Episode 001: Come Viddy, Me Little Droogies—A Clockwork Orange (1971) with Wind Goodfriend
Join Alex and Dr. Wind Goodfriend on discussion of the psychological concepts in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on the book by Anthony Burgess.
(Apologies for the audio issues! The crackling you hear is not your speakers/headphones, but turned out to be equalizer settings. I tried to fix it, but it led to some gaps in audio. This won’t be an issue on future episodes!)
Please leave your feedback on this post, the main site (cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com), on Facebook (@CinPsyPod), or Twitter (@CinPsyPod). I’d love to hear from you!
Legal stuff:
1. All film clips are used under Section 107 of Title 17 U.S.C. (fair use; no copyright infringement is intended).
2. Intro and outro music by Sro (“Self-Driving”). Used under license CC BY-SA 4.0.
3. Film reel sound effect by bone666138. Used under license CC BY 3.0.
Episode transcription:
<Electronic intro music>
Alex Swan: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of the CinemaPsych Podcast! I am your host, Dr. Alex Swan and we have a great show for you today. We have a guest host, so first episode, first time we have the uh, regular format of the show, the–the format that I told you about in Episode 0. Before we get to our guest host, I want to go ahead and do a little bit of housekeeping. I want to go ahead and thank some of our donors with a specific special thanks in a moment, but I want to thank my good friend Celeste Pilegard for her awesome donation and my sister, Caitlin, for her awesome donation. That support has helped us get launched the podcast with hosting and with getting the better microphone that you’re hearing my voice on right now. And, uh, for those of you who shared and listened to that first episode, it’s really awesome that you did that. Please please please don’t forget that we still need some help getting this podcas-podcast off the ground, so if you have a few dollars to spare, the GoFundMe is still active and then in about a month or so I’ll probably transition that to a Patreon account.
Okay, so, without further ado… because I’m sure this is probably going to be a long episode. Uh, let’s introduce the guest host. My guest host today is Dr. Wind Goodfriend. Uh, she is the Professor and Chair of Social Sciences at Buena Vista University, which is much like Eureka College where I’m at: a small private liberal arts college in Iowa–I’m in Illinois–so we’re fairly close to each other. She has Master’s and PhD in social psychology from Purdue University. She is author of three textbooks, “Social Psychology”, won the “Most Promising New Textbook of the Year” award in 2019. That’s pretty awesome, I’d say. So… I’m going to let Wind introduce herself a little bit more through some of my questioning and the big shout-out goes to her because she gave a massive contribution to the podcast, uh, startup, so I want to say thank you to you Wind, and please say hello to everyone.
Wind Goodfriend: Hi everyone, this is Wind Goodfriend. It’s absolutely my honor to be here on Episode 001 of this fantastic podcast and I want to thank Alex for inviting me to be a part of the project and just say I’m excited to be here.
Alex: Well, I’m super glad that you are here so we can talk about a fantastic film. Before we do talk about that film that you brought for us, I did want to find out a little bit more about you so my first question to you is what do you love about film? What brings you to this podcast?
Wind: Yeah, you know, going back to my childhood was a really weird kid. I used to have symptoms of both autism and Tourettes and… I just didn’t fit in with other humans very well. I didn’t really have any friends until 8th grade, so, for me, I enjoyed film, and live theater as well, because it was a study of humanity. It was a study of human behavior and why people do what they do and I especially liked the idea that people are playing a role and I kind of thought maybe we’re doing that all the time in our in our real lives… and so I like the idea of theater and film being a study of human behavior just as much as psychology is.
Alex: Which was why they work so well together, right? <inaudible> is why this podcast is a great idea: people who may give small grants for this idea…
Wind: This genius idea…
Alex: Right, this awesome really really really really cool idea, come on now… Uh, on a similar but more along the lines of your-your training, what sort of research do you do in and how does that tie in with your teaching? In-in psychology, in general and then how do you loop film into that as well?
