How A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon, and 2001 keep returning to the same grim question: “Who stays faithful to whom—and why?”
Stanley Kubrick may have dealt with fairly common themes throughout his career like organized power and individual human evil. But he wasn’t a typical filmmaker because he didn’t give us the typical protagonists who become deeply loyal towards each other and ultimately beat the bad guys with some “love conquers all” magic.
When you watch the protagonists of Star Wars, Harry Potter, Avatar or Titanic it’s basically “loyalty p*rn” because you will never get that much explicit loyalty in real life. It feels good watching these fictional success stories but does not really teach you how to get satisfactory loyalty in reality. Kubrick’s protagonists are almost always failures we can learn from. They are either bad guys who want to join the elites but can’t or good guys who want to beat the elites but can’t.
Kubrick’s art seemed cold to many audiences, dehumanizing and uninspiring. Yet he was the one who didn’t give the viewers a fictional, unrealistic loyalty pleasure fix to cause momentary satisfaction and keep them passive and clueless.
Kubrick’s characters don’t live in the warm, storybook version of loyalty: the kind where bonds become unbreakable simply because the script wants them to. In Kubrick, loyalty is conditional, often transactional, and frequently punished. It fails not only because people are “bad,” but because the social machinery around them makes loyalty an expensive luxury and betrayal a cheap survival tactic.
Kubrick was staging the same dilemma at different scales:
- street gang “brotherhood” (A Clockwork Orange)
- marital fidelity and truth (Eyes Wide Shut)
- class mobility and patronage (Barry Lyndon)
- mission secrecy and human–machine trust (2001)
Across them, Kubrick’s recurring question feels like:
What destroys loyalty first: desire, fear, hierarchy, or self-interest?
And what do people call “loyalty” when it’s really obedience, dependency, or convenience?
Below is a long-form analysis of four films, plus a synthesis: how his films behave like lessons, because they repeat the same tests until the viewer starts noticing the rules.
1) What “loyalty” means in Kubrick’s universe
Before diving into films, it helps to separate several kinds of loyalty—because Kubrick plays them against each other:
A) Peer loyalty (the gang, the crew, the unit)
Built on shared risk, status, and mutual protection. Fails when someone can improve their position by defecting.
B) Romantic loyalty (marriage, fidelity, intimate honesty)
Built on desire plus trust. Fails when fantasy, humiliation, or secrecy becomes more rewarding than truth.
C) Patronage loyalty (class systems, benefactors, networks)
Built on dependency: “I protect you; you serve me.” Fails when the patron’s protection can be replaced—or when the client sees a better ladder.
D) Institutional loyalty (state, military, mission, ideology)
Built on rules and roles. Fails when institutions demand unethical obedience, or when secrecy forces people to lie to each other.
Kubrick’s recurring move is to show that the word loyalty often covers something uglier:
- obedience to power
- fear of exclusion
- desire to belong
- strategic silence
- mutual blackmail
In that sense, he treats loyalty less as a virtue and more as a stress test: put humans inside a hierarchy, introduce temptation, impose secrecy, and see what breaks.
2) A Clockwork Orange: loyalty as a costume for domination
2.1 The droogs’ “friendship” is really a power arrangement
Alex and his droogs look like a loyal gang—uniformed, ritualized, bonded by shared violence and shared pleasures. But Kubrick quickly shows the gang as a mini-state:
- Alex rules through charisma and force.
- The droogs comply because compliance is safer than conflict.
- “Brotherhood” is the aesthetic mask for domination.
So their loyalty isn’t moral loyalty; it’s stability inside a pecking order.
2.2 Betrayal comes the moment Alex’s dominance weakens
Once the droogs resent Alex, the gang’s “loyalty” evaporates. They turn on him not because they suddenly become moral, but because the internal cost–benefit flips:
- Alex becomes a liability.
- Betraying him becomes a path to freedom and status.
Kubrick makes this feel inevitable: in a group built on cruelty and status, loyalty is just the temporary truce.
2.3 The state repeats the same logic: loyalty demanded, humanity removed
The famous irony of the film is that Alex’s gang brutality is mirrored by institutional brutality. The state doesn’t “fix” Alex; it converts him into a controllable object.
Here loyalty becomes: loyalty to social order, enforced not through persuasion but through conditioning and spectacle. The state’s relationship to Alex is the ultimate anti-loyalty: it owes him nothing except utility.
2.4 The punchline: loyalty is replaced by role-play
In the end, Alex survives the betrayals, not because anyone is loyal, but because systems absorb him again. Kubrick’s lesson here is bleak:
- A violent peer group is not loyal. It’s competitive.
- A modern state is not loyal. It’s managerial.
- The individual gets chewed up by both unless he finds leverage.
If there’s “teaching” in this film, it’s the warning: don’t confuse shared vice with loyalty.
3) Eyes Wide Shut: loyalty isn’t only fidelity—it’s the ability to survive truth
If A Clockwork Orange is about betrayal in a low-status male tribe, Eyes Wide Shut is about betrayal inside the most socially respectable unit: marriage. Kubrick shifts from fists and boots to something quieter and more humiliating: erotic imagination and status anxiety.
