Essays


Essay Index

Representations of Science and Scientists
in Kubrick's 'Science Fiction Trilogy'

Introduction

Science and scientists are represented in particular ways in the texts of popular culture. These representations help set the tone for the way in which the general, non-scientific population views science. An examination of such representations seems particularly apposite in the era of the science wars and the postmodern refutation of grand narratives and epistemological certainty.

Interesting examples of representations of science, scientists and technology can be found in three films of Stanley Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971). Many commentators have seen these three films as constituting a futurist trilogy; Gene D. Philips calls Dr. Strangelove 'the first of Kubrick's science-fiction trilogy'(1), while James Chapman notes that A Clockwork Orange has been seen as 'the third in a loose trilogy of futurist films'.(2) However, Michel Ciment asked Kubrick whether he had intended making such a trilogy, to which Kubrick replied: 'There is no deliberate pattern to the stories that I have chosen to make into films'.(3) While there might have been no deliberate pattern to his choice, science or scientists play their part in the story-line of in all three films. Moreover, by concentrating on futurist films during the 1960s, Kubrick was reflecting that decade's engagement with science and technology. As a British resident, Kubrick will have been aware of a certain excitement within British society. Harold Wilson, the leader of the Labour Party, spoke of 'a Socialist-inspired scientific and technological revolution releasing energy on an enormous scale'.(4) Christopher Booker noted that it was not around Clause Four and nationalisation that Wilson rallied Labour supporters, but around such slogans as 'Change', 'Technology', 'Automation' and 'The Scientific Revolution'.(5) The 1960s also saw a growing interest, in both the academic world and among the general public, in the increasing pace of change in science and technology. As the scientist and author John Gribbin noted:

concern about the way the world might be going began to move out of the arena of academic debate amongst specialists, and became a topic of almost everyday interest to millions of people.(6)

A Clockwork Orange reached the screen in 1971, at the end of a decade of technological optimism. As Arthur Marwick states:

there was probably till the early seventies general acceptance of the view that science and technology offered great boons to society. Only in the seventies ... did this fundamental liberal-optimist assumption begin to be questioned.(7)

As the very model of an auteur, there can be no doubt that the vision in each of the films under discussion, and thus the representation of science, is Kubrick's. Kubrick has been the sole or co-producer, director and screenwriter of all his films (except Spartacus (1960)). He has a visual style that is almost instantly recognisable: the use of natural light and of particular kinds of framing and tracking shots, the organisation and visual effect of the mise-en-scène, the use of music, and so on, which as As Alexander Walker avers, reflect Kubrick's 'perfectionism, his inordinate taste for technology, his fascination with diagrams and statistics'.(8) Kubrick, however, had little formal education in science. He left school at seventeen without the requisite grades to enter college, although, as Alexander Walker says: 'physics was the most satisfactory among his subjects, in which he earned undistinguished grades'.(9) Michel Ciment reiterates this: 'At school ... the only good grades he received were in physics (science was his favourite subject)'.(10) During his adult life, however, Kubrick became an autodidact, and read widely.

Kubrick's three science fiction films possibly represent three of the most critically discussed science fiction films of all time, emphasising Hunter's comment that:

the British sf films that have received most attention have been those with firm auterist credentials, which can be detached from those of low-budget productions, and indeed from the confines of national cinema itself, and seen as contributions to world cinema.(11)

Each film, however, presents a different image of science and the scientist. Does Kubrick – as a celebrated auteur – present a particular, consistent viewpoint or vision of the role or position of science or the scientist in society? Superficially, each film presents a different image of science and the scientist. For example, Dr. Strangelove contains at its heart the vision of the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove. 2001 can be seen as a hymn to science and rationality, with scientists as, perhaps, cold, competitive and faceless. Yet 2001 becomes at the end a visionary and transcendental tale. A Clockwork Orange can be seen as a moral or political tale, yet the instrument of Alex's conversion is a scientific technique, conceived and operated by cold, bureaucratic, faceless scientists. In Kubrick's science fiction trilogy, do we see, as Hunter claims for the science fiction genre, the 'horror of science and modern life rather than optimism about their possibilities'?(12)

The rest of this essay is organised in four sections, discussing each film in chronological order, and finishing with a general discussion of the representation of science and technology in Kubrick's films.

Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is Kubrick's black comedy on the theme of global nuclear war. Although science fiction in the respect that it deals with a futuristic weapon that could destroy all life on the planet, it nonetheless has a more contemporary feel than 2001 or A Clockwork Orange. Its crisp, monochrome textures reflect an era that was still close in mood to the militarism of the Second World War, mirroring in some respects the generals in their bunkers shown in the realistic war-films. It is a film that demands black-and white photography; colour would have seemed frivolous, and the darkness of the shadows matches the blackness of the comedy.

Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, there had been marked fear of nuclear war, both in Europe and America. As Arthur Marwick reports, 'Fear of nuclear war was a very strong emotion in the America of the fifties'.(13)That emotion was equalled in Britain, where, Christopher Booker says:

The fearsome image of the hydrogen bomb ... bec[ame] a focus of emotion on all sides. Since the early Fifties ... the implications of this menace had received comparatively little attention. But ... in the autumn of 1957, it suddenly fired the fantasies of the nation with a nightmarish vision. Almost overnight the press became obsessed with the perils and jargon of the nuclear age.(14)

Although Kubrick didn't yet permanently reside in Britain, his work on Lolita, and subsequently on Dr. Strangelove, meant that he spent much of his time working in British studios, and he must have been aware of the anti-bomb sentiment abroad in British culture at the time. Marwick notes that:

Throughout the second half of the fifties opinion polls indicated that between one quarter and one third of the British public favoured Britain's unilaterally renouncing nuclear weapons.(15)

Kubrick had been in Britain working on Lolita during 1960, the year in which 'CND reached [its] peak ... when the annual Labour Party Conference adopted a resolution in favour of Britain's unilateral nuclear disarmament'.(16) Whether or not Kubrick was aware of CND, he himself feared nuclear war, and was interested in the 'perils and jargon' of the nuclear age. John Baxter records that Kubrick 'read extensively on nuclear war ... [and] ... subscribed to technical journals about military weaponry', and had on his desk a 'pocket-sized Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer'.(17)