Wind: I am a social psychologist by training, so my areas of research are domestic violence–trying to understand relationship violence both from the perpetrator and from the survivor’s side. What’s it like to be in that kind of experience and-and how can we prevent it from happening? And then I also study prejudice including sexism, and-and heterosexism and homophobia, so together that that’s a little bit depressing… because it seems like most of my career is studying sort of the dark side of social psychology…
Alex: But really crucial stuff…
Wind: It’s really important to talk about and try to understand, and of course, these are also addressed in film, so… I teach a psychology of film class at my University and A Clockwork Orange–ooh, I gave it away! <laughter>
Alex: <laughter>It’s alright
Wind: So one of my favorite films to show in that class is A Clockwork Orange and that’s what our topic is for today.
Alex: Yes! But before we get to that though, before we get to that–
Wind: I’m sorry, I spilled the beans–
Alex: –I have one more question…It’s OK, it’s OK. It’ll work in-it’ll work in just a second. Uh, what good stories–I know you have some good stories–what good stories do you have about psych in film?
Wind: Well, I don’t know if good is the right adjective for the story but, um, when I teach psych in film I try to show them movies that they’ve never seen before. Which is not what they want when they sign up for that class. They want it to be all movies that they’ve seen, like Nicholas Sparks all day long. And that’s not what they’re going to get. Some weird obscure movies that no one has seen except for me and like seven other people <inaudible> or movies that were from before they were born, which increasingly depresses me.
Alex: Yeah, it’s just going to get worse right?
Wind: So, I show them these movies and they’re not very pleased with them honestly. There’s one week if I class where I show a Lifetime movie because the topic is eating disorders and that is their favorite film of the whole semester, which I find super depressing.
Alex: Because, you know, they can secretly make fun of it or something, y’know?
Wind: I think they genuinely like it.
Alex: Yeah, it’s true. They probably do.
<film reel sound effect>
Alex: OK, so uh, Wind, what film do you have for us today?
Wind: <laughing> Well, surprise, surprise our film choice for today is A Clockwork Orange.
Alex: By the amazing Stanley Kubrick.
Wind: Right.
Alex: So what was your-what was your thought process in choosing this film?
Wind: Well this is one of my favorite films for a couple of reasons: one sort of psychological and one that’s a little more personal. Um, psychologically, my favorite genre is dystopias, so I really appreciate this as an example of a dystopian future and of course the-the Kubrick vision is iconic and classic, so it is really important film just for film history if not for psychology. And the more personal reason I like this–it sounds scary when I say I like it for personal reasons–but, because when I was in high school, I did an exchange program where I lived in Russia for a little while and in the film, the made-up language that the main character uses is about half of the words that he uses are based on Russian teen slang and so the the Russian kind of tie is for the person aspect and it makes me feel nostalgic for when I lived there.
Alex: Yeah. The-the slang is really fun and I also read that they did a purposeful mix of that-those Russian words with Cockney slang–
Wind: Right.
Alex: –and it is sort of flows… like, you don’t even realize “oh, maybe that’s not Cockney slang it’s just right it’s just really fancy in the future Cockney slang, maybe”.
Wind: Right. A lot of people don’t realize that the Russian piece to it… they just think that it’s like totally made-up word or something like that–
Alex: Or something, you know, similar to what, uh, an English word might be. Do you have any, um, examples?
Wind: Well… so they go to The Milk Bar, in the movie, and, you know, the milk has-has drugs in it, but the word they use for milk is “moloko”, and so um, he-he says something like um, “devotchka” and that kind of thing, talking about women. And so, some of the words sound more Russian than others but um, but I like that aspect of it.
Alex: Now is “droog” Russian or was that just a made-up word?
Wind: I think that’s British. It’s not a word that I came across when I was in Russia, but I’m not sure about that one, actually.
Alex: It’s my favorite word/slang in-in the film, especially when he says <slight British accent> “my little droogies…” Um, right. And-and, for those who may not be familiar with the film when we talk about “he” or the main character, we are talking about a character named Alex–not to be confused with your humble host here. Um, so I’m not entirely sure how we’re going to handle, uh, you know, differentiating the two.
Wind: Important to know that you are not that Alex–
Alex: <crosstalk> Yes. Not that Alex–
Wind: <crosstalk> You’re a nice person.
