Ludovico Technique Beyond Fiction and Films

Production photo of director Stanley Kubrick on the set of the 1975 film Barry Lyndon.

Back in 2018, on an idle boring day, I decided to watch Kubrick’s entire body of work; an endeavour embarked on by many for sure. In a couple of weeks, I binged his entire filmography, or at least the one attributed to him on Wikipedia. From his early documentary shorts like “Flying Padre” (1951) or “The Seafarers” (1953), to his last production “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999). The experience was overwhelming. Watching Kubrick’s visual narrative developing was an absolute delight. After my journey under his Practical Light, I ended up falling in love with “Dr Strangelove” and sort of obsessed with the central role John Alcott played in Kubrick’s most iconic films. Speaking of which, there was one film that I had already seen several times, “A Clockwork Orange” (1971). And today, I want to talk a little bit about one of the most intriguing concepts we are presented with in this film, the Ludovico Technique.

Before my Kubrick visual saturation, I stumbled upon a French short film from the early 60s that somehow reminded me of Alex’s suffering under the Ludovico Technique. The film’s title is “La Jetée”, which translates to something like “The Pier”. Centred on our brainwashing topic, both films delve into the human psyche and explore the consequences of manipulating human behaviour and frolicking with the limits of free will. In “La Jetée”, a man is subjected to a series of…