The best-known sci-fi movie Stanley Kubrick directed remains 2001: A Space Odyssey, since that’s about as quintessential as the genre gets, especially if you’re talking hard science fiction. It’s not his only masterful sci-fi film, though, since just three years on from 2001: A Space Odyssey, he also directed A Clockwork Orange, which is more dystopian than science fiction in the conventional sense, and also very much a crime film. With 2001: A Space Odyssey, the book of the same name was written and developed at the same time as the movie, but with A Clockwork Orange, it was a more traditionally done adaptation, with the source material, by Anthony Burgess, being published in 1962, and the film coming out just under a decade later.
For the most part, it’s in line with the original novel, but makes some interesting choices near the end that set it apart, as a film. Kubrick makes it a bit more cynical, and even though Burgess wrote so much of what was ultimately in the movie, including the line “I was cured, all right,” it’s being considered here as Kubrick’s line, owing to how he changed the source material to further emphasize – and change the meaning of – the piece of dialogue in question. Confused? Read on! It might get a little less confusing, o my brothers.
The Plot of ‘A Clockwork Orange’
If you don’t know the deal here, A Clockwork Orange is about a young man named Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), though he’s just Alex in the original novel, without a surname given. Anyway, he’s not exactly a great guy, because he rampages around a dystopian Britain, with accomplices he calls his droogs. In both book and movie, you have to put up with them doing a great many horrible things before Alex gets betrayed by his underlings, after antagonizing them one too many times, and he’s left to be arrested at the scene of a crime. He then ends up in jail.
Alex learns he might get released earlier if he agrees to take part in an experimental procedure referred to as the Ludovico technique.
It’s in jail where the sci-fi elements enter into A Clockwork Orange, because Alex learns he might get released earlier if he agrees to take part in an experimental procedure referred to as the Ludovico technique. He’s made to feel nauseous while thinking about or seeing violent things, in turn being turned off from committing further acts of violence… or at least that’s the plan. There are inadvertent side effects, and then much has changed outside prison since Alex was sent away, with victims from before able to get back at him for what he did, and he’s essentially defenseless. He’s tortured by one former victim to the point he jumps out a window, almost to his death, but not quite.
The Ending of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and “I Was Cured, All Right”
You get to the ending, then, if you’re talking about the film, and through his narration, Alex says, “I was cured, all right!” He finds he no longer feels nauseous when he thinks about violence, or hears the music of Beethoven (one of the unintended consequences of the treatment), and so to him, being cured involves being able to go back to his old ways. From the ending of this movie, one imagines Alex eventually getting back out onto the streets, and possibly enacting violence upon those who got back at him when he was defenseless… though of course, many of them did that because he was violent in the first place.
It’s a whole vicious cycle, and in the movie, with him being surrounded by smiling people (both in reality and in his fantasy), it’s a cynical way to end the movie. With the cut to the end credits, “Singin’ in the Rain” is heard again, and with that song infamously underscoring the most upsetting scene in the movie (albeit it’s a version sung by Alex himself, not the Gene Kelly version, which is heard in the end credits). This supports the idea of further misery and violence occurring, with it all being for nothing, and the State – with their treatment that goes wrong, making an unlikely martyr out of Alex – making things worse. So, it’s for less than nothing. It’s a depressing regression, but that’s Kubrick’s doing, because the book is a bit different.
How Stanley Kubrick Altered the Meaning of the Line
Well, the American version of A Clockwork Orange originally didn’t include the final chapter, and Kubrick used that version while writing the screenplay. He learned of the final chapter before filming began, apparently, but then said he thought it didn’t fit the tone of the movie anyway. In the book, Alex temporarily goes back to his old ways, meaning it’s the second-last chapter that ends with the line, “I was cured, all right,” but he’s a bit older and half-hearted with his rampaging. He meets one of his old droogs and finds he’s reformed, which further makes Alex ponder whether his life of crime is worth going along with.
You can still read the book’s ending as slightly ambiguous, and maybe if you want to be cynical, imagine this is only a temporary “see the light” moment. But Kubrick’s version is all about Alex not learning anything, and getting the opportunity to not just double-down on his evil ways, but have a certain amount of support for doing that, owing to how he can play the victim after the controversy with the Ludovico technique. That’s why “I was cured, all right” feels more iconic as a line in Stanley Kubrick’s movie than it did in Burgess’s original novel. There’s a different emphasis placed on it here, and it ends up meaning more – and packing a greater punch – as the story’s final note, rather than a late-game note played before an epilogue that, for the most part, suggests redemption.
