To illustrate how Kubrick addresses this topic of free will, we must look at certain things to gain an insight into how it will ultimately relate to it or for its argument in ACO. First, we must address what is free will? and who decides it in the end. Secondly, we need to look at why the character of Alex is so anti-social in his behavior and why this is absolutely necessary for Kubrick, in order to give ACO's thesis its fullest implications. Thirdly, an overview of the State on what it is and its role in society. Fourthly, we will look at what happens to Alex after he is "cured" of his disease. And last, but certainly not least, I will discuss the different ways in which Burgess manipulated language in order to achieve a contextual effect vital to the portrayal of Alex's anti-social behavior, and how Kubrick went about translating this to the screen. In addition to all of these things, I will, for the sake of elaboration, give insight into how Kubrick fulfills these points cinematically throughout the reading of this paper. Intermittently, I will also interject a few comments on how various features of ACO relate to cyberpunk fiction.

"The will is, indeed, that whereby we sin and that whereby we live justly," writes the Christian philosopher, Augustine (Bourke 177). For both Burgess, ACO's creator, and Kubrick, ACO is a question of free will. But what is free will? To Augustine, it was the God-given choice one makes whether to lead a life of righteousness or a life devoid of it, and by following these chosen paths we either find God or eternal damnation. But stripping Augustine's free will view of its theological implications, what is essentially left is the innate `right' to choose what actions will dictate our lives. So what does it mean to be human then, as opposed, to say, a wall or some tabletop basket of fruit? It is that choice, the ability to choose good or evil, that makes us human. Otherwise, we would all operate like clockwork: wound up, cold, indifferent, and mechanical to the rhythms that dictate how to behave. For one to get a good understanding of how Kubrick frames this argument of free will we must look at who and what Alex is in order to understand the full meaning of why free will is so important when placed in this context.

Alex, the way we first see him, is violent, ruthless, and altogether evil, showing no mercy or remorse for his actions. He is the embodiment of moral anarchy, showing no respect to any authority figure other than to himself. Even his droogs (friends) are merely sheep grazing in the field, waiting for their shepherd to scoop them up for a walk in the pastures. His loyalty resides in being loyal only to himself; every one else is basically a means to his ends. So in a sense, one can see Alex's situation as survival of the fittest, and that he is a post-modern, cultural by-product of Darwinistic evolution (or rather de-evolution). Some have even suggested that Alex is the quintessential natural man, acting purely on instinctual, animalistic drives and needs:

Aaron Stern, the former head of the MPAA rating board
in America, who is a practicing psychiatrist, has suggested
that Alex represents the unconscious: man in his natural
state (Ciment interview).

But what does it mean for man to be in his natural state? Would we all act like Alex and go about our merry way committing random acts of "ultraviolence" or the "ol' in/out, in/out" with society as a whole? For Kubrick the answer may be yes. He sees man as an "ignoble savage" that is at once "brutal, weak, silly, [and] unable to be objective about anything..." (Kubrick letter). What Alex does in the first half of ACO, we, at times, wish we could engage in ourselves. So indeed, there is almost a certain glee or sinister appeal to the random acts of violence that Alex and his droogs inflict upon their victims because it appeals to our unconscious level in such a way that we actually begin to relate to Alex's first-person testimony (Ciment interview).

In cyberpunk, we see characters like Alex that pollute that genre's landscape, characters such as Raven, from "Snow Crash," by Stephenson or even Rick Rickenharp with his band --"Rickenharp was putting his own taste before the survival of the band"-- from John Shirley's "Freezone" (Sterling 150). All of these characters are driven to serve themselves, regardless of others.

Cinematically, Kubrick brings to life the carnal violence in an almost cartoonish-like manner by scoring in orchestra pieces by well-known composers, such as Ludwig Von Beethoven, whom Alex loves with a passion. We sit back and watch the senseless violence as the music lifts our spirits to a feeling of awe; our senses become fine-tuned to the various nuances that charge the music and images into a psychological lacework of carnal emotions.

