Here's a classic "Kubrick stare" to start your evening, O my brothers
Part 2 of 2
When reading A Clockwork Orange, you have the opportunity to go back and work out puzzling slang words at your leisure. That option doesn’t exist when you’re watching a film (or at least it didn’t in the days before home video). This is presumably why, when filming A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick made numerous changes to Nadsat, reducing its original complexity.
In the book, Alex describes his sentencing as follows: a “starry very grim magistrate in the lower court govoreeting some very hard slovos against your Friend and Humble Narrator.” In the film, this becomes “some very hard words spoken against your Friend and Humble Narrator.” Alex’s local hangout in the book, where he drinks doped-up milk with his droogs: “the Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto.” Kubrick’s version: “the Korova Milkbar sold milk-plus.”
In the book, Alex reacts to the sight of a drunken old man with these words: “I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy…whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real starry like this one was.” Kubrick “normalizes” the language like this: “I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.” While Kubrick does preserve some Nadsat words throughout the film, the language becomes more comprehensible to the cinema audience, while losing some of its distinctiveness.
As a cinematic auteur, Kubrick was legendary for his meticulousness, which bordered on fanaticism (as an example, one short scene in Barry Lyndon required something like 77 takes). So it’s a bit of a shock that he allowed Malcolm McDowell to botch the pronunciation of Nadsat on a few occasions. At one point, Alex pronounces “oomny” (smart) as “omni,” and more than once he changes “krovvy” (blood) to “kroovy.” Kubrick allowed another strange oversight to occur. The novel contains an explanation of the title A Clockwork Orange – it is a book being written by the dissident writer F. Alexander, who is brutalized by Alex and his droogs in an early scene. However, the film omits this detail, leaving the title a mystery to those who know only the film.
In keeping with the principle that changing one thing usually means you have to change another, the simplification of Nadsat forced Kubrick to make at least one important plot change. In the book, F. Alexander, encountering Alex for the second time, recognizes him by his way of speaking (“strange, strange, that manner of voice pricks me. We’ve come into contact before, I’m sure we have”). In the film, where Nadsat has lost much of its strangeness, the writer (now called simply “Frank”) recognizes Alex when he hears him doing a lazy rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain” in the bathtub – the same song Alex had sung when beating and kicking Frank in that earlier scene.
Kubrick altered some other things as well. In the book, the treatment Alex undergoes leads to his being nauseated by any music that he hears. In the film, the only music that makes him sick is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which also happens to be his all-time favorite piece. It is easy to understand why Kubrick made this change – Burgess (who was a composer as well as a writer) stuffs his narrative with descriptions of music, including works by made-up composers like Friedrich Gitterfenster, Claudius Birdman, Adrian Schweigselber, and “the Danish veck Otto Skadelig.” Such a panorama of largely fictional musical achievement would be difficult to recreate on the screen.
And cinematic plausibility presumably dictated another significant alteration. In the novel, one of the more shocking details – which we discover about one-third of the way in – is that Alex is only fifteen years old. When the British version of the book ends, he is a mere eighteen. A teenage psychopath played by an actual teenager would have been problematic for a number of reasons; as it happened, the role was played by Malcolm McDowell, already in his mid- to late-20s when the film was shot. But this leads to another peculiar oversight: when Alex’s mother leaves for work, she tells him to get out of bed because “you don’t want to be late for school, son!” Perhaps in this world of the future, it’s normal to be a 27-year-old high school student; but from my point of view, it looks like someone wasn’t paying sufficient attention to detail.