Stanley Kubrick helped to immortalize A Clockwork Orange by turning it into a movie. His image of Alex and his droogs in white suits with top hats and canes, bizarre, bulging codpieces and menacing eye makeup is burned into the minds of cult fans everywhere.

The story is disturbing and thought-provoking, a commentary on human nature, mind control and free will. But having read the book, it is the words, the dialog, those minute building blocks, that give the story power on an almost molecular level.

You see, Burgess was quite the cunning linguist, and the words he creates for the book happily find their way into the screenplay. As a linguist he wrote about slang as a form of rebellion, a sullying of the language rules defined by the rulers.

In the hoodlums’ strange and foreign words we hear their rebellion and their isolation from those who would rule them. How far, how deep, would we go to force them to conform? To the atoms of their thoughts, to their very language?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 12:13 pm and is filed under UK and Ireland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.