I had this high school teacher, Mr. Alvarez. A strange, yet amusing little man. One day, he had the audacity to show us A Clockwork Orange in class for reasons I still can't quite fathom, though looking back, it's hard not to chuckle. I often wonder if he ever got fired for that little stunt. After the film ended, he left us with a thought-provoking remark: "What A Clockwork Orange means to you as a teen will not be what it means to you as an adult." How right he was. At 38, the film carries an entirely different weight than it did at 16. As a rebellious teenager, I was drawn to the film's mysterious mayhem, captivated by its vivid imagery, and unsettling narrative. Though I wasn't a troublemaker—never got into fights, steered clear of drugs, and barely understood the concept of 'misogyny'—A Clockwork Orange had a magnetic pull like no other. Its vibrant colors, peculiar slang, grotesque set pieces, and sociopathic characters both fascinated and terrified me. And I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I first watched it. 

I was alone in a dark room. 14 years old. Parents and siblings had gone to bed. A dark, electronic crash from a moog synthesizer suddenly opened the film against a crimson-orange backdrop, swirling and clamoring until it found the shape it was looking for: Purcell’s “Music for Queen Mary’s Funeral.” It’s the kind of bold, aggressive musical choice that immediately commands your attention, and in my case, paralyzed me with a brilliant kind of fear. Alex’s face and eyes suddenly fill the screen. The fear amplifies. I’m staring at him, and he just stares right back. Kubrick holds for quite some time allowing his “glare” to work its evil, evil magic. So effective. That contorted smirk, that creepy eyelash, the way his psychotic grinning face draws you into a vicious staring match as you itch to make sense of the dread he exhibits. The camera slowly zooms out into the Korova Milk Bar revealing both the rotten womb of a teenage death chamber and the horror of an eerie, clinically-lit sexual decor. Nude statues riddle the place, with crude female posturing, white plastic milk machines, the openness of male sexuality, the brutality against naked women, and the overall menacing air of emphatic misogyny. 

To this day, it remains the most frightening opening I’ve ever witnessed in any film, both for its startling, sinister visuals and its uncertain psychological surfaces. And that’s the thing. As a teen, watching Alex and his droogs do terrible things to other people was something I only ever felt and was super disturbed by, but could never snap into swift, intellectual form. I knew what I was watching was evil, but I was nonetheless fascinated by the style, the wit, the gripping first-person narrator, and the larger philosophical ideas that snaked their way into my young, fledgling mind. 

As an adult, I’ve come to understand how profoundly controversial the emotional response to this film is, and how it manifests differently in different people. Kubrick takes a massive risk by plunging you directly into Alex’s point of view, like Burgess does in the novel. This choice forces you to see things through Alex’s eyes, which means you’re quickly drawn into a nefarious world where things like rape, murder, burglary, car theft and home invasion are characterized as fun, exciting, and hormonally fantastic. There’s no sanitizing the personification of evil from the perspective of evil itself, especially for a character who ruthlessly demands the helm to envision the world in his own way, through his own false eyelash. Of this first-person perspective Kubrick defended:

 “I’d say that my intention with A Clockwork Orange was to be faithful to the novel and to try and see the violence from Alex’s point of view, to show that it was great fun for him, the happiest part of his life, and that it was like some great action ballet. It was necessary to find a way of stylizing the violence, just as Burgess does by his writing style.” 

The stylization of violence in the film easily opens itself up to be criticized as exploitative and celebratory, but this is a risk that places you directly into Alex’s villain-brain, which is crucial to the film’s thesis on free will, punishment, reform, human evil, the mechanical universe, and the way Kubrick uses ironic misdirection to complicate our grasp of “Alex-as-human.” In relation to the film’s aesthetics, what Alex says (voiceover), what he sees (subjective camera), and what he thinks (mind-tv) are all critical components for lodging these Kubrickian-Burgessian themes into a highly subjective, ever-paradoxical frame of reference.

Let’s start with “Alex-as-human.”

On the one hand, Alex is never a character you like, enjoy or agree with. You’re meant to despise and fear him. He’s a nasty and completely despicable bastard in which the viewer requires no aversion therapy to feel real disgust for him. The disgust is automatic. He’s certainly not an individual that should be free at large, so from the perspective of societal safety he is blameworthy and punishable. In the middle of the spectrum, Alex is a pure psychopath. He lacks not only a conscience, like an innocent, but a working knowledge of what it means to be free. In the beginning, for example, the ecstasy he feels for raping women and beating up others is purely a matter of animal instinct. He has no morals about his actions, and certainly no regret. His aggression is strictly a matter of pleasure and entertainment. It’s as though he exists in a corrupt Eden without knowing he’s corrupt. Or maybe he exists in a Hobbesian state of nature and knows only the “nasty, brutish” ways of nature and not the elevated, humane. How blame, culpability and punishment work from this perspective is ambiguous. People can only be held accountable for what they freely choose, but a psychopath doesn’t have a conscience so how do you assign blame? On the other hand, at the other side of the spectrum, Alex’s love of language (culture) and Beethoven (beauty) ironically forces you to identify not just with his more redeemable traits, but those very aspects that make him most human and relatable. The marriage of these three poles—Alex the monster, Alex the innocent psychopath, and Alex the man—join together to express the paradox of “Alex-as-human,” which only gets further complicated once he’s thrown into prison.

