Stanley Kubrick's Film - a Clockwork Orange - as an Allusion to Plato's Mimetic Imaginatioon

According to Plato, a philosopher enters the realm of universal knowledge when his understanding is purely an abstract science. At this stage, the philosopher is in touch with the ultimate “Form of the Good,” and knows what is best for man. Imagination plays an integral role in reaching the Form of Good, because it serves as a means to which students can understand abstract ideas and eventually reach universal thought. In his pre-modern narrative The Republic of Plato, however, Plato finds that society can be easily consumed by the mimetic imagination, in which people are tricked into believing that the imaginary is reality. Plato’s condemnation of the mimetic imagination alludes to Stanley Kubrick’s postmodern film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), which features a youth gang driven by images of sex, violence, and drug, set in a dystopian future Britain. Furthermore, Kubrick’s film resembles Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, as the prisoners of the imaginary are introduced to new realities.

In Book VI of The Republic, Plato prefaces his Allegory of the Cave with his concept of the “theory of the forms.” This view asserts that each thing existing on earth has a corresponding “form,” or perfect idea in the Form of the Good, the highest form of all . Those things existing on earth are part of the lower material realms, known as the Form of Intelligible and the Form of the Visible. Socrates, who is used as the main character in the dialogues of Plato’s Republic. Socrates cannot is unable to find a succinct definition of the highest good, so we provides an analogy which stretches into the Allegory of the Cave found in Book VII. The metaphor begins with the sun, which illuminates the Visible Realm, just as the Good illuminates the intelligible realm. The sun is the source of visibility, sight, and is responsible all life, and thus the existence of the intelligible realm. Likewise, the Good is the source of intelligibility, capacity for knowledge, and