Oh shit I guess I didn’t post my other songs either. There’s more songs than just that one, also check ‘em out!

This is adorable actually

Burgess write an entire 1984 fanfic called 1985 that sounds really bad but I’m curious so I might check that out too. Anyway, that’s all that I have to say about Clockwork Orange. It’s fine, more enjoyable than the movie but actually not as good as the movie when it comes to exploring its themes.

Anyway, idk. It’s like a 6/10. It’s not bad, it’s even kind of fun, but if I want to read an interesting book of this kind that actually has something to say I’d rather just re-read 1984 or branch out to other novels like that. 🧵

Alex isn’t a good person in either but he’s way less forgivable in the book. It’s just a huge dropped ball in terms of commenting on anything related to oppression or the police. It sets up discussion but fails to meaningfully capture it beyond “crime bad and police also bad and free will good” 🧵

And from what I remember of the film: it ends with Alex hospitalized, shaking the hands of the minister, smiling a plastered on fear riddled smile while his eyes water, the regret and fear and sadness and repression lingering just beneath the wetness of the tears. Way more fitting 🧵

Alex’s urges for violence are never completely addressed, their route cause and the fact the state abandoned basically every citizen isn’t addressed, the corruption of the police force isn’t really addressed. It just ends on an un-earned “oh boys will be boys and they grow up” note 🧵

In CO the book, the treatment just… wears off while Alex is in the hospital, the entire political discussion had by the writer self insert who wrote CO in CO is dropped almost immediately after it isn’t relevant anymore, and Alex just decides to mature. 🧵

Which is a better choice. Also the eye droppers, not something which existed in the book. A scientist constantly doing eye drops into Alex’s eyes is so much more off putting and also makes more sense, since there’s no way a person could ever keep their eyes open that long without moisture 🧵

The Ludovigo treatment is so much better done in the movie too, from what I remember. In the book the scientists are kind of like, just smart bullies?? They laugh at Alex and talk down to him, not in a particularly hard to believe way but Kubrick made them almost completely silent in the movie 🧵

Discussions about authoritarianism, about police brutality, about the ways the state will systematically traumatize its people to shape them into something acceptable. But here’s the thing, it completely drops the ball on every one of these points of discussion, and the ending is absolute TRASH 🧵

I liked a lot of the process of reading Clockwork, which from here on will be shortened to CO for the dreaded character limit. But the story itself… ehhhhh it was okay. It had some really good parts to it, and I think it sets up really interesting discussions. 🧵

And this made it way better because… well it’s not that crazy a story on its own. Which is my biggest problem with the movie. The movie is like, pretty much a direct retelling (except for some scenes which I will get to) and I think this is actually part of the problem with the movie 🧵

So it was more work, but I think the work made the book all the better. Like it’s so much more fun to read a sentence and not fully comprehend it until you have take into account the context around it. Like he doesn’t ever tell you what “zoobies” is, but it makes perfect sense in context 🧵

I found Clockwork Orange a mixed bag; it was fun to read, and certainly more enjoyable than the movie adaptions imo, which I had seen years ago and really didn’t care much for. The book itself was way more fun because it’s ENTIRELY written in Alex’s weird dialect (Nadsat it’s called in the book) 🧵