Alex: <laughter> That would be bad if I was that Alex. Um, OK… so, this film is useful in psychology for a number of reasons, but I think what you and I both really focus on is the psychological concept that screaming at you for I would say a good portion of the film. In sort of the middle section of the film, um, and that’s how conditioning is represented. And we mean conditioning in the-the traditional sense of the word, right, so–
Wind: Right, the Pavlovian sense of the–
Alex: –right, exactly. So what… Because you did write a Psychology Today piece on this I’ll defer to you on explaining it. So what about the conditioning that you see the film makes it Pavlovian or classical?
Wind: Right. So when I’m talking about this with my students, we start with what-what is classical conditioning. Lots of people are at least a little bit familiar with the classic study, done by Pavlov, with dogs and salivation. And so, the idea is that Pavlo, he didn’t intentionally study conditioning, that was sort of an accident in his lab–
Alex: It’s a great story, about that.
Wind: –he was studying digestion with dogs and he’s trying to measure how much they salivate and they started to predict that they were going to be fed by these cues that they have learned in their environment, such as him walking down the hallway, wearing a white lab coat, and it’s messing up his experiment. So he actually started to train the dogs to only salivate when they heard a noise and the the urban legend is that it was a bell. He didn’t actually use a bell, he used a metronome and a tuning fork and whistle, but everybody always says bell, so… OK. Just putting out there, it’s not actually a bell, but for the purposes of today, we’ll say bell. So, he trains them to hear this bell and they learn that that’s a cue that they’re about to be fed and so after multiple pairings of “bell leads to food,” they start to salivate when they hear the bell. So it worked to make this association in their environment and it’s an automatic, instinctive reaction. So Pavlov is arguing that it’s really on a physical level for the dogs–they’re not logicking (sic) it out, really–
Alex: Right.
Wind: So that’s where we see the classical conditioning in the film. So Alex is this very violent character–he is a murderer, he’s a rapist, he assaults people on the street and so he eventually he goes to prison for murder and he is–
Alex: Which, I will say, by the way, since we both recently watched the film, it’s almost an accidental murder and when you see his face, when they say that the old woman was murdered, he’s like “wait what…”
Wind: That’s interesting, though, because, is he upset that he murdered someone? Or is he upset that now he knows for sure he’s going to go to jail?
Alex: Uh yeah, ambiguous… It looked–I mean, from a-from a personal standpoint, it look like fear to me but, you know–
Wind: Right, fear like “oh I’m screwed now”.
Alex: Possibly, yeah–
Wind: Not-not like regret that I just murdered someone.
Alex: Potentially, but continue. Yeah, go ahead.
Wind: There are a lot of debatable things in the movie–which is one of the reasons I love it. So anyway, he goes to jail. He ends up <inaudible> for this treatment that he gets all excited about because instead of spending years more in prison he can get out in 2 weeks. And so the treatment ends up being this classical conditioning where they give him a shot several times a day and they don’t actually tell him what the shot is, but the shot is going to cause him to be nauseated a few minutes later. Before they hook him up to this watch really violent movies and as he’s watching these violent movies he starts to feel the nausea and so the classical conditioning for him is whenever he starts to think about violence he has this physical, instinctive reaction when she starts to feel nauseated.
Alex: Yeah, and-and that’s the quick classical conditioning. and eventually, it becomes–not it–becomes learned in the sense that his body does it automatically and they go through this whole song and dance number of showing it to, you know, the officials, the warden of the prison where he was from, and other members of high–I suppose British society, that when he tries to act violently or lasciviously, he can’t cuz he wants to barf. They never show him barfing, though.
Wind: <laughter> No, he starts to feel gassy and he sort of goes into the fetal position. But when the thought of violence, instinctively causes him to feel this nausea and that’s the classical conditioning piece to it.
Alex: Yeah, and it really shouldn’t be confused with the other major form of conditioning that many people might be familiar with, which is operant conditioning, you know, the patterns of reinforcement and Punishment and I think it’s it-it-it-it’s important to distinguish the two because a lot of words get thrown around in the film that pull you to operant conditioning because the word punishment is used, right?
