After working in Malaysia in the 1950s, Burgess considered music as a career, and was as prolific at composition as he was at writing books. It was his wife, however, who urged him to choose one discipline and focus on it. She gave him an ultimatum: write one more piece and send it to the BBC Orchestra. If the BBC accepted the work, he should follow composition. If not, he should focus on writing. Although the BBC rejected Burgess’s effort and he became a full-time writer, he continued composing for the rest of his life. He even published a memoir about his musical experiences called This Man and Music (1983).
The Adaptation of the Novel
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was not even a decade old when Kubrick adapted it for the screen. The main character of the story is Alex, a teenage thug who, with his three friends, perpetrates on innocent citizens what he calls “ultra-violence.” Alex has a great love of classical music, which he uses much like a drug, either stimulating him into action or providing a way to come down after causing mayhem. The novel mentions many composers (some of them fictional), while the film boils down Alex’s love of music into love of one particular composer: Beethoven. The effects of this choice will be discussed below.
Burgess sold the film rights to A Clockwork Orange long before Stanley Kubrick’s film version was released. At one point in the 1960s, lawyer Si Litvinoff commissioned a screenplay adaptation of A Clockwork Orange from the author himself. Litvinoff was anxious to produce the film. It would have been his first, and he had envisioned Mick Jagger—a fan of the novel—playing Alex. (Although the Rolling Stones were too busy to allow Jagger to star in the film, their album The Rolling Stones, Now! (1965) has liner notes written in a style similar to the “Nadsat” language Burgess developed for the book.)1 Like Nabokov before him, Burgess’s adaptation was far too long and complicated to be filmed. Litvinoff lost the rights and the discarded script was thought lost. The rights to A Clockwork Orange were subsequently acquired by Kubrick in 1969.
We know a bit more about Burgess’s script now, since it was rediscovered in the author’s house in Bracciano, Italy (near Rome), eleven years after the author’s death. Burgess biographer Andrew Biswell describes it:
[The script] is an elaborate reworking and reimagining of A Clockwork Orange rather than a straightforward adaptation. It introduces a number of Nadsat words not present in the original, as well as a series of extravagantly bloodthirsty dream-visions . . . [in which Alex is] urged on to further atrocities by the classical soundtrack which plays constantly in his head. . . . Burgess’s stage-directions make it clear that this cinematic Alex is intended to represent the suppressed violent desires of the audience.2
Although Burgess would be called to answer for the violence allegedly inspired by Kubrick’s film version, and he took pains to distance himself from the project at times, Biswell points out that Burgess’s script “has an intensity of violence which is largely missing from Stanley Kubrick’s more euphemistic interpretation.”3
Stanley Kubrick turned to A Clockwork Orange after the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Warner Bros. had limited its financial contribution to this new project because of the expected X rating, and Kubrick, in response, attempted the adaptation himself. The scope of A Clockwork Orange was small enough to make the transition to the big screen without being oversimplified. This is not to say that Kubrick arrived on set with a completed screenplay on the first day of filming. His adaptation of the novel took place during filming. Kubrick would choose scenes from the novel, encourage the actors to improvise, and often film a single take after rehearsals. This was not Kubrick’s usual modus operandi, but it seemed to work for the actors and the film. The script was typed up after the day was done.
When Burgess first heard of Kubrick’s efforts to make a film based on his novel, in 1970, he recalls that he was a bit skeptical that it would happen. He also felt, rightly, that the matter was very much out of his hands. He did suspect, however, that if the film was made, Kubrick would show rape, violence, and frontal nudity, believing that the zeitgeist in American cinema favored explicit depictions of such acts over suggestive and vague images.4 The film’s notoriety lent Burgess a modicum of fame, but he remained ambivalent about the finished project. In 1975, Anthony Burgess wrote an article for the New York Times called “On the Hopelessness of Turning Good Books into Films.” In this article Burgess stated, “Film, seeming to have all the resources, and more, of literature, still cannot produce anything as great as a work of literature.”5 Furthermore, in the mid-1980s, Burgess completed an adaptation of the original text: a stage version, complete with original music that Burgess composed. The “play with music,” as he called it, could be accurately termed a singspiel or musical and seems to be—among other things—an attempt to reclaim the story from Kubrick and to reimagine the narrative in a musical perspective. Many other adaptations have followed, including Burgess’s own A Clockwork Orange: 2004 (from 1990), a production mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company featuring music by Bono and The Edge of U2.
