Thought Experiment

Crime and Punishment in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
by Kelly Lagor

“Stop!” I creeched. “Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It’s a sin, that’s what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!” They didn’t stop right away, because there was only a minute or two more to go—lewdies being beaten up all krovvy, then more firing squads, then the old Nazi flag and THE END . . .

. . . Dr. Brodsky said: “What’s all this about sin, eh?”

“That,” I said, very sick. “Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.” . . .

“Music,” said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. “So you’re keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It’s a useful emotional heightener, that’s all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, Dr. Branom?”

“It can’t be helped,” said Dr. Branom. “Each man kills the thing he loves, as the poet-prisoner said. Here’s the punishment element, perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased.”

—A Clockwork Orange (1962)

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Most western countries in the 1960s experienced rising crime rates. Naturally, it led the public, academics, and politicians to speculate over what was causing the spike, and to discuss what might be the best way to punish criminals and prevent rates from spiking further. Prior to the 1960s, a rehabilitative philosophy had been the most popular approach that took an individual’s background and circumstances into consideration. By the 1970s, however, both the United States and, to a lesser degree, England, had pivoted toward a less personal, more incapacitative approach, which dealt with crime primarily through the use of jail time.

Today, we know the growth in crime from the 1960s to the 1990s was due to a number of interrelated causes: the baby boom in the post-World War II years created a large demographic of 15–24 year old boys, who are the most likely of any global and historical demographic to engage in violent criminal behavior; the loss of many unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in urban areas to automation that led to an increase in urban poverty, particularly among ethnic and racial minorities; and the impact of racial discrimination (be it intentional or not) in the design of crime prevention policies, particularly in the U.S., created a vicious cycle from poverty to incarceration and back to poverty that continues to this day.

So what caused this change in approach to crime in England and the United States? And what was it about this zeitgeist that inspired Stanley Kubrick to follow up his optimistic science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Oyssey (1968), with the brutally dystopian Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)?

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“What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the Earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more. Do your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans.”

—Unhoused man to Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange

 

How to best punish criminals and prevent crime has been something cultures have always struggled with, and at this conundrum’s heart lies a culture’s particular moral ideas about fairness and justice. An early example of a formalized punishment scheme for crimes was the Mesopotamian Hammurabic code (BCE 1755), which imposed “like for like” punishments—though, perhaps unsurprisingly, certain classes, races, ages, and sexes were punished more severely for the same crimes.

Throughout history, different approaches to punishment have come in and out of fashion. Retribution is the oldest form. Behind this is the idea that if someone commits a crime, they incur a debt, be it to an individual or to society, that must be repaid. This approach, of which the Hammurabi code is an example, doesn’t care why someone committed a crime, only that a crime was committed. Because the idea of “fairness” is at its heart, a punishment should be proportional to a crime. Unfortunately, fairness is in the eye of the beholder, and this “just deserts” model nevertheless led to punishments like public torture and executions that were popular before the eighteenth century.

The next theory of punishment to come into vogue was deterrence. This approach was philosophically utilitarian, and held that people are rational, self-interested, and driven primarily by a pleasure/pain principle. Crimes are therefore committed because the pleasure of crime outweighs the pain of it, and punishments should be severe enough to prevent both the criminal and others from committing that crime in the future. This school was popularized by the 1760s Italian philosopher and “Father of Criminology” Caesare Beccarria, who thought the goal of any punishment should be prevention, and if a punishment didn’t achieve this, it only added to the suffering of society. Deterrence has been shown to be a largely ineffectual approach, but nevertheless is the primary rationale behind the retention of the death penalty in the U.S.

Rehabilitation was a twentieth century strategy associated with the rise of the social sciences. This philosophy is more personal and takes an individual’s circumstances, as well as the crime they committed, into consideration before deciding on a punishment. This approach understands that crimes are committed because of individual or societal problems, and the best way to prevent future crime is to therefore address these problems. This approach was widely used until the 1970s in the U.S., and included things like drug treatment programs instead of jail time, and saw the goal of prison as rehabilitory, offering services like counseling, and educational and vocational programs. This approach is still widely used in Europe today and is known as the Scandinavian model.

Incarceration has been the overwhelming approach to crime in the U.S. since the 1970s, and was adopted to a lesser extent by England (which now has the highest prison population in Europe, per capita). The primary goal of this approach doesn’t take into consideration someone’s personal circumstances, but instead assumes that criminals, if not locked away, will continue to commit crimes, and the best way to stop that is to lock them up, and keep locking them up. This approach inspired various disastrous policies in the U.S., like mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws, and has been a major factor behind the massive expansion of the prison industrial complex in the U.S.