Dr. Strangelove was based on a novel, Two Hours to Doom, by an ex-RAF flight lieutenant and CND member, Peter George. George's book describes how a USAF general, suffering depression over a terminal illness, orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union under procedures designed to enable retaliatory strikes even if the command structure of the US were to be destroyed in a sneak attack. The US President informs the Soviet Premier of the problem and helps destroy the US planes. Kubrick bought the movie option for George's book, and began working with George on a script in 1962. According to Baxter, George was a 'troubled man morbidly preoccupied with the growing threat of an accidentally-triggered nuclear war'.(18) While Kubrick and George worked on the script it remained relatively serious. However, when Kubrick met with his producer James Harris in the evening, they couldn't help but see the funny side of the projected situation; as Baxter notes, while 'Kubrick shared George's horror of nuclear war, ... there was much about the idea of atomic holocaust that fascinated and even amused the war-lover within him'.(19) Kubrick regretted losing the humour that he and Harris injected in their evening drinking sessions. At the same time, Kubrick was aware that Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959) had been met with indifference, and that the novel Fail-Safe (which had actionable similarities to Two Hours to Doom) had been optioned in Hollywood. Kubrick therefore sought a new approach. Terry Southern, 'a wayward and eccentric prose stylist with a surrealistic sense of humour'(20), was drafted in to help with the screenplay. Southern helped Kubrick refine the script and redirect it towards black comedy. In a sense it is sick comedy, dealing with the same sense of despair and destruction that Jeff Nuttall found characteristic of the 'hip' movements of the 1960s, as they tried to come to terms with proximate death; as Nuttall says:

There was the sick sense of humour ... Jokes that not only said 'We are ill' but also said 'We are ill and so what. We love it'. It was precisely that step that we were all trying to take in our humiliation and despair.(21)

Nuttall goes on to say, however, that 'sick is also simply what it says, an illness and therefore undesirable'.(22) Although for Nuttall the threat of nuclear weapons produced the sickness, for many intellectuals the sickness was ultimately the product of the scientist. Brian Appleyard muses:

The innocence of the easy, progressive Enlightenment myth ... finally died at Hiroshima ... Scientific reason was as capable of producing monsters as unreason. [T]he atomic genie had been let out of the bottle and new, evil rationalisms would find other justifications for its use.

As with Nuttall, Appleyard sees nuclear weapons as intrinsic to the breakdown at the centre of society, saying that they 'confirm our sense that there was something unprecedentedly and uniquely corrupted about our age'.(23)

If the result of the nuclear threat was a sickness, then Dr. Strangelove can be seen as a symptom of a sick society. However, Kubrick's reaction to Nuttall's perceived sickness, and to his own fear of nuclear annihilation, was likely to be complex, as '[h]e was both too enamoured of high technology and too politically neutral to be interested in simple polemic'.(24) As in George's book, Dr. Strangelove is the story of a USAF base commander who orders his wing of nuclear bombers to attack their primary targets in the Soviet Union, using the special authority granted to him. The commander, Jack D. Ripper, then commands that the base be secured so that nobody can obtain the recall codes that could be used to countermand his orders. Ripper orders that all forces that attempt to enter the base should be repelled, as even those dressed as US soldiers could be Soviet soldiers in disguise. Interestingly, when US forces do attack Ripper's base, Kubrick uses a documentary-style technique for the attack, using hand-held cameras close to the action, reminding us of cinema newsreel of the Second World War and Korea. In George's novel, the reason for the base commander ordering his wing to strike is depression over a terminal illness. In Dr. Strangelove, Ripper orders the strike because he is, essentially, sexually impotent. Ripper has rationalised his impotence as the result of drinking impure fluids – in particular, fluoridated water. Choosing fluoridated water as the source of Ripper's impotence is an interesting choice by Kubrick. The benefits of fluoridating water have been the subject of a debate that has rumbled on for decades, and still continues. For example, the Web page Fluoridation: Governmentally Approved Poison(25) derides the supposed health benefits of water fluoridation and presents a scare list of diseases supposedly caused by it. The debate is a good example of the way in which both proponents and opponents of a technique can mobilise science and scientists in defence of their positions.(26) It becomes, therefore, almost irrational to judge Ripper's position as irrational; who are we to judge when even the scientific establishment cannot equivocally settle the case? Our view of this debate is further muddied by our awareness that in Sterling Hayden's performance, Ripper is irrational – in fact, he is insanely paranoid, believing as he does that the campaign to fluoridate the US water supply is a communist-inspired plot to emasculate and debilitate the US population (a metaphor, perhaps, for perceived impotence in the face of Russian military superiority).

In Ripper's view, the only way to protect the seed of the American male is to bomb the Soviet Union into oblivion. Unknowingly, he is also setting the stage for the destruction of all life on Earth. For we discover, from a conversation between the Soviet ambassador and the US President, that only one US bomb striking its target is enough to detonate the Soviet Union's doomsday device. The doomsday device is supposed to be the ultimate deterrent for, when the device explodes, the radioactive fall-out it produces is sufficient to destroy all life; mutually assured destruction indeed. When asked the point of a deterrent about which nobody knows, the ambassador points out that the Soviet Premier was to announce the device at the next party congress, as he liked his little surprises. It is at this point that we meet Dr. Strangelove. Incredulous about such a device, the President turns to Strangelove to ask him if such a thing is possible. Strangelove pushes himself forward in his wheelchair and announces that such a device is feasible, and that its automatic detonation is child's play.

Strangelove is presented as the very image of the sinister scientist: a strangulated German accent immediately identifies him as a German, thus associating him with the stereotypical view of cold and efficient German industry and technology, and reminding us of Germany's role in the race to develop nuclear weapons. Strangelove's name plays upon conventions of the science fiction film. 'Strangelove', in either it's Anglicized or Germanic form – and we are reminded of the Germanic form in the film – sounds strange and alien. As Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis note, in science fiction '.. the Anglo-Saxon name almost without exception denoted a sympathetic character, while a foreign name, especially when allied to a foreign accent in those xenophobic times, connoted a villain'.(27) Strangelove's gloved right hand always seems to be out of his control, and the glove perhaps conceals the fact that his arm is some inhuman technological appendage; tinted spectacles conceal his eyes; even the wheel-chair implicates him as half-man, half machine (similar to the way in which Stephen Hawking's wheel-chair and mechanical voice implicate him as all brain; and Davros, the leader of the Daleks in their eternal battle with the Doctor, is a human connected to the lower half of a Dalek).

