Listening to Stanley Kubrick (23 page)

It is also questionable that Alex would know and take pleasure in a song like that. In the novel and the stage version of the story every piece of music experienced with pleasure by Alex is some form of art music, and every person who enjoys pop music is treated with contempt. The inclusion of “Singin’ in the Rain” is problematic because the choice of the song came from the actor, Malcolm McDowell, rather than the character, Alex.
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Alex has, up to this point, shown that music is important to his life and character, but even the tagline of the film underlines his connection to Beethoven, not to musicals. One could argue that “Singin’ in the Rain” is itself a classic and therefore suitable for Alex’s tastes, but then his love of art music becomes diluted and less effective as a tool for his destruction. The film, in general, provides a looser interpretation of Alex’s love of music. The sharp-eyed viewer may even notice that Alex, in an early scene, removes a tape of pop singer Goggly Gogol from his stereo before putting in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

For the Alex of the film, “Singin’ in the Rain” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony are both a source of pleasure in the first half of the film. These two anthems form the soundtrack to his joy.
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In the second half, the use of these pieces either reflects the evil of those trying to take Alex’s free will or, in the case of “Singin’ in the Rain,” causes Alex to fall into the hands of people willing to sacrifice him to make a political point. The two pieces are juxtaposed rather powerfully in the concluding moments of the film. Alex’s final line, “I was cured all right,” occurs between the end of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth and the beginning of Gene Kelly’s recording of the title song from
Singin’ in the Rain.
Leading up to this moment, Alex has been returned to his natural state. Music once again can inspire images of sex and destruction. In this case, Alex imagines cavorting with a nearly naked woman at a high society affair—the clothing of the onlookers seems to suggest Ascot— to the last bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The placement of “Singin’ in the Rain” over the final credits suggests that Alex will continue on his path of violence and destruction. It also leaves the audience with this enduring sonic “image” of the protagonist.

At the end of the twentieth chapter of the novel—the point at which the film ends—Alex hears the Ninth Symphony (the scherzo, not the fourth movement) and he does have a fantasy, but one that does not involve sex. Instead, Alex dreams of running along, carving the screaming face of the world with a razor. In Alex’s final fantasy of the film—he is applauded by the Ascot-ian spectators, a naked woman straddles him and playfully bats his hands away—Alex seems more anti-establishment than violent. He is not hurting anyone, not beating or stabbing anyone. Even the woman he dallies with seems to have a smile on her face; he is not holding her down, he is not in the position of attacker. Alex is simply thumbing his nose at tradition and social mores. “Singin’ in the Rain” seems to mirror the playfulness of the image. The song undercuts the seriousness of Alex’s “cure” and ignores the implications of his willingness to be a pawn of government again. Kubrick might have changed the ending because he wanted Alex’s cure to seem less chilling. Once again, Alex is the cad. He’s not wicked, just incorrigible.

“Popular” Music in the Film

There are two popular tunes heard in the film. One is Terry Tucker’s “Overture to the Sun,” which appears in the post-Ludovico show. The piece accompanies the staged fight between a rude man and Alex. “Overture to the Sun” has a quasi-renaissance sound to it, with tambourines echoing the strong beats and a reed instrument playing the modal melody. The courtly piece is an interesting counterpoint to the behavior of the man who is being deliberately rude to Alex. Erika Eigen’s “I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper” plays as Alex returns to his parents’ apartment after being released from the Ludovico treatment center. Catchy and cute but lacking the gravitas of Alex’s musical choices, this song is meant to show Pee and Em’s lack of taste.
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Kubrick used it as part of the decoration, like the paintings on the wall or the postmodern sofa and chairs. The song is sourced on-screen; it plays on a radio in the middle of the living room, and Alex’s father turns it off once Alex announces that he is back.

Both Erika Eigen and Terry Tucker belonged to a psychedelic folk trio called Sunforest (Freya Hogue was the third member of the ensemble). The three of them pursued their dreams of pop stardom in London, where an executive from Decca Records discovered them in 1969 and helped them record their only album,
The Sound of Sunforest
. Both “Overture to the Sun” and “Lighthouse Keeper” appeared on this album, but Kubrick had Tucker and Eigen re-record their songs for the soundtrack. “Overture to the Sun,” for example, is in a higher key.

