Anthony Burgess considered the novel to be one of his less important works, and that the only reason it was ever made popular was Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Kubrick, as an artist of singular vision, fleshed out the themes prevalent, but subtle, in Burgess’s work: the interplay of ethics and free will – whether a person conditioned to behave as a moral member of society truly is moral; and a broadside indictment of behavioral conditioning, so prominently displayed in the film’s iconic Ludovico Technique scene of a man strapped to a chair and forced to watch horrific images on a screen. Burgess’s book caused no small amount of controversy for its material; Kubrick just intensified it.

On this day, December 19, in 1971, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange premiered. Kubrick’s refusal to shy away from Burgess’s explicitness earned the movie an X rating and a ban in the United Kingdom.

The story’s protagonist, Alex, is an aimless street youth, prone to violence and crime, who is caught by the police and subjected to radical treatment. Alex emerges from the treatment with a visceral association of violence with sickness, which bodes ill for him at an encounter with his former gangmates. A defenseless Alex is beaten and left for dead, fortunately found by a government minister, who takes to using him as a propaganda tool. Eventually the associative effect wears off and Alex comes back to his former self. While Burgess includes a final redemptive chapter in his book, where Alex grows up and loses interest in violence, Kubrick does not.