“YOU REALIZE: NO ONE IN A DYSTOPIA PROBABLY THINKS THEY’RE LIVING IN A DYSTOPIA.” James Lileks compares the pre-graffitied British Mcdonald’s restaurant that we linked to on Sunday to the garish sets in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange: “Trash chic aside, the touchscreens and their mounting bracket would belong at the Korova milkbar.”
Burgess’ novel was indeed “A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece,” as the great Theodore Dalrymple wrote a decade ago at City Journal:
Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums. The result is that adolescents and young men take any refusal of a request as lèse-majesté, a challenge to the integrity of their ego. When I refused to prescribe medicine that young men wanted but that I thought they did not need, they would sometimes answer in aggrieved disbelief, “No? What do you mean, no?” It was not a familiar concept. And in a sense, my refusal was pointless, insofar as any such young man would soon enough find a doctor whom he could intimidate into prescribing what he wanted. Burgess would not have been surprised by this state of affairs: he saw it coming.
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Alex’s parents (one of the things Burgess didn’t foresee is the rise of the single-parent family) are afraid of him. He comes home late and plays his music very loud, but “Pee and em [Father and Mother] . . . had learnt now not to knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them. Now they would take sleep-pills.” When Alex’s father wants to know what he does at night—Alex is only 15—he is apologetic and deferential: “ ‘Not that I want to pry, son, but where exactly is it you go to work of evenings?’ . . . My dad was like humble mumble chumble. ‘Sorry, son,’ he said. ‘But I get worried sometimes.’ ”
When in a symbolic reversal of the direction of authority Alex offers his father some money (robbed, of course) so that he can buy himself a drink in the pub, his father says: “Thanks, son. . . . But we don’t go out much now. We daren’t go out much, the streets being what they are. Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks.”
In 1962, the idea that the young would someday impose upon old people in Britain a de facto after-dark curfew was still unimaginable, but Burgess, seeing the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand on the horizon, imagined that outcome very vividly. With a prophet’s imagination, he saw what would happen when the cloud grew until it covered the sky.
But I’m not sure if Burgess would have anticipated the other “youth culture” that’s about to wreak havoc on England, or how already parts of England make Alex and his droogs seem positive tame by comparison.