Kubrick’s film was financially successful, earning $15.4 million worldwide, a $13.2 million profit over the $2 million in production costs. Burgess sued for his share in 1973 and was conceded (out of court) a “percentage of the film’s net income.”6 It is important to note that the book became a best seller only after Kubrick’s film; A Clockwork Orange is by far Burgess’s best-known work, and the average American reader would be hard-pressed to name even one of Burgess’s many other novels. The film has also entered into pop culture as fodder for parodies, including parodies in Mad magazine and on The Simpsons animated television show.
Comparison of Versions7
The film A Clockwork Orange allows the audience to experience the sights and sounds of Alex’s world in a visceral way. Music reinforces and acts as a counterpoint to the exploits of the characters, especially Alex. In the case of the film A Clockwork Orange, the main character’s passion for the music of many composers—meticulously described in Burgess’s novel—encompasses far fewer composers than in the novel, but the music in the film is acoustically present. In the first scene, which takes place in the Korova Milkbar (an establishment that serves milk spiked with drugs), Kubrick begins with a close-up of Alex, who gradually becomes more distant as the camera dollies back. The music in this scene of the film is a synthesized arrangement of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. By contrast, in the novel, a pop song plays in the Milkbar: a fictional tune called “You Blister My Paint” by Berti Laski.
Kubrick chose to omit some of the scenes of violence and to retain others; he also chose to make the main characters and his friends a bit older than they are in the book. The director’s choice of Malcolm McDowell in the lead role shifted the focus of the novel from the serious crimes of teenagers (Alex is just fifteen in the book) to the serial crimes of youth (McDowell was actually twenty-eight years old when he played Alex). Because of the actors’ ages, teenage delinquency does not seem to be society’s problem in the film version; rather, it is the willful misbehavior of young adults who, perhaps, should know better. However, Mr. Deltoid, Alex’s “Post-Corrective Advisor,” fills the combined role of parole officer and school guidance counselor as he investigates “young” Alex’s truancy. The victims of crime—at least three ten-year-old girls in the novel are victims of rape or attempted rape—are played by older actresses in the film, making the crimes less egregious and in one case turning statutory rape into a consensual ménage à trois.
Perhaps the most significant difference between the novel and the film version is that Kubrick chose not to film the final chapter of the novel. Kubrick used the American edition, which was published, at the behest of the New York publisher, without the final chapter. The twenty-first chapter finds Alex restored to his original state after being subjected to the Ludovico treatment, a behavioral therapy that effectively removes from Alex his free will. He is sitting with three new friends (he was betrayed by the original three) in the Korova Milkbar, just as he
was in chapter 1. But unlike the beginning of the novel, Alex does not feel like participating in the “ultra-violent” activities they have planned. He goes off on his own and thinks about having a family. Alex believes that he is growing up. The European version of the novel ostensibly ends on a note of hope, but upon a closer reading, it is just as unsettling as the truncated ending. Alex, in thinking about his possible family, realizes that the son he may someday have will indulge in the same kinds of crimes that he himself has perpetrated. Alex will not be able to stop him, neither will his fatherly advice nor his own horrible experiences. Alex’s son’s destiny is to make the mistakes of his father and suffer accordingly. The twenty-first chapter also underlines the inevitability of patriarchal conditioning that is far more subtle than the Ludovico treatment. By turning his back on youthful, violent behavior, Alex finally conforms and, to a certain extent, relinquishes his free will to conventional gender roles and societal urging. Kubrick came across the final chapter after filming had already begun and did not consider adapting it because it struck him as “unconvincing and inconsistent with the style and intent of the book.”8
From a musical standpoint, the twenty-first chapter also reveals changes in Alex’s musical tastes as he matures. In the first twenty chapters of the book, Alex listens mainly to stentorian orchestral music. In the final chapter, the first time Alex admits that he is tired of destruction, he also reveals that his passion for orchestral thunder has given way to a taste for German lieder, “just a goloss [voice] and a piano, very quiet and yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy [big] orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and trombones and kettledrums.”9 Alex’s outward choice of music reflects the inner change of his character.