Audiences, I believe, are meant to react to the
earlier violent sequences firstly by "enjoying"
them at an aesthetic level, and then by
examining one's own response to them: am I
enjoying this depiction of violence? ... If so,
then I am no different than Alex: he too regards
violence as an art-form... (Craig Clark)

In a way, we almost come to appreciate the seemingly orchestrated and almost poetic acts of ultraviolence, as if Kubrick is conditioning us himself for a greater purpose. The film fulfills that promise when Kubrick literally forces us to watch, not just to see, the flipside of Alex's ultraviolence later on when he returns from the clinic.

Up until now, the inhuman treatment of people presented at the beginning of the movie is made to appear somehow artistic or of having artistic value; "[i]n short, Kubrick `aestheticises' violence" (Craig Clark). In addition, one must remember that Alex is the faithful narrator and we see things from his point of view, and that no longer is he in a position to inflict pain but instead becomes the victim when he returns to his home town after being "cured." Once there, we see him beaten up and nearly drowned by his old droogs, who have now become police officers --the guardians of society, the physical extension of the State-- which altogether is a funny look at police brutality: Alex's ol' droogs need a something legit, so why not become police officers? Now they have a legal reason to be sadistical.

The scene in which Alex gets drowned and beaten by his ol' pals, is such a powerful part of the film that it deserves to be looked at closely for the way Kubrick markedly treats it as opposed to the earlier scenes of "ultraviolence." Ol' Georgie boy and Dim (a sort of dim-wit) finally get their way with poor old Alex, who can't defend himself. The minimal use of camera-angle cutting and its fairly dry shot forces the viewer to watch in horror the display of violence as perpetrated by the State through these policemen. Kubrick creates the cinematic equivalent of having our eyelids forced open by clamps, as were Alex's. "In `A Clockwork Orange,' violence is not viewed as anti-social: rather Kubrick is concerned with illustrating a social order which is defined by violence" (Craig Clark article). The shoulder ensignia patch on Dim's shoulder even reads, "665," bringing to mind the Number of the Beast, "666," a further illustration of how closely related the State is to evil: just one notch away.

But doesn't the State ultimately serve the will and purpose of the people? of the masses it protects from criminals like Alex? The answer can either be very simple or it can be otherwise at the same moment: Yes and No. It is a question we have to ask ourselves seriously in order for the full effect of Kubrick's thesis to come through: What role does the State play in our daily lives? Or more so: to what extent? The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset saw the State as essentially an extension of what we are as a society. In other words, it is a reflection of what a society feels it needs to have at that moment. But as time goes by, he says, we come to take it for granted and we consequently forget the fact that human desires and corruption is as much a part of that institution as is everything else. Nothing is clean.

The contemporary State is the easiest seen and best-known
product of civilisation. And it is an interesting revelation
when one takes note of the attitude that mass-man adopts
before it. He sees it, admires it, knows that there it is,
safeguarding his existence; but he is not conscious of the
fact that it is a human creation invented by certain
men and upheld by certain virtues and fundamental
qualities... (120).

Typically, the State tries to portray its image as sanitized and good, out to serve the common man, but at what price will the State go to achieve its election year agenda? To Gasset, we make the terrible mistake of looking toward the State as our sole problem-solver for all of our worries (it confirms the suspicion political/ military leaders like Mussolini and philosophers like Plato have had that mankind cannot govern itself --democracy is a joke; a select few should do the decision-making), which is a clear invitation for a fascist takeover by the State. When the public negates its liberty and freedom in exchange for a false sense of security, we allow the State to further control our lives from within, and maybe from externally without us knowing it. What we are basically saying, when we do this sort of thing, is that we cannot take care of ourselves because we don't know how to think, so please do it for us. Thus by initiating this Pavlovian conditioning of Alex, the State assumes that man is not capable of making the "right" choices, so it should make it for him, by associating the dreadful feeling of death with images of violence causing him to act only in a "good" way from then on. After seeing that the treatment has worked, the State feels freshly justified in its newly-fascist behavior: that because Alex is such a bad criminal who is going to care what happens to him? It just works and we can all feel safer now. Is this the society we want to live in? Are we that willing to give up our personal freedom, our free will, the choice between good and evil, in order to feel safe with ourselves?

Hell is paved with good intentions.

In ACO, Kubrick carefully balances these questions with the horrifying images of Alex's past transgressions on the one hand, and the one the State is committing on the other, forcing the viewer to ask themselves is this right or is this wrong? In the State's voter-conscious short-sightedness, they overlook, or choose not to look at, the fact they are, in effect, creating a "new psychedelic fascism" (Kubrick letter).