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“You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”

—Social worker P.F. Deltoid to Alex in A Clockwork Orange

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Writing A Clockwork Orange was a traumatic experience for Anthony Burgess. The novel was, in part, his way of exploring the trauma left by the 1944 robbery, rape, and assault of his pregnant wife, Lynne, who was attacked by U.S. servicemen (likely deserters) on her way home from work during the London Blitz. She soon after miscarried and attempted suicide. Burgess was stationed in Gibraltar, working for the Army Educational Corps at the time, and was denied leave to go see her. In the aftermath, the two became serious alcoholics (Lynne would die of liver cirrhosis in 1968 at forty-seven). They also became close artistic collaborators and staples in the British literary scene, with Lynne taking teaching gigs and helping Burgess with research and translations including on The New Aristocrats (1962), a French novel about a gang of delinquent boarding school teenagers.

In 1958, when he and Lynne were living in Brunei, where Burgess was stationed as a history teacher, Burgess collapsed in class. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and was told he had a year to live. Upon his return to England, he spent time in a neurology ward where he was found to have no brain tumor after all. Burgess then got a discharge from the military and became a full-time writer, and, in a fit of creative mania, wrote five novels in his first year.

The specific inspiration for Clockwork came during a cruise he and Lynne took from England to Leningrad in Russia in 1961. Burgess, who was re-learning Russian at the time, was struck by the oppressive political atmosphere in Russia. A former Catholic and self-professed anarchist with conservative leanings, he saw communism, as well as the British welfare state (which he merged together in Clockwork), as deeply flawed systems that ignored the welfare of individuals to prioritize the needs of the State. Both systems chafed against his beliefs about the nature of free will, original sin, and the sanctity of the individual. He combined his anxieties over the roving youth gangs in England with his fascination with languages (combining Russian with demotic English and rhyming slang) to design the disquieting nadsat (Russian for teen) slang Alex and his droogs use in the novel.

For the Ludovico technique that seeks to make Alex associate violence, his great joy in life, with a profound sense of physical distress, Burgess drew from the contemporary work of the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. Behaviorism became the dominant school of thought in psychology from the 1920s to the 1950s, in large part because it was the first framework that enabled the use of the scientific method. Skinner’s work from the 1950s and 1960s focused on conditioning responses to stimuli in animals and humans through the use of rewards or punishments. Skinner saw human behavior as a function of reinforcing consequences from environmental stimuli that had nothing to do with someone’s thoughts or emotions. This deeply cynical view dovetailed perfectly with Burgess’ critiques of the British welfare state, and his views on personal freedom and choice.

Burgess wrote the novel to have three parts of seven chapters each to symbolize the age of maturity. The three parts are circular, all starting with the same phrase (“What’s it going to be then, eh?”), and with Alex encountering similar, yet divergent situations involving many of the same people and places. The difference is in part one, Alex is free and enjoying his violence; in part two, Alex is confined in an overcrowded prison, being rehabilitated by a chaplain before he’s treated by the Ludovico technique; and in part three, he is free, yet cannot enjoy violence (or music) until he’s nearly killed by a former victim, and is returned to his original, joyfully violent state. In the final, twenty-first chapter, Alex realizes his childish love of violence has waned. When he parts ways with his new gang for the night, he encounters a former droog, Pete, who’s out with his wife. Alex realizes he wants that kind of life as well, and, for a moment, glimpses the cycle of violence his son will continue ad infinitum. Burgess saw the final chapter as pivotal to the story where “Alex grows up and chooses creation over destruction.” It gives the novel “the quality of fiction—that human beings change either via a moral transformation or an increase in wisdom.”

The book was published in 1962 in its entirety everywhere in the world except the U.S. Burgess’ New York publisher saw the last chapter as a cop out and cut it (it wasn’t published there in its entirety until 1986). Burgess hated violence and thought the book to be “too didactic to be artistic.” He was concerned mostly with money at the time, and wasn’t confident anyone else would publish it, so he agreed. The novel was released worldwide to brutal reviews and poor sales, with some critics accusing Burgess of destroying the English language.

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But what I do I do because I like to do.

—Alex in A Clockwork Orange

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In 1970 Kubrick certainly had crime on his mind. Kubrick had moved his filmmaking enterprise to England while making Lolita in 1961 to avoid Hollywood interference, to not be restricted to one role on set (as was dictated by Hollywood unions), and to take advantage of British financing, provided his film crew was at least 85 percent British. It wasn’t until 1965 that Kubrick moved his entire life and family permanently to England from his native New York City, primarily citing concerns of how dangerous New York had become.