It is the uncontrollable arm of Strangelove, however, on which we begin to focus. It takes on a life of its own, attempting to strangle Strangelove, forming Nazi salutes, and so on. Despite only appearing in the second half of the film, Strangelove is in someway central to the film's thesis; the title of the film implies that the film is about Dr. Strangelove. It is tempting, therefore, to see Strangelove as an embodiment of the clash that Kubrick sees between science and technology. On the one hand, literally, is control and calm. Strangelove, the scientist – and the embodiment of science to which Kubrick seems drawn - is in control. On the other hand – the gloved hand, with its vague implication of the cyborg – technology is out of control. Strangelove, the scientist, finds it hard to control this hand, just as the scientist cannot control the results of his work; once the technologist finds a technique derived from pure science, the science embodied in the technology has entered the social and political domain, and is no longer 'pure'. Equally, from a metaphorical standpoint, it is interesting that it is Strangelove's right hand that is out of control. Traditionally, it is the left hand that is sinister. But here it is the right hand that dominates; the symbolically benign hand, but also the dexterous hand, the hand that creates tools and techniques. In being gloved, it is the hidden hand, implying that technology is hidden, that technologists work in secret, away from the gaze of an audience. It is Strangelove's right hand, too, that is prone to giving Nazi salutes. Fascism has always been placed 'on the right', and it is possible to see this struggle between science and technology, and left and right, as a metaphor for an interpretation of technology as ultimately about control, a control of technique that is in the hands of an elite and, therefore, ultimately fascistic. Interesting, in this light, is that Kubrick has been criticised as an overly controlling director; and that in later films he used a wheelchair as a camera platform.

Two of the most obviously comic performances in the film are those of Peter Sellers, as the scientist Dr. Strangelove, and George C. Scott, as General Turgidson, the military man who also seems comfortable in the scientific/technical world of mega-deaths, fall-out and response times. Sellers uses all of his inventiveness to create a comic grotesque in Strangelove, while Scott was unhappy that '[f]rom dozens of takes, Kubrick selected only the most manic moments of each'. The effect, Baxter says, is to portray Turgidson as 'a gibbering idiot ... interjecting, frowning, grimacing'.(28) In contrast, Hayden's performance as Ripper – the actual madman, who espouses a particular line of pseudo-science - gives him an air of calm authority. That it is Ripper who appears rational, while Strangelove and Turgidson appear mad, seems to reveal a certain antipathy on Kubrick's part towards scientists and technologists.

The War Room in which Sellers and Scott antic is an impressive design; as Alexander Walker enthuses, 'This is one of the most functional and imaginative sets ever designed for film'.(29) The set was designed by Ken Adam; Kubrick had admired his design for the evil scientist's laboratory in Dr. No. Adam's first designs for the War Room were loosely based on NORAD and other establishments he had researched. Kubrick rejected these, so Adam began drawing a strong triangular shape. Kubrick commented that he liked the triangular shape, and that the triangle was one of the strongest geometrical forms. He asked Adam how he would treat the walls. Adam suggested reinforced concrete. Kubrick noted that this would be like a gigantic bomb shelter, and went away happy with the design. It was, perhaps, less Kubrick's desire for 'form to be "justified" by function'(30) as Walker enthuses, and more, as Baxter notes, that, in the War Room, 'Adam had designed a variation on the Dr. No set – which Kubrick had wanted all along'. Baxter suggests that Kubrick liked the Dr. No structure as it 'recalled the pre-World War II style of German futuristic romances ... which ... featured vast halls with gleaming floors, dominated by humming machines'.(31) Adam also designed the interiors of the B52 bombers. Kubrick and Adam had been unable to obtain information from USAF, so Adam based his designs on the information in 'technical magazines like Flight, which Kubrick now collected, and which routinely published minute specifications and illustrations of the latest weapons of mass destruction'.(32)

In the original script, Dr. Strangelove ends with a food fight in the War Room. This was shot, but left out of the final cut. The reasons are not clear. Baxter states that 'many people' believed this was in response to the assassination of Kennedy two months before the opening of the film, but, as Baxter points out, the scene never made the final cut of the film, which was finished before the assassination. Baxter also notes that Southern believed that the scene was removed because the actors were obviously enjoying themselves, and Kubrick felt that watching people having fun isn't funny.(33) With the removal of this scene, the last War Room scene ends with Strangelove – having worked himself up into a state of quite human and unscientific excitement with his plan to secrete the top political and scientific minds in the country in secret tunnels, with ten women to each man to help repopulate the US – standing up from this wheelchair and shouting 'Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!' The film then ends with images of atomic explosions, which represent the multiple explosions of the Soviet's doomsday device, and Vera Lynn singing 'We'll Meet Again'. We are left to wonder, if we do meet again, what kind of world it will be in which scientists such as Strangelove, and politicians and military men, are left to plan their own brave new world. As Appleyard said about the nuclear world:

most of the time, nuclear anxiety was containable. Indeed, its very totality gave it a remote quality. Our powerlessness was a real powerlessness that left us a choice only between neurosis and proceeding with our lives as best we could. And, in these lives, science and technology retained much of their problem-solving mystique ... It was as if science had taken on the duality of its creators – benign in one aspect, unspeakably malignant in another – and as if our futures all depended on the balance of these aspects as they emerged from the laboratories and the equations.(34)

In the world-to-come, after the bomb, when we meet again, we wonder what benign or malignant creations will appear along with the descendants of Strangelove and his cohort as they emerge blinking from their mineshafts. The image of Strangelove portrayed in the film leaves little doubt that Kubrick feels those creations are more likely to be malignant than benign.

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps one of the most academically analyzed science fiction films of all time. It changed the face of science fiction film. As I. Q. Hunter notes:

2001 ... changed everything. Kubrick's masterpiece... raised the stakes for the genre. Unprecedented in scale, cost, technical perfection and intellectual difficulty, it not only established the possibility of intelligent epic science fiction but also began the identification of the genre with expensive, special effects-driven spectacle.(35)

Such was the ambition and intellectual difficulty of 2001, it divided critics upon its release. Despite the critical ambivalence, however, it began to achieve '[c]ult status, among the young in particular ... backed by spectacular special effects, and including a psychedelic trip sequence'.(36) Indeed, it was partly due to the film's ending, which includes the 'psychedelic trip sequence', that the film achieved an audience at all. 2001 depicts the development of man from barely surviving proto-hominid, to planet-hopping space-traveller, to something possibly post-hominid. These achievements are enabled by the appearance of a monolith, which somehow has the power to effect human development.

