Listening to Stanley Kubrick (24 page)

As the music moves into a transition, Alex explains that music helps him to envision violent scenes. The first shot is filmed from directly underneath the gallows of an execution scene. A woman (a stuntman in costume)
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in a white dress falls through the trapdoor, her shoes coming straight at the camera. The next image of Alex baring his bloody fangs is cut in very quickly; the shot occurs twice more. There are two explosions, one sending dirt and earth into the air, the other a fireball. The cavemen clip is footage from
One Million Years B.C.
(1966); Kubrick must have reasoned that Alex would replay in his mind violent images he had seen in films. Finally, there is a plume of fire that is possibly a pictorial representation of Alex’s orgasm. The montage suggests amoral power through religious imagery, explosions, vampirism, and capital punishment.
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The idea of Alex using the music as the soundtrack to an internal film is a popular one among scholars; Thomas Allen Nelson, for example, calls Alex’s fantasies “an internal
horrorshow
, Alex’s Cinema of the Id.”
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The scherzo continues as Alex’s mother attempts to wake him in the morning. The camera then follows Alex’s mother into the kitchen; it is one of the few times in the film that the camera does not follow Alex. As the music continues, no longer sourced (it is heard equally as loud in Alex’s room and the kitchen where Pee and Em speculate on where Alex spends his nights), the scherzo takes on a new function: that of a proxy for Alex’s presence.
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He is not physically in the kitchen with his parents but his presence is strongly felt and his domination of their lives is complete; even asleep in his bed, he is still in control of the family. The scherzo continues as Alex leaves his room—via a door with a combination lock—and struts around the apartment he thinks is empty, yawning and scratching. Here, the music appears to be what is buzzing around Alex’s head from the night before. The scherzo comes to a stop, however, when Alex notices guidance counselor/parole officer Mr. Deltoid sitting on his parents’ bed.

The scherzo appears once more in the film, toward the end. Alex wakes up to the scherzo—this time realized on the Moog synthesizer—blaring through the floor. F. Alexander and his associates have brought Alex to another house (a traditional Tudor house as opposed to F. Alexander’s home, which is a more modern structure) and locked him in an upstairs bedroom. F. Alexander sits in the room directly below—a game room—in which the giant speakers of the stereo lie on a pool table. The associates seem bored, unmoved by the music, one leisurely rolls colored balls into the pocket on the opposite side of the table. Only F. Alexander looks pleased as he glances upward, taking on Alex’s role as torturer, using music to do harm. Alex decides the only way out is through the window. He jumps, and Kubrick provided a startling point-of-view shot by throwing a camera out of the window. The music is a catalyst, the serpent in the Garden of Eden that perpetrates Alex’s literal “fall” from grace. When Alex regains consciousness in the hospital, his free will has been restored to him, as has the ability to listen to music. We can also think of this music as the catalyst that closes the circle; the weapon of music is returned to its original owner.

The main vocal theme of the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony—what most people would identify as the most recognizable segment of music—occurs twice in the film: when Alex and his droogs return to the Korova Milkbar, a woman sings a capella “Freude schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium / wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.” After she sings, Dim answers her with a raspberry, which Alex punishes with a rap from his cane. This is the first sign of any dissension in the ranks. Alex’s hasty retribution for mocking the singer leads ultimately to his betrayal by the droogs. Placing the protection of music above loyalty to his friends proves detrimental. The theme’s second appearance occurs as the accompaniment to one of the Ludovico films.

