Sunday 24 April 2011

A Clockwork Orange/ A Clockwork Testament

Most people will have seen Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and may have noticed that the name "Anthony Burgess" features in the credits in a typeface as large as Kubricks since the film is based on a novel of the same name. While Burgess's novel also features the teenage criminal Alex it also has a serious intent, to explore the conflicting viewpoint of Saint Augustine and Pelagus on the notion of Original Sin and the freedom to chose between good and evil. When Alex is offered the chance to leave prison if he submits to a form of conditioning the prison chaplin argues that if a person no longer has the freedom to chose between good and evil then they are no longer fully human but no more than a mechanical being - a clockwork orange.

Kubrick's film was a great success but did precipitate a degree of violence which backfired on Burgess as being the originator of the story and therefore responsible for the violence that was caused. In response Burgess wrote "A Clockwork Testament" which features Enderby, a character from several other of his novels. Enderby is a poet, now living in New York and at work on an epic poem about Augustine and Pelagus. But he has also written a shooting script based on Gerard Manley Hopkin's poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" in which a group of nuns bound for America are shipwrecked and drowned. The result is a rather exploiting film which features nuns being raped by Nazi youth and suddenly poor Enderby, as did Burgess, receives all manner of abuse and threats that he has precipitated attacks on nuns. The novel
is humorous but also Burgess's way at hitting back at Kubrick and a film that he particularly disliked.

But yet again it is a meditation on the notion of original sin and the freedom to chose.

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