More than half of the film involves us in an imagined world at the end of the 20th century, when space flight, assisted by artificial intelligence, is common and commercialised. In this respect 2001 was very much a film of its time. In Britain, the 1960s were characterised by Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology', while in the US, NASA was concentrating all its efforts on landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. Most of the film's overtly scientific/technological content is, therefore, plausible conjecture based on forecasts by space experts such as those in NASA, and Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author enlisted by Kubrick to help create the sceenplay for 2001. This context is, to an extent, obvious, but there is an interesting subcontext that needs to be considered in the gestation of 2001. As Arthur C. Clarke notes:

Stanley was still basking in the success of his last movie, Dr Strangelove, and was looking for an even more ambitious project. He wanted to make a movie about about Man's place in the universe.(37)

We have already seen that Kubrick obtained only average marks at high school, but Baxter states that 'IQ tests rated him above average' and that 'formal learning bored him'. Baxter also quotes Kubrick as saying that 'I never learned anything at school and I didn't read a book for pleasure until I was nineteen years old'.(38) Baxter states that, by the time of Spartacus, Kubrick had become the 'ultimate autodidact, an information addict'.(39) Ciment also notes that as Kubrick prepared for a project, he studied 'books and magazines with the systematic curiosity of an autodidact'.(40) Baxter states that in preparation for 2001, Kubrick had taken to reading both science fiction and books on extra-terrestrial intelligence, and quotes Clarke as saying 'Stanley was in danger of believing in flying saucers ... I felt I had arrived in time to save him from this gruesome fate'.(41) Around the same time as Kubrick developed ideas for 2001, the UK was experiencing sustained UFO 'flaps' at Stoke-on-Trent, Banbury and Warminster. The availability of cheap paperbacks during the 1960s enabled a burgeoning UFO literature, along with its attendant 'was-God-an-astronaut' literature, to become widely available. Ultimately, there is little to distinguish the anthropological and scientific basis of Kubrick/Clarke's critically acclaimed 2001 from von Daniken's critically reviled The Chariots of the Gods (1968). The coincidence of 2001 and The Chariots of the Gods appearing in the same year is intriguing; the research for 2001 began in 1964, while the writing of Chariots ... took place in 1966 (42). However, the proposition that man's development was influenced by extraterrestrials has a long history. The Chariots of the Gods was itself almost certainly influenced by The Morning of the Magicians (1960), written by the French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, and One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963), by another French author, Robert Charroux.(43) Although Clarke's short stories 'The Sentinel' (1948) and 'Encounter in the Dawn' (1953) – both used as sources for 2001 – pre-date these books, the idea that extraterrestrials have influenced man's development goes back to at least Charles Fort who, in the early 1900s, stated that 'we are property'(44).

The film itself is, by any standard, slow and confusing; it is only through Clarke's novel that you can make sense of the plot. Throughout the whole film, with a running time of over two hours, there is only some 40 minutes of dialogue. However, Walker feels that this is partly what makes the film unique, saying that it came about through:

Kubrick's gradual perception of the perfect cinematic concept for the film as a nonverbal visual experience, one that would resist neat categorizing by dialogue or narration and, instead, penetrate an audience's consciousness at a deeper and more stimulating level.(45)

Walker also notes that '2001 deals everywhere in dispersal, boundlessness, mystery.'(46) This is as true of the initial scenes, which show us the proto-hominids discovering the monolith, and through this, learning how to use tools, as it is of the later, space-bound scenes. The opening scenes of the film provide a range of shots of wide and vast expanses of empty land. These are the spaces which, once the proto-hominids have begun to master technology, they can move into and exploit. To the proto-hominids, these vast spaces are as daunting as the emptiness of space.

We are taken from the 'Dawn of Man' to the year 2000 by a jump-cut almost as bold as that from a hawk to a Spitfire in Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944). As our introduction to the brave new world of sophisticated space technology, we watch the docking of a space-liner with a rotating space-station. This is accompanied by Strauss's The Blue Danube; waltz music that alludes to the precision required for such a manoeuvre, and reinforces the notion of the procedure as a technological ballet. This is our first encounter with the 'expensive, special effects-driven spectacle', and the mise-en-scène has influenced countless science fiction movies since. From this point until the Stargate sequence that introduces the final segment of the film, we are in the realm of space. As Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis note:

Space travel [has] provided some of the richest material for science fiction speculations over many centuries ... [T]ravels into the remotest corners of the cosmos – and beyond – always brings spaceships, spacemen and space ideas firmly back down to Earth. Indeed, it is in doing so, figuratively or literally, that the relative (and hence criticizable) nature of the human condition can be stressed and then worked over.(47)

In the space-flight sections that take up much of the film, we can see a working through of some of the concerns with science and technology that were to characterise criticism from the 1960s onwards. Technology is cold: the exteriors of the space-craft are white; the interior of the space-station is white. All the furniture in the space-station is functional and hard-edged. Everything is efficient; the precision of the docking manoeuvres, the perfunctory conversations in both formal and informal situations. There is a descent, rather than an ascent, of man, as technology replaces human functions. We move from Moonwatcher, the proto-hominid, who now has a bone, and is undeniably going to use it; to the bureaucratic scientist Heywood Floyd, a cog in the scientific/technological apparatus; to the technologists-as-caretakers represented by Bowman and Poole, the astronauts on a space-flight to Jupiter. The performances of Keir Dullea, as Bowman, and Gary Lockwood, as Poole, are strikingly unemotional and lifeless, almost as if it is they that have been reduced to automatons. Bowman and Poole are reduced to caretakers because the HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence, runs most of the space-flight. Although, being a computer, we only hear HAL's voice, there appears to be more emotion in HAL than in Bowman and Poole. Walker notes that this section of 2001 differs from the others by dramatizing this difference between the two astronauts and HAL 'into a conflict between men and machines.'(48) This conflict returns to a theme that characterises Kubrick's 'science fiction trilogy' – technology gone awry – and emphasises the notion that technology will ultimately control the human, rather than vice versa. However, in the battle between super-computer and human, it is man's invention and resilience that wins through; Bowman defeats HAL. And in defeat there is an attempt to elicit pathos – to identify HAL as an entity worthy of our compassion, as kindred – when, as Bowman removes the hardware that create its intelligence and cognition, HAL slowly regresses through its development, until it sings the first song it ever learned, 'Daisy, Daisy'.

The defeat of HAL leads into the final sequence of the film. It is this sequence – in which Bowman passes through some kind of portal to another world, ends up in a Louis Seize styled 'apartment', where the monolith reappears to him just before his death from old age, and is reborn as the 'Starchild' – that has generated much discussion. Walker states that Kubrick ensured this ending 'cannot be patly detached from the work itself.'(49) Yet the ambiguity of this ending falls into the pattern of the 'good' science fiction ending as described by Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis:

Endings are crucial in science fiction films ... The fantasy aspect of science fiction, and a contribution to its subversive potential, lies in its essentially open character and its opening ability. It actively disturbs ... tearing reality apart. To end by sewing it back together again would be neat and tidy, but would counter science fiction's current of violation and contravention. Science fiction endings are best when they are sudden, dramatic, and open.(50)

Certainly, the ending of 2001 fits this pattern. Walker notes that the ending has divided critics over its meaning, and in particular whether it:

and the whole film embody an optimistic or pessimistic view of man's potential to transcend himself, since it shows him dependent on a higher order of beings for every step of progress he makes, until in the end he is reduced to what they regard as an inarticulate embryo.(51)

