Synopsis
England, the near future. The city has no precise name but is recognisable: it is every Western city brought to its point of saturation. Alex DeLarge is seventeen years old, speaks a hybrid Russian-English slang called nadsat, loves Ludwig van Beethoven with an almost religious devotion, and leads a gang of four thugs — the droogs — through nights of gratuitous and systematic violence. The Korova Milkbar serves drug-laced milk. Outside, beggars are beaten, homes invaded, women raped while their husbands watch, immobilised. Alex performs all of this with the grace and detachment of a conductor who already knows every note of the score.
One evening the gang splits. A robbery goes wrong: Alex beats a woman to death with a phallic sculpture in her cat-filled villa. The droogs knock him out and hand him over to the police. Arrested, sentenced to fourteen years, Alex spends two years in prison learning to simulate redemption. When the government launches an experimental programme — the Ludovico Technique — to reduce prison overcrowding, Alex volunteers.
The technique is simple in its brutality: for two weeks Alex is immobilised in a chair, eyes held open by metal clamps, forced to watch footage of extreme violence while a chemical serum induces acute nausea. Violence and suffering become neurologically linked. But through a programming error — or perhaps an irony of fate — the soundtrack of the footage includes the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth. Alex emerges conditioned: he can no longer commit violence without collapsing, but he has also lost the music. The only language in which he recognised himself has been taken from him.
Released as proof of the government's success, Alex re-enters a world that does not forgive. His parents no longer recognise him as their son. An old tramp he had beaten years before finds him and attacks him with others. Two of his former droogs have become policemen and drag him into open countryside to drown him in a cattle trough. Half dead, he knocks on the door of a writer — Frank Alexander — whom he himself had assaulted years earlier and whose wife had died as a result of that night. Alexander does not recognise Alex but understands he can use him: he exposes him to Beethoven's Ninth amplified in a sealed room to push him to suicide, with the political objective of bringing down the government that produced the Ludovico Technique.
Alex falls from a window. He survives. In hospital, the government — fearing political scandal — rehabilitates him, reverses the conditioning, restores to him both violence and music. The film's final image: Alex imagining himself having sex in the middle of an applauding crowd in Victorian dress, the Ninth playing in the background. Voice-over: "I was cured, all right."
Review
14 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 30. June 2026
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The title as philosophical enigma
A Clockwork Orange is a title that functions as a conceptual trap. Anthony Burgess, who wrote the novel in 1962 in three weeks after being told he had a brain tumour (a diagnosis later proved wrong), declared that he had borrowed an expression from Cockney slang — queer as a clockwork orange — to indicate something that on the surface appears organic, natural, alive, and that inside is purely mechanical, artificial, devoid of its own life.
The orange is the human body: soft, coloured, biological, fragrant. The mechanism is what the conditioning technique would install within it: a behavioural automatism that replaces choice with conditioned response, volition with reflex, freedom with function. The title does not describe Alex before the conditioning. It describes Alex after: a being who retains every appearance of humanity — walks, speaks, laughs, suffers — but has lost the faculty that made that humanity human: the capacity to choose.
Kubrick adds a second level that Burgess had left implicit: the mechanism is not only the one installed in Alex's mind by the Ludovico Technique. It is the one already present in society as a whole — in the media, in the institutions, in the power structures that produce violence and then punish it, that create monsters and then exhibit them as proof of their own necessity. A Clockwork Orange is society itself, not merely its most disturbing product.
Free will as theological and political question
Burgess was a Catholic, and A Clockwork Orange is, in a deep sense, a theological work disguised as a dystopian novel. Its central thesis is of a brutal simplicity: evil is the price of freedom. A man who cannot do evil is not a good man — he is a machine set to a function. Goodness, to be real, must be chosen. And choice necessarily implies the possibility of its opposite.
This argument — rooted in Augustine, in Aquinas, in the medieval debate on grace and free will — is embodied in the film with ferocious irony: the prison chaplain is the only character who truly understands what is at stake. "God wants goodness," he says, "he does not want good machines." But his voice counts for nothing in the economy of political power. The government is not interested in goodness: it is interested in conformity.
Kant had established that human dignity resides in autonomy — in the capacity to give oneself one's own moral law through reason. Removing from Alex the capacity to choose does not make him better: it strips him of dignity, degrades him to a means. The Ludovico Technique is not redemption: it is reduction. Kubrick's film is, among other things, a fierce critique of the utilitarianism that sacrifices the individual on the altar of the collective good — and of Skinnerian behaviourism that reduces the human being to a system of conditionable responses, ignoring the interior dimension of experience.
Violence as the grammar of power
The film establishes from its opening sequences a precise mapping: violence is not Alex's problem. It is the common language of an entire society, inflected in different registers depending on who speaks it.
Alex and the droogs exercise violence with the frankness of the strong toward the weak: it is aesthetic, theatrical, self-aware violence. Alex does not hide — he performs. The home invasion sequence — Alex singing Singin' in the Rain while beating the writer and raping his wife — is unbearable cinema precisely because it is choreographed. Violence is spectacle, and Alex is its knowing director.