... the State is involved in a worse evil in depriving him
of his freedom to choose between good and evil. It must
be clear that it is wrong to turn even unforgivably vicious
criminals into vegetables (Ciment interview).

Carrying the weight of the film's thesis on his shoulders is the prison Chaplain. At first, our introduction to him is as your typical "fire-and-brimstone spouting buffoon" but eventually emerges as the film's sole voice of reason (Fitzgerald, Kubrick letter). For the Chaplain, free will is much more important than the simple fact that Alex is now safe to roam the parks and subways without him biting anyone on a whim. Being just good is not human, nor is it human to be just evil. "Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have a master" (Camus 56).There comes a point where we make a conscious choice to continue down the path we've set or to mend our ways. We are our own masters and able, by nature, to make our own destinies whether it is good or evil. "The film seems to say that to take away man's choice is not to redeem but merely to restrain him," writes John E. Fitzgerald, whom Kubrick quoted (Kubrick letter). Devoid of the option to choose good and evil for ourselves, we become zombies following a singular path with no deviations allowed, essentially leading to a meaningless existence. When the Chaplain argues this point with the Minister of the Interior, after Alex is proven to be "cured" and conditioned, the Minister merely scoffs in his face and says, "Who cares? The point is it works!" and the room erupts into a round of applause. We never hear from the Chaplain after that. In those few seconds of dialogue a crucial precedent has been set, one in which reason and morality has been debunked in favor of voter appeal and promises of reduced crime by crooked politicians. It brings to mind the famous Nietzche quote about human nature: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you" (89).

Kubrick illustrates here to what extent politicians will go to ensure their re-election, and to what extent we as a society apparently will put up with to feel safe again. It is a satirical look at politics and how they work in our society today. But Kubrick is not only satirizing the extreme Right, but also the extreme Left, with the crazed writer, throughout the film.

The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure
of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left.
"The common people must be led, driven, pushed!" he
pants into the telephone. "They will sell their liberty for an
easier life!" (Ciment interview).

At the end of the film, after Alex has regained his old self, the Minister of the Interior, clearly concerned with his political party's fall from grace in the public eye, makes Alex a visit. As once the poster child of revolutionary criminal rehabilitation, Alex has come to be a thorn in the side of the State so now they must do something about it. Ol' Alex boy was cured all right, but that wasn't enough. So the State and Alex make an alliance together at the end of the film, promising to be good to each other `til the very end, smiling into the cameras and flashes and laughing gleefully into the microphones. It's a picturesque scene. And in the end everybody is happy. Kubrick, here, is satirizing the way the State can always rely on a good photo shoot and smiles, even with the cause of their worries like Alex, to smooth over any rough, serrated textures in their seemingly perfect quilt. "The government eventually resorts to the employment of the cruelest and most violent members of the society to control everyone else --not an altogether new or untried idea" (Ciment interview). The State seeks only to reaffirm its idealistic position that it is the good overseer of civilization, that it has all of the answers, that we can trust it.

There is also a sense of irony in the way Kubrick handles how Alex is eventually brought back to life. For example, it should be noted that as soon as Alex is "cured" of his dreadful disease, all the people he has wronged in the past get their payback: his parents disown him, the bum beats him up, two of his droogs, whose rebellion he squashed, get their revenge, the liberal writer locks him a room with Beethoven blaring through the floor causing him to attempt suicide, and finally the cat lady has her revenge, so to speak, with Alex's capture at her untimely and misfortunate expense. What does this say about being "good" to Alex? Obviously, being good is not the bundle of flowers we all want Alex to think it is. It is cruel, indifferent, corrupt, and worst of all: unrelenting in all of those. It is reality. Alex, once taken out of his own world, is finally able to see, to know what it is like to be a victim.