So, for example, for Ciment the film is about 'man, who transcended the animal condition by means of technology, must free himself of that same technology to arrive at a superhuman condition'.(52) Yet, for Walker:

If one can isolate any dominant thematic core in 2001, it is the film's concern with concept of intelligence. Stripped of its awesome effects, 2001 is nothing less than an epic-sized essay on the nature of intelligence.(53)

2001 is, therefore, a polysemic text, open to many interpretations. Yet, as Walker notes:

Kubrick has said on several occasions that 'the God concept' is at the heart of this movie; he prudently and swiftly adds that he does not refer to any monotheistic view of God, and he would probably be nearer to the view of those critics who see his film as embodying mythical rather than religious experience. (54)

This reflects the view of Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis that:

Science fiction ... contains many substitutes for religion ... Two of the most obvious substitutes ... are the belief in science as saviour and the desire for heaven, with its angelic hosts, and a new paradise ... expressed ... by the urge that directs us towards the stars. The journey into space is a spiritual and heavenly quest in technological guise.(55)

Indeed, although we assume that the monolith has been planted by an extraterrestrial intelligence – and the scientists in the film assume that is so – the monolith could just have easily been planted by God, Allah or Zeus.

2001 followed Dr Strangelove, and as Alexander Walker points out, the films 'could scarcely be more dissimilar'. While 'Dr. Strangelove was a nightmare satire; 2001 is, in Kubrick's words, a "mythological documentary"'. Walker states that 'Dr. Strangelove was weighted with pessimism', while '2001 is buoyed with hope'.(56) However, what both films share is an ambivalent response to the progressive nature of science and technology. While Dr. Strangelove posits an end to humankind in the scientific/technological rationality of the nuclear age, 2001 appears to imply that humankind can only survive by going beyond science and technology, to become, somehow, a disembodied intelligence. However, while that is one solution to the mystery of the 2001's ending, it is the Daniken-esque precursory scenes that intrigue me. Indeed, M. John Harrison's statement about The Chariots of the Gods, can be applied, with some modification, equally to 2001:

The vulgarized anthropology of Erich von Daniken becomes, in Chariots of the Gods, a blueprint for collective inferiority, suggesting a loss of confidence of such an extent that we now prefer to attribute our progress to mere reinvention and our very ability to progress to the result of genetic interference by some spacefaring master-race.(57)

For most of 2001 is little more than an attempt to find a dead God elsewhere, and a loss of faith in humanity to survive without some form of 'divine' intervention.

A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is a dystopian vision of a not-too distant future in which uncontrollable gangs of youths get their kicks through violence and sex. Alex, the narrator and protagonist of the film, leads a gang whose night-life is an endless round of violence, rape, robbery, and car-jacking. After killing one of his victims, Alex is sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. This is commuted if he agrees to undergo the Ludovico Technique, a system of behavioural therapy that associates sex and violence with feelings of nausea and disgust. The film is based on Anthony Burgess's novel of the same name, first published in 1962. In general, the film follows the book quite closely, even using the slang that Burgess created for his teenagers. At the heart of both Burgess's novel and Kubrick's film is the question of moral choice; as Blake Morrison says, 'Alex must be able to choose to be good; he must be an orange, capable of growth and sweetness, not a wound up clockwork toy.'(58) There is no doubt that Burgess's novel reflected the apparent increase in juvenile violence of the 1960s; as Morrison notes:

Burgess had been struck by the development of coffee bars, pop music and teenage gangs. In particular, there was rivalry between Mods and Rockers, whose violent bank Holiday clashes - in Brighton and in Hastings - he was in a good position to observe.(59)

This was also a time of engagement by the social sciences with the problem of juvenile delinquency, which resulted in books such as T. R. Fyvel's The Insecure Offenders and Peter Willmot's Adolescent Boys of East London. It is possible to see Alex as one of Willmot's adolescent boys, in that 'much of what [they] are doing, is, in strictly rational terms, pointless and senseless - much of the behaviour is an expression of bubbling exuberance, of animal high spirits.'(60) The concern with juvenile delinquency and violence - particularly the violence associated with football and the growth of the cult of the skinhead - continued into the 1970s, making Kubrick's film as topical in 1971 as Burgess's novel had been in the early 1960s.

Burgess's novel can be placed in a long line of pessimistic futuristic or science fiction novels, such as Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984. As I. F. Clarke notes:

most of the classic statements on the hateful future appear in the United Kingdom. It seems that the descendants of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, no longer able to accept the idea of progress, have chosen to discharge their feelings of anger and anxiety by working through the entire paradigm of social and political parables.(61)

What then, could attract Kubrick, the American director, to Burgess's novel? Clarke goes onto state that, while English writers create futures that explore political oppression, Americans writers:

have written more widely and with greater effectiveness about the repressive potentialities of the mechanized society ... [American writers] focus their satires on the ways in which technological developments can destroy prized relationships in society.(62)

If we assume that 'prized relationships in society' can only be fulfilled if all parties to the relationship have the freedom to act as they will, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Kubrick found the subject matter of the book interesting. However, one has to be cautious when attributing any conscious motives to Kubrick's selection of Burgess's text; as Kubrick said:

First of all, I don't choose stories as political tracts. The fact that Burgess's novel happens to be about something that now happens to be particularly topical – behavioral psychology and the conditioning of antisocial behavior ... – is really just a part of what my interest was in A Clockwork Orange.
What attracted me to the book was its qualities as a work of art. Essentially, that's what attracts me to stories for films. I don't start by saying 'What am I concerned about, and can I find a story that relates to that?'(63)

Kubrick's film is, as usual, visually sumptuous, and with nearly everything filmed in a pin-point sharp, deep focus, nothing in the mise-en-scène goes unnoticed. is a real horror-show treat for the glazzies, Oh my brothers. The film contains many of Kubrick's visual motifs, particularly the shots of long corridors, which we either peer along from a fixed distance as the action moves towards us, or travel along with an actor. Although Kubrick has remained faithful to Burgess's novel, even given the inevitable compression that a film usually imposes, it is in the mise-en-scène that we notice Kubrick's own authorial voice. In particular, it is through the mise-en-scène that Kubrick lays a particular emphasis on sex that is missing from the book. For example, the first scene shows Alex and his gang (his droogs) drinking milk plus (milk containing drugs) in The Korova Milkbar. As the camera pulls back to from Alex's face, the field of view encompasses the milkbar. We then see that the tables and milk dispensers are lifelike, life-size models of naked women, posed so as to create a functional object such as a table. Kubrick's use of sexual motifs and erotic décor enabled him to suggest a futuristic setting for the period, '[t]he assumption being that erotic art will eventually become popular art ... and ... you may one day buy erotica [in Woolworths].'(64)

