Listening to Stanley Kubrick (20 page)

50. Victor Yuzefovich,
Aram Khachaturian
, trans. Nicholas Kournokoff and Valdimir Bobrov (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985), 131.

51. Yuzefovich,
Aram Khachaturian
, 137.

52. Yuzefovich,
Aram Khachaturian
, 160.

53. Geduld,
Filmguide to 2001
, 51.

54. Jan Harlan, interview with the author, April 20, 2011.

55. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 interview in
Playboy
quoted in
The Making of Kubrick’s 2001,
ed. Jerome Agel (New York: New American Library, 1970), 145.

56. Walker,
Stanley Kubrick Directs
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 270.

Chapter Four

“It Was Lovely Music That Came to My Aid”

A Clockwork Orange

It is no accident that many early operas
told the story of Orpheus. What better story for a composer to set than one that relies heavily on the power of music? In operas like Monteverdi’s
L’Orfeo
, Peri’s
Euridice
, and Gluck’s
Orfeo and Euridice
, the main character’s music is part of the narrative; Orpheus needs it to charm his way into the underworld to his beloved Eurydice. Any work of literature—opera libretto, play, or novel—that deals with music or that features a character who is a composer or musician may only achieve its full realization in a performance medium. In today’s culture, the dominant medium for such realizations or adaptations is film.

Much as opera provided the perfect medium for the telling of the Orpheus myth, likewise, the film form, from its invention, has offered a unique opportunity for directors who want to tell stories that rely on music as part of the narrative or stories that have music as an essential part of the setting. Stanley Kubrick saw that potential in Anthony Burgess’s novel
A Clockwork Orange
, and he understood, better than many other directors, that
A Clockwork Orange
’s musical aspects were ripe for adaptation into a form that had both visual and aural components.
A Clockwork Orange
stands alone as the most musical of all the raw sources from which Kubrick adapted his films, and it is therefore necessary to discuss the music in the novel in order to understand Kubrick’s choices in translating the material to the screen.

Anthony Burgess undertook the writing of
A Clockwork Orange
in 1961 after reportedly receiving a diagnosis of a fatal brain tumor. Burgess wrote three novels in that same year, hoping to leave his widow an income after his death. When it was clear Burgess was going to live, he went on to write many more novels, and some of these also feature musical themes or characters. Music is a recurrent theme in his work, and there is an important reason for this: Burgess was an amateur, self-taught musician and composer. His mother sang and danced professionally (as Beautiful Belle Burgess) and his father was a pianist who occasionally subbed for the cinema pianist in town. Burgess, who was born and grew up in Manchester, England, attended symphonic concerts and even tried his hand at violin lessons as a child. Although the lessons did not last long, his affinity for music would continue until his death.

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.)
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 Versions
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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.”
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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.
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