Music serves the narrative of A Clockwork Orange in ways specific to the medium in which the story is told. In the novel, music serves a largely symbolic function. It is arguable that music, in Kubrick’s adaptation, is more important than it was in Burgess’s novel, for it is in the film that the music is transformed into a structural element, an aesthetic standard, or an emotional hook. It ceases to be simply a symbol. Instead, music is a visceral connection to the actions on-screen, the cuts in the film, and the experiences of the main character. It is effective for many reasons, but especially because the music Kubrick chose is enjoyable and familiar, packed with its own cultural meanings, meanings that will be parsed in this chapter.
Music in the Film
Film music scholar Claudia Gorbman has described many functions of music in film, and her definition of narrative film music seems particularly apt as it relates to the score of A Clockwork Orange. Narrative film music may cue the audience of a film to associate certain themes with a character, and these connections are repeated throughout the film. For example, a musical theme experienced by a character in the diegesis—sung by the character, for example—may emerge orchestrated on the score later in the film.10
Advertisements for the film seem to make an ironic connection between Alex’s love of music and the other activities he enjoys. The tagline on one movie poster reads: “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.” Music is tied into Alex’s feelings of power, and far from being a passive interest, it is part of his violent rituals. In Burgess’s novel, Alex—during a quiet moment alone at home—muses over an article he read: “Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more civilized. Civilized by syphilised yarbles [testicles]. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like old Bog [God] himself.”11
Because this connection between music and violence is made so explicit, even in the film, the viewer is made to wonder how Alex developed his tastes. They were not instilled in him by his parents, nor were they born of peer pressure; Alex’s friends seem ignorant and indifferent to the music Alex loves. When Dim gives a raspberry to a woman singing in the Korova Milkbar—Beethoven’s Ninth in the film and an aria from the fictional opera Das Bettzeug in the novel—his slight is punished swiftly and violently by Alex. His parents (Alex calls them Pee and Em) are portrayed as weak-willed, sniveling creatures who listen to silly pop music. Alex’s teenage rebellion forms him into his parents’ opposite: the thundering id to their cautious, timid egos and the cultured prince to their blue-collar, middle-class kitsch. The girls Alex meets in the record shop also seem ignorant about everything but pop music, “Who you getten, bratty? . . . The Heaven Seventeen? Luke Sterne? Goggly Gogol?”12 Even highly educated people in the novel and film, as represented by Dr. Brodsky, profess ignorance of music. Alex complains about the use of Beethoven as the soundtrack music for the Ludovico films to which Brodsky explains that the only thing he knows about music is that it’s good for heightening emotion. Alex, in both film and novel, plays the role of music critic. He is the only one for whom classical music is special, even sacred, but the reader or viewer can only speculate how it came to be so important to Alex and so intertwined with his violent impulses.
Music may read as a symbolic representation of Alex’s free will since his ability to listen to music is lost as a side effect of the Ludovico treatment. Or perhaps Alex’s love of music is his only redeeming characteristic, the one thing he shares with the rest of humanity. It certainly allows the viewer to forge a connection to Alex, even subconsciously. From Kubrick’s point of view, the score allows the audience to enjoy the music, even when we are upset by the scenes accompanied by the music. Furthermore, Kubrick’s use of music allows characters to participate in a visual dance. In an interview with Penelope Houston, Kubrick comments on the choreographic connections of image and music:
In cinematic terms, I should say that movement and music must inevitably be related to dance, just as the rotating space station and the docking Orion space ship in 2001 moved to the “Blue Danube.” From the rape on the stage of the derelict casino, to the super-frenzied fight, through the Christ figure’s cut, to Beethoven’s Ninth, the slow-motion fight on the water’s edge and the encounter with the cat lady where the giant white phallus is pitted against the bust of Beethoven, movement, cutting, and music, are the principal considerations—dance?13
Like the spaceships in 2001, Alex dances through A Clockwork Orange. Violent fights take place against the backdrop of music and enemies circle each other as if waiting to partner up, but in the latter film, we aren’t shown peaceful docking maneuvers set to a famous waltz, we get loosely choreographed crime, sex, and conflict.
