Beethoven's "Ninth": An 'Ode to Choice' as Presented in Stanley Kubrick's "A ClockworkOrange"Author(s): Galia Hanoch-RoeSource: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Dec.,2002), pp. 171-179Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149775Accessed: 16/05/2010 18:55

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G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179 171

BEETHOVEN'S NINTH: AN 'ODE TO CHOICE' AS PRESENTED IN STANLEY KUBRICK'S A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

GALIA HANOCH-ROE

Department of Music Haifa University Mount Carmel, HAIFA 31905, Israel E-mail: ghanoch@isdn.net.il

UDC: 78.01:78.067 BEETHOVEN

Original Scientific Paper Izvorni znanstveni rad Received: October 14, 2002 Primljeno: 14. listopada 2002. Accepted: October 22, 2002 Prihvaeeno: 22. listopada 2002.

Abstract - Resume

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange uti- lizes the mythical status that Beethoven's Ninth has achieved in order to shock the spectator by the association between this work and extreme violence on the one hand; while being assisted, on the other hand, by the symbolism it contains, including all the textual and musical elements, in order to raise essential questions concerning music and western culture in general. Culture and aesthetics are not, to Kubrick, a representa- tion of man's supremacy, delicacy and sophisti- cation, which distinguish him from barbarity and animalism, but rather simply one of the two faces of the human being concealed in the basic character of man, who is allowed a choice. When choice is eradicated there is no more sense to life and he desires to die.

Kubrick, by utilizing Beethoven's Ninth as a structural base for the film and as a signifier of the dramatic development of the plot, claims that music does not have meaning beyond that which every human being awards it. Freedom of choice is inherent in the musical work, and even Beethoven's Ninth, moral, sublime and humanitarian as it is, contains aggressiveness and impulsiveness, and thus allows a choice for each to hear or see it as one wishes. The same Ninth encloses in its musical and textual ele- ments an ode to humanitarian brotherly love alongside violent and aggressive messages, and the complete person is allowed a choice in the meaning it furnishes.

In one of the most appalling moments in film, Alex, the protagonist of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, is shown a film of Nazi violence accompanied by the Turkish March from the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. As part of a behavioral modification treatment, in which he is subjected to violent abuse by the authori- ties, the conditioning against Beethoven's Ninth reaches the point where Alex can no longer bear the abuse, and begs the doctors to stop. When asked what had

172 G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179

bothered him, he does not refer to his own suffering, but to Beethoven: >>Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone, Beethoven just wrote music.<<

Throughout the film Kubrick raises and answers one of the historically most debated questions in music in general and of this symphony specifically. Is it pos- sible to state that Beethoven had >just< written music? Or, as phrased by Leo Treitler in a recent musicological debate: >We hold that music has no 'meaning' in the lexical sense. It is praised and envied because its content is its form - sounding form in motion, Hanslick said. But does music's 'indefiniteness' (Edgar Allan Poe's word) block inquiries about music's meaning?1<

Kubrick makes use of the Ninth Symphony, imbued with meanings and hermeneutic interpretations, to explore and tackle the problem. He utilizes the

mythical status that Beethoven's Ninth has achieved in order to shock the specta- tor by the association between this work and extreme violence on the one hand; while being assisted, on the other hand, by the symbolism it contains, including all the textual and musical elements, in order to raise essential questions concerning music and western culture in general.

In Burgess's novel, on which Kubrick's film is based, the protagonist rapes two girls to the sound of the Ninth's Finale:

Then I pulled the lovely Ninth out of its sleeve, so that Ludwig Van was now nagoy (naked) too, and I set the needle hissing on to the last movement, which was all bliss. There it was then the bass strings like govoreeting away from under my bed at the rest of the orchestra, and then the lovely blissful tune all about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven, and then I felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two young ptitsas.<<2

Most of the ultra-violent scenes, which include rape, gang-rape, murder, vio- lence and sexually violent fantasies, are performed to the sound of classical music

by Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and the like. Himself a composer, Burgess sought to shock his readers by the use of these works as catalysts for such extreme psy- chopathic behavior. Stanley Kubrick, in his film adaptation of the book, chooses the Ninth, from all the other works, as a continuous narrative to the action. In all the ultra-violent scenes, including those of the authorities against Alex, and his dehumanization, Kubrick concentrates almost exclusively on the Ninth as Alex's focus of admiration.

