Musick Hund On A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange” is one of the deepest movies ever made on the subject of violence. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel sets up the issue in a very unsettling way. We cannot help but be drawn into Alex’s point of view, and this is unsettling precisely because he finds violence to be a joyous celebration of pure agency. The movie forces us, vicariously, to feel that too.

There’s a sense in which—in the first act of the film— Alex and his droogs exist, as it were, in a “state of nature” insofar as violence is concerned. This is underscored by Alex’s response to the idea of going after the “big big money” (instead of the hardcore mayhem and petty theft he is drawn to, as he is drawn to the music that makes up the soundtrack to his violent fantasies), “And what will you do with the big, big, money? Have you not everything you need? If you need a motor-car, you pluck it from the trees. If you need pretty polly, you take it.” This sounds a lot like Rousseau’s description of labor-free humans in the state of nature in “A Discourse on Inequality.” Planning a score starts to sound a lot like work to carefree Alex. So he reasserts his pack leadership through an act of violence that Kubrick presents as a slow-motion ballet. 

However, as Alex soon finds out, his power over his mates must be consensual, not coercive. In Arendtian terms, he conflates power and violence, not realizing that his strength as a leader derived almost entirely from the willingness of his droogs to be lead. Alex ends up in the hands of the state, and the state ends up making the same mistake he did. The “Ludovico Technique” is high tech version of the sorting out of obedience that Alex thought he had successfully administered to his droogs. It backfires for the same reason, namely that moral or immoral behavior is, a the padre remarks, entirely matter of choice, or else it is merely a matter of instrumental coercion, which, in Arendt’s terms, can only be applied instead of power, not as a means to it.