The police exercise the same violence with the advantage of a uniform: the two former droogs who drag Alex into the countryside and nearly drown him are no different from what they were before — they have simply changed costume. The state authorises their violence; Alex's it does not. The difference is not moral but bureaucratic.
The government exercises the most sophisticated and most obscene violence: the technical, medical kind, presented as a cure. The Ludovico Technique does not beat — it conditions. It does not wound the body — it violates the mind. It is the violence of power that does not recognise itself as such, that calls itself rehabilitation while practising neuropsychological torture.
Citizens, finally, exercise the violence of revenge — the tramp who attacks Alex with his companions, the writer who uses him as a political instrument, the society that offers no path to reintegration. Collective morality does not forgive: it wants blood, not healing. And in this it is indistinguishable from Alex.
What Kubrick shows with surgical precision is that there exists no plane of moral purity in the work. No character is innocent. No institution is just. Violence circulates in every direction like a current that no one has created but that everyone feeds.
Art and violence: Beethoven as paradox
Alex's relationship with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is the most unexpected and most fertile philosophical core of the film. Alex does not use the music as a cultural alibi — he lives it with an authentic, almost mystical intensity. When he listens to Beethoven, the mental images he produces are of total destruction: explosions, catastrophes, falling bodies. The highest beauty of Western civilisation and the desire for annihilation inhabit the same room, without apparent contradiction.
This is not a paradox resolved by the film but left open like a wound. Nietzsche had written that art is born from the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian — between form and chaos, measure and frenzy. Alex is purely Dionysian: the Ninth gives him access to something prior to ethics, to an energy that precedes the distinction between good and evil. The question the film poses — and which no one has yet answered satisfactorily — is whether a structural connection exists between intense aesthetic experience and the destructive drive, or whether Alex is simply a particularly eloquent clinical case.
Thomas Mann, in Doctor Faustus, had already explored the territory: the musical genius who sells his soul to the devil, the great German art that proves contiguous with Nazi barbarism. Kubrick does not cite Mann but inhabits the same conceptual space. And the Ludovico Technique, which irreparably contaminates the Ninth by associating it with nausea, is a metaphor for what happens when the state enters aesthetic experience: it destroys it. Not Alex's evil — the art.
The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord published La Société du spectacle in 1967, a year before Kubrick began working on the film. The two works do not know each other but think the same world. For Debord, modern society has replaced living with representing: everything that was direct experience has been transformed into image, into consumable spectacle. Authentic life has retreated, replaced by its representation.
Alex lives this logic with absolute consistency. His violence is never private — it is always performance. The droog costume (bowler hat, white jumpsuit, false eyelashes, cane) is a theatrical costume: Alex dresses for the stage of the street. Every action is choreographed, every gesture aware of its own visual effect. Alex does not commit violence — he executes it, as one executes a score.
But the film itself is a spectacle about violence — and Kubrick knows it. The camera that follows Alex with formal admiration, that renders the most atrocious sequences aesthetically splendid, that uses the music of Rossini and Beethoven to make the beatings almost comic and balletic: Kubrick does not document violence, he stages it. And the viewer who remains in the theatre — who does not leave, who watches — is already inside the logic the film criticises. We are all in the Society of the Spectacle. The difference between us and Alex is only one of distance from the camera.
Debord wrote that the domination of the spectacle is the dictatorship of appearance: what matters is not reality but its image. The government that uses Alex as proof of its own efficiency — and then uses him again as a scandal against the opposition — does not manage reality but its media representation. Alex is not a citizen: he is content.
Identity and dehumanisation
Nadsat — the hybrid Russian-English language invented by Burgess — is far more than a stylistic device. It is the linguistic sign of an autonomous, irreducible identity that the system cannot completely colonise. Alex speaks nadsat as one speaks a mother tongue: with fluency, with irony, with pleasure. When the system conditions him, the conditioning acts on behaviours but not on language. Alex emerges from the Ludovico Technique still speaking nadsat — and nadsat is resistance.
Dehumanisation in the film moves in two opposite directions that converge on the same result. Alex dehumanises his victims: for him they are objects upon which to exercise will, not subjects with an inner life. But the system dehumanises Alex with equal efficiency: the Ludovico Technique does not see him as a person but as a technical problem to be solved. The registration number replaces the name. The chair replaces the body. The clamps replace the eyes.
The question the film leaves unresolved — and which has grown ever more urgent — is whether a moral difference exists between the two forms of dehumanisation. Alex chooses not to see the humanity of the other; the system chooses not to see the humanity of Alex. The difference in scale is not necessarily a difference in kind.
The moral responsibility of the State
Kubrick's film is, among other things, a trial of institutions: not corrupt or exceptionally malevolent institutions, but normal ones, which function exactly as they are designed to function and nonetheless produce a monstrous outcome.
The prison does not rehabilitate — it manages bodies. Medicine does not heal — it obeys government committees. The government does not govern — it produces consensus. The family does not welcome — it adapts. The church — in the figure of the chaplain — understands but can do nothing. Every institution has its own internal logic that does not pause before the individual: it passes through him, uses him, expels him.