Music of the Ludovico Treatment

In his seminal work
Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
, Siegfried Kracauer remarks on the way that film lowers the consciousness of the spectator. Likening the effect of film to that of a drug, Kracauer states, the audience is “not prompted by a desire to look at a specific film or to be pleasantly entertained; what they really crave is for once to be released from the grip of consciousness, lose their identity in the dark, and let sink in, with their senses ready to absorb them, the images as they happen to follow each other on the screen.”
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Furthermore, Kracauer explains the effectiveness of film propaganda and the use of tools such as camera angles, lighting, and music to cue the viewer to specific reactions. He refers specifically to the use of “musical themes with stereotyped meanings” to evoke a response from the spectator.
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Although the “stereotyped meanings” of pieces had been in practice since the beginning of film and literally codified as early as the 1920s, Kracauer mentions these practices in the larger context of the role of music in film.

It would seem that the purveyors of the Ludovico treatment believe, like Kracauer, that films with music are the best way to reach their subjects. There are three elements in the Ludovico treatment: the visual images shown to Alex, the serum he is given before the film sessions, and music (although in the novel, the music comes from various composers). The first soundtrack piece used is Wendy Carlos’s original composition,
Timesteps.
The music starts with atmospheric sounds that enter the consciousness slowly.
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As Alex is readied for the films—he is strapped into a chair and his eyes are forced open—the audience begins to become aware of the strange sounds. Gradually, the sounds become more intrusive, with gongs and other computer-generated sounds banging away at seemingly random intervals. When the quick, rhythmic section of the piece begins, the film starts. The frenetic pace of the music and the schizophrenic changes of tempo and rhythm seem to suit the film, which depicts a vicious beating and a gang rape. On the second day of treatment, Carlos’s music is gone and in its place is the music of Beethoven.

Kubrick has given Ludwig van Beethoven central importance in
A Clockwork Orange
. Mozart, Handel, Haydn are never mentioned, nor are any other composers. At crucial moments in the film, excerpts of Beethoven’s music and even the composer’s likeness appear. The very first notes of Beethoven we hear in the film are the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony; the “Fate Knocking at the Door” motif from the symphony is transformed into the doorbell at the home of F. Alexander and his wife. When Alex rings, the fate of his victims hang in the balance, as does his own fate. Kubrick chose to use Beethoven’s music throughout the film as a unifying theme, unlike Burgess who varied Alex’s listening choices.

Kubrick’s small changes to the novel sometimes have large consequences. In the scene in which Alex fights with the cat lady, she grabs a bust of Beethoven and swings it at Alex. In the novel, it is Alex who tries to grab it, but falls in the process. In the film, Kubrick makes it explicit that Beethoven has now become a weapon against Alex. The cat lady uses it, the Ludovico clinic uses it (or they follow government recommendations) to combat Alex’s violent images, and F. Alexander uses it to drive Alex to suicide.

