British author Anthony Burgess claims that he heard "queer as a clockwork orange" as a Cockney phrase on the streets of London. He liked it so much that he co-opted it as the title for a novel, which was later made into a movie. (There is, however, no evidence that the phrase was ever used before 1962, so Burgess probably made it up.)
The novel suggests that a man, like an orange, does not benefit from being engineered. In fact, he posits that attempts by the government to socially engineer its populace are more evil than things that have been with us for a long time, like rape and murder. The novel is a difficult read because the main characters extensively use a pseudo-Russian slang invented by Burgess called nadsat. There is no explanation for what the terms mean, so the reader must puzzle them out. This is intentional—Burgess wants you to feel alienated by the dystopian world he is describing. But, in my opinion, he took it too far.
And by all accounts the film is more difficult to watch than the book is to read because of the graphic things it depicts.
So do yourself a favor: skip the book and the film and just enjoy this clockwork orange instead.
This illustration was drawn using Stable Diffusion 2.1.