Wind: Right.
Alex: And it’s specifically used by the doctor, uh-uh–
Wind: Which is unfortunate from a pedagogical point of view <laughter>
Alex: Right, a pedalogical (sic) and pedantical point of view–
Wind: Right, right. <laughter>
Alex: So yeah, he says “oh, it’s just a punishment.” And what is that punishment, Wind?
Wind: Well when the doctor is referring to the punishment, he’s talking about what I think we would refer to his compound conditioning. So basically Alex isn’t particularly enjoying the nausea, but he doesn’t get really upset about this treatment until he realizes that the score the music in one of the film’s is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Alex has this kind of quirk to his character in that despite his horrible violence and toxic masculinity, he really likes Beethoven, so… So he starts to feel this association when he hears Beethoven’s 9th, he then feels nausea and that’s what’s really upsetting to him. And so that’s the punishment that-that-that psychiatrists or psychologists sort of overseeing this notices and says oh well here’s the punishment. Which is interesting because it implies that what was happening before was not supposed to be punishment.
Alex: Yeah that’s true. That it was just, you know, “science”, “treatment”, “we’re going to make this person better but you know if he hates Beethoven after this, if Beethoven makes them physically sick then ehh…”
Wind: Right. It makes it sort of a happy coincidence from their point of view. But the term from psychology would be compound conditioning. Now we sort of accidentally conditioned him to the Beethoven as well as to the violence.
Alex: Yeah, so a double-whammy from Alex’s perspective that both of them now cause this, uh, nauseated feeling. Um, he also describes it as like numbness and just general unpleasantness–
Wind: Mm-hmm, and wanting to snuff it, or kill himself.
Alex: Right. And that becomes pretty important later in the film.
Wind: Right.
<Beethoven’s 9th Symphony 4th Movement plays>
ALEX DELARGE (V.O.): It was the next day, brothers, and I had truly done my best, morning and afternoon, to play it their way and sit like a horrorshow cooperative malchick in the chair of torture, while they flashed nasty bits of ultra-violence on the screen.; though not on the soundtrack, my brothers. The only sound being music. Then I noticed in all my pain and sickness what music it was that like cracked and boomed. It was Ludwig van. 9th symphony, 4th movement.
ALEX: <Screaming> Stop it… stop it, please!!! I beg of you!!! It’s a sin!!! It’s a sin!!! It’s a sin, please!!!
DR. BRODSKY: Sin? What’s all this about sin?
ALEX: That!… Using Ludwig van like that! He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.
DR. BRANOM: Are you referring to the background score?
ALEX: Yes!!!
DR. BRANOM: You’ve heard Beethoven before?
ALEX: Yes!!!
DR. BRODSKY: You’re keen on music?
ALEX: Yes!!!
DR. BRODSKY: (softly) It can’t be helped. Here’s your punishment element perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased… (louder) I’m sorry, Alex, this is for your own good, you’ll have to bear with us for a while.
ALEX: But it’s not fair! It’s not fair that I should feel ill when I hear lovely, lovely Ludwig van!
DR. BRODSKY: You must take a chance, boy! The choice has been all yours.
ALEX: You needn’t take it any further, sir. You’ve proved to me that all this ultra-violence and killing is wrong and terribly wrong. I’ve learned my lesson, sir. I see now what I’ve never seen before I’m cured, praise Bog!
Alex Swan: Now, the interesting thing about the classical conditioning though it’s not just Alex.
Wind: Right.
Alex: Which is so well done by Kubrick in this case because it’s very subtle, but it’s still there and and what-what-what aspect of that is in the film?
Wind: So what I find really interesting is that there’s a-there’s a second character who experiences classical conditioning and so-so earlier in the movie before Alex is arrested, he breaks into a house with his droogs, his gang members, and it’s a married couple who are in this house and he rapes and assaults the woman who’s there–
Alex: I’m going to play a clip of that for everyone to hear and then we’ll come back to it.
<keyboard clacking; doorbell rings>
MR. ALEXANDER: Who on earth could that be?
