Saturday, May 2, 2009
Clockwork Orange & Foucault's Reform
I recently saw A Clockwork Orange for the first time a few weeks before we started to read Foucault in class. The movie version of the story revolves around a character named Alex who is a juvenile delinquent. He commits crimes with his gang around his community which is portrayed as a corrupt place with a high violence and crime rate. He eventually gets caught in the film and sentenced to a term in prison where he spends some time and then volunteers to be part of an experimental treatment to cure him of his "baddness", which is where I think some of Foucault's principles apply. Foucault talks about reform of the body through training and repetition, and in A Clockwork Orange these systems are used but in a torturous extreme. Alex is put in a strayjacket and made to watch horrible images on a screen for a length of time each day, but the aspect in which the cure comes in is when the doctors gave him drugs that put him in an extruciating amount of pain that caused him to feel violently ill. The pain and the images put together were a way of conditioning his body to have a negative reaction to violence so that he would become "good". While Foucault doesn't give examples this severe as a way of reform, I think that this movie really relates well to his ideas.
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