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.46
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.”47 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.”48
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.49
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.
In M, the use of a familiar piece is particularly effective because there is no other music in the entire film; its starkness is ominous and its playfulness is a striking contrast to the character’s murderous activities. Incidentally, the film was later used by the Nazis in propaganda dealing with the evils of deviant sexual behaviors. Fritz Lang was half-Jewish and fled from the Nazis and his own wife—a devout follower of Hitler—in 1933.50 The Nazis’ use of music has been discussed above, and their connection to this repertoire has become something of a film cliché. Even films made when the Nazis were in power painted them as lovers of great music, and since then screenwriters and directors have portrayed the ironic combination of their musical knowledge and their violent actions. In the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), one character says of Germans: “They sink undefended ships, shoot innocent hostages, and bomb and destroy whole streets in London, killing little children. And then they sit down in the same butcher’s uniform and listen to Mendelssohn and Schubert. There’s something horrid about that.”51 The character is not referring to the Nazis since the comment is made during World War I, but the film itself was made during the Second World War, and the significance of the statement could hardly have been lost on the audience.
Even recently, a filmic depiction of Nazis is incomplete without some act of horror, torture, or violence accompanied by classical music that seems utterly indifferent to the cruelties on-screen. In Schindler’s List (1995), for example, in a scene with Nazi thugs clearing out a Jewish ghetto, one of them stops for a moment, amid the gunfire and screams, to play Bach’s English Suite on a piano.
Bach’s music as enjoyed by the well-ordered criminal mind is something of a cliché itself.52 In Thomas Harris’s best-selling book The Silence of the Lambs, serial killer Hannibal Lecter is a both a cannibal and classical music aficionado. He, like Alex before him, uses classical music as a backdrop to his violence. When director Jonathan Demme adapted the novel into an Oscar-winning film in 1991, he used the music Harris described in the novel—Bach’s Goldberg Variations—as a chilling counterpoint to a series of brutal murders.53
Classical music as the accompaniment to torture is an important aspect of Ariel Dorfman’s 1992 play Death and the Maiden. Both the play and its 1994 film adaptation tell the story of a woman, Paulina, who was tortured and sexually molested by a man who played Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet while he abused her. When Paulina’s husband brings a mysterious man home one evening—fifteen years after the torture—Paulina believes that the guest was her tormentor. The Death and the Maiden quartet forms part of the film’s score.54
Whether the connection between classical music and deviant behavior and violent characters is due to the coding of classical music in film from the age of silent films or if it is the influence of famous characters like Hans Beckert in M or Alex in A Clockwork Orange, the practice lives on in film. It should be noted that, according to filmic depictions, not all criminal minds are amenable to classical music. There are many film characters who commit crimes and listen to popular music or no music at all, but it seems that those criminals who love classical music are those either wholly committed to their life of crime and who do not see the immorality of their actions (through amoral behavior, compulsion, or by indulging in a completely divergent worldview), like Alex and Hans Beckert; or those whose minds are so meticulously well ordered that classical music is the only sufficiently complex diversion for them, like Hannibal Lecter. It is interesting to note that in the real world, classical music is often used as a deterrent for criminal behavior, effectively repelling muggers and drug dealers from public parks, train stations, and parking lots.55
The Struggles of Beethoven
Canonical music accompanies many of the scenes in A Clockwork Orange. Competing for the most screen time are Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Rossini’s overture to La gazza ladra. Beethoven’s music occupies a place of lesser importance in the novel than in the film, although admittedly, the Ninth is the only piece that Burgess mentions more than once. In Burgess’s stage version—written twenty-five years after the novel and fifteen years after the film—songs based on Beethoven’s work are featured in every part of the play.56 It seems odd that Burgess should place such great emphasis on Beethoven’s music; in the novel, the most significant pieces (i.e., the one that leads to the betrayal of friends or the one that drives him t
o suicide) are fictional compositions. Perhaps he did not want to assign “responsibility” to pieces that actually existed.
We can analyze the use of Beethoven’s music in the play as a reaction to Kubrick’s use or misuse of music in the film (in Burgess’s estimation). Burgess could also have seen the music of Beethoven, wrought through struggle and difficulty, as an analogy to the struggle of the main character.57 Beethoven is known for his progressive deafness, his staunch individuality as an artist, his personal problems (familial and romantic trouble), and his aggressive, overbearing nature; he is consistently associated with a narrative of overcoming.58 Beethoven, like Alex, was uncompromising, and in the music of Beethoven there seem to be more and greater personal struggles than there are in the music of the preceding classical period. Burgess has said this of Beethoven’s music:
The conflict is prolonged, and when resolution comes it is delayed and hard-won. Periods of peace balance phases of struggle, and slow movements are represented as visions of beatitude. The struggle is not physical . . . it can only be moral, an attempt to win through to the light of the good after wrestling with the forces of darkness. Beethoven’s private despairs and triumphs confirm this.59
Wendy Carlos, Switched on Beethoven
Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) is similar to Anthony Burgess in that her career has been a combination of two disciplines, in this case music and technology. Carlos composed her first piece at the age of ten and built her first computer at age fourteen. As a child, she won a scholarship at the Westinghouse Science Fair for a project she made involving computers. At sixteen, she was altering the tuning on the family piano.60 At seventeen, Carlos built a music studio of her own and recorded electronic compositions based on the fundamentals of musique concrète, using tape recorders to manipulate found sounds. At Brown University, where Carlos studied both music and physics, she ran small, informal workshops to teach the basics of electronic music to her fellow students and colleagues. As a student at Columbia, specifically the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she continued composing and championing the work of other electronic composers. To that end, she helped Leonard Bernstein assemble a program of electronic music for a concert at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center. During this period, Carlos had two of her electronic pieces recorded. In the late 1960s, Carlos began working with engineer Bob Moog and was introduced to, and developed significant modifications for, the Moog synthesizer.
Listening to Stanley Kubrick Page 18