<doorbell rings again>
MRS. ALEXANDER: I’ll go see.
<doorbell rings twice more>
MRS. ALEXANDER: Yes? Who is it?
ALEX: Excuse me, Mrs… will you please help, there’s been a terrible accident. My friend’s lying in the middle of the road bleeding to death. Could I please use your telephone for an ambulance?
MRS. ALEXANDER: I’m sorry, but we don’t have a telephone. You’ll have to go somewhere else.
ALEX: But Mrs… it’s a matter of life and death.
MR. ALEXANDER: Who is it, dear?
MRS. ALEXANDER: There’s a young man here. He says there’s been an accident. He wants to use the telephone.
MR. ALEXANDER: Well, I suppose you’d better let him in.
MRS. ALEXANDER: Wait a minute, will you… I’m sorry, we don’t usually let people in the middle of the night.
<Alex and his droogs laugh as they rush inside the door>
ALEX: Right, Pete. Check the rest of the house.
ALEX: Dim…
<Alex sings Singin’ in the Rain as he kicks Mr Alexander repeatedly>
Wind: So-so as you heard the-the man who is having to watch this whole thing go down with his wife he’s observing this and-and while Alex is doing the assault he’s-he’s singing this song “Singing in the Rain” and so then later in the film Alex is going to prison and he’s gone to the treatment he’s released and he’s-he’s violently beat up by the police and he can’t defend himself because it makes him sick, so he’s sort stumbling through the woods after getting beat up by the police, and he gets, sort of, to this person’s house accidentally, and the guy takes him in for, you know, various motivations, but he doesn’t recognize Alex because Alex was wearing a mask at the time of the assault. And so Alex kind of lets his guard down and is taking a bath and relaxing and he starts singing the same song–Singing in the Rain–and it’s only then that the husband has this emotional, sort of, biological reaction to this song and Alex’s voice.
Alex: Of like, extreme rage.
Wind: Right, right and it’s the association of this song with the feelings he had during the actual assault.
Alex: Yeah, it’s-it’s-it’s almost you have to wonder: Alex recognizes him and maybe subconsciously thinks it’s a good idea to start singing the song?
Wind: I don’t know if he starts singing because it’s the same place and it’s sort of like a place memory like… method of loci type of thing… I don’t know if that’s it. But I think another interpretation is: so Alex has gone through this treatment where despite his inner nature he now cannot be violent but it hasn’t changed other aspects of his character so he’s still pretty reckless and I think he still has sort of a feeling of invulnerability and so I think he lets his guard down, you know, a little early and I think he does it without really realizing it. Now maybe on an unconscious level he’s wanting to get caught because <inaudible> situation… So again, we see a point in the film that’s kind of debatable what are people’s motivations and that’s another reason that I love this film so much.
Alex: Yeah, it–you have to think about–you have to wonder if he did it on purpose or if it was subconscious in the sense that, you know, “this guy won’t remember me…”–
Wind: Right.
Alex: “He’s not listening on the other side of the door…”
Wind: But as soon as Alex starts to suspect that the guy does recognize him, he tries to get out of town. You know, “thanks a lot, I got to go” and by then the guy has recognized him and drugs him.
Alex: Yeah, he was trying to figure out was in that wine glass <laughter> knowing nothing about wine cuz he drinks milk with drugs in it–
Wind: Right.
Alex: –with PCP in it <laughter> Yeah it means a–lot of–there’s a lot of parallels too. So, uh, you had some-you had some notes I saw about the connection with the book. Did you want to explain the connections with the book?
Wind: Well… So when are the things that I find fascinating about this film and-and Kubrick’s sort of vision and what made the books famous based on the film was that the film was based on the American version of the book which is not the same as the British version of the book. The British version was published first–
Alex: I did not know that.
