“A Clockwork Orange” and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Some compelling parallels can be drawn between the infamous “aversion therapy” scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Michel Foucault’s highly influential book, Discipline and Punish. Foucault discusses the fact that, prior to our modern-day prison system, public torture and execution was the prevailing form of punishment for criminals. Foucault goes on to say that an unintended consequence of this form of punishment revealed itself in the fact that crowds would inadvertently “identify” with the tortured individual and that mobs would break out in protest against the monarchy that was meting out punishment. In this sense, the tortured criminal becomes a victim, if not an outright martyr, and the monarchy is posited as an even worse criminal in the inhumanity that it shows towards its deviants.
This idea plays itself out in Kubrick’s film. While Alex is guilty of unspeakably inhumane acts, the aversion therapy that he undergoes (albeit willingly) makes him a sympathetic character. Alex volunteers to be a guinea pig, but it is clear that he gets more than he bargained for when his free will is taken from him. The medical and political audience that witnesses Alex’s torture is criminalized in that they inhumanely observe Alex’s suffering, and they are “panoptic” in the sense that their main objective is the transformation of Alex into a harmless, self-governing member of society. The idea of Alex as a sympathetic character is reinforced when one of his former victims, as well as his former gang members, beat and torture him because they know that he is unable to defend himself. In this sense, it is a triumph when Alex is restored to his “normal” raping and murdering self. One of the film’s messages is that the removal of free will is even more of a crime than rape and murder. Foucault, on the other hand, demonstrates how “real” society has chosen to remove the free will of criminals through imprisonment and a highly regimented schedule within the prison system. Through this analytical lens, “A Clockwork Orange” is a corrupted, social fantasy/nightmare where individuals like Alex are celebrated; as opposed to Foucault’s analysis, which demonstrates how our society deals with individuals like Alex in the most “humane” way they can.