In A Clockwork Orange the connection between the plot and the Ninth is felt at several levels: it is heard at dramatic turning points of the plot; it draws visual and textual images from Schiller's text in the last movement of the symphony; and the construction of the film is based on the musical structure of the symphony. Con-

trary to other films, in which the music plays an important yet subordinate role to

1 Leo TREITLER, History, Criticism, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Nineteenth Century Music III (1980): 202.

2 Anthony BURGESS, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 39.

G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171 179 173

the plot, expressing and magnifying the dramatic developments and emotional intensity, here the music takes the role of a commentator following the plot closely, almost to the degree of a protagonist in the film itself. Beethoven's Ninth is always actively heard by one or more of the characters, who listen and experience it, and are consequently driven into action. Its use differs from other classical master- pieces that accompany various other scenes in the film, such as Rossini's Thieving Magpie and >>Wilhelm Tell<< overture, Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, and Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. The Ninth causes certain actions to happen. It is music with a constructed connotation whose occurrence at critical points signi- fies the dramatic development of the plot. Being itself imbued with symbolic con- notations, it takes on an important role similar to that of a Wagnerian leitmotiv.

The Ninth is heard five times during the film, at pivotal moments, always listened to actively by the protagonist, and always causing violence. The Sym- phony is first heard at a most prominent point in the plot, when a woman at the Korova Milk-bar begins singing the >>Ode to Joy<< from the Finale, and Alex, ex- claims excitedly: >>She suddenly came with a burst of singing, it was for a mo- ment, oh my brothers, like some great bird had flown into the Milk-bar, and I felt all the milaky little hairs on my plot standing endwise and the shivers crawling up like slow milaky lizards and then down again, cause I knew what she sang... it was a bit of the glorious Ninth by Ludwig Van.<< When his >>fellow droogs<< laugh, Alex takes on the role of Beethoven's defender and hits Dim. This leads to the fight between Alex and his brothers, which in turn leads to his imprisonment, therapy, suicide attempt and final recovery. Next, Alex is seen listening to >>a bit from the glorious Ninth by Ludwig Van<< as a nightcap to a >>perfect evening<< of rape and violence. While listening to the second movements of the Ninth, Alex places his live rattle snake to crawl up a naked woman's body and envisions a statue of a bloody-Christ dancing in perfect choreography to the music. >>Bliss, oh heaven, bliss and heaven, oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity of human flesh as I listened, I knew such lovely pictures. . . <<. The music provides Alex with grand vio- lent and sexual visions. Alex's eyes, and the ultra-violent expression that he takes on, are surprisingly similar to those of Beethoven himself, as reflected in an enor- mous picture hanging on Alex's wall. The third time we hear the symphony is during the >>Ludovigo therapy<< that Alex undergoes (the name implying Beethoven once more), when he is made to watch a film about the Nazis, accompanied by Beethoven's Ninth. He is conditioned to become nauseated at the sound of the Ninth. The Ninth is next utilized by the writer whose wife had died following Alex's violent robbery in the first part; it is his revenge against Alex. Alex is locked in a room where the Ninth is being played in the room below over huge loudspeakers, causing him to feel so nauseated and depressed, that he jumps out of the window in an attempt at suicide. Finally, following his fall, his ability to enjoy the Ninth and the violent visions that it creates is recovered, and the Ninth is brought in as an offering of appeasement to Alex by the authorities. It is heard over tremendous loudspeakers and accompanied by a crowd of reporters, flowers and the constant flash of cameras. Alex's eyes now roll in ecstasy when he returns to seeing ultra-

174 G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179

violent fantasies to the sound of the Ninth, and the film ends with Alex's deter- mined exlamation: >I was cured alright.<<