The use of Beethoven in the film might bring to mind the Nazi appropriation of the works of Beethoven and Wagner.
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Certainly, this point becomes explicit when the Ludovico film of a Nazi rally is accompanied by the march from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The use of this music as the soundtrack for the film seems to echo historical events; conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, vice president of the Nazi’s Reich Music Chamber, conducted the Ninth Symphony for Hitler’s birthday concert in 1942.
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Second only to Richard Wagner in popularity, Beethoven enjoyed an important place in the political machine of the National Socialists. But his place in the Reich was cemented only after
The Journal of the Reich Committee for the Volk’s Health and Service and the German Society for Racial Hygiene
proclaimed in 1934 that his racial genealogy was free of undesirable elements.
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Once he was shown as a pillar of German history, the use of his music—especially the Third and Fifth Symphonies—at rallies and as the soundtrack to propaganda films was encouraged. The Ninth Symphony was not popular with the Nazis at first; the message of universal brotherhood was not congruent with their policies; yet manipulation of the work’s message over time stressed a united brotherhood of humanity as the Nazis defined it.
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In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick comments on the connection between music and the Nazis as it pertains to
A Clockwork Orange
: “I think this [Alex’ love of rape and Beethoven] suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men but it didn’t do them, or anyone else, much good.”
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Apart from its use in the Third Reich, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has a complex history in terms of its genesis, composition, performance, and reception. It has proven to be one of the most enduring works in the canon and one of the most popular. In his handbook
Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony
, David Levy argues that the work’s almost universal appeal is due in some measure to the words of Friedrich Schiller’s
An die Freude,
set in the final choral movement. The poem’s “non-specific religiosity” seems to embrace all listeners and unite many disparate factions in the hope and promise of universal brotherhood.
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The Ninth Symphony has served as the victorious music celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, an offering of atonement at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria, the joyful music to accompany the beginning of construction of Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, and the opening theme to the 1998 Winter Olympic Games.
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As a universally popular work, Beethoven’s Ninth has had many interpretations over the years from Richard Wagner’s claims of programmatic idealism to theorist Heinrich Schenker’s contradictory assessment of the Ninth as absolute music, that is, music with no narrative or extra-musical meaning.
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At the end of the twentieth century, the Ninth Symphony became a battleground for issues of gender and sexuality, perhaps most famously in Susan McClary’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth as a musical expression of “explosive rage.” By withholding cadences, she observes, Beethoven causes a build-up of frustration that bursts forth in a manner akin to an ejaculation. In addition, McClary compares her reading of the symphony to Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message,” which begins with the line “A man in terror of impotence . . . ”
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Neither Rich nor McClary mentions
A Clockwork Orange
in their work, but these ideas of violence and sexuality as portrayed in the music seem to resonate in the novel, film, and play.

The use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the film has garnered particular attention because of its familiarity and its importance to the narrative. It is the soundtrack of Alex’s violent fantasies, his theme song, and a tool for his enemies. Beethoven’s Ninth is one of the best-known works from the canon of Western art music, a piece categorized as being perhaps Beethoven’s most “valuable” work.
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Of the four movements of the symphony, only two appear in the film, the second and the fourth. The second movement of the symphony, the scherzo, has a quick tempo, a percussive character, and an imitative opening. The first time it appears in the film is after the night of ultra-violence. Alex returns home, wanting to hear a little “Ludwig van” before he goes to sleep. The version we hear is the traditional orchestral version. The music is not only a soundtrack to the film but also the score to the film Alex sees in his head. As the music plays the camera focuses on the objects in Alex’s room, one by one. The opening of the scherzo, a series of downward octave leaps, is accompanied by a fast tracking shot up to the stern face of Beethoven on the window shade. This is the “answer” to the slow dolly backward in the opening scene at the Korova Milkbar. The face of Beethoven is the mirror to Alex’s face.

The face of Beethoven is then replaced by the face of a woman painted on the wall. The camera slowly pans down to see Alex’s snake Basil slithering along his perch toward the vagina of the painted woman (perhaps she is Eve?). The camera continues its motion down and finds four identical statues of Christ bleeding from the wounds in hands, feet, and side and bearing the crown of thorns. The statues are posed so as to bring to mind a chorus line of dancers. As the camera reaches the statues of Christ, the music takes on a structural function. Kubrick uses Beethoven’s sudden fortissimo as the place to begin cutting on the strong beats of measures. The first edit coincides with a fortissimo hit on the timpani, and each subsequent cut, featuring details of the Christ statues, happens on the first beat of each measure. The music in this scene acts as an accompaniment to masturbation (made explicit in the novel), which is suggested only by the tight close-up of Alex’s face and the slight movement of his shoulders. The scherzo is particularly effective here because of the rapid-fire editing that matches the music. The religious iconography of the Christ statues suggests that this ritual of music, fantasy, and masturbation is Alex’s equivalent of a spiritual experience.