actors, settings and direction of the film deserve credit where credit is due. But what the film could not do, despite its utilization of Alex playing the narrative voice of Alex, is to convey the complete absurdity and abnormality of the prime character’s thought processes. The film began with him talking to us, surely, but it stopped as the film went on and the viewer, previously the reader, could feel a lack of perspective of the protagonist. Action and narration cannot, I understand, go forever hand in hand, but the torture of Alex and his consequent realization that he is becoming a clockwork orange were crucial points in the story and told us that he can, in fact, ask “What, sir, happens to me?” but nowhere in the film is the phrase ‘A Clockwork Orange’ shown or uttered. Even though the filmmakers effectively showed that getting back the ability to choose between good and evil does not automatically give you the choice of making your own decisions—the Minister of Interior as the government that controls you still—their lens did not fully focus on the dilemma of man himself:
“Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.”
The light shed on the personal conundrum and the depression Alex faces, both when he wants to “snuff it” and when, in the last chapter of the book that was omitted in the film, after being able to choose violence, he wonders “What’s it going to be then, eh?” i.e. good or evil or a ground in between, is absent in the film. One could justify this absence by assuming that the filmmakers only wanted to show the inevitability of man choosing and loving violence, but one can also hold them accountable for cutting the edges of a perfect square, the complex conscience of a conscious man.
Love and religion are also put under scrutiny in the novel; origin of the former and corruption of the latter as felt and carried out by humans were also, perhaps, some sharp edges that the filmmakers thought best not to touch. The novel is 140 pages long and the movie is a little over two hours; time hardly seems to be the cause of cutting the edges.
“What’s it going to be then, eh?” one must ask: the full scenery or a few trees burned here and there as victims of the modern age?
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