‘A Clockwork Orange’ and Its Psychological Teachings

A Clockwork Orange is one of Stanley Kubrik’s most memorable films Its mix of shocking scenes and social criticism made it a controversial work that, however, has become an icon of cinema (in addition to providing the ingredients for some of the most popular costumes at carnival).

Now, A Clockwork Orange does not stand out only for the spectacular nature of its photography or for criticizing certain aspects of politics. It also contains a reflection that has great value for psychology and that resorts to a psychological current called behaviorism Below we will see what this underlying idea consists of.

Brief review of the film’s plot

In (very) broad strokes, the plot of A Clockwork Orange is as follows.

The protagonist, Alex, is the leader of a gang made up of young people who They regularly entertain themselves by engaging in acts of extreme violence They like to beat up, rape and enter other people’s property to destroy what they find.

But this is not the only thing Alex likes to do; He also feels an almost unhealthy passion for Beethoven’s music, to the point that he hits one of his classmates when he makes fun of someone who listens to those pieces of music. This is one of the protagonist’s weaknesses, although at that moment it is barely evident, since Alex is in a place that allows him to dominate others

However, everything changes when, after murdering a woman, Alex’s colleagues betray him so that the police can arrest him. At that moment the protagonist continues to be defiant and, in his own way, continues to exercise control, pretending to be kinder than he really is in order to receive privileged treatment.

That is partly why he accepts that his sentence be shortened in exchange for undergoing experimental psychological treatment: the Ludovico method, designed to prevent recurrence in acts of violence. Alex is not interested in changing, but in doing what is necessary to be free as soon as possible.

However, the Ludovico treatment not only turns out to be unusually painful and degrading, but it also does its job. In the following lines I explain how it works and the effects it has on the protagonist.

Ludovico’s technique

In the sessions in which he was forced to participate, Alex was strapped to a chair that forced him to constantly look at a screen, while my eyelids were held with rods so that I would not close them. While drops were being applied to his eyes, Alex became a viewer of videos with all kinds of violent content: mutilations, rapes, war scenes…

However, this was not the only thing that the protagonist was registering. At the same time, through a needle, he was supplying a substance that made him feel worse and worse, that he experienced nausea and wanted to get out of there at all costs. All this, throughout sessions that lasted several hours in a row.

The Ludovico treatment is a fictional technique created for the film, and yet it is based on a class of treatments that really existed: therapies based on classical conditioning, used for example to intervene on phobias.

classical conditioning, described by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is based on the phenomenon that by learning to associate a stimulus that causes well-being or rejection on its own from the beginning with another stimulus that in itself does not generate a significant reaction, one can reach the point where the second stimulus becomes into something as aversive or pleasant as the first.

In this case, the government was trying to get Alex to learn to associate what he likes with an intensely unpleasant experience, so that once he was released he couldn’t participate in those kinds of acts without feeling so bad that he couldn’t do it. His expectations were met when, in a test phase, Alex showed himself incapable of attacking even though he tried to provoke him.

From executioner to victim

Alex’s life became hell after his release His desire to participate in violent actions had not disappeared, the only thing that had changed was that he was not able to satisfy that desire, because every time he tried he suffered intense discomfort.

He had gone from being a tyrant to becoming an incredibly vulnerable victim. This becomes clear when he encounters his former colleagues, turned police, who beat Alex without her being able to even attempt to defend herself against her. Something similar happens when one of the homeless people attacked by Alex in the past recognizes him and begins to attack him without the protagonist being able to do anything but flee.

The Beethoven effect

But there is another relevant piece in the protagonist’s transformation. In Ludovico’s treatment sessions, some of the video cuts They had Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as their soundtrack When Alex takes refuge in one of the first houses he finds after being the victim of a beating, he does not realize that the house belongs to one of the men he attacked in the past.

The moment the man realizes who his guest is, and after finding out that he has developed an aversion to both violence and Beethoven, he locks him in a room and forces him to listen to one of the parts of the Ninth. Symphony until he jumped out the window, which he ended up doing.

However, Alex survives, and after being admitted to the hospital becomes an instrument of propaganda for the ruling party which has lost a lot of support after publicly supporting Ludovico’s technique as a reintegration tool and the outcome with the suicide attempt.

The psychology of A Clockwork Orange

The purpose of A Clockwork Orange is not in itself to criticize the current of behavioral psychology (among other things because behaviorism is not based on simple conditioning and gives more importance to the techniques proposed by psychologists such as BF Skinner), but to offer a reflection about the times we lived in at the end of the 20th century. Ludovico’s method is the tool that the film chooses to use to explain how a power beyond the individual can transform the latter into a puppet

This criticism is carried out using two closely related themes: the legitimacy of violence and the degree to which human beings enjoy freedom in liberal democracies.

legitimate violence

The aspect of violence that draws attention to is the fact that Alex is not the only antisocial element in the film: the government also acts by imposing its program, although with one difference: it has the legitimacy to do so.

That is why it is possible to plan and even publicize a treatment as brutal as Ludovico’s technique and it is also why Alex’s former colleagues They can attack it without reason without noticing that there is something that weakens the State These are elements that, despite being based on the use of force, do not seem to go against the logic of the State, but in any case explain how it usually works.

The lack of freedom

The reflection on freedom is perhaps the most interesting from the point of view of psychology. In this film, the government manages to “hack” Alex’s mental processes with a very simple objective: deactivate him as an unpredictable subject and make him meekly fit into the political framework that has been woven to maintain power.

The aim is not to ensure the well-being of the patient, but to stop them from being an element capable of generating harmful headlines in the newspapers. The clash between pacification and violence does not disappear simply leaves the public sphere and moves to the body of the protagonist, who experiences first-hand the suffering that this tension produces.

A final thought

After going through Ludovico’s technique, Alex is not freer, since that would mean having more options to choose how to be happy; On the contrary, it is clearly shown how he becomes a person marked by the limitations that this treatment has imposed on him. The public problem of having a young man with a lust for blood roaming the streets ceases to exist, but another appears that is individual and private and that cannot even be equated to a prison sentence.

This is the option that, according to the film, liberal democracies can provide to the elements that put people at risk. Not to do everything possible to expand people’s horizons of freedom, but to intervene on them by removing from sight what makes the landscape ugly. In short, treating people from the same mechanistic and instrumental perspective that the film’s title suggests