While Alex is temporarily removed from his natural state of being, the reader and viewer is thrust head long into a literal collage of language, that is both overpowering, distracting, and musical even. It is true, both the book and film of ACO is plentiful in ironic plot twists, but it is also filled with a clearly unusual yet original manipulation of language --a sort of hybrid of English and Russian-- but more so with the novella for a number of reasons. Even the individual names of Alex and his droogs can find a home in the Russian language: "ALEX, GEORGIE, PETE, and DIM ... with DIM an abbreviation for DIMITRI" (Bryce Utting). In the novella, Burgess creates a new vernacular for his characters which serve two purposes: One, obviously, is to give his characters a distinct textural feel to them, more personality and exuberance. Secondly, Burgess used this new language --Nadsat, it is called-- to achieve a certain amount of responsive cushioning, so to speak, between the reader and what he or she was reading.

It is one thing on the printed page for Alex to claim
that "we tolchocked the devotchka until, Oh my
brothers, the krovvy came out of her rot": and
another entirely to read that "we hit the woman
until blood came out of her mouth" (Craig Clark).

Burgess is so successful in creating this linguistic smoke screen that the reader almost does take a certain delight or at least feels a sudden acceptability about the malicious acts of violence perpetrated by Alex and his droogs, as if we were all skipping along down the yellow brick road with Alex, the narrator's voice, musically humming us onward. But while this worked so effectively for Burgess on the written page, Kubrick felt, cinematically, that the same feeling would have to be conveyed more so through the images as opposed to the dialogue.

I tried to find something like a cinematic equivalent
of Burgess' literary style, and Alex's highly
subjective view of things (Ciment interview).

In choosing to do this, Kubrick, therefore, relies less heavily on the perversion of language to provide the cushioning effect that it had in Burgess' novella, and replaced it with a visual style that literally makes the viewer the other person there witnessing everything with an unflinching eye. Kubrick's use of wide angle shots, odd lighting, weird set designs and costumes that look like some post-modern fashion nightmare, slow motion and fast motion filming all give Kubrick's ACO a lively textural feel that one might get from reading Burgess' novella.

Similar in its purpose, cyberpunk fiction also features an odd assortment of mutated languages that helps to create a certain atmosphere in which the reader is immersed in a technical wonderland, which this mutated language sustains. When we read a cyberpunk novel or story, we may not always know what they're talking about in a certain passage, but the illusion that the authors do know is certainly there, allowing the reader to become enthralled with what may actually be "1969 Toronto dope dealers' slang, or biker talk" as William Gibson would say (Browning 27).

In conclusion, Stanley Kubrick's treatment of Anthony Burgess' novella, A Clockwork Orange is both a cinematic masterpiece in storytelling and an important exploration of man's quest for true freedom: the freedom to make the basic choice between good and evil, and the moral implications it carries with it. In the end, we all choose what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. Kubrick illustrates this by posing the question of should we, as a supposedly moralistic society, allow for the dehumanization of unrepentantly evil criminals, like Alex, in order to make society a more safer, yet profoundly sicker place? It is not an easy question to answer. Of course, we would all like to live in a crime-free world. But to deny what is naturally human to another human being is the worst crime of all; it is a crime against the whole human race.

In the Burgess novella, the original manuscript included a twenty-first chapter where Alex decides that his adolescent days are over and that he must finally accept responsibility and settle down. Alex calmly fades into the background mesh of societal conformity. By doing so, Burgess is saying to people that there is light at the end of this very dark tunnel, that in the end humans are capable of goodness. But for those who don't see this as a viable ending to a remarkable story, we might agree with Kubrick that his ending for his film is the right one.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the publisher
had somehow prevailed upon Burgess to tack
on the extra chapter against his better judgment,
so the book would end on a more positive note. I
certainly never gave any serious consideration to
using it (Ciment interview).

So in Kubrick's interpretation, Alex is left being bathed in glory and acclaim and attention, and the faithful narrator ends with saying, "I was cured all right." It leaves a haunting impression in one's head and cinematically leaves the viewer feeling a bit uneasy about the way these people --us-- really behave. We are the Alex we first see when the movie begins in the milk bar. We are the State trying to do what is good without regard for what is right. We are the Chaplain fighting for moral integrity. We are all of these things.

A Clockwork Orange: A play with music
Chaplain: "It may not be nice to be good, 6655321.
It may be horrible to be good. I know I shall have
many sleepless nights about this. What does God
want? Does God want goodness or the choice of
goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps
in some way better than a man who has the good
imposed upon him?" (Bryce Utting).