Wind: –and it has it has an extra chapter that the American book does not have. It was published in England and the author is British and he-he sold it to an American publisher who says “I don’t like the end, we’re just going to chop off the last chapter” and at the time the author of the book really needed money, and he’s like “well, if that’s what it takes to publish a book…OK, I guess I’ll do that” But it’s a totally good ending and Kubrick uses the American version of the book to make the film, but it in the book, in this extra chapter, it–so the last chapter starts when the when the movie ends, so the last scene of the movie is Alex has basically gone through an extinction process so he could now be violent again without feeling the nausea and he says “I was cured all right” as in “I was cured from the treatment. In the last chapter of the book missing from the old–you got a new edition it’s it’s put back in there now–but in the original version of the book, um, in the last chapter he-he basically gets out the hospital and he’s wandering around and he’s like “all right, I’m going to go back to my old ways of murdering and raping” and he gets a new gang and they do that for a while he’s just bored, and he doesn’t like it anymore. He doesn’t feel the excitement. He doesn’t-he doesn’t get energized by it and he ends up going to this little cafe by himself and he’s like drinking tea and then he sees one of his old gang members in this little cafe with a woman and they’re married and he decides “that’s what I want now–I want to just grow up and be an actual human and find a woman and have a baby and start a family” And so it’s this intrinsic motivation for him to change into what we try to force him to change into with the therapy. And the idea was at the therapy didn’t work because he’s not A Clockwork Orange, he’s not a mechanical robot that we can control. He has to decide to change himself and that’s how the original book ends.
Alex: Yeah. That’s a great point to the overall morality idea… the overall thematic quality of the film which is about morality: can you really condition somebody to be a good person?
Wind: And are they good if they’re forced to be good?
Alex: Yeah, right, and are they good if they’re forced to be good. And-and we can–and research likely backs this up–I think we can be pretty confident in saying that probably not right, would you agree?
Wind: Yeah, I think a lot of research shows that for kind of therapy to work or any kind of treatment, the-the person has to really want to change. So you know it’s like something as simple as I’m going to try to stop smoking and I’m going to go to a hypnotist or something like that, the person has to really want it for that to work.
Alex: Right, exactly, you-you… you need to have the uh, wherewithal to understand that you have a problem first, right? Alex doesn’t think he has a problem in the film, and then like you said you have to have that motivate-that intrinsic motivation to-to actually then deal with the problem and again he doesn’t think he has a problem so why is he going to go deal with it.
Wind: Right, and this is something that I see in research on domestic violence, right? One of my main areas of research is these perpetrators of relationship violence–male, female, you know, anyone who’s doing this–if they don’t think it’s a problem to be violent toward their partner. You can put one of them in anger management classes, you can put him in jail, you can make him pay a fine… that’s not going to stop it. They have to decide what I’m doing is wrong.
Alex: Yeah yeah… that it unfortunately a fact of these relationships. So you had a-an interesting find: what are these Pavlok bracelets?
Wind: <laughter> So I just saw this coming across my Facebook advertising about a week ago. There’s this new product that’s a little bracelet you can wear, looks like a Fitbit or something like that–it’s the brand name, they’re not paying us for this, I’ll just say that–
Alex: Oh, right, exactly, no money I don’t even know who they are–
Wind: We’re not getting any money so <laughter> or you’re not getting money. I-I’m not either, I’m not implying that I’m getting paid by these people, I am not. So it’s called Pavlok which I think is a little pun on Pavlov. So it’s a bracelet you can wear and you can program it to send you electric shocks if you are doing something that you want to train yourself not to do. So I watched a couple of videos of some people who have tried this. So you can um, you can set it to um, make sure you don’t like <inaudible> but you can also say “OK, I’m at the <inaudible> So you have to voluntarily put this bracelet on and at beginning of a training, according to what I watched online at least, I didn’t like spend like 5 hours on this, I spent, you know, half an hour doing some research on this. You-you purposely engage in the bad habit while you’re wearing the bracelet and you send yourself electric shocks. So you’re trying to condition yourself to find the bad habit unpleasant right, and so the idea is you do this on purpose for a few minutes and then you’re supposed to kind of keep it up over 5 days every time you do the bad habit or you start to think “Oh I’d like to do bad”, you send yourself a shock. And you’re trying to give yourself classical conditioning. And there’s one version I saw where you can give your friends permission to send you shocks I don’t know that I trust my friends that much–
Alex: Oh my goodness–
Wind: –You can have this social reinforcement, as well, like some friend of mine just sent me this shock. So I’m curious as to how popular these are going to be, because you voluntarily, number one, identify a negative habit that you’re truly motivated to stop doing and then you have to send yourself an electric shock. So to me, anyone who is willing to take those steps has really crossed that intrinsic motivation line.