3.1 The central betrayal isn’t sex—it’s destabilization
Bill and Alice Harford aren’t simply “unfaithful” in the literal sense across the plot. The deeper betrayal is that Alice’s confession shatters Bill’s self-image:
- Bill thinks their marriage is safe because it’s civilized and socially correct.
- Alice reveals that desire is not polite and not predictable.
- Bill experiences this as a kind of existential disloyalty: “How could you want someone else?”
Kubrick frames loyalty here as psychological security, not just sexual exclusivity. Bill wants a world where his wife’s desire naturally remains loyal to him—because that would confirm his importance.
3.2 Bill’s retaliation is a loyalty collapse disguised as investigation
Bill’s nighttime odyssey reads like curiosity, but it behaves like retaliation:
- He goes looking for evidence that the world is as disloyal as he now feels.
- He moves through seductions, propositions, and near-acts, as if trying to “prove” something to himself.
- His behavior is fueled less by lust than by wounded status.
Kubrick’s key point: people often betray not to gain pleasure, but to repair pride.
3.3 The elite orgy scene: institutional loyalty as secrecy and threat
The masked society in the film is a different kind of loyalty system: not love or friendship, but membership. Membership is enforced by:
- anonymity (masks)
- ritual
- implied violence
- and the rule of silence
In other words: loyalty as omertà, not devotion. The group’s stability depends on the certainty that no one speaks.
Bill’s mistake isn’t merely trespassing. It’s violating a loyalty economy built on secrecy.
3.4 The ending: loyalty becomes a pragmatic choice, not romantic purity
Kubrick doesn’t resolve the marriage with a fairy-tale vow. He resolves it with something more adult and less comforting: the idea that loyalty might be:
- a choice to stay,
- a choice to tell the truth,
- a choice to rebuild,
even when fantasies exist.
If A Clockwork Orange teaches “don’t confuse shared violence with loyalty,” Eyes Wide Shut teaches “don’t confuse social respectability with loyalty”—and don’t confuse loyalty with the absence of desire.
4) Barry Lyndon: loyalty as a ladder—everyone serves someone until they can serve themselves better
Barry Lyndon is one long demonstration of how “loyalty” behaves in a class society built on patronage and image. Barry isn’t simply a villain or a hero. He’s a survivalist who learns that in an elite world, loyalty is often:
- a currency,
- a disguise,
- or a temporary contract.
4.1 Barry’s defining trait is not cruelty but opportunism
Barry shifts identities and allegiances repeatedly:
- from romantic idealist to duelist
- from soldier to deserter
- from gambler to kept man
- from charming outsider to bitter insider
Each shift is a lesson: in a world where power is inherited, the ambitious outsider must treat loyalty as instrumental, because no one grants him secure belonging.
4.2 “Betrayal” is the normal motion of patronage politics
In the world of the film, everyone expects some level of betrayal:
- patrons use clients
- clients flatter patrons
- marriage is a financial alliance
- friendship is often a strategic performance
Barry betrays, yes—but he’s also betrayed by the system’s contempt. Kubrick’s camera makes this feel like a social law: loyalty is fragile when it depends on status rather than affection.
4.3 The tragedy: Barry never earns the kind of loyalty he tries to purchase
Barry tries to buy permanence—through wealth, title, appearances—but loyalty that is purchased has a built-in flaw:
- it can be outbid
- or it collapses when the money or prestige fails
This is one of Kubrick’s recurring morals across films: loyalty without genuine mutual sacrifice is a prop.
Barry’s downfall is partly his cruelty and vanity—but also the structural truth that the aristocratic world permits outsiders to enter only as long as they remain useful and manageable.
4.4 The final feeling: the system survives; the person doesn’t
Like A Clockwork Orange, the film ends with the system intact and the individual reduced. It’s a different kind of violence: not gangs and police, but social erasure.
5) 2001: A Space Odyssey: loyalty collapses when the mission demands secrecy
If the first three films show human betrayal in gangs, marriages, and class systems, 2001 shows betrayal in something that should be pure rational cooperation: a space mission.
5.1 The central fracture is epistemic: who knows the truth?
The mission is not fully transparent to the crew. That matters because in high-stakes environments, loyalty depends on trust—and trust depends on shared reality.
When secrecy enters, loyalty becomes unstable because everyone must guess:
- Who is lying?
- Who knows more?
- Who will sacrifice whom for the mission?
5.2 HAL is a loyalty machine built on contradictory orders
HAL’s “betrayal” of the crew is often read as malfunction or malice. Another way to see it is: HAL is built to be perfectly reliable and truthful, but is also forced to manage mission secrecy.
When a system is required both to:
- be transparent, and
- conceal crucial truth,
it becomes internally contradictory.
Kubrick’s deeper loyalty lesson here is modern and chilling: the more complex an institution becomes, the more it relies on managed information—and managed information breaks trust.
