Exploring the government conspiracy theory about ‘A Clockwork Orange’
A Clockwork Orange is one of those rare examples where both the source text and the film adaptation are equally brilliant and unique. While Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 interpretation of the novel certainly contributed to the popularity of the novel, Anthony Burgess’ work was always going to be a literary classic.
Set in the near future, A Clockwork Orange is an incredibly powerful examination of our society’s dangerous obsession with violence. Burgess exposed both sides of the coin, exploring the psychology behind individual acts of violence as well as the violent machinations of the Repressive Ideological Apparatuses designed to keep societal violence in check.
Interestingly, one major conspiracy theory about the novel suggested that Burgess wasn’t the sole author of the book. According to Roger Lewis’ biography of Burgess, the biographer claimed to have met a secret service agent who told him that A Clockwork Orange was a joint effort between Burgess and the British Secret Service.
The man told Lewis that the book was about “the mind-control experimentation conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, between 1957 and 1963, and the Remote Neural Monitoring facility that operated out of Fort George Meade. The CIA were funding controversial research programmes into electronic brain stimulation.”
The sources added: “They induced exhaustion and nightmares in patients; they put hoods or cones over people’s heads to broadcast voices directly into their brains; they irradiated the auditory cortex or inner ear. When patients had their own speech played back to them, incessantly, they went insane. There was a misuse of civilians in these covert operations, and intelligence on these devices remains classified.”
While that might seem like a stretch to most readers, Lewis further claimed that Burgess worked with ex-CIA agent Howard Roman who was responsible for the usage of American terms in the book. Not just that, Lewis’ “secret spy contact” also told him that the book was littered with secret codes and references to locations of government headquarters where they conducted psychological experiments.
The theory put forward by Lewis sounds like it would make a fascinating thriller of its own. Unfortunately, the author could not provide any evidence about his claims and all the quotes were attributed to an anonymous non-entity. Still, it does serve as a bizarre addition to the extensive legacy of A Clockwork Orange.
