Question 1

What is a "droog"? In fact, what is the almost incomprehensible language that Alex and his gang speak?

Accepted Answer

Anthony Burgess created a made-up language for the novel and called it “Nadsat.” It’s a hybrid of English and Russian, and the inference that many took from it is that the book is set in a future where the Soviet Union has conquered Western Europe and spread its language and socialist culture there. American paperback versions of the book originally included a Nadsat glossary at the end. Here are a few examples:

Question 2

Do they get drunk off milk in the movie? What is that about?

Accepted Answer

Because the milk is spiked with drugs. In the opening scene, Alex is heard in a voiceover saying: "The Korova Milk Bar sells Milk Plus: milk plus synthemesc, vellocet, or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This will sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence." Synthemesc is synthetic mescaline, vellocet is a form of amphetamine, and drencrom is adrenochrome. Anthony Burgess has also stated that the milk symbolizes the fact that Alex is still an infant emotionally.

Question 3

Why was the film banned in the United Kingdom?

Accepted Answer

This is a false rumor. Immediately upon its release, the “ultraviolent,” sexually charged, and seemingly amoral film caused waves of revulsion and protest in the United Kingdom. It also led to a string of copycat crimes based on incidents in the film. For Kubrick, the last straw came while he was in Ireland in 1973 working on his next film, Barry Lyndon. Kubrick and his family began receiving explicit threats from people claiming they would find him and his family and give them the same treatment that Alex and his droogs gave their victims in the film. This caused Kubrick to demand that the film be yanked from distribution in the United Kingdom. It was legally unavailable for viewing in the UK from 1973 until 2000, the year after Kubrick died. For years, though, the film was outright banned in other countries such as Ireland, Brazil, and Australia.

Question 4

Why was the film rated “X”?

Accepted Answer

From 1930 to 1968, there were no official ratings slapped onto films presented to the public for viewing, although there was a very specific code of rules known as the Hayes Code that prohibited almost all forms of nudity, profanity, and sacrilegious topics from being greenlit. Then, in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America came out with their ratings system: “G” (General Audiences), “M” (Mature, later replaced with “GP” and then “PG-13”), “R” (Restricted; no one under 17 admitted without a parent or guardian), and “X” (which was changed to NC-17 in 1990 after an “X” rating essentially had become equated with hardcore pornography).

Startlingly, the first three years after the new ratings system came into effect, two “X”-rated films were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The first, Midnight Cowboy (1969) actually won Best Picture despite earning an “X” rating for its shocking depictions of homosexual prostitution and violent depravity in Manhattan. A Clockwork Orange originally received an “X” rating due to its “ultraviolence” and a few very graphic (if brief) sexual scenes. In 1972, Kubrick edited about 30 seconds of sexual content from his film and re-released it in the USA with an “R” rating to gain wider distribution.

Question 5

Is A Clockwork Orange disturbing?

Accepted Answer

Though its ability to shock audiences is much less now than when it was originally released, A Clockwork Orange is still considered to be one of the more disturbing movies ever made. The film includes a lot of violence, multiple depictions of rape, and full-frontal nudity (male and female). Overall though, the most disturbing parts of A Clockwork Orange are the ideas it presents rather than the visuals seen on the screen.

Question 6

How did they do the eyeball scene?

Accepted Answer

The “eyeball scene” refers to the administration of the Ludovico Technique. Alex had already been injected with the experimental serum that made him nauseous and defenseless. Strapped to a chair and with his eyelids forcibly kept open by steel clasps, Alex was made to watch scenes of extreme violence and sexual depravity so that in the future he’d have a Pavlovian response of disgust to all such situations and imagery. The psychiatrists also played Beethoven during the administration, ensuring that Alex would be unable to ever bear hearing his favorite composer again without becoming violently ill. As Alex is screaming in pain at the sight of WWII atrocities, a doctor stands over him, calmly placing eyedrops in his eyes so they didn’t dry up. This was a real doctor. But during one take, McDowell had a cornea scratched and was temporarily blind in that eye.

Question 7

What does the title A Clockwork Orange mean?

Accepted Answer

According to novelist Anthony Burgess, he’d heard the saying “as queer as a clockwork orange”—with “queer” meaning “strange” rather than “gay”—in a London pub around 1945 and then continued hearing it for years.

In a 1972 television interview, he said, “Well, the title has a very different meaning but only to a particular generation of London Cockneys. It's a phrase which I heard many years ago and so fell in love with, I wanted to use it, the title of the book. But the phrase itself I did not make up. The phrase ‘as queer as a clockwork orange’ is good old East London slang and it didn't seem to me necessary to explain it. Now, obviously, I have to give it an extra meaning. I've implied an extra dimension. I've implied the junction of the organic, the lively, the sweet – in other words, life, the orange – and the mechanical, the cold, the disciplined. I've brought them together in this kind of oxymoron, this sour-sweet word."