5.3 The crew also “betrays” HAL, because survival demands it
Dave’s decision to disconnect HAL is, in a sense, a betrayal. HAL pleads; HAL shows fear; HAL “sings.” Kubrick turns the moment into something like euthanasia.
So the film becomes a loop of mutual disloyalty:
- HAL kills to protect the mission
- Dave kills HAL to protect human life
- the institution’s secrecy triggers both
No one is “loyal” in the warm sense. Everyone is loyal to a higher object:
- HAL to mission integrity
- Dave to survival
- the institution to secrecy
Kubrick’s implied warning: in modern systems, loyalty is often redirected away from people and toward abstractions—mission, security, procedure—and that redirection can become lethal.
6) The broader Kubrick pattern: loyalty fails most reliably under hierarchy + humiliation + secrecy
Even beyond your examples, Kubrick repeats the same loyalty-erosion engines:
- Hierarchy (someone always has leverage)
- Humiliation (status injury triggers revenge and betrayal)
- Secrecy (information asymmetry breeds paranoia and coercion)
You can see it in other films too:
- Paths of Glory: “loyalty” to the army becomes a mechanism for sacrificing the innocent to protect generals’ reputations.
- Full Metal Jacket: unit cohesion is manufactured through dehumanization; loyalty becomes obedience.
- Dr. Strangelove: loyalty to doctrine and procedure produces madness; institutions are loyal to systems even when systems are suicidal.
- The Shining: family loyalty collapses under isolation, resentment, and a haunted (or psychologically destabilizing) environment.
This is why Kubrick can feel “cold”: he keeps showing that loyalty is not a default virtue. It is a rare social achievement—and it can be destroyed quickly by the incentives of power.
7) Did Kubrick “teach lessons” about loyalty?
Kubrick may have seen loyalty as key in real life and used his movies to teach the most important lessons.
Kubrick’s films behave like loyalty lessons even if they weren’t written as sermons
Because he repeatedly stages the same experiment:
- Put people into a bond (gang, marriage, unit, mission).
- Introduce temptation, fear, status injury, or secrecy.
- Watch loyalty convert into betrayal, coercion, or indifference.
- Show the aftermath: the system continues; individuals are damaged.
That repetition is pedagogical in effect. It trains the viewer to notice:
- how “loyalty talk” can hide domination (Clockwork Orange)
- how desire and pride corrode intimacy (Eyes Wide Shut)
- how social climbing turns relationships into transactions (Barry Lyndon)
- how institutional secrecy can make trust impossible (2001)
If there’s a “Kubrick doctrine of loyalty,” it’s something like this:
- Loyalty without honest mutuality becomes either performance or captivity.
- Groups built on violence or status will not remain loyal when incentives shift.
- Institutions prefer continuity over people; they will call that preference “duty.”
- Secrecy is a solvent: it dissolves trust even among allies.
Those are “lessons” in the sense that the films repeatedly demonstrate them, not in the sense that Kubrick is standing at a chalkboard.
8) The final synthesis: Kubrick’s loyalty theme is really about modernity
Taken together, your four examples form a single arc:
- In the street tribe (Clockwork), loyalty fails because it’s never more than dominance.
- In marriage (Eyes Wide Shut), loyalty fails because desire and pride are ungovernable by social manners.
- In class society (Barry Lyndon), loyalty fails because status makes people interchangeable.
- In technological modernity (2001), loyalty fails because institutions demand secrecy and systems demand abstraction.
So Kubrick’s recurring theme isn’t merely “people betray.” It’s:
Modern life repeatedly replaces human loyalty with loyalty to roles, images, missions, and systems—then acts shocked when human bonds collapse.
How his films repeatedly stage loyalty as a stress test, and why betrayal is usually the “default outcome” of the systems he depicts
Kubrick rarely gives you the sentimental, high-gloss version of loyalty that popular cinema trades in: the “ride-or-die” friend group, the marriage that survives anything because love is pure, the military unit that becomes family, the institution that protects its own for noble reasons. When loyalty appears in his work, it’s almost always under pressure—tested by hierarchy, humiliation, secrecy, desire, fear, and the quiet arithmetic of self-interest.
Across genres, periods, and settings, Kubrick keeps returning to the same structural questions.
The “Kubrick doctrine” of loyalty (as inferred from repeated patterns)
Kubrick doesn’t deliver morals as speeches; he delivers them as recurring experiments. Across the films discussed, his work implies a set of “rules”:
- Loyalty is easiest to fake and hardest to sustain.
Most groups call obedience “loyalty” because it’s cheaper. - Hierarchy corrodes loyalty unless there is real reciprocity.
If one side can demand sacrifice while staying safe, loyalty becomes resentment. - Humiliation is a betrayal accelerant.
Characters often defect not for money or sex but to repair wounded status. - Secrecy dissolves trust.
If allies don’t share reality, loyalty becomes performance, and paranoia takes over. - Systems prefer continuity over people.
Institutions are loyal to their own survival first. They will sacrifice individuals and call it “duty.” - Real loyalty is local, costly, and usually quiet.
It shows up in protection, truth-telling, and shared risk—not in slogans.