'What gets into you all?' Alex's corrective officer, Mr. Deltoid, wonders:

We study the problem and we've been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You've got a good home here, good loving parents, you've got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?(65)

With no answer to the question of what motivates delinquent behaviour, and the prisons becoming overcrowded, the government of Alex's world sees a solution in the Ludovico Technique. By using the technique, based on classical Pavlovian conditioning, a criminal can be safely released back into society; the prisons can be emptied. Alex becomes the first inmate on whom the Ludovico Technique is attempted. It is such conditioning that is the target of A Clockwork Orange, rather than gang culture or violence, as Chapman notes:

Burgess had been disturbed by accounts of new behaviorist methods of reforming criminals, particularly the work of American psychologist B. F. Skinner, who believed that the experiments conducted by Pavlov in the behaviour modification of animals could be applied to human beings. Burgess believed that this would erode the freedom of people to make moral choices. The freedom of choice, even if it was the choice to commit rape and murder, was, in Burgess's view, essential for humanity.(66)

Skinner recognised the increased interest in behavioral conditioning – reflected in the sales of his utopian novel, Walden Two – and believed there were two reasons for it:

'behavioral engineering' ... was, at the time, little more than science fiction ... The 1950's, however, saw the beginnings of ... behavior modification ... A technology of behavior was no longer a figment of the imagination ... [Also t]he world was beginning to face problems of an entirely new order of magnitude ... But [change...] would only happen only if human behavior changed, and how it could be changed was still an unanswered question.(67)

A Clockwork Orange only displays its scientists as technicians. We know that Dr. Brodsky developed the Ludovico Technique, but it is a technique constructed, perhaps, from ready-made science: conditioning and pharmaceuticals. The conditioning scenes show all of the scientist/technicians in white coats, that signifier of science. The first scientist we see administering treatment to Alex is female. She is a tall, strong-looking woman, and with her swept back hair and tie, she has an air of masculinity about her. Dr. Brodsky – and note the foreign name, which, like Dr. Strangelove's, connotes a villain - is quiet, authoritative, and unemotional. When Alex realises during his conditioning that he is hearing Beethoven, he goes into a frenzy. Brodsky remains aloof, emotionally unaffected by Alex's suffering. The technician who sets up the apparatus required for Alex's conditioning is rarely seen after Alex has been wired and clamped. During the conditioning, the camera concentrates on Alex's face; the technician remains to one side, a constant presence, dropping water into Alex's unblinking eyes. Alex, it seems, has a face, while the technician does not. The technician does not interact on any personal level with Alex. Brodsky, the technician, and the female scientist seem to be acting as a metaphors: science is cold, remote, faceless and male. The metaphor carries a further weight; by showing that the technician is always quietly there, the scene implies that science/technology is always at your shoulder, always part of the scene. As Robert Merton notes, 'technical civilization ... [is that in which] the ever-expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life.'(68)

A Clockwork Orange displays Kubrick's usual obsession for detail in the technical equipment assembled in the Ludovico Centre: eyelid-clamps, skull-clamps, syringes, electrodes, cathode-ray tubes, and a host of other impressive-looking boxes that lurk around behind Dr. Brodsky. The function of the boxes is unknown, but Kubrick draws no particular attention to them; their presence is understated, and our knowledge as to their function is unimportant. They are the ubiquitous black boxes of input-output and control. The room in which the treatment takes place is in semi-darkness, so that the conditioning films can be shown. This darkness, along with the objects of the technique – the eyelid clamps, the skull clamp, the straight-jacket, the chair with its restraining devices, as well as the black boxes and the flickering light of the movies – makes the treatment room feel more like a torture chamber; further accentuated by Alex's cries and shouts on hearing his beloved Beethoven on a film soundtrack. Within the story, these objects have a rationale; they are part of the Ludovico Technique. They also operate metonymically, signifying, as much as the white coats, the rule of technique.

A Clockwork Orange, as in 2001, uses classical music in its score. In A Clockwork Orange, however, the classical music is matched by synthesized music created predominantly by Walter (Wendy) Carlos. Carlos's score is mainly used for incidental music; the music used to highlight action is predominantly recordings of orchestral classical music. Through this musical dichotomy, Kubrick's ambivalence towards technology can be seen. Kubrick states that:

Walter Carlos has done something completely unique in the field electronic realization of music ... I think that Walter Carlos is the only composer and realizer who has managed to create a sound which is not an attempt at copying the instruments of the orchestra and yet which, at the same time, achieves a beauty of its own employing electronic tonalities. I think that his version of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony rivals hearing a full orchestra playing it, and that is saying an awful lot.(69)

Yet, for those scenes that depict Alex's violence, and his violent imaginings, the music used is 'real' music, played by orchestras or sung by humans. The tramp – whose beating is our first sight of the droog's violence – sings In Dublin's Fair City; the rape of Mrs. Alexander is accompanied by Alex singing Singin' in the Rain. The fight with Billy Boy's gang, Alex's imagined violence, Alex's suicide attempt, and so on, are accompanied by recorded orchestral music. However, Alex's orgy with the two girls is accompanied by a synthesised version of the William Tell Overture. The scene is overcranked, and thus 'gives away' the technological nature of the movie. The scene becomes unreal both visually and aurally. Equally, when Alex is made to watch violent movies during conditioning, the music is electronic; signifying that the violence in these movies is 'screen violence', and not Alex's 'real violence'. The arrangement of Beethoven's Ninth used in these films is ersatz Beethoven. It is cold and unreal, not alive in the Romantic sense of feeling and spirit. Only Alex is alive in that sense. Only Alex's actions deserve real music. Indeed, it is possible to see Alex as a Romantic figure in Kubrick's film, living as a Rousseau-like savage, or a Byronic figure. Cranston describes Byron as 'handsome in a dark and brooding way, ... extravagant, outrageous and the lover of many women; ... a lord and a fighter'.(70) This description of Byron could also fit Malcolm McDowell's portrayal of Alex. Critics have commented on McDowell's aristocratic bearing; and Alex the character is extravagant and outrageous, always rich (given his crasting of pretty polly), and while no 'lover', certainly able to fulfill his sexual fantasies, no matter what violence he uses to get it. The film centres on Alex's return to 'liberty' from his conditioning, and liberty was a concern of the Romantics, certainly Byron. While the Romantic ideology is more complex than this, Alex seems a caricature of the Romantic idol. If we accept Alex as a Romantic figure, it is possible to see A Clockwork Orange as a playing out of the antagonism between rationality and irrationality, or between spirituality and science. As Cranston notes, 'the romanticism of the Romantic Movement is a product of modernity; it begins in the eighteenth century Age of Reason, and is in part a reaction against that Age'.(71)