The prison sequence is the most fascinating part of the film. It reshapes the “ultra-violence” of the first half by arguing that the greater violence committed, in this already “real horror show” of a movie, is in stripping Alex of his autonomy through forced psychological conditioning. One may wonder if the “Ludovico Technique,” an experimental treatment to correct bad behavior, represents a greater evil than what the viewer has already subjectively endured through Alex’s wicked point of view. For Burgess, “the freedom to choose is the big human attribute.” Individuals must be allowed to make their own choices, even if that results in viciousness. If inherent evil is forcibly denied, as the State tries to do with Alex, then the definition of human nature becomes indistinguishable from a machine. Forcing someone to be good without the option to choose bad is meant to be a net positive for securing a “greater societal good” by preventing crimes, but it’s also no different than programming a computer with code that, once set in motion, has no choice but to fulfill its logic. This is where the dystopian nature of the film really becomes clear: the State doesn’t want civilization to be comprised of human beings who might potentially choose wrong. The State prefers the efficiency of well-oiled, well-behaved robots that must choose good, even if destroying human choice blinds them to the Kubrickian ironies of pumping out Doomsday Machines from Strangelove, or HAL 9000s from 2001. 

Alex is vile and reprehensible, but from the Burgessian perspective, he is undeniably human. His choices about what it means to be human make the first half of the story uncomfortable to watch. Yet, by freely choosing violence, he affirms his identity and sense of self. In contrast, the State seeks totalitarian control over Alex's body and mind, aiming to eradicate what Burgess believes defines humanity. The State's suppression of Alex's ability to make his own decisions represents a world "in which everything is made easy, where you are wound up like a clockwork machine, always good and without the burden of ethical choices." Burgess is deeply committed to freedom and human choice, opposing the clockwork universe, a sentiment echoed by Kubrick. Kubrick emphasizes Alex's freedom in horrifyingly graphic terms. The discomfort of the first half serves to establish the connection between the two halves of the narrative, illuminating important aspects of Kubrick's use of stylized violence.

First, Kubrick’s style pits the viewer between the atrocities of a violent youth in the first half and the moral dilemma of destroying his will in the second half, asking, in effect, which is worse—To be human, or to be a machine? Second, the paradoxical choice between a society of control versus a society of freedom challenges the viewer to simultaneously preserve their feelings of disgust towards the Alex of the first half without making his humanity of the second half feel completely dispensable. Third, even the prison chaplain believes in the value of free will (“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”). However, the irony of the chaplain’s hellfire sermons is linked to the horrors of his enforced social contract (Ludovico), and this makes the physical rape-violence of the first half feel darkly psychological in the second half. Fourth, and perhaps most controversial, the Kubrickian-Burgessian skepticism of the clockwork universe reshapes the apocryphal “Free Speech” idiom of Voltaire. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is cinematically changed to “We disapprove of what Alex and his droogs do, but will defend to the death their ability to make their own choices **over** a government that systematically seeks to suppress their individuality by turning them into wound-up automatons.” As Burgess contends: “It is better to be bad of one’s own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing.” 

None of this suggests that Alex shouldn’t be punished, that jail-time is never warranted, or that criminals should always go exonerated. It only suggests that destroying human agency through forced psychological conditioning is not the path to reform and rehabilitation. 

B.F. Skinner, the American psychological behaviorist, was ultimately against negative reinforcement and would’ve contested to Alex’s sadistic rehab conditioning, the part that vaccinates him against future crime by inducing violent sickness. Skinner would’ve called this conditioning of the wrong sort. He was a proponent of positive reinforcement and other behavioral interventions, believing that humans could inevitably control both stimulus and response: “Behavior can be changed by changing the conditions of which it is a function.” Our world is in a bad way, says Skinner, human behavior must change before we destroy ourselves, and conditioning based on rewards (not punishment) will help us become better citizens. Burgess rejected Skinner’s beneficent brainwashing technology due to his personal commitment to unfettered free will. Kubrick disagreed with Skinner’s reductive notion that human nature could be “explained” in rational-behaviorist terms, but what’s interesting to consider is that he recognized something critical in Skinner’s call for reform, something that was very much adjacent to his own view of humanity’s nihilist penchant for self-destruction. Check out this fascinating statement he makes after reading Skinner’s book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity: 

“It works on the premise that human freedom and dignity have become inconsistent with the survival of our civilization. It’s a very startling and sinister and not totally refutable contention.”