The "banality of evil" requires not monsters but functionaries, not sadists but bureaucrats. The Minister of the Interior who shakes Alex's hand in hospital, smiling for the cameras, is the banality of evil in a double-breasted suit. He does not hate Alex. He uses him. And indifference is worse than hatred because it leaves no room even for moral rivalry.
The responsibility of the State that Kubrick stages is not that of having created Alex — society produces violence for structural reasons that precede any individual. The responsibility is that of having responded to violence with another violence more sophisticated and more hypocritical, without ever interrogating the conditions that produce that violence. And then of having used the product of that violence — conditioned Alex — as propaganda, as political commodity, as spectacle.
Parallels
A Clockwork Orange continues to exert a surprising force of attraction on contemporary cinema because it anticipated questions that today run through very different works. As in Pluribus, identity no longer appears as an original given but as the result of continuous modelling exercised by political, technological and cultural devices, throwing into crisis the very idea of a truly autonomous subject. In the same way, The Zone of Interest shares with Kubrick a reflection on the normalisation of violence: if in the 1971 film it erupts in a spectacular dimension, in Jonathan Glazer's work it is absorbed into daily life until it becomes an integral part of domestic order, demonstrating how evil can be administered and rendered invisible through the efficiency of institutions. This tension extends also into Titane, where the body becomes the site in which identity, gender and belonging are redefined. If Alex is transformed into a disciplined organism through the control of the mind, Julia Ducournau imagines instead a corporeality that escapes all classification, opposing to the logic of control a radical metamorphosis that renders any normalisation impossible. It is finally The Substance that perhaps inherits most directly from Kubrick's film, shifting the apparatus of control from the political sphere to the economic and mediatic one. The Ludovico Technique and the substance that promises eternal youth respond to the same obsession: correcting human imperfection to produce individuals conforming to a predetermined model. The instruments change — state coercion on one side, the market and the image industry on the other — but the same reduction of the human being to a manipulable object persists, stripped of its irreducible freedom. It is precisely this intuition that makes A Clockwork Orange an extraordinarily contemporary work: not so much for its representation of violence, as for the lucidity with which it had already understood that power would progressively shift its dominion from the control of bodies to that of consciences, desires and identities.
Security against freedom: the impossible compromise
The already Freudian question that runs through the film from beginning to end is the one every modern society poses without ever finding a satisfactory answer: how much freedom are we prepared to surrender in exchange for security? And who establishes the terms of this exchange?
The Ludovico Technique is the extreme, grotesque answer to this question. But the logic that produces it is exactly the same that produces every system of behavioural control: mass surveillance, profiling algorithms, social scoring systems already in use in certain contemporary societies. The difference is one of technology, not of principle. The principle — that individual behaviour can and must be technically regulated in the collective interest — is identical.
John Stuart Mill had written that the only freedom deserving the name is that of pursuing one's own good in one's own way, so long as one does not attempt to deprive others of theirs. Kubrick shows that this liberal definition collides with an insoluble problem: Alex pursues his own good in his own way, and that way includes the destruction of others' good. Classical liberalism has no answer for Alex. Nor does totalitarianism offer a satisfactory one — as the Ludovico Technique demonstrates.
What the film suggests, without saying so, is that no stable equilibrium point exists between security and freedom. Every gain in security is a loss of freedom; every expansion of freedom is a risk of violence. Society oscillates perpetually between these two poles without ever stopping, and political systems are distinguished not by having resolved this tension but by how they choose to manage it — with what degree of hypocrisies, of legitimised violences, of individuals sacrificed.
The final image: "I was cured, all right."
The film's closing is among the most cynical and most precise in cinema history. Alex restored to violence and the Ninth — "cured" in the medical sense, reintegrated into the political system as a propaganda pawn — smiles at the camera while imagining his own erotic triumph. The applauding crowd in Victorian dress is society applauding its own product, celebrating the return to order without asking what order this might be.
Alex's smile in the final frame is the smile of one who has understood. Not of one who has changed — of one who has grasped the rules of the game and agrees to play it. The system used him; he will use the system. No one has learned anything. No one has been redeemed. The wheel turns.
Burgess had written a twenty-first chapter — the number of maturity in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, three times seven — in which Alex, grown older, spontaneously tires of violence and desires something different. Redemption came not through external conditioning but through inner growth: the confirmation that free will operates in both directions. Kubrick cut that chapter deliberately. He did not believe in Alex's redemption. Or perhaps he did not believe in redemption at all — at least not in this form of society.
The film without the twenty-first chapter is a question without an answer. A clockwork orange that keeps turning, that does not stop, that does not explain itself. Like the monolith of 2001: something that appears, that disturbs, that does not console. Kubrick does not build cathedrals. He digs foundations and then walks away, leaving the viewer with the burden of understanding what it is they are standing on.
The machines no longer obey us. It is we who synchronise ourselves with them. — Günther Anders
