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This chapter examines the relevance of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange in light of the revival of torture during the global war on terror. The film’s casting choices, musical inventiveness, and cinematic experimentation made it a complex, multilayered text without crudely drawn lines between good and evil. Some questioned the clarity of its message, whereas others welcomed Kubrick’s critique of the liberal state’s capacity to justify rights violations. This chapter argues that A Clockwork Orange operates as “art against torture” and that it indicts state terror. It describes the Ludovico Technique—used to domesticate the film’s main character Alex DeLarge—as an example of techniques employed by the state (including drug therapy) to “control the deviant, the criminal, and the mentally ill”.

Chapter 2 explores the deployment of musical works and styles as settings within and across his films. Music marks various dramatic climates and tracks the progress of characters. The impact of a second major technique, the traversal of the conventional divide between diegetic and nondiegetic music and the related use of voice-over narration, is also explored in this chapter in two case studies: Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.

This chapter discusses how Kubrick implicitly undermines the characteristics of classical Hollywood narrative. In Kubrick’s adaptations, music is not only foregrounded, becoming audible, but also helps the progression of the story, often moving and motivating characters’ actions, as in the case of A Clockwork Orange. It is also an indispensable element in the creation and development of the metaphor of dance. The chapter discusses how and why this metaphor is used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket.

This chapter details the decade of the 1970s, during which Carlos remained in hiding but continued to release albums and written statements under her birth name. Most notably, she collaborated with Stanley Kubrick and created music on the Moog synthesizer for the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. She and Rachel Elkind also released several additional albums in the mold of Switched-On Bach, as well as the proto-ambient album Sonic Seasonings. By the late 1970s, Carlos felt it was time to disclose her identity. She had missed a number of potential collaborations in the past decade, including several film projects and a meeting with Stevie Wonder.

Focussing on the evolution of Anthony Burgess’s prose style from A Clockwork Orange through later works like Nothing Like the Sun, MF, and Earthly Powers, this chapter argues that Burgess developed a ‘higher morality’ predicated on linguistic particularity and wordplay, as a means for existing in and through the difficulties of moral choice. Reading Burgess against his own readings of James Joyce (outlining a Joycean ethics) and the work of Vladimir Nabokov, it suggests that for Burgess a baroque style related intimately to questions of free will and moral choice, and came to supply a surrogate faith for his lapsed Catholicism.

This chapter focuses on games that use classical music to allude to the films of auteur director Stanley Kubrick, whether as homage, parody, or both. By invoking Kubrick’s work, these games aim to connect with his legacy as an artistically lauded filmmaker whose works also had wide appeal. The chapter explores connections between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the massively successful early space flight simulator Elite, which includes features explicitly modeled on Kubrick’s film. It continues by examining two very different games that make reference to Kubrick’s notoriously violent film A Clockwork Orange: Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Batman: Arkham Origins.

This chapter examines the dreamy atmospheres in Kubrick’s films. Music, dialogue, and voice-over emphasize the characters’ passivity, which is one of the features that help to create the dreamy atmosphere enveloping A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick’s protagonists are often passive wanderers in their diegetic worlds. They remain entrapped in a dreamy world, governed by the director’s aesthetic rules, in which the extradiegetic world is often cited.

Stanley Kubrick had settled in England to film big pictures that revolutionised the genre and indeed cinema itself. Located in London, the self-exiled Jerzy Skolimowski tended to live from hand to mouth, was nomadic like Polanski, and chased money and producers everywhere for independent, on-the-hoof projects. Yet both were to the 1970s what Michel Angelo Antonioni, Joseph Losey and Roman Polanski had been to the 1960s in British cinema: visionaries with an expatriate eye who got under the skin of the indigenous culture and its many complexities. While Kubrick and Skolimowski are at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum, they both play a crucial part in the evolution of British cinema. In the relativistic world of artistic modernism, it is surprising that what drives Kubrick much of the time is something absolute: the existence in human affairs of original evil. This chapter looks at Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon as well as those of Skolimowski such as Knife in the Water, Deep End, The Shout, Moonlighting and Success is the Best Revenge.

