The Psychosomatic Associations of Music

Rating: 9/10 (4 June 2011)

It's all been said about A Clockwork Orange, I think. From McDowell's eerie iconic performance to the controversy over its supposedly "pornographic" violence to its satirical portrayal of governmental and civic abuse of liberty, this utterly genre-less work of sublimity remains one of those mystifying pinwheels of the cinema. Kubrick's painterly, insoluble kaleidoscope is most often explained as political satire, or dystopian sci-fi, or a crime drama, while its intersecting allure to the horror fan community is clearly pervasive. Though I don't pretend to entirely understand this film, I nevertheless find it profound and unique, especially in its loaded portrayal of the psychosomatic associations we make with music, or that music makes with us. A crucial musical instant in Kubrick's inspired carrying out of Anthony Burgess' inventive story comes when Alex bursts into song in the bath.
He's just been beaten and almost killed by his former "droogs" who've been rehabilitated as policemen by manipulative judicial rule, looking to safeguard its society even if it has to confine them to do so. In desperate search of a home, Alex has unconsciously meandered in from a rainstorm only to realize he is back at the place of one of his "ultra-violent" crimeswith a doorbell whose chord tone is the opening bar of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Here, years before, he and his milk-guzzling goons disabled a radical writer, Patrick Magee in enjoyably frenzied form, and raped his wife throughout a standard night on the town. Magee's eyes exceptionally gush excruciating sonorities and a full to bursting house boy whose sculpted physique and size guarantee that the master's safety will never again be disturbed.
The cold-blooded delinquent's initial anxiety at being recognized by his now wheelchair-bound host swiftly scatters as Alex remembers he wore a Pinocchio-penis mask, craftily supplementing the brimming jock ensemble of the hooligans' costumes, throughout the real-life nightmare. More substantiation of his obscurity is discovered in the day's paper where the freshly sprung "reformed" criminal's mug gilds the headlines, proclaimed as a mammoth triumph for the government's crime layout. But the warm, foamy water unwinds the liberated fluke, who feels so at ease that he thrashes out one or two choruses of Singin' in the Rain: Trouble is, that was the jingle he felt unencumbered enough to bawl while having his "in-out" with Magee's voluptuous wife. Hearing the same crooner who reduced his life to rubble sets the author off to extract a musical vengeance: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
To make Alex not dangerous to recommence his life in the social order, and preclude the government thousands in prison costs, he's barraged with gruesome imagery of violent promiscuous sex, brutal beatings and genocide until any inkling of these appalling ways causes a bodily nausea of vomit-inducing magnitude. Played relentlessly throughout this total indoctrination, Beethoven's most illustrious, celebrated and astounding conception, a personal beloved of the classical-music enthusiast whose ménage à trois with a pair of lascivious girls from a record shop scored by Rossini's 1812 Overture remains the most feverish intercourse in cinema. Inadvertently, the born-again peacekeeper has the same stomach-turning response whenever the Ode to Joy is heard. Kubrick uses the music in a remarkably accomplished way. In the early moments, we hear Ferenc Fricsay's 1958 recording with a barefaced product placement predicting the imminent social evil of fusing business and art, but when in the hospital, the music is as synthetic as his mind-blowing rehabilitation. But using the chic simulation has import on various planes: The reproduction just cannot substitute the real thing.
The closest I've come to a firm grasp of the film as a whole, in terms of its production and costume design, is the notion that whatever society we would actually see in our future, unlike most futuristic films, really would be something to which we'd be stumped on how to react. Like this film's period-combining architecture and unthinkable use of color and decor, it would be hypnotic to experience, somewhat different the more we return to it and very off-putting and even at times uncomfortable in its expression of sexuality. But somehow, although the film is now 40 years old, we may not be far from a point at which all desire and interest as derived from our sex instinct, plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical, from violence to dress sense to hang-outs decorated entirely by nude mannequins that dispense milk from their genitalia to a teacher showing up at Alex's house, laying on the bed with him and grabbing his groin. It's a world that seems contradictory in those ways to mainstream society, especially in America, where we're still very uptight about sexuality outside of hetero gender-role normatives, but leave it to the visionary who brought 2001 to the screen to envisage a society devoid of many conventional inhibitions, in a story about inhibitions.