Crime of all types rose by 400 percent in the U.S. from the 1960s to the 1980s, due, in large part, to the transformation of cities, of which New York was often cited as a prime example. The U.S. homicide rate doubled between 1964 and 1974. Murders were concentrated in poor, largely minority neighborhoods, and involved mostly young men aged 18–24. The National Research Council’s The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014) explores the major reasons for this increase. These poor neighborhoods were established after World War II when workers from rural areas, mostly ethnic and racial minorities, who had lost agriculture jobs to industrialization, moved to cities to discover the semi- and unskilled jobs they’d hoped to find had been lost to automation.

Pre-existing urban white populations soon clashed with their new neighbors, leading to race riots like the 1943 “Zoot Suit Riot” in which white servicemen and police officers beat and detained hundreds of young people in a dominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the late 1940s, in response to the organized protests of the early Civil Rights movement, white residents called for greater police presences in these minority neighborhoods, as well as harsher punishments for crimes.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, similar panics over increases in crime occurred whenever waves of migrants moved into poor, overcrowded urban neighborhoods. In response, Progressive Era sociologists concluded that crime in such neighborhoods was caused by the strains of urban life and the problems of fairness inherent to a capitalist system. The resulting rehabilitative policies approached the issue by increasing access to education, social services, and social programs, while simultaneously improving public infrastructure to address the poor living conditions in such neighborhoods. Crime rates went down as a result.

In the early 1960s, rehabilitation had continued to be the preferred approach to crime, though the effectiveness of its programs depended on dwindling public funding. As crime rates began to rise again, instead of investing more in social programs, politicians saw an opportunity to appeal to the fears of the vocal majority of white voters. In 1965 President Johnson paired his “War on Crime” with his “War on Poverty,” the combination of which resulted in the targeting of ethnic minorities for arrest and incarceration due to an increase in police presence in minority neighborhoods. By the 1970s, criminal justice had become a perennial political issue, with “street” crime being a focus. The shift toward harsher incarceration policies had begun.

In 1969 Kubrick was very aware of these political debates over crime when his prior Dr. Strangelove collaborator, Terry Southern, handed him A Clockwork Orange. “I was excited about everything about it,” Kubrick said in 1971, “the plot, the ideas, the characters, and, of course, the language.” Kubrick compared Alex to Shakespeare’s Richard III in how their energy, candor, and charm wins you over, despite their obvious faults. He liked how the novel illustrated how violence is a choice anyone can make, including “upstanding” citizens, as evidenced in Alex’s encounters with police, politicians, and activists who aimed to use Alex to score political points. These are the people who spit on, beat, molest, and attempt to kill Alex. Alex is only different because he doesn’t put on airs about his love for violence.

Kubrick acquired the already-optioned rights for two hundred thousand dollars in 1970. Much to Burgess’ later consternation, the version Kubrick received from Southern lacked the final chapter.

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“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.”

—Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)

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Kubrick wrote the screenplay himself (he would only do this once more on Barry Lyndon [1975]). Kubrick adapted the novel’s circularity, and commentary on cycles of violence, into the film’s myriad of circular visual motifs, from the use of eyes, the prisoners walking in the yard, and the breasts of women. While Kubrick’s adaptation was mostly faithful, he did make a few impactful changes. He wanted us to “see the violence from Alex’s point of view, to show it was great fun for him, and the happiest part of his life, like it was some great action ballet.” So to create a similar effect to Burgess’ language, Kubrick heavily stylized the story’s violence. The draft screenplay took him four months and was completed in May 1970. Kubrick didn’t find out there was a missing chapter until after, and when he did, he stuck with the truncated version. Kubrick felt everything that needed to be said was in the novel he had read.

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was shot over the winter of 1970–1971 for a svelte two million dollars (compared to the $10.5 million spent on 2001). It was filmed entirely in England, mostly on location, with only a few sets (the Korova Milk Bar, the prison admission room, and the foyer to the writer’s house were the exceptions). Kubrick did location scouting by reading through ten years’ worth of architecture magazines, seeking out places that felt both contemporary and near-future. The tag line of the film sought a similar temporally dissonant, yet timeless, effect with its picaresque-like “Being the adventures of a young man whose principle interests are rape, ultraviolence, and Beethoven.” Alex’s costume even parodied an elegant, sporting young Englishmen, including a bowler hat, false lashes, a codpiece, and a cricket uniform.

Kubrick knew he wanted Malcolm MacDowell to play Alex on his first read-through. MacDowell had been a Shakespearean stage actor before he was cast in his first screen role as a rebellious teenager at an English prep school in the critically acclaimed satirical film, If . . . (1968). “One doesn’t find actors of his genius in all shapes, sizes, and ages,” Kubrick said of MacDowell in 1971. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that much fun on a job,” MacDowell later said in a 2001 interview. “The great thing that I think Stanley and I had in common was a wicked sense of humor.” MacDowell experienced his own share of violence on set. His cornea was scratched during the treatment scene, his ribs were broken during the “rehabilitation” theater scene, and he nearly drowned in the scene where he’s brutalized by his former gang mates.