Put differently, Kubrick sympathizes with Skinner’s premise to condition human behavior, at least in principle, because he recognizes the destructive power of human freedom for sending us back to the Stone Age. 2001 and Dr. Strangelove are prime examples of the universe moving in reverse because of the threat of nuclear annihilation, both of which affirm the nihilist tendency of humans using free will not in the name of progress, but in the name of self-destruction. Interestingly, Kubrick’s films don’t necessarily cast blame on individuals themselves. His films see the brutality and irrationality of individuals stemming more from collectivist systems, plans, mindsets, institutions and widespread societies, none of which account for the contingencies of a paradoxical universe. THE KILLING, for example, finds Johnny’s rational “fool-proof” plan ill-equipped to handle the complexities of a much stranger, unpredictable universe. In PATHS OF GLORY, institutional commands turn humans into suicidal death-machines; those who disobey are simply dehumanized in the political machinery of the court. In LOLITA, Humbert follows a perverted mindset to its logical end, only to discover his self-destructive shadow, Quilty, who he must annihilate. Ripper, in DR. STRANGELOVE, is the chaotic product of Cold War bureaucracy and military indoctrination, whose obsession with “purity” and “fail-safe” systems leads not only to his own insanity, but to the obliteration of the entire human race. 2001 depicts nothing but primal struggles and evolutionary regression, where orderly systems and societies are eternally annihilated by their inabilities to account for their own destructive human-machine tendencies. In each of these films, the underlying structures of our personal and collective existence reveal that our dependence upon authorities, systems and fantasies, etc. are not only fragile but also blinding to the dangers of nihilism.

Coming full circle to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kubrick draws attention to Alex’s sociopathic behavior in order to connect the results of his delinquency back to an oppressive, dehumanizing State. During the first half, the dystopian society in which he lives feels almost entirely without law and order, a rusted criminal’s playground that creates little Alexes to run amok, due to living in a highly hedonistic and repressed society. In prison, Alex falls victim to the mechanical society and the institutional monoliths of Church, Science and State. He is forced, at the hands of behavioral engineers and political scientists, to become more machine than man; in effect, he is a robotic monster of a clockwork state. Through this vicious feedback loop of the first and second halves, the individual evil of the hedonistic society is connected to the systemic evil of the mechanical society, providing no answers as to which is more desirable or solvable. On the one hand, collectivist systems and cultural monoliths that are said to be irrefutably rational, orderly and moral are what Kubrick repeatedly questions and satirizes throughout his work. On the other hand, unfettered free will has “become inconsistent with the survival of our civilization.” The demise of civilization is enhanced on either end of the paradox — total freedom leads to a dystopia of thugs, murderers, and rapists; total control leads to a dystopia of forced personas, fake transformations, and suppression of the very attribute that makes us human: our wills.

On the point of personal transformation, Kubrick’s version of the story defies the “orange-oozing sweetness” of the British ending of the book. For Burgess, Alex’s arc is entirely about the clockwork rhythms of youth and the rites of passage into adulthood. Young people are forever engaged in the spoils of youth and the nastiness of teenage character, but through the redeeming grace of freewill they eventually put off the clockwork man and become “creatures of growth and capable of sweetness,” like an orange. Kubrick wasn’t a man of sentiment or fairytale ribbons. He removes that “sweetness” from his version because for him, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE isn’t about religious notions of grace, forgiveness, or redemption, nor is it about feeling sympathetic for Alex on his journey. Kubrick’s vision is primarily about two things: 1). The sanctity of freewill as a necessary given, even if people choose evil, and 2). Whether a person can be forcibly changed and whether it is ethical to do so, even if it’s for the greater good of society. For Kubrick, mechanistic morality is not a substitute for anarchism. Artificial interference with the natural (even not so natural) course of human development is just a gambit for awakening the delayed yet destructive capacities of a HAL 9000 or a Doomsday machine. As such, in Kubrick’s eyes, Alex is neither capable of orange-ness nor is he subject to the gears of a clockwork machine, for in that final sexualized image that comes to us with rapturous applause from the on-watchers, he denies Burgess’ 21st chapter and leaves it ambiguous as to whether Alex truly transformed. 

Here’s some final speculation: 2001 ends with the ambiguous yet serene stare of a Star Child, whereas A CLOCKWORK ORANGE begins with the malevolent stare of a sadistic rapist. Within the glare of the Star Child, there exists an infinite number of rebirths as humanity strives to avoid the cataclysms of DR. STRANGELOVE. As A CLOCKWORK ORANGE chronologically follows 2001, it would seem the next iteration of the Star Child’s future has once again been corrupted by illicit human urges, blurring the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE posits a different kind of slow-burn destruction from its predecessors, one that doesn’t instantly wipe away humanity in a mushroom cloud, but teeters on a precipice of fragility that gradually pollutes the social and moral order of things. The film watches, with bated breath, as societies inch their way towards oblivion and beyond. If we want to believe Alex truly transformed, the Star Child’s gaze is benevolent and Burgess’ 21st chapter is eternalized. If want to believe Alex returns to his old life, the Star Child’s gaze portends the extinction of the human race along with the reboot to do better in the sequels. Kubrick allows both options to exist. He presents the symptoms and consequences of nihilism with unflinching honesty, but also points beyond the problem. Are we all feeling a bit shagged and fagged and fashed, my brothers?

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