There are two other sections of the fourth movement that appear in the film, the alla marcia section and the final prestissimo section. The alla marcia first appears as the accompaniment to Alex’s trip to the Music Bootick. This version of the march is realized on the Moog. The timbre of the Moog makes the piece sound as if it were played by toys; the cymbal hits sound like a child hitting pots and pans. At the beginning of the scene, the camera focuses on a blond woman licking a phallic lollipop. She’s standing next to a board labeled “Top Ten,” each slot of which lights up in a different color. Alex enters the Music Bootick and walks a circuit around the store back to his starting place. Alex passes panels of brightly colored plastic, shiny silver walls, and flashing colored lights. The music is ecstatic and the visuals complement the sound. Instead of covering the exposed lights with gels, Kubrick allowed the lights on the ceiling to cause lens flares. The sequence in the Music Bootick is an overload of sights and sounds. Alex’s outfit and walking stick could have been modeled on a famous statue of Beethoven in Heiligenstadt.
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Alex holds court in the music shop, walking around in his royal purple coat with its ornate cuffs and collar, his walking stick and manner of speech making him seem ever the courtly gentleman. The music in the scene seems to be sourced because Alex speaks loudly over it. The tenor vocal line of the alla marcia section has also been fed through a Vocoder (a synthesizer for the voice) resulting in a strange, otherworldly sound. The tenor voice sings “Froh” (joy) just as Alex turns to notice the two beautiful girls.

The march, realized on the Moog synthesizer, also appears as the score to one of the films Alex is forced to watch in the Ludovico clinic. The scene depicts a Nazi rally (possibly Nuremberg) in which thousands of Nazi soldiers goose-step seemingly to the cadences of Beethoven’s march; bombers of the German Luftwaffe in flight; the blitzkrieg across Europe; Nazi paratroopers jumping out of airplanes; a tank moving through a field; members of the military searching houses; and a city burning behind a sculpture of children playing. When the camera focuses on Alex again, strapped to the chair in the Ludovico cinema, his voiceover speaks of his realization that the only sound present is the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, fourth movement. The practitioners of the Ludovico treatment appropriate the music of Beethoven for their therapy in a manner akin to the way the Nazis appropriated the music of Beethoven and Wagner for political rallies, and indeed the way any group appropriates music for propaganda. The Nazis knew, just as the doctors at Ludovico know, that music is an effective way to get into people’s heads. The doctors’ choice of Beethoven seems completely coincidental, and consequently music is the unwitting pawn in this chess game. When Alex—during the Ludovico treatment—insists that the use of this music as the soundtrack to the film is “a sin,” he claims that the appropriation of Beethoven for their purpose is wrong; but this is hypocritical as his own use of it was no better.

When the main vocal theme begins with the words “Freude schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium” (“Joy, beautiful divine spark, daughter of Elysium”), Alex pleads that it isn’t fair that he must hear this music while feeling so ill. Dr. Brodsky and colleague seem surprised that Alex knows what the music is, but reason that this unfortunate side effect cannot be helped. Because of the length of the scene, Kubrick omitted some music so that the end of the scene would coincide with the end of the movement. To get the two excerpts to fit together organically, Wendy Carlos changed the end of the earlier section to more closely match the beginning of the later excerpt. As we hear the last twenty measures of the movement, and indeed of the entire symphony, Dr. Brodsky’s proclamation, “In less than a fortnight now, you’ll be a free man,” has a sense of finality.

When Alex wakes in the hospital after attempting suicide, it becomes clear that his free will has been returned. The backlash against the government has been swift and powerful, explained by newspaper headlines painting Alex as a powerless pawn ruthlessly used by this totalitarian regime. The Minister of the Interior asks Alex for his support and in return, the government will make sure he is well treated. As an act of goodwill, the minister gives Alex a stereo with ridiculously large speakers. As these are rolled in, the score is already playing the end of the fourth movement from the symphony (although it’s not clear if the music is actually coming from the stereo). Assistants run in with large baskets of flowers, photographers jockey for position to snap pictures of the minister with his arm around Alex. The music continues and Alex’s “Cinema of the Id” starts up again. During the four measures marked
Maestoso
, Alex begins fantasizing. As in the fantasy sequence from the first half of the film, edits are done on structural points in the music. Kubrick cuts from the reality of the photo op to the images in Alex’s head on the downbeat of a measure. The meter changes and the tempo becomes prestissimo; Alex is seen cavorting in slow motion with a woman, while well-dressed men and women applaud. When the music hits the final cadence, Alex proclaims—as an analogue to Brodsky’s comment—“I was cured, all right.”