The timeless mix of antiquity, contemporary, and near future, was also reflected in the score. Kubrick approached a creator of the first Moog synthesizer, Wendy Carlos, after hearing her “Switched-on Bach” album (1968). He asked her to adapt some classical music pieces on the Moog (the first score to use one), to help give the familiar pieces new emotional connotations, thus paralleling Alex’s own changing associations of the music he loves from pleasure to pain.

In one of the more brutal scenes in both the book and the film, Kubrick underscores this thematic tie between music and violence. During the first home invasion scene in the novel, Alex observes the writer is working on a manuscript called A Clockwork Orange before his gang’s brutal attack on the man and the rape of his wife. When Alex stumbles upon the writer’s house after his treatment and subsequent beating by his former gang mates and enemies (who are now policemen), the writer deduces Alex was his masked attacker in part because Alex gives away that he saw the A Clockwork Orange manuscript. During filming, this scene kept not coming together for Kubrick. Three days in, when MacDowell began to spontaneously sing “Singin’ in the Rain” (from the eponymous 1952 musical film), as it was the happiest song he knew, it made everything click. It’s Alex’s singing of this song upon his return to the writer’s house that triggers the writer’s recognition. It’s the dissonant and powerful associations both characters have with the song, and the dissonance between that and our own associations with the song, that makes both scenes absolutely chilling.

It was the first film where Kubrick truly had complete control. He shot the film mostly with a hand-held Arriflex camera so he could get in close to his actors and create a disquieting sense of physical proximity. He also edited the film entirely himself over six months. It was the first time he had not only final cut, but also complete control of the marketing, a privilege he enjoyed for the rest of his career, and the film was released as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, with his name in the title, not for the last time.

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As the music came to its climax, I could viddy myself very clear, running and running on like very light and mysterious feet, carving the whole face of the creeching world with my cut throat britva. I was cured, all right.

—Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (screenplay)

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Censors in the U.S. gave the film an X rating, which was usually reserved for hardcore pornography at the time. The Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy had previously received the distinction of earning an X rating in 1969. After some cuts to Alex’s orgy scene, it was re-released with an R rating in December 1971.

Critics were understandably divided. It was nominated for a number of Oscars and Golden Globes (losing in all categories to The French Connection), and won the New York Film Critics Award. Burgess said of the film, “the writers’ aim . . . had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground. A film was not made of words.” In this way, he compared it to Lolita in how it missed the book’s aim, but thought it was nonetheless a brilliant homage to his use of language. The director Luis Buñuel wrote of it, “it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.”

It was also accused of “sucking up to thugs.” People were outraged over Alex’s joy over his violence, and it was cited frequently in the discussion of the effect of media on violence for decades to come. “No one is corrupted watching A Clockwork Orange any more than they are by watching Richard III,” Kubrick said in a 1971 interview. “Although a certain amount of hypocrisy exists about it, everyone is fascinated by violence,” Kubrick said again later in a 1972 interview, “after all, man is the most remorseless killer who ever stalked the earth. There is no evidence violence in films or television causes social violence.” Kubrick believed people could not be made to do anything against their own nature, and violence in films could be beneficial as it gives the atavistic part of everyone a harmless cathartic outlet. The only dangerous portrayals of violence were depictions in which violence was consequence free, like in the wildly popular at the time James Bond movies.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the press coverage, Clockwork was a hit, breaking box office records and drawing record audiences. It finished third that year behind The Godfather and the Bond film Live and Let Die, and by 1979, it had made forty million dollars. It cemented Kubrick’s reputation as one of the great directors of all time, and was hugely influential on the burgeoning “New Hollywood” directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Steven Spielberg.

In 1974, after a spate of copycat crimes by teenaged boy, Clockwork-inspired, droog look-a-likes, a heartbroken and shaken Kubrick pulled the film from distribution in England. This was a self-imposed ban that stood until after Kubrick’s death in 1999. But life continued to imitate art in an eerily cyclical fashion over the next few decades. In the U.S., the film inspired Arthur Bremer to shoot the Alabama governor, presidential candidate, and ardent segregationist George Wallace in 1972, which later inspired Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, about a Vietnam vet’s eventual attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, which later inspired John Hinkley to shoot Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Burgess died in 1993, and resented that Clockwork became his most popular work. He entirely credited Kubrick’s film for keeping the book in circulation and he stated he would “gladly disown” it if he could. He spent the rest of his life answering questions about why Kubrick left out the last chapter because, as Burgess said, “life is, of course, terrible.”

Copyright © 2025 Kelly Lagor