Cave Dwelling, Whole Milk, and Ultraviolence: Platonism in A Clockwork Orange
“Undoubtedly, such captives would consider the truth to be nothing but the shadows of the carved objects.”
-Socrates in Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” (around 380 BCE)
“You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir.”
-Alex DeLarge, A Clockwork Orange (1972)
In his allegory of the cave, Plato explores a multitude of themes: the insistent but tumultuous search for knowledge, the drive towards enlightenment, the quest for truth, etc. To SparkNotes this — because I am no Plato, and I doubt my writing or ideas will survive approximately 2400 years into the future — imagine yourself in a cave, chained up from infancy and contorted in such a manner that you are only able to keep your gaze directed ahead at the cave walls. A fire burning quietly and infinitely behind you, at times, projects shadows onto the wall in front of you. A bizarre partition exists within the cave, where, if you are lucky, your gaze is drawn to the contoured projections of passersby, shadows of odd creatures, and objects to excite your dulled mind. Your whole life, you have only ever seen these projections. Plato imagines that if you were to break from the chains and stare into the fire, or see the actual objects themselves and not their mere shadows, you would cower in fear, rubbing your eyes in pain due to the intensity of the brightness or the hardness of the material objects; you would desire to return to the status quo, as Socrates states, “Wouldn’t he turn away and run back to those things which he normally perceived and understand them as more defined and clearer than the things now being brought to his attention?”. If you managed to escape the cave, and bask in the sights of “heavenly bodies,” the grandiosity of the sun, and wished to share your newfound knowledge with your fellow captives, you and your ideas would be ridiculed as outlandish, going against everything they have known their entire lives. Perhaps such a disruptive proposition would get you killed.
In A Clockwork Orange, Alex consents to undergo rigorous rounds of Ludovico treatment, a behavioral aversion therapy, in exchange for his prison sentence being effectively terminated. While his eyes are kept open with metal curved bars and administered with Serum 114, Alex’s crimes of “ultraviolence” (assault, battery, murder, torture, theft, and so many others) are paralleled on a screen in front of him as various transgressive media are forced upon him, with the general goal of inducing intense physiological sickness as an inherent response to any future desire to harm another person. In this scene, there are some obvious one-to-ones with the allegory of the cave. For example, the chained man having a unidirectional outlook with only specific, cherry-picked entities, themes, words, objects, sounds, and light-sourced projectiles to consume. Things familiar and unfamiliar become known only within this curated, observed, and administered context. From here, I’d like to focus on a particular line from Plato’s Republic, “What our message now signifies is that the ability and means of learning is already present in the soul. As the eyes could not turn from darkness to light unless the whole body moved, so it is that the mind can only turn around from the world of becoming to that of Being by a movement of the whole soul”. Though Alex’s treatment effectively renders him cured, in the sense that he wants to vomit on himself any time he has the urge to punch his friend, or starts convulsing when he sees a naked woman, this “movement of the whole soul” represents a strict departure from the allegory of the cave; Alex does not autonomously wish for this change. Earlier in the film, the chaplain of the prison replies to Alex’s plea for the treatment, “The question is whether or not this technique really makes a man good. Goodness comes from within; goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man”. Plato believed in a movement of the soul, a complete re-contortion of the body willingly and autonomously. This “movement,” I think, is quite important and understated, as its absence troubles the question of whether Alex has been actually cured, or has gone so far as to be “enlightened.”