State control, the vision of recurrent violence, nihilism - perhaps Kubrick had his finger on the the pulse of the nascent 1970s. After the optimism of the 1960s, the 1970s were, in Christopher Booker's words:

scarcely a decade to cheer about ... we may remember [it] primarily as a kind of long, rather dispiriting interlude: a time when, in politics, in the arts or in almost any other field one considers, the prevailing mood was one of a somewhat weary, increasingly conservative, increasingly apprehensive disenchantment.(72)

Kubrick's film matches Burgess's assessment of the American edition of his book: 'Nixonian ... with no shred of optimism in it'.(73)

A Clockwork Orange, then, in the words of James Chapman 'posit[s] a problematic relationship between humanity and science in the future'(74), and implies that 'the outlook for the future is bleak ... that science and humanity are incompatible'.(75) It shows a world of violence and despair, of nihilism and destruction. To control that anarchy through technological means is to emasculate the Romantic hero – a hero who represents the triumph of the irrational, and the flight from reason.

Conclusion

Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis assert that:

because many people's main exposure to science is through science fiction, the portrayal of the scientist, and the nature of scientific activity, is of crucial importance. All too often the characters are stereotyped and bear little resemblance to real scientists.(76)

Kubrick does not move too far from the stereotypes: Strangelove is mad; the technicians at the Ludovico Center are cold and dispassionate; the scientists in 2001 are cold and bureaucratic. Just as with the sorcerer's apprentice, the magic wand always goes wrong: nuclear deterrence doesn't; artificial intelligence goes out of its mind; the Ludovico Technique has unforeseen results. And while Kubrick himself asserts 'I'm not afraid of technology'(77), it seems that his viewpoint on the effects of science and technology is in line with that characterised by Lewis Wolpert:

Science is dangerous, so the message goes – it dehumanizes; it takes away free will; it is materialistic and arrogant. It removes magic from the world and makes it prosaic. But note where these ideas come from – not from the evidence of history, but from creative artists who have moulded science by their own imagination. It was Mary Shelley who created Frankenstein's monster, not science. (78)

Walker notes that:

It is characteristic of Kubrick that while one part of him pays intellectual tribute to the rationally constructed master plan, another part reserves the skeptic's right to anticipate human imperfections or the laws of chance that militate against its success.(79)

While the skeptic is to be seen quite clearly in Kubrick's trilogy, it is not evident that Kubrick is 'paying intellectual tribute to the rationally constructed master plan'. Such skepticism clearly resonates with an 'intellectual' audience; the type of audience that matches Robert Pirsig's characterisation of the anti-technologist, the hip young thing of the 60s and 70s, afraid of technology and the forces behind it:

I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the 'it' is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape ... Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It's all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.(80)

If, as I.F. Clarke states, 'the tale of the future has always been the popular means of communicating the hopes and fears that follow out of the changing conditions of the great urban societies'(81), then the science fiction film has almost always communicated the fears rather than the hopes. While his interest in technology and his desire for accuracy give Kubrick's films a veneer of scientific and technological veracity, and despite his high 'regard for reason, logic, and precision'(82), still there exists the 'skepticism about the upward progress of mankind'(83); science and technology remain the 'favourite scapegoat'(84). The Golem is out of control.

Notes
1 Gene D. Phillips, 'Stop the World: Stanley Kubrick', in Stanley Kubrick Interviews, ed. by Gene D. Phillips, (Jackson, USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), pp. 140-158 (p.148).
2 James Chapman, 'A Clockwork Orange', in British Science Fiction Cinema, ed. I.Q. Hunter, (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 130.
3 Michel Ciment, Kubrick, trans. Gilbert Adair, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 153.
4 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs, (London: Collins, 1969; repr. London: Fontana 1970), p. 213.
5 Booker, The Neophiliacs, p. 213.
6 Future World, John Gribbin, (London: Sphere/Abacus, 1979), p. 9.
7 Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, 3rd edn, (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 258.
8 Ciment, p. 42.
9 Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick Directs, (London: Davis-Poynter, 1972), p. 13.
10 Ciment, p. 33.
11 I Q Hunter 'Introduction', in British Science Fiction Cinema, pp. 1-15 (p. 4).
12 Ibid., p. 5.
13 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, (Oxford: OUP, 1998), p. 31.
14 Booker, The Neophiliacs, p. 127.
15 Marwick, British Society Since 1945, p. 102.
16 Marwick, British Society Since 1945, p. 122.
17 John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 166.
18 Ibid., pp. 170-171.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture, (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968; repr. London: Granada, 1972), pp. 128-129.
22 Ibid., p.132
23 Brian Appleyard, Understanding the Present, (London: Pan Books 1992; repr. London: BCA, 1992), p. 122.
24 Baxter, p. 171.
25 www.arthritistrust.org/topics/fluoride.htm
26 See S. B. Barnes's essay 'On the Reception of Scientific Beliefs' for a discussion of the way in which those for and against fluoridation have co-opted science in their arguments. In Sociology of Science, ed. by Barry Barnes, (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 269-291.
27 Robert Lambourne, Michael Shallis and Michael Shortland, Close Encounters? Science and Science Fiction, (Bristol: IOP Publishing, 1990), p. 102.
28 Baxter, p. 187.
29 Walker, p.178
30 Walker, p. 178.
31 Baxter, pp. 176-177.
32 Ibid., p. 181.
33 Ibid., p. 191.
34 Appleyard, p. 124.
35 Hunter, pp. 1-15 (p. 11).
36 Marwick, The Sixties, p. 529.
37 Arthur C. Clarke, 'Back to 2001', in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 4th repr., (London: Hutchinson, 1968; repr. London: Orbit, 2000), pp. 9-18 (p. 11).
38 Baxter, p. 23.
39 Ibid., p. 149.
40 Ciment, p. 41.
41 Baxter, pp. 205-206.
42 Ronald Storey, The Space Gods Revealed, (London: NEL, 1978), p. 19.
43 Ibid., p. 19.
44 Charles Fort, Book of the Damned, (New York: Horace Liveright, 1919. Hypertext version with annotations by Mr. X at www.resologist.net/damnei.htm), p. 156 (at www.resologist.net/damn12.htm).
45 Walker, p. 39.
46 Ibid., p. 243.
47 Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis, p. 118.
48 Walker, p. 252.
49 Ibid., p. 265.
50 Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis, p. 112.
51 Walker, pp. 264-265.
52 Ciment, p. 127.
53 Walker, p. 244.
524 Ibid., pp. 264-265.
55 Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis, pp. 130-131.
56 Walker, p. 241.
57 M John Harrison, 'Sweet Analytics', in New Worlds: An Anthology, ed. by Michael Moorcock, (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 341-346 (p. 343).
58 Blake Morrison, 'Introduction', in A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, (London: Penguin, 1972; repr. 2000), pp. i-xxiv (p. xxiii).
59 Ibid., p. xv.
60 Peter Willmot, Adolescent Boys of East London, rev. edn., (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 154.
61 I.F. Clarke, The Pattern Of Expectation, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), p. 279.
62 Ibid., p. 275.
63 Gene Siskel, 'Kubrick's Creative Concern', in Stanley Kubrick Interviews, ed. by Gene D. Phillips, (Jackson, USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), pp. 116-125 (p. 110).
64 Ciment, p. 162.
65 Burgess, p. 30.
66 James Chapman, 'A Clockwork Orange', in British Science Fiction Cinema, p. 132.
67 B.F. Skinner, 'Walden Two Revisited', in Walden Two, rev. edn, B. F. Skinner, (New Jersey, USA: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. v-xvi (pp. vi-vii).
68 Robert K.Merton, 'Foreword', in The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul, trans. John Wilkinson, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964 [Paris, 1954]), pp. v-viii (p. vi).
69 Philip Strick and Penelope Houston, 'Modern Times: An Interview with Stanley Kubrick', in Phillips, pp. 128-139 (p. 132). (First publ. in Sight and Sound, Spring (1972)).
70 Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), p. 71.
71 Ibid., p. 1.
72 Christopher Booker, The Seventies, (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 5.
73 From the preface to the 1988 US edition of A Clockwork Orange, quoted in Blake Morrison's 'Introduction' in Burgess, pp. i-xxiv (p.xvii).
74 Chapman, in British Science Fiction Cinema, pp. 128-137 (p. 131).
75 Ibid., pp. 136-137.
76 Lambourne, Shortland and Shallis, p. vii.
77 Kubrick, quoted in Ciment, p. 188.
78 Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. x.
79 Walker, p. 63.
80 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (London: Corgi, 1974; repr. 1977), p. 16.
81 Clarke, p. 302.
82 Walker, p. 36.
83 Ibid., p. 36.
84 Jacob Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, (London: Penguin, 1960), p. 143.
Filmography

