— GrubStreetJournal (@GrubStreetJorno) August 25, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess
… the tale was inaccurate. It tells of Burgess, the great linguist, “bellowing Malay at a succession of Malayan waitresses” but “unable to make himself understood”. The source of this tale was a 20-year-old BBC documentary … [The suggestion was] that the director left the scene in, in order to poke fun at the great author. Not so, and I can be sure, as I was that director … The story as seen on television made it clear that Burgess knew that these waitresses were not Malay. It was a Chinese restaurant and Burgess’s point was that the ethnic Chinese had little time for the government-enforced national language, Bahasa Malaysia [Malay]. Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; it was the girls in question who did not.
— GrubStreetJournal (@GrubStreetJorno) August 22, 2021
Morality
The film’s central moral question is the definition of “goodness” and whether it makes sense to use aversion therapy to stop immoral behaviour.[5] Stanley Kubrick, writing in Saturday Review, described the film as:
A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots.[6]
Similarly, on the film production’s call sheet, Kubrick wrote:
It is a story of the dubious redemption of a teenage delinquent by condition-reflex therapy. It is, at the same time, a running lecture on free-will.
You must log in to post a comment.