A Clockwork Orange

Ed Driscoll @ Insty links to a satire piece at the Onion and he adds a separate line that I've seen him make before but I ignored. "but more seriously, their headline is a reminder that as Theodore Dalrymple wrote a decade ago, these days, it's Anthony Burgess' world, we're just living in it: A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece. Ed's link evokes 48 fairly good comments.

Fine, Ed. I'll read your stupid link about a movie I didn't like, since you keep insisting.

Why do you keep doing this, Ed? You're such a literary geek.

Maybe I'll learn something about why this is the favorite movie of a friend of a friend who I don't much care for due to his apparent high functioning psychopathy.

This is the guy who at a very pissy dinner party, exceedingly formal, reigned supreme at the head of a very long table set up elegantly banging on about manners while snapping rudely at a young hired waiter working his way through school and earning a few extra bucks. "I think it's important young people learn manners. If we don't teach them, who will?" His arrogance pissed me off. And I was young and snappy myself. Purely by happenstance, I had just recently read Letitia Baldrige's New Complete Guide to Executive Manners, a very fat book about ridiculous things important to diplomats. Guests at the table were embarrassed. I said, "rules around manners are there to help us in uncertain situations, not freeze us into limited modes of behavior." That was a line from the book. I added, "There's really nothing actually wrong with such things as eating with your elbows on the table." A standard thing parents teach children so I knew his parents drilled him. He had his elbows on the table and I saw a blur as he retracted them and I burst out laughing because he's so overly self-conscious and the rule is ridiculous, but nobody else noticed the blur, they didn't see his uncomfortable self-correction. They were looking at me, and then they argued about what I just said. But I didn't care. I was too busy laughing and spitting into my wineglass.

Two wineglasses each. One for red and one for white. Plus a water glass. Crystal tightly cluttering the whole table from one end to the other. That's how ultra pissy this holiday dinner was. And I can't even drink that stuff. I'd rather have Pepsi.

Why would A Clockwork Orange be anyone's favorite movie?

That right there tells you how weird the guy is. He told me Nixon is his favorite president.

I don't like him. And I don't like the film.

You know how sometimes the Spark Notes or CliffNotes can be better than the original books? This link of Ed Driscoll's to Theodore Dalrymple explaining A Clockwork Orange is like that. I got more out of Dalrymple's explanation of the film than I did from watching the film. His explanation surrounds the movie and puts the film in its setting. He explains the author, Anthony Burgess, so the work makes much more sense. He explains how the book relates to the overwhelming worldwide predominance of Behaviorism at the time. He describes the meaning of the different endings of the original British and the truncated American versions of the book and Kubrick using the American ending that has the redemption chopped off. He describes the private argot used by the teens.

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky [small] toys you viddy (see) being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks [men] made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties [goes], like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. 

He explains why the book is genius.

And I didn't appreciate any of that.

Plus I learned a new word. Right as I was congratulating myself for not having to look up solipsistic, Dalrymple springs Pelagian heresy.

I was surprised to lean the original book has only 150 pages. The ones on Amazon have 223 pages. That's still fairly short.

Recommended. Especially if don't care for A Clockwork Orange. I now see the whole thing differently, the film, the books, and the appreciation they get.