Stanley Kubrick's Adaption of Anthony Burgess's a Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is a twisted coming of age novel depicting the ugly lives of youths in an ugly and not-so-distant future. At the center of the story is Alex, a sociopath teenager who thrives on drugs and violence, or drugs and sex, or drugs and violent sex. Burgess writes the novel in the first person offering exclusively Alex's subjective point of view as he recalls events from an unspecified point in the future. The novel acts as Alex's memoir of his mid through late teens and as with any record told in the first person, his reliability is questionable and the reader is left with little choice but to trust him. Stanley Kubrick is able to achieve a similar subjective perspective in his film adaptation through use of numerous cinematic techniques. To adapt the words from Burgess's novel directly, the film would have to be narrated entirely with the camera acting as Alex's eyes, an awkward method rarely used in adaptation. Instead, Kubrick films in the third person, relying on the combined effects of cinematographic, mise-en-scene, and soundtrack motifs to represent the world seen in the film as Alex's personal version. These physical motifs require the audience to make associations between repeated occurrences over the duration of the film. Making these associations over repeated viewings is considerably more satisfying than simply being told by Alex via narration of the nature of his feelings and his relationships to other characters. Additionally it has the effect of evoking, as the novel does, the notion that the film does not take place as Alex is experiencing it, but is rather Alex's subjective memory of his past experience and reflects his personal bias. By examining specific reoccurrences of certain physical motifs in the film and determining why they might have been used, Kubrick's use of formalism in adapting Alex's point of view from novel to film is more clearly understood.