The role music plays in the novel is limited to the imagination of the reader—in terms of the allegorical compositions—and to his or her familiarity with the actual preexistent music Burgess describes. Adaptation to the film medium allowed Kubrick to expand the role and functions of music in the narrative. Music is still an important emotional experience for Alex, fuel for his deviant fantasies and inspiration for violent deeds, but it is also a visceral experience for the audience. The connection between music and violence also hints that if Alex enjoys violence and music as visceral pleasures, he is the most truly alive and fully realized character in the drama. He is the most human, although he is not humane. Alex’s love of music also makes him the Other, an anomaly in a society where pop music seems to be the choice of young and old. The Alex of the book describes pop music as a sweet kid’s drink served in an expensive goblet. He has no taste for it. To him, Mozart and Beethoven are worth hearing; pop music doesn’t make the grade.

In addition to serving the narrative as a comment on the main character or society, the music, to Kubrick, often suggested movement and dance. The rhythms of the music often inspired Kubrick’s editing, and Carlos’s interpretations allowed alterations in tempo to better match the mood of the scene. The music also allowed Kubrick to stylize sex and violence. The music acts as a buffer to the violent images. In this way, it takes on the same function that the Nadsat language performs in the novel. Burgess, in the introduction to the 1986 American edition of the novel, said, “Nadsat, a Russified version of English, was meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography.”
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In other words, because our translation of the words is not instantaneous, we are spared the gut reaction we might otherwise have. Similarly, because the score allows us to see the images on-screen as dance-like, they are easier to accept.

Classical Music and Violence in Film

Most of the music that appears in the novel, film, and stage versions of
A Clockwork Orange
comes from the established canon of Western music. The role of music in the film goes beyond a simple narrative function; it speaks to the role of classical music in modern culture. At the time of the film’s release,
Time
Magazine
art critic Robert Hughes said this of the film, “No movie in the last decade (perhaps in the history of film) has made such exquisitely chilling predictions about the future role of cultural artifacts—paintings, buildings, sculpture, music—in society, or extrapolated them from so undeceived a view of our present culture.”
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Music has been thought to have a calming effect, but in film, classical music is often used as an accompaniment to violence or as the music of choice for dastardly villains. Using classical music in this way has cultural resonance both in the filmic tradition and in other aspects of popular culture. The average audience viewer has come to expect the cliché of educated criminals who possess an appreciation of classical music. The portrayals of violence in connection with classical music affect readings of the music. One may argue that we, as a culture, somehow begin to associate classical music with violence outside of film or perhaps even begin to see classical music as deviant in and of itself. Film music is extremely effective at contributing to cultural mythology and encoding it the narrative structure of the medium.
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Forty years before
A Clockwork Orange
presented “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven,” Fritz Lang’s
M
(1930), one of the first masterpieces of sound film, tells the story of a man whose principal interests are pedophilia, murder, and Grieg. The film was based on true events, a series of child murders in Dusseldorf. Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a pedophile with a taste for two things: little girls and Edvard Grieg’s
Peer Gynt
Suite, specifically the theme from “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” It is his whistling of this music—there is no background score—that identifies him as surely as the white chalk “M” that a pursuer places on the shoulder of his coat. The blind balloon-seller remembers that he heard a man whistle the music as he bought a balloon for a young girl, Elsie, who was later found murdered. Beckert can no more stop his nervous whistling than he can control his twisted impulses. Later in the film, the balloon-seller hears the music again and remembers the man who bought Elsie’s balloon. The recollection starts a chain of events that leads to Beckert’s capture. Lang must have chosen Grieg’s
Peer Gynt
because it was easily recognizable, but it is unclear why he chose that rather than a folk or popular tune. Unlike Malcolm McDowell’s choice of “Singing in the Rain,” we do know that the whistling (and perhaps the song) were not Peter Lorre’s choice; the actor could not whistle. Fritz Lang did all of Beckert’s whistling in the film. Grieg wrote the incidental music for Ibsen’s play in 1874; he later popularized the music into a suite.