Book vs. Movie: A Clockwork Orange

Clockwork Orange 几年前试尝读过，读不下去，觉得太难了，好多字都看不懂。

租了电影来看，觉得电影的视觉艺术很棒，配乐也好。

今年年初把书又拿出来读了，终于读完了。才知道我不认识的字都是作者 Anthony Burgess 自己发明的，要根据语法和上下文来猜测。但因为很多是俄文的字根，我自然看得很困难。从网上找到一个“字典”，才看懂了。觉得作者真是天才。

然后又看了电影。Kubrick 当然是天才，视觉艺术的天才。

发现书和电影所要表达的东西非常不同。

故事大致是这样的（书和电影略有不同）。第一部：一个在生活在未来英国社会的青少年 Alex，有严重暴力倾向。他和朋友每天晚上出门，打砸抢奸，无恶不作。后来遭同伙出卖，在一次作案中被警察抓住，送进监狱。第二部：为了早日出狱，他要求接受 aversion therapy。几天之后，他“治愈”了，变得完全不能忍受任何暴力。第三部：出狱之后，他遭受同伙的报复，家人的抛弃，以前受害者的欺负，却因失去自卫能力，想自杀都不行。最后政府为了搞宣传，又把他治回原状。他又开始暴力的生活了。

可是，书比电影多出一章。这第21章使得两部作品的寓意有很大差异。

书的结尾是这样的：Alex 回到暴力的生活后，又过了一段时间，忽然感到暴力很无聊，意识到“that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction. Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.” 他就结束暴力生涯，结婚，生子，"and perhaps even create something... "做了一个正常的社会公民。

电影虽然是在英国拍的，Kubrick 却选择用了美国小说的版本，没有最后一章的内容。

我读书和看电影，最大的收获是读了作者 Burgess 写的前言，主要是关于最后一章的。据 Burgess 说，他的书在美国发表的时候，出版社让他把最后一章删掉：

My New York publisher believed that my 21st chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don't you know. It was bland and it showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil. The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than British and could face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam. My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of a human life.

I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities....

印象最深的是作者的这段话：

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human characters is se, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.

最好笑的是，因为电影比书更出名，在作者把第21章加上后，很多读者／观众都来信询问。作者说，他的后半生大部分时间就是在 Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention，给读者回信，解释为什么书比电影多出一章来--while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanour. :)