'A Clockwork Orange' and its psychological teachings

A Clockwork Orange is one of Stanley Kubrik's best-remembered films.. Its mixture of shocking scenes and social criticism made it a controversial work that, however, has been transformed into a movie icon (in addition to providing the ingredients for some of the most popular costumes in carnival).

Now, A Clockwork Orange does not stand out just for its spectacular photography or for criticizing certain aspects of politics. It also contains a reflection that is very valuable for psychology and that resorts to a psychological current called behaviorism. Next we will see what this basic idea consists of.

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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 regularly amused themselves by participating in acts of extreme violence. They like to beat up, rape, and break into other people's property to destroy what they find.

But this is not the only thing that 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 weaknesses of the protagonist, although at that moment it is hardly 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 this time 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.

Partly for this reason, he accepts that his sentence be shortened in exchange for being subjected to experimental psychological treatment: the Ludovico method, designed to prevent recurrence in acts of violence. Alex is not interested in changing, but in doing whatever it takes to get free as soon as possible.

However, the Ludovico treatment not only turns out to be unusually painful and degrading, but also fulfills its purpose. 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 restrained to a chair that forced him to watch constantly to a screen, while my eyelids were held with rods so that they would not closed 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 her feel worse and worse, that he was nauseated and that he 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 fictitious 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 by itself from the beginning with another stimulus that If it doesn't elicit a significant reaction, you may get to the point where the second stimulus becomes just as aversive or pleasant as the first. first.

In this case, the government was trying to teach Alex to associate what he likes with an intensely unpleasant, so that once he was released he couldn't engage in that kind of act without feeling so bad that he didn't could do it. His expectations were fulfilled when, in a test phase, Alex proved incapable of attacking despite his attempts to provoke him.

From executioner to victim

Alex's life turned into 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 finds his former colleagues, turned into policemen, who beat Alex without her being able to make even the threat of defending herself against her. Something similar happens when one of the homeless men attacked by Alex in the past recognizes him and begins to attack him without the protagonist being able to do more than flee.

The Beethoven Effect

But there is another relevant piece in the transformation of the protagonist. In Ludovico's treatment sessions, some of the video clips They had Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as their soundtrack.. When Alex takes refuge in one of the first houses he comes across after being beaten up, he doesn't realize that the house belongs to one of the men he attacked in the past.

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

However, Alex survives, and after being admitted to the hospital becomes a propaganda tool for the ruling party, which has lost a lot of support after publicly supporting Ludovico's technique as a reintegration tool and the outcome of 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 as b. F. skinner), but to offer a reflection about the times that were lived at the end of the 20th century. Ludovico's method is the tool that the film chooses to use to explain how a power that lies beyond the individual can transform the latter into a puppet.

This critique is made using two closely related issues: the legitimacy of violence and the degree to which human beings enjoy freedom in liberal democracies.

legitimate violence

The aspect of the violence to which attention is drawn is the fact that Alex is not the only antisocial element in the film: the government also acts by imposing its program, although with a 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 thought processes with a very simple goal: deactivate him. as an unpredictable subject and make it fit tamely into the political fabric that has been woven to maintain power.

The well-being of the patient is not sought, but rather to stop 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 no longer free, since that would entail having more options to choose how to be happy; on the contrary, it clearly shows 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 bring to the elements that put people at risk. Not to do everything possible to broaden the horizons of freedom of people, but to intervene on them, removing from sight what makes the landscape ugly. In short, treating people from the same mechanistic and instrumental perspective that the title of the film suggests.

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