Kubrick not only uses the Ninth Symphony at pivotal dramatic points but also constructs the film to resemble the structure of the Ninth. The Symphony has four movements, which correlate to the four parts of Kubrick's film. The first move- ment, marked Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso, is energetic and powerful and ends with a climax correlating in rhythm and substance to the film's first part, which culminates in the cat-lady's murder and Alex's abusive interrogation by the authorities. The second movement, a fast tempo scherzo, diabolical and humor- ous, correlates to the imprisonment section in the film, which is comparatively light and humorous. The third movement of the Symphony is a slow Adagio molto e cantabile, which correlates to the difficult sequence of the Ludovigo therapy that Alex undergoes. The final section of the film correlates to the Ninth's finale, which begins with a musical exploration of the three proceeding movements in search for the ultimate melody of the >>Ode to Joy.<< In the film Alex returns physically to the milestones of the beginning: he visits the house of his parents, who have now adopted a new 'good' son; he then meets the drunk homeless of the beginning, who now gathers his gang of drunken to revenge Alex and beat on him; this leads to his encounter with his fellow 'brothers' who have now become violent cops; he then searches for refuge at the writer's 'home,' whose later revenge pushes Alex to attempt suicide. The Finale of both film and Symphony reach an ecstatic climax of salvation and liberation. In a visual and actual sense this scene correlates to both text and the music resounding with great force from the speakers. The full orches- tra, choir and soloists reach a catharsis together with Alex, who is ultimately en- joying the Ninth, being begged for forgiveness by his parents and the authorities alike. Once again the authorities make cynical use of the 'Symphony of humani- tarian brotherhood' in order to gain more political power.

The multiple references in Beethoven's finale appears to have inspired both

Burgess and Kubrick: e.g., blissful symbiosis with a nurturing preoedipal mother

(,,all creatures partake of joy at Nature's breast<), explicated as the Korova Milk- bar drugged milk delivered through the breast-shaped tap; a thrusting drive for erotic union (>>drunk with rapture we enter thy sanctuary<<) evoked in the Billy boy rape at the beginning of the film;3 the brotherly union (>>All men become Broth- ers where your gentle wing rests<<) and Alex's constant referral to his fellow >>droogs< as brothers; the name of the film itself (>>Joy, joy drives the wheels in the universal clockwork<<); and finally, one might even suggest that the film's motto is to be found in Schiller's >>Your magic power reunites what strict custom has di- vided<<.4 Kubrick's film indeed appears to be an exemplar of Schiller's warnings: Schiller speaks of man's departure from the archaic period of an ancient Garden of

3 See Maynard SOLOMON, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: The Sense of an Ending, Critical In- quiry 17(1991): 303-304.

4 Translation of Schiller's text taken from Nicholas COOK, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 109.

G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179 175

Eden, in which man and nature were one, a harmonic whole, but which was sev- ered by the formation of civilization. Man's quest is to regain such union. The Artist's duty is to depict such a possibility, which will heal the wound incurred as a result of man's distancing from nature. The ancient vanished heaven will thus be regained and the brotherhood of man released from constant struggle.

Outwardly Kubrick's film appears to state: 'Observe what modern industrial- ized society has caused, what the human race has begotten when distanced from nature's harmonic perfection.' But Kubrick takes these ideas far beyond a simple cry against industrialization. At the opening of the film, Alex is presented in a total state of id, nurtured by drugged breast-milk from the Korova Milk-bar, violence, sex and Beethoven's Ninth; a state in which Classical music, commonly associated with notions of order, control and morality, is dissonant. The battle between 'cul- ture' (represented by the super-ego) and violence (represented by the id) is visual- ized bluntly in the cat-lady sequence, when Alex attacks her with a huge phallic sculpture (referred to as >>an important work of art<<), while the cat-lady defends herself with a bust of Beethoven. This is the first of the several times the composer 'turns against' Alex in the plot, leading to his imprisonment and behaviorist 'cure,' which effectively deprives him from being able to enjoy Beethoven's Ninth. Alex will 'recover' Beethoven only in the closing scene, when restored from the 'cure'.