Alex: Yeah… <laughter> oh my goodness, people will capitalize on anything really…
Wind: <laughter> I wish I could have invented this.
Alex: Did they say how big the shock is?
Wind: They didn’t in what I saw. I think you can change it to be what-whatever level you want. The videos I saw people who had tried it said it wasn’t actually painful, it was more kind of startling. And it’s-it’s more about… when you-when you push the button on the bracelet or you like use the app on your phone or whatever and you say send me an electric shock, it’s sort of like a variable interval in terms of how long it’s gonna be until I get the shock. So it could be immediate, it could be up to 10 seconds later and so it’s more like this negative anticipation even that you’re going to get the shock and then it’s a surprise when it happens, and so the whole experience isn’t so much based on pain as it is this like physical anticipation and-and startle response.
Alex: I guess that there is some parallels then with the film and Alex’s character because you definitely see it when Georgie and Dim as police officers come and grab him and he’s like “oh man I’m going to tell you feeling sick right now”
Wind: Right, he’s already anticipating this whole thing is really badly for me…
Alex: Right. Oh man, I don’t know if I could do that… I don’t know if I could wear a bracelet that shocks me nor would I ever give my friends the ability to remotely send shocks.
Wind: I can’t even do it to my dog.
Alex: What if-what if you’re sleeping?! Or, you know, writing? I imagine you don’t wear it on your writing hand, but still.
Wind: Or if they’re just being jerks sending it to you randomly, or maybe they’re sending it to you when they know you’re doing something that you enjoy and now they’re like really going to mess with you, because–you’re going to have a negative association with this thing you used to like.
Alex: Yeah, that’s no good.
Wind: Right. <laughter> Enough said on that.
Alex: I wonder how long it will take that company–
Wind: to get sued?
Alex: Yeah <laughter>
Wind: I’m sure they have a lot of disclaimers like–
Alex: Yeah, exactly… um… One of the things that I did want to mention that my wife caught on on-on this one was the name of the technique–it’s a fake technique we should be clear–that the aversion therapy, the classical conditioning aversive therapy that is used in the film is real in the sense that, you know, anyone can do it–although holding somebody’s eyes open… they really did that to Malcolm McDowell too and he’s a super champ for doing–
Wind: It’s like method acting, right there.
Alex: –yeah, super method acting. Um, and the guy who had to keep putting eye drops in his eyes <laughter>. No, the name of the technique for that was made for the film and I kind of went down a rabbit hole on this one. I was like, “huh, is this an aversive therapy technique, I need to go look this up.” So I literally went onto Google Scholar and I was looking for this technique. It’s called the Ludovico technique and the interesting thing is that, it’s fake obviously, as I’ve just said, but it’s linked to Beethoven. And it’s just one of those subtle things that you’re like, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there.”
Wind: Right. And that’s one of the reasons I like reading the book version of-of the film–the book came out first, but–because, um, Burgess has all these sort of like brilliant subtle references and applications. This is um–it’s funny because this is not his favorite book that he wrote. He finds it kind of annoying that this is the one that got famous because of the movie. But, he-he-he’s not that impressed with the book himself, so, you know, so he finds it kind of frustrating that nobody reads any of his other books.
Alex: Well, you know, you can’t win ‘em all right?
Wind: Right. Fame is fickle, I guess.
Alex: Right. I guess, he as-as an author he has a little bit more time to describe things that a film just doesn’t have the time to go into. I think it would have been weird exposit-exposition or expository scenes where they’re like, mm, this is my technique, blah-buh-blah, this is what I do”. No, it’s easier–it’s better to just show it, um, because that’s what it is, that’s the medium is, you’re showing it and by golly it’s a-it’s a really good show…
Wind: And then it’s fun to find these little easter eggs like the technique is named after Beethoven.
