I watched the movie about 20 years ago. It’s not Kubrick’s best, but it’s still an excellent film – I highly recommend watching it. The book is also a worthwhile read.

Burgess’s take on dystopian fiction focuses primarily on language, violence, and morality. The story follows Alex, a young gang leader who ends up in prison for various crimes. A new experimental method is tested on him, designed to make humans incapable of violence. However, the conditioning has unexpected consequences: once Alex is released, he becomes the victim of the very violence he once inflicted.

The totalitarian state in which the story takes place resembles a futuristic version of 1990s Great Britain. Most people are glued to their televisions, parents are detached from their children, and the youth have no vision beyond short-term pleasure.

Much like in 1984, A Clockwork Orange shows how language can be used to control not only thought but emotion. The protagonist is morally “bad,” yet he doesn’t truly understand the difference between good and evil because he lacks the language to express these concepts. His passion for classical music hints at an inner longing for beauty and, through it, a kind of moral guidance. But neither his parents, his friends, the state, nor even the only beauty he knows – classical music – can offer that guidance.

The world Burgess portrays is one devoid of any morality. Even the government’s conditioning program, which aims to produce moral citizens, fails to reach the essence of morality – that which comes from reason and empathy.

The invented slang of the characters makes the book difficult to read at first, but once you get used to it, the rhythm of the language becomes engaging. If you’re not much of a reader, the movie is your go to piece of entertainment– it stays relatively close to the novel’s story and delivers the basic talking points while also giving us Kubrick’s trademark filmmaking aesthetics.

A Clockwork Orange on Goodreads