Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as art against torture

Abstract

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange ( ACO) has generated considerable debate over the effects of violence and its representation, but its depiction of torture has inspired little scholarly consideration of the film as art against torture. Produced in the early 1970s, it expressed the era’s wariness of liberal states’ potential to abuse power and to violate individual rights in the name of social good. The aversion therapy to which the main character is subjected was not the stuff of fantasy but was familiar to contemporary critics of the penal welfare complex and the covert tactics of the Cold War. ACO resonates anew in the early twenty-first century, as officially sanctioned torture, justified in the so-called Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), provides fresh cause to question what is sacrificed in the name of security.