Kubrick elicits in the spectator a sense of unease about the connection be- tween violence and culture as represented by Alex and Beethoven's Ninth. The spectators, as well as the authorities of order and culture - the minister and war- dens who choose Alex for the rehabilitation program, are taken aback when they see a picture and a bust of Beethoven in Alex's cell. The condescending question put by the doctors at the Ludovigo Institute: >>You've heard Beethoven before?,<< highlights such a possibility as apparently bizarre and astonishing. To them (and to us) a violent and impulsive psychopath such as Alex is more likely to be fond of hard-rock, punk and the likes and any association with Beethoven the sublime, for whom he is willing to go through all the agonies of hell, seems an unlikely one.

Kubrick's film is imbued with cultural and aesthetic symbols, which ostensi- bly lend an ironic cast to the violent action. He himself had stated that >In a very broad sense, you can say the violence is turned into dance.<<5 Violence here is made attractive and is presented as a creative act, performed with charm. The rape scene at the beginning takes place in an operatic connotation, on a stage, with 'costumes' reminiscent of the commedia dell'arte, to the sound of Rossini's Thieving Magpie. Theatrical stylization and exaggeration is emphasized in the slow motion sequence of Alex attacking his gang and the high-speed sexual escapade with two teenage girls, something of a reversal of expectations. Visually, the lobby in Alex's housing project is decorated with neo-classical images; his parents' flat is in the art-deco style; the writer and his wife's 'home' is built in the ultra modern style and their doorbell sounds Beethoven's Fifth; and the cat-lady is surrounded by 'important

5 From an interview with Alexander Walker, see Alexander WALKER, Stanley Kubrick Directs (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1971).

176 G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179

works of art.' The merging of aesthetic symbols and violence is not coincidental. Alex himself, who calls himself Alex deLarge, is in other words Alexander the Great, Greek commander of the Fourth Century B.C., who was one of history's greatest warriors and conquerors on the one hand, and a student of Aristotle, the founder and distributor of Classical Greek culture on the other. This is but one of the many examples of the integration between culture and violence interwoven throughout history. The Nazi era, shown to Alex on film at the Ludovigo treat- ment center, accompanied by the Ninth, is another prominent example of such combination. Coincidentally, the Ninth itself was highly regarded by Nazi officials and was played on Hitler's birthday.

As much as the social elite represented in the film are astonished by Alex's adoration of the Ninth, they themselves represent the violence inherent in man- kind. Kubrick lets the viewer witness the police investigators' enjoyment of Alex's abuse under interrogation following the cat-lady's murder, and the wardens' and government officials' enjoyment of the Foucaultian demonstration of Alex's 'cure' at the Ludovico center; the use of violence at this demonstration is supposedly legitimate when used to display Alex's cure. The whole idea of the Ludovico treat- ment consists of violence and abuse in the name of restoring order. The authorities are made of, in Kubrick's view, the same substance as Alex. His fellow >>droogs<< in the new form are now police officers. The observers of law and order have shifted the violence into a legitimate channel. The cat-lady's art objects echo the sado- masochistic subtext of the sequence and illustrate how the wealthier classes have appropriated the violence around them into their artwork. The woman's house is filled with wall paintings that place women in fetishistic positions, such as licking boots and breasts. Art and life have merged to the point where human sexuality has been displaced by artwork. The merging of pleasure with pain and sexuality with violence perfectly illustrates the distorted values of this society.6

Of all the possible musical masterpieces the question'still remains, why did Kubrick choose the Ninth? Roland Barthes had claimed, >>Beethoven was created a complete hero, granted a discourse (rare for a musician), a legend (a good score of anecdotes), and iconography, a race (that of the titans of art: Michelangelo, Balzac) and a fatal flaw (Deafness in one who created for the ear's pleasure).<<7 Of all his oeuvre, in his last symphony Beethoven established his credo, which was a vision for humanity. By utilizing Schiller's text to the >>Ode to Joy<< in the Finale, it became a revolutionary epos, an anthem to