Alex: Yeah, and I’ve seen the film about a handful of times and I never actually got caught on to that and that’s why I went down the rabbit hole on whether or not it was a real technique. They tricked me! It tricked me! any other-any other thoughts, details you wanted to drop on the film?
Wind: We-we briefly mentioned earlier that sort of toxic masculinity… that-that’s another theme in this film and that’s one of the reasons that that sort of final chapter is really important as a commentary on the fact that this kind of violence and-and selfishness that Alex portrays is, of course horrible and harmful, to both him and society, but the point of this last chapter is it’s an immature response to the world. To have this kind of senseless violence. And that mature people choose to not have that kind of reaction to the world and so I think that’s a really interesting point that we don’t get in the film, but would you get in the original version of the book. So I think that’s an important point. And one other thing that I think is really important about both the book and the film is the idea of the ethics of doing research on prisoners. So the book came out before this-this famous kind of committee called the Belmont Report, that-that said you can’t do research on certain populations because they can’t really give informed consent. And prisoners is an example of that, where if you give them some kind of compensation or motivation to engage in the research, that’s really kind of persuading them in a way that someone not in prison wouldn’t feel–
Alex: Right, it’s coercive.
Wind: It’s absolutely coercive, yeah that’s the word I was kind of searching for. And so that was another point of the book and film, is um, doing this kind of research on prisoners is really not ethical, and-and it’s interesting that the book came out about 15 years before the Belmont Report really kind of solidified that for modern sort of psychological ethics.
Alex: Yeah, the APA Code of Ethics, you’re right. I-it definitely could be inserted into that “Which films are good for talking about ethical human research?” It’s up there with, uh, the film that came out in 2015 about the Stanford Prison experience–I will always forever call it the experience cuz it’s not an experiment–the film that was made about Milgram’s work, The Experimenter, which also came out in 2015. It was a good year for older social psychologists, among-among other films where you’re like, wait a minute they’re doing some silly stuff to people–
Wind: –and that’s another–
Alex: –we really shouldn’t be doing that.
Wind: –another reason that for me, social psychology has such an interesting history, because a lot of our most famous studies are unethical by today’s standards and so it’s always an um, interesting debate in class to say, should we even talking about these? Are we glorifying them in this way that they don’t really deserve? But on the other hand if we-if we don’t they already happened, the harm has been done can we learn from this and can we-can we conclude interesting things about psychology, but also try to not repeat the past of the unethical nature of the study.
Alex: Right. I-it makes a good starting point for saying this is what not to do.
Wind: Right. Yeah. Although, I think they’re certainly variation… I wouldn’t-I wouldn’t put Milgram and Zimbardo it in the same boat really necessarily.
Alex: That’s fair. I will agree, I will agree on that one. Well…uh, any other thoughts/comments?
Wind: No, just if you haven’t seen this film, I hope that our conversation today really kind of intrigued people and if you have seen the film but you haven’t read the book, I would encourage you to read the book and make sure you get an edition with 21 chapters–
Alex: Twenty-one? I gotta go check my copy upstairs to find out which one it is…
Wind: And the number 21 is even meaningful– he-he purposely had it be 21 chapters because he said 21 is where you actually kind of become an adult in terms of maturity and and you have realized, I kind of have give up the selfishness of youth.
Alex: Hmm… that’s a good point. He was a little off on the age but–
Wind: Right, the age is debatable, but it was purposeful when he put it as 21 chapters, but you know, we’ve all done things for money, right? <laughter>
Alex: <laughter> That’s true and he made a lot of money…
Wind: He made a lot of money…
Alex: In 1960s money, which is pretty good.
<film reel sound effect>
Alex: Alrighty… well thank you, Wind, for joining me on this first episode of the, you know, long format, chattin with, uh, chattin with a fellow psychologist on super fun topics like film. I want to thank you for joining me on and discussing A Clockwork Orange and for those of you who are listening, I just want to say please share, like, and subscribe to the podcast–that would be really awesome if you did that! And until the next episode thanks for listening!
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