Henry Purcell: Funeral Music for Queen Mary
Appearances:
0:00:10–0:00:53 Credit sequence
0:00:54–0:02:24 Opening shot in the Korova Milkbar under Alex’s expository voiceover
0:13:23–0:14:38 Alex and his friends return to the Korova Milkbar
0:16:55–0:18:48 Alex walks home (he whistles the main theme and it is picked up by the score)
1:24:04–1:26:16 Testing the Ludovico treatment’s effectiveness
1:38:58–1:43:26 Alex is attacked by his old friends
2:02:18–2:04:20 Alex is in the hospital
Wendy Carlos’s realization on the Moog synthesizer of the march from Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary begins the film, and the title cards are cut to structural points in the music. When the last credit card has flashed, the first shot is of Alex, sitting in the Korova Milkbar, looking boldly at the audience. During the long dolly out, the first voiceover begins as Alex explains who and where he is and introduces us to his friends Pete, Georgie, and Dim. In the credit sequence and the opening shot, the march serves structural, aesthetic, and political functions: the visual cuts coincide with the musical cadences; the march introduces the strange and perhaps “futuristic” sound of the Moog synthesizer and seems to evoke a sense of doom; it perhaps suggests a death knell for some kind of governmental authority. The sense of doom is enhanced by
the short quote of the Dies Irae plainchant in the excerpt.
Example 4.1. Dies Irae melody.
The Dies Irae is a chant and poetic text from the Roman Catholic Requiem mass. Wendy Carlos’s inclusion of it is appropriate in the sense that this was intended as a funeral march. The Dies Irae will be discussed in detail in chapter 6. Carlos appropriately revisited this chant for the score of The Shining.
Purcell’s march also adds “Englishness” because it is by British composer Henry Purcell, in a highbrow, early Baroque style that anticipates Alex’s anachronistic musical tastes. The music, although distorted, adds to the “courtlike mood.”14 Henry Purcell (1659–1695), arguably the greatest native English composer of the Baroque period, wrote his Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary in 1694, when Queen Mary succumbed to an outbreak of smallpox. Kubrick did not acknowledge the possible political meanings of the work, but his use of it in the film suggests some understanding of these ideas.
The Purcell march appears in scenes in which characters demonstrate authority of some kind. At the beginning of the film, Alex is in control of everything. He holds the audience’s gaze, speaks to them via voiceover, and holds court in the Korova Milkbar. His droogs are his subjects and the street is his kingdom. When Alex walks home, he whistles the theme to himself as the march continues playing on the soundtrack. The music is not sourced at that point—it doesn’t appear to be coming from anywhere on-screen—but the synchronicity of Alex’s whistling along with the piece shows that either Kubrick shot the scene to that piece or made sure it fit after the fact. The march reappears as the gang heads back to the Korova Milkbar for a drink after a night of ultra-violence. After the Ludovico treatment, Alex is subjected to a number of tests in front of an audience. When the topless woman sent to entice Alex comes through the curtain, Purcell’s music starts again, this time because she holds the power in the room. There are various reaction shots of the audience and of Alex, wide eyed and speechless at her approach. When the funeral music reappears much later in the film, it is changed, with percussive hits added to mirror the beating Alex is getting from his former droogs. Alex is no longer in control; the Ludovico treatment has rendered him utterly helpless, unable even to defend himself. Georgie and Dim, now members of the police force, occupy places of authority and the change in the music reflects the violent way they choose to practice this authority. The return of the music also ironically underscores Alex’s lost power. Purcell’s march also suggests that the government has taken control and autonomy away from everyone. Alex is made helpless, the beautiful woman is the tool of the doctors who are, in turn, tools of the government. In this political system, everyone is turned into a clockwork orange.
Listening to Stanley Kubrick Page 15