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Cinematography, Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott (additional photography). Main cast: Keir Dullea, Dr. David Bowman, Gary Lockwood, Dr. Frank Poole, William Sylvester, Dr Heywood Floyd, Douglas Rain, HAL 9000 (voice). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 1968. MGM DVD, 2001.

Clockwork Orange, A. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay, Stanley Kubrick from the novel by Anthony Burgess. Cinematography, John Alcott. Main cast: Malcolm McDowell, Alex De Large, Warren Clarke, Dim, James Marcus, Georgie, Michael Tarn, Pete, Patrick Magee, Frank Alexander, Adrienne Corrie, Mrs. Alexander, Miriam Karlin, Cat Lady, Carl Duering, Dr. Brodksy, Godfrey Quigley, Prison Chaplain, Aubrey Morris, P. R. Deltoid. Warner Bros. 1971. Warner Bros. DVD, 2000.

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay, Stanley Kubrick, Peter George and Terry Southern. Cinematography, Gilbert Taylor. Main cast: Peter Sellers, President Merkin Muffley/Dr. Strangelove/Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, George C. Scott, General 'Buck' Turgidson, Slim Pickens, Major T. J. 'King' Kong, Sterling Hayden, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, Keenan Wynn, Colonel 'Bat' Guano. Columbia Pictures. 1964. Columbia Tristar DVD, 2000.

Bibliography

On Kubrick and the films:

Baxter, John,Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, (London: HarperCollins, 1998)
Ciment, Michel. Kubrick, trans. Gilbert Adair, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984)
Duncan, Paul, Stanley Kubrick, (Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 1999)
Phillips, Gene D., ed., Stanley Kubrick Interviews, (Jackson, USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2000)
Walker, Alexander, Stanley Kubrick Directs, (London: Davis-Poynter, 1972)
The Kubrick Site, www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/

Source texts:

Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange, (London: Penguin, 1972; repr. 2000)
Clarke, Arthur C., 2001: A Space Odyssey, 4th repr., (London: Hutchinson, 1968; repr. London: Orbit, 2000)

Contemporary history:

Booker, Christopher, The Neophiliacs, (London: Collins, 1969; repr. London: Fontana 1970)
Booker, Christopher, The Seventies, (London: Penguin, 1980)
Marwick, Arthur, British Society Since 1945, 3rd edn, (London: Penguin, 1990)
Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties, (Oxford: OUP, 1998)
Nuttall, Jeff, Bomb Culture, (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968; repr. London: Granada, 1972)

Science and science fiction:

Appleyard, Brian, Understanding the Present, (London: Pan Books 1992; repr. London: BCA, 1992)
Barnes, Barry, ed., Sociology of Science, (London: Penguin, 1972)
Bronowski, Jacob, The Common Sense of Science, (London: Penguin, 1960)
Chalmers, A.F., What is This Thing Called Science, 2nd edn, (Buckingham, UK: Open University, 1982; repr. 1994)
Clarke, I. F., The Pattern Of Expectation, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979)
Collins, Harry, and Trevor Pinch, The Golem, (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1993; repr. 1996)
Cranston, Maurice, The Romantic Movement, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994)

Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964 [Paris, 1954])
Fort, Charles, Book of the Damned, (New York: Horace Liveright, 1919. Hypertext version with annotations by Mr. X at www.resologist.net/damnei.htm)
Gregory, Jane and Steve Miller, Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility, (Cambridge, Mass: Plenum Press, 1998) Gribbin, John, Future World, (London: Sphere/Abacus, 1979)
Hunter, I.Q., ed., British Science Fiction Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1999)
Lambourne, Robert, and Michael Shallis and Michael Shortland, Close Encounters? Science and Science Fiction, (Bristol: IOP Publishing, 1990)
Lapp, Ralph E., The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power, (New York, Harper & Row, 1965)
Moorcock, Michael, ed., New Worlds: An Anthology, (London: Fontana, 1983)
Snow, C.P, The Two Cultures, (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1959; repr. 1998)
Storey, Ronald, The Space Gods Revealed, (London: NEL, 1978)
Waddington, C. H., The Scientific Attitude, 2nd edn, (London: Penguin, 1948)
Wolpert, Lewis, The Unnatural Nature of Science, (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)

Other sources:

Pirsig, Robert, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (London: Corgi, 1974; repr. 1977)
Skinner, B. F., Walden Two, rev. edn, (New Jersey, USA: Prentice-Hall, 1976)
Willmot, Peter, Adolescent Boys of East London, rev. edn., (London: Penguin, 1969)