1 Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

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The debt owed by David Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity,” to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey couldn’t be more obvious. But Kubrick’s next film, a chilly adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, is where the story really gets interesting.

Set in a totalitarian, future-present Britain, A Clockwork Orange is the story of delinquent, Beethoven-loving schoolboy Alex, the leader of a gang that spends its nights raping and pillaging while wired on amphetamine-laced “milk-plus.” Kubrick had set aside his planned biopic of Napoléon Bonaparte to make a movie version after being given a copy of the book by screenwriter Terry Southern, with whom he’d worked on Dr. Strangelove, and falling in love with it. In 1972 Bowie repurposed its swagger and shock value for his career-making turn as “leper messiah” Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual alien rock star with fluffy red hair and a weakness for asymmetric knitted bodysuits who ends up being killed by his fans.

Ziggy was a collision of unstable elements—some obscure (drug-addled rocker Vince Taylor; American psychobilly pioneer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy), others less so. It’s easy to see what Bowie took from Kubrick’s movie because, like his hijacking of the melody from “Over the Rainbow” for the chorus of “Starman,” the borrowing is so blatant. Bowie-as-Ziggy walked onstage to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, as played by Moog synthesizer maestro Wendy Carlos, while his band the Spiders’ costumes were modeled on those of Alex and his droogs—“friends” in Burgess’s invented language Nadsat.

The early ’70s was a grim, embattled era in England. John Lennon sang in 1970 that the (hippie) dream was over. But 1971 was the year things turned brutish as the alternative society splintered into a mass of competing factions such as the radical-left urban terrorists the Angry Brigade—Britain’s answer to Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang—who launched a string of bomb attacks against Establishment targets. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange came out in the UK in January 1972, five months before The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The following year the director withdrew it from cinemas after receiving death threats; the gesture amplified the film’s air of leering menace while saying a good deal about the febrile social climate.

Both the movie and its source novel celebrate the exquisite sense of belonging that being in a gang affords. But they’re also interested in the aftermath: what happens when the gang dissolves and the power that held it together leaks away. You can, if you want, see Alex as Ziggy and his droogs as the Spiders—the fictional band, not Bowie’s actual musicians Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder. In Bowie’s opaque Ziggy narrative they’re cast as bitter sidemen who bitch about their leader’s fans and wonder if they should give him a taste of the old ultraviolence by crushing his sweet hands.…

The novel itself had a tragic genesis. The story goes that in 1959 Burgess was diagnosed incorrectly with terminal brain cancer. Spurred into action, he wrote five novels very quickly to support his soon-to-be widow. A Clockwork Orange took him three weeks and was inspired by a horrific incident in April 1944 where his first wife, Lynne, pregnant at the time—she subsequently miscarried—was assaulted in a blackout by a group of American soldiers. She’d been on her way home from the London offices of the Ministry of War Transport where she was involved in planning the D-Day landings. A Clockwork Orange is interested not just in what might drive someone to carry out this kind of attack, but also in the ethics of rehabilitation. Can you force someone to be good by torturing them, as per the Ludovico Technique aversion therapy Alex undergoes?

If Burgess and Kubrick were equally important to Bowie, it’s worth noting the differences in their visions, differences Burgess considered so stark he ended up renouncing the novel because he felt the film made it easy for readers to misunderstand the book. He meant that his handling of sex and violence was more nuanced than Kubrick’s, which might be true, though in some ways the novel is nastier—for example, the scene where Alex rapes two underage girls after getting them drunk. In the movie they are clearly adult women, the sex is clearly consensual, and Kubrick uses a fast-motion technique to blur the action and create a slapstick tone.

The biggest difference, though, has to do with the ending. The British edition of the novel ends on an optimistic note, with Alex turning his back on violence and contemplating fatherhood. But the original US edition on which Kubrick based his screenplay omits this epilogue. It ends with Alex saying sarcastically, “I was cured all right,” having just shared with us his dream of “carving the whole litso [face] of the creeching [screaming] world with my cut-throat britva [razor].”

Burgess had been intrigued by the razor-packing teddy boys of the late 1950s. Kubrick picked up on the androgyny of the mod culture Bowie flirted with in the mid-1960s. For example, Kubrick turned Alex’s false eyelashes—bought in bulk from hip London boutique Biba, bombed by the Angry Brigade shortly after the shoot concluded—into a key visual motif. Nadsat, the Anglo-Russian slang spoken by Alex, crops up in “Suffragette City.” But the way Bowie used it decades later in one of his final songs, “Girl Loves Me,” suggests a deeper appreciation that leads back to the rich linguistic textures of the novel. For in “Girl Loves Me,” Bowie mixes it knowingly with the secret gay language Polari, reinforcing the cultural historian Michael Bracewell’s point that A Clockwork Orange was an audit on modern masculinity. Finding men to be in crisis, the movie hastened the birth of a new kind of loner—the young soul rebel, who offset corruption with an intense emotional idealism. That sounds like Bowie to me.