Deep brain stimulation and wireless deep brain stimulation have the potential to reduce or control violent dispositions. This raises the question of whether enhancing the morality of those who are likely to harm others is ethically acceptable. The implications of controlling harmful dispositions for free will is a feature of the enhancement debate, and it was a feature of worries about other techniques earlier in the twentieth century. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess expresses the concern that a new technique that controls the violent dispositions of the central character in the book and film, Alex, violates him as a person. This chapter distinguishes a number of worries about the treatment given to Alex, and argues that we should not be concerned that altering dispositions in this way removes free will, if the conditions described in the chapter are met. Neurointerventions to control desires can be ethical when they are consistent with a person’s second-order volitions about the kinds of desires they wish to act upon. So long as a person can genuinely fit new dispositions within a stable self-conception, these new dispositions seem to enable rather than violate their free will.

For different reasons than those of their conservative counterparts, many on the left had also grown increasingly wary of social engineering over the course of the 1960s. By the 1970s, a civil libertarian consensus had formed that the freedom to be one’s self and think one’s thoughts was under attack by the state. Technocracy, these critics felt, was serving reactionary ends more than progressive ones. In its most extreme form, their rhetoric held that it was better to be dead than to become an object through which the state carried out a social agenda. As a repudiation of an invasive nanny state, the death penalty became a symbol of a harsh punishment that nonetheless respected the mental integrity of those who suffered it. Civil libertarian discontent with discretion also underlay the creation, in capital trials, of a new “penalty phase,” a post-conviction trial about whether a given offender was worthy of death. Now, when it was imposed, a death sentence followed days of testimony about free will, personal responsibility, and moral blameworthiness. This new way of determining punishment turned capital punishment into an overt expression of a cultural faith in libertarian understandings of freedom.

While there are now numerous accounts of the use of music as a means of torture, this chapter sets recent practices in the context of a larger history of sonorous violence. After having sketched the general outline of such a reflection, it pursues a detailed reading of Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange and proposes the following hypothesis: violence begins when one tries to rivet, to nail, music to a meaning. It finds useful Lacan's concept of "button ties" (points de capiton) as a way of characterizing the sonorous stigmata of the wounded subject.

This chapter looks at how the assemblages that characterise a society of control intervene at the level of speech and thought. It takes up Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), a meditation on control over language, expression, and thought, but also technoscientific control, namely, through the ‘Ludovico technique’ — an assemblage of cinematic technology and pharmaceutical innovation the State uses to resubjectivise the criminal class. The novel is as famous for its ultra-violent aesthete, Alex, as for its fabrication of Nadsat, a fictional argot spoken by delinquent youths. Though Deleuze never cited Burgess, he wrote at length about Stanley Kubrick, who adapted Burgess's novel in 1971. Hence, this chapter shows how Burgess and Kubrick illuminate Deleuze's thoughts on literature and language, cinema and control, and allows us to trace their affinities with SF criticism and the genre's linguistic creations.

This chapter considers how different forms of surveillance capture, fashion and potentially distort identity, sometimes without the subject knowing. It raises questions about how surveillance personnel and procedures establish and monitor authentic and inauthentic identities, as well as the strategies individuals and groups take to counteract malevolent scrutiny in order to retain control of their identities. Going beyond visual surveillance of actual bodies, the chapter examines the importance of computers and Big Data in creating new forms of identity. It also touches upon the intriguing area of the post-human and the ways in which creatures who seek personhood, such as replicants and robots, complicate notions of human identity. This chapter interprets an array of novels and films considered in other chapters (including The Truman Show, The Handmaid’s Tale, Blade Runner and Gattaca), while introducing new texts, such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Alex Proyas’s I, Robot. All these works probe at the boundaries of what it is to be human or fully human, and how surveillance functions to define, dehumanise and disempower.

Our understanding of the moral psychology of screen stories is incomplete and underdeveloped unless we examine the ethical significance of moods, which are quite different than emotions. This chapter examines the role of moods in screen stories. More specifically, it shows how moods figure into the ethical implications of screen stories. To understand what moods in screen stories are, we must first distinguish between moods that screen stories have and moods that people have; they are different things. Moods are significant for an ethics of screen stories because (a) moods express a perspective, (b) moods are closely related to moral understanding, and (c) moods have effects on the spectator that have ethical implications.