In Burgess's final chapter of A Clockwork Orange, Alex reaches the age of 18 and starts to grow up, seeing his former life of tolchoking and ultra-violence as juvenile disorder and the state of youth itself as "being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold on the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and then you wind it up grr grr grr . . ." Like clockwork in fact.

". . . One final point. I toyed, when first publishing the book, with the notion of affixing an epigraph from Shakespeare. This was considered to be a dangerously literary proposal: the book had to strand naked with no chaperonage from the Bard. But perhaps I may now conclude with it. In Act III scene 3 of The Winter's Tale the shepherd who find the child Perdita says: "I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wrangling the ancestry, stealing, fighting." It sounds like an exceptionally long adolescence, but perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own. It is the adolescence, somewhat briefer, that I present in A Clockwork Orange."
~ ~ Anthony Burgess

Kubrick concludes the film version with a more dystopian vision. Alex's voice-over states, "I was cured alright", and we view a scene of him naked and sexually engaged with a young girl, while the grey ranks of the Establishment applaud his actions. Malcolm McDowell's performance as Alex is undeniably one of the films greatest "virtues": Jaggerish lippiness and piercing blue eyes lend a fatal attraction – dramatically sexy and arrogant, bristling with malicious intelligence.

Genetic determination is no more implacable than social determination of the kind usually offered as an alternative. Indeed, it is generally more congenial to self-determinism. The notion of genes as principal "puppet-masters" is now thought to be simply incorrect. Many genes are just as much at the mercy of the environment and free will as any other part of the body – we control our own genes at least as much as vice-versa. It is obvious that we are the product of external influences about as much as we are the products of our own selves. The "truth" is complex. Some genes, by acting early in life, have ineradicable effects and are indeed "puppet-masters" over which we have little control. In the same way some experiences occur during life and have pronounced consequences. Other genes, and other experiences, act continuously throughout our lives often governed by our "free-will". The crucial distinction is not between genes and environment, nor is it between determinism and freedom. It is between causes that are susceptible to change and causes that are not.

Contemporary society effects appearances composed of fictions whose lack of substance is emphasized in extreme situations. Central to this complex is a condition wherein the mind can no longer endure continual consciousness, particularly self-consciousness, and therefore reacts by shutting down. It is increasingly impossible for humans to contain the idea of their own "identity". Within this we can witness an inexorable battle between the unconscious and the conscious, with the former characterised as the more primeval and "real" part of ourselves. The "dromologist" Paul Virilio says:

"We now have the possibility of seeing at a distance, of hearing at a distance, and of acting at a distance, and this results in a process of de-localization, of the uprooting of the being. "To be" used to mean to be somewhere, to be situated, in the here and now, but the "situation" of the essence of being is undermined by the instantaneity, the immediacy, and the ubiquity which are characteristic of our epoch."

In Virilio's theoretical investigations, all the key tendencies of the contemporary epoch are envisioned: the fantastic acceleration of culture to its imminent moment of collapse in a nowhere zone between speed and inertia, the mutation of subjectivity into "dromocratic consciousness" and the irradiation of the media-scape by a "logistic of perception" that proceeds according to the "laws" of the virtual world. Virilio's Dromology is an empire of immediacy, speed and communication, where the self continuously mutates, where living means quick circulation through the technical capillaries of the media-scape and where culture is reduced to the Society of the Spectacle.

In "The Art of the Motor" Virilio suggests the "Subject" in the form we understand it is barely able to hold together or maintain coherence – like watching 500 television channels at once. The culprits: television, the Industrial media, and the twin spectres of bio-technology and cybernetics. For Virilio each of these elements represents a particular combination of Speed and Vision, combined the play of these forces, mediated by the four factors mentioned, obliterate the "Subject". According to Virilio, the incredible velocity of the mutation of appearances – made possible by the "Art of the Motor" ends up mutating reality itself. What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. Experience entails a loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other) – a disturbance of the relationships with the other and the world. It is apparent that this dislocation, this non-situation, will inaugurate a deep crisis which will affect the complexion of society.

As J.G. Ballard has commented, the struggle now is to attempt to decode, to decrypt the multi-leveled space that we experience.

". . . All my characters are trying to escape from whatever situation they find themselves in. They do so largely by – their way out is to construct a kind of psychosis which dramatizes their own predicament, and to come to some sort of solution . . . psychosis is the most dramatic "remaking" of the mind that one can embark upon."