A Clockwork Orange is closer to reality than many people realize.
It's often said that the films of Stanley Kubrick deal with the dehumanization of human beings. They give us a picture of what a person looks like when their humanity is stripped away.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in his film A Clockwork Orange, where, as the title indicates, a human is made into a metaphorical machine—a mechanical fruit. The startling assertion is that human identity, selfhood, and one’s very being are not immutable characteristics. It is possible for another person or group of people to destroy our humanness. Not only does A Clockwork Orange claim to show us how this is possible, but perhaps more than any other Kubrick film, it shows that this a real problem for us in modern times: experimentation on the minds and bodies of criminals and mental health patients is not merely a problem of the distant past, nor merely a future possibility: it’s a real possibility for us right now, because experiments like this actually happened in real life within living memory.
In this video I’m going to be breaking down some of the real life history behind A Clockwork
Orange, as well as examining it’s themes of human nature, free will, and the human sense of justice.
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CHAPTERS
00:00 The Horrific Reality Behind A Clockwork Orange
1:50 Aversion Therapy: What Is It?
4:28 Freedom of Choice: What Makes Us Human?
10:12 Real Life Clockwork Oranges: Aversive Conditioning Experiments in U.S. Prisons
17:49 The Most Important Philosophical Question of Our Time?
20:01 ACT III: The Dire Consequences of Tampering With Human Nature
24:09 Revenge Vs. Rehabilitation: What is Justice?
25:55 A Warning About the Dangers of Progressivism
28:02 The Tricky Balance Between Freedom & Limitation
SOURCES / FURTHER READING
Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange: An interview with Michel Ciment
www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.aco.html
Kubrick Tells What Makes A Clockwork Orange Tick by Bernard Weintraub
www.archiviokubrick.it/english/words/interviews/1972clockworktick.html
Nice Boy From the Bronx? By CRAIG MCGREGOR
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/film/013072kubrick-profile.html
“Legislating the Control of Behavior Control: Autonomy and the Coercive Use of Organic Procedures,”
https://books.google.com/books?id=yIHhIcMJge0C&pg=PA784&lpg=PA784&dq=Conditioning+and+Other+Technologies+Used+to+Treat+Rehabilitate+Demolish+Prisoners+and+Mental+Patients&source=bl&ots=VPK_I7mN1u&sig=ACfU3U2dPoFW0jxbbQyMhbqy8kR5LvtP9w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTvuHklNT7AhUvHzQIHd5wBUUQ6AF6BAgaEAM#v=twopage&q&f=false
“Erasing Minds: Behavioral Modification, the Prison Rights Movement, and Psychological Experimentation in America's Prisons, 1962–1983” Journal of American Studies
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/abs/erasing-minds-behavioral-modification-the-prison-rights-movement-and-psychological-experimentation-in-americas-prisons-19621983/169B471EFF8A2F71D736CF8C90D771ED
“Behavior Modification: Legal Limitations on Methods and Goals,” Notre Dame Law Review
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2748&context=ndlr
“Behavior modification” National Institute of Corrections
https://nicic.gov/tags/behavior-modification
“Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” National Institute of Corrections
https://nicic.gov/projects/cognitive-behavioral-therapy
“Inmate Behavior Management: Brazos County Jail Case Study,” National Institute of Corrections
https://nicic.gov/inmate-behavior-management-brazos-county-jail-case-study