Free Will in A Clockwork Orange

The Clockwork Orange emphasizes the fundamental importance of moral choice. This was show en through the ultra-violence of Alex. After the movies release, copycat crimes were so rife in Britain, that Kubrick himself withdrew it from U.K. markets for over two decades. Kubrick fell victim for the usual moralistic condemnations for the way the film seemed to colorize Alex's rapacious taste for ultra-violence. This backlash was based on an incomplete understanding of the director's intentions.

I find A Clockwork Orange to be one of Stanley Kubrick's most life-affirming works. The final scene, where a chastened Prime Minister has an impressive sound system wheeled into Alex's hospital room, the chorale finale of the "Ode to Joy" booming in the background while Alex fantasizes about raping a young woman as a Victorian-era upper crust applauds in approval, is one of the most ambivalently exhilarating sequences in the history of cinema. Alex ends the film with with: "I was cured, all right!"

Alex was cured from was the effect of the Ludovico technique. His attempt to "snuff it" by jumping out a window had caused him sufficient trauma to the head. However, this trauma did not liberate him from the nightmarish conditioning process as most people who have seen the movie have interpreted. Alex was conditioned to to feel nausea whenever he was confronted by sex and violence. However, Alex, conditioned himself to tolerate the nausea using graphic sexually violent images to deter the nausea. He could then resume his old sadistic thoughts and condition himself to no longer become nauseated at the prospect of sex or violence, Alex was free to resume his old ways. In my view, Kubrick celebrates Alex's recovered freedom of choice here. No matter how monstrous Alex was, it was clear that the State attempted to rob Alex of his free will. After his suicide attempt, the state saw they had done wrong, that they revoked his free will by conditioning him to not have a choice.

Kubrick focused on this theme. In an interview with Stanly Kubrick in 1980 about the film, the question "how do you see your own film?" was asked. Kubrick replied that "The central idea of the film has to do with the question of free will". Do we lose our humanity if we are deprived of the choice between good and evil? Do we become, as the title suggests, A Clockwork Orange?" Kubrick answers "yes" to this question.

To reduce Alex to a collection of innate drives and claim that he did not have free will before the Ludovico treatment because his psychological makeup governed his behavior seems to miss the real point of the film. Alex, before the treatment was a free agent capable of moral choice and after the treatment, he was robed of making moral choices. In the novel, the chaplain asks Alex, as he considers whether to submit himself to the conditioning process, if it might not be better to choose evil willingly than to do good unwillingly. The answer to that question is that indeed it might.

At the end Kubrick has us identify with Alex not just as the embodiment of our repressed desires, but as an immensely dynamic force of life, albeit one put to evil ends. Kubrick stacks the deck early on by making Alex's victims as unsympathetic as possible (in chronological order, a sodden street bum, a gang about to rape someone, a rich bleeding heart liberal and his snooty wife, his own derelict droogs, and the bony old ptitsa with 100 cats), so we feel little for them when they are abused. In the end, we rejoice that Alex has recovered his will, though we expect him to return to his old, depraved ways, and this time as a protected member of the establishment.

It is comparatively easy to affirm human existence by depicting the triumph of good over evil. It is much more difficult to convincingly celebrate being in the world in the face of some of its greatest challenges. Tragedy, to my mind, is the most profound of theatrical genres precisely because of its ability to be life affirming despite the injustice of the fates of its protagonists. A Clockwork Orange celebrates human freedom, while showing some of its distasteful consequences. In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick confronts us with the immoral monstrosity that is little Alex. For the Ode to Joy at the end tells us how to read the meaning of the sequence; it would be much worse for society to rob such an individual of the capacity to do evil than it is to be forced to continue to deal with the consequences of his choosing to do so.