The book and the film

Rating: 9/10 (10 July 2019)

This movie is about watching other movies, and how those movies influence us. Kubrick was never about the writing. He was all about the photography and what's on the screen being presented to you. So consider what is being presented to us:
Our on screen surrogates, the droogs, are in costume, constantly performing for each other, with theatrical speech and slang.
The rumble with their rivals is on a stage.
The rape scene is acted out as another film (they even sing the song for you)
There is a non stop focus on the eye - this is meant to be your eye.
Here's where it got interesting and meta, and it was already in the book too: the accosted writer is (self-referentially) the writer of the film, who incidentally drives the character to suicide by exposing him to a performance.
This is all meant to hit you over the head during the therapy scenes. Alex is forced to watch movies, just as we are forced to watch him watch.
Kubrick knows how to handle abstraction. When there is a film in a film, the degree of abstraction has to be the same inside the film, as the film we are watching has with real life.