In essence, the Ludovico Technique had rendered Alex to be half-human (orange) and half genetically modified machine (clockwork). Many linguists disagree with Burgess’s claims of repeatedly hearing this phrase in London, arguing that no printed evidence exists prior to the publication of Burgess’s novel that it was a slang term at all. In a completely alternate explanation, they insist Burgess made up the story about overhearing it. Instead, they say the original title was A Clockwork Orang, with “orang” being a Malay word meaning “man,” and that the original title meant to convey the idea of a mechanical man. They say that Burgess was overcompensating for the fact that the book’s publisher made a huge typo, thinking that Orang was a misspelling.

Question 8

If the story is set in the future, why does it still resemble the 1970s?

Accepted Answer

There is no specific statement in either the novel or the film that the story is set in the future. People make this inference based on some very spotty logic: One is that the car that Alex and his droogs drive is called a “Derango 95,” leading people to assume that the film was set in 1995. There’s also the fact that in the novel (1962), the homeless man that Alex’s gang brutalizes talks about men walking on the moon, which didn’t happen until 1969. But in one scene where Alex’s parents are looking at a newspaper, there’s a chart in the paper that shows the paper’s growth in circulation from 1969 to 1970, which would imply the film was set in an alternate-reality version of the present. In a 1974 interview with Playboy, Anthony Burgess confirms that his original novel was set in the present:

“Clockwork Orange is a satirical study of life as it was in 1960, when the tone of postwar England was socialistic, collectivist, and I was really trying to satirize that sort of world in which people had nothing to live for, had no energy--except for the young, who could do nothing with their energy but employ it to totally barbarous ends. I was really writing about the present. The then present. The now past. The future is already in the past. In Clockwork Orange, I had world telecasts and men on the moon. Of course, these things have come true; but there's nothing in the book that wasn't already present in the technology of the early Sixties, except for the use of a composite dialect called Nadsat."

Question 9

Did Alex ever have consensual sex with women, or was he purely a rapist?

Accepted Answer

In the scene where Alex takes the two girls from the record shop back to his bedroom for a time-lapsed sexual romp, they came with him willingly and undressed of their own accord. In the fantasy scene at the end where a naked woman is riding Alex on top while upper-class Brits surround the duo and applaud, it’s also implied that the sex is consensual.

Question 10

What is Alex’s surname (last name)?

Accepted Answer

Although his last name is never mentioned in the article, the film leads to conflicting theories about his surname. Although Alex calls himself “Alex DeLarge” when asked by prison authorities, some suspect this is merely a joke to self-aggrandize himself as “Alexander the Great.” But the Minister of the Interior and Mr. Alexander both refer to him as “Mr. DeLarge.” What’s confusing is that in the film, whenever newspaper accounts of Alex’s criminal case and rehabilitation are shown, he is referred to as “Alex Burgess.” Some suspect that this was Stanley Kubrick’s way of trolling the novel’s author.

Question 11

Although Dim and Georgie obviously became police, what happened to the other droog, Pete?

Accepted Answer

In the novel, the 21st chapter features a scene where Alex encounters Pete after his rehabilitation and finds that Pete has abandoned his former criminal ways. Also in the novel, Georgie died while Alex was in prison. But since Kubrick’s film was based on the American version of the novel that omitted the book’s  21st chapter, it is unclear what happened to Pete.

Question 12

What about deleted scenes?

Accepted Answer

Kubrick—cinema’s ultimate perfectionist—originally cut the film so that it lasted nearly four hours. Then, after hiring assistant editors, the final version released to theaters ran two hours and sixteen minutes. But after deciding on a final cut, Kubrick ordered that all extraneous footage be forever destroyed, as was his habit. Scenes that we will never see include:

Question 13

What about rumors that Malcolm McDowell almost drowned in the scene where Dim and Georgie “waterboard” him by repeatedly dunking his head in a water-filled trough?

Accepted Answer

These rumors are false. Although that scene went through 28 takes, Malcolm McDowell was wearing an underwater breathing apparatus. He has also never claimed that he nearly drowned during the scene, although he’s said he was disgusted by the food additive used to make the water a dirty brown for the scene.

Question 14

What are some popular culture references to the movie?

Accepted Answer

A Clockwork Orange has had a tremendous influence on all aspects of culture. Here are only some of the references to the film:

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