Varför undviker Kubrick en direkt förklaring till "Clockwork Orange" s mening?

TL; DR:

Kubrick ville fans som verkligen önskade sin mening att antingen tolka sin egen mening från filmen eller läsa Burgess 'bok för att härleda meningen författaren .

Långt svar:

I en artikel med New Yorker, Anthony Burgess , förklarade författaren av A Clockwork Orange hur namnet kom till honom:

I first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London pub before the Second World War. It is an old Cockney slang phrase, implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature, since could any notion be more bizarre than that of a clockwork orange? The image appealed to me as something not just fantastic but obscurely meaningful, surrealistic but also obscenely real. The forced marriage of an organism to a mechanism, of a thing living, growing, sweet, juicy, to a cold dead artifact—is that solely a concept of nightmare? I discovered the relevance of this image to twentieth-century life when, in 1961, I began to write a novel about curing juvenile delinquency. I had read somewhere that it would be a good idea to liquidate the criminal impulse through aversion therapy; I was appalled. I began to work out the implications of this notion in a brief work of fiction. The title “A Clockwork Orange” was there waiting to attach itself to the book: it was the only possible name.

Han sa också :

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.

Andra förklaringar finns på Wikipedia, men i slutändan är det tydligt Anthony Burgess hade en klar uppfattning om vad A Clockwork Orange faktiskt menade

Anledningen till att jag tar upp det här är att det är en av anledningarna om varför Stanley Kubrick inte förklarade filmens innebörd. Från en intervju gav regissören med Philip Strick & Penelope Houston :

S&H: How closely did you work with Anthony Burgess in adapting A Clockwork Orange for the screen?

Stanley Kubrick: I had virtually no opportunity of discussing the novel with Anthony Burgess. He phoned me one evening when was passing through London and we had a brief conversation on the telephone. It was mostly an exchange of pleasantries. On the other hand, I wasn't particularly concerned about this because in a book as brilliantly written as A Clockwork Orange one would have to be lazy not to be able to find the answers to any questions which might arise within the text of the novel itself. I think it is reasonable to say that, whatever Burgess had to say about the story was said in the book.

Det här förstod naturligtvis inte att han inte huggade och ändra vad Burgess ursprungligen hade skrivit och tillfogade sina egna tolkningar. Burgress, i en senare intervju , sa faktiskt:

The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation

Så klart tyckte han att Kubrick hade tagit sin film i en annan riktning (och de som känner till romanen och filmen kan tydligt se detta). Med dessa förändringar kom ny "mening" uppenbarligen i filmen. Men Kubricks wikisida , komplett med referenser, visar att han alltid föredrog att låta publiken göra sitt eget sinne på hans verk. Filmhistoriker Alex Walker kommenterade:

"Kubrick preferred to leave the film as the only real comment he could make on his work".

Kubrick själv sa:

[He felt a film was "spoiled" for those] unfortunate enough to have read what the filmmaker "has in mind". ... I..enjoy those subtle discoveries where I wonder whether the filmmaker ... was even aware that they were in the film.

Slutsats

Kubrick lämnade ofta sina filmer öppna för tolkning, hatande att ge någon definierad mening åt dem. När det gäller A Clockwork Orange önskade Kubrick fans som verkligen önskade sin mening att antingen: