STUDIES

New music guidelines. Kubrick after 2001: A Space Odyssey – A Clockwork Orange

A study on the use of music in the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick. According to Kubrick, it was essential to find a way to stylize violence, just like Burgess did in his novel. »The use of music as ironic counterpoint was definitely a way to achieve that. All violence scenes are completely different without music«. Kubrick drew from his experience with 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially from the scene in which the space shuttle lands on a rotating space station. Audience rebellion — because they were used to the standard use of music in which music explains and »follows« the scenes — made the scene especially attractive to different interpretations, criticism, and understandings, and it has not lost that attraction to this date. However, the shock that the waltz The Blue Danube caused could not be compared to the shock that violence scenes accompanied by Gioachino Rossini’s overture The Thieving Magpie from the first part of A Clockwork Orange provoked. Not only did Rossini’s flutteringly orchestrated music seem unusual in terms of tradition, it seemed inappropriate, even morally unacceptable. However, almost the same way as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick explains by means of the film itself (i.e. the manner in which it was shot, edited, acted) why he used that kind of music. The text argues that music follows the changes of the character, i.e. the relationship towards music in the film changes the way the protagonist’s position changes in the society. In the first part of the film Alex enjoys doing horrifying things, so music suggests fun, dance, and enjoyment. In the second and the third part he is forcibly pushed from his own world into the real life and so music looses the ironic counterpoint quality and becomes an uninteresting parallel to film scenes — the most impressive scenes, the best remembered ones, the ones at which all the criticism is directed, are the scenes in which music serves as a counterpoint to what we see and thus draws us into Alex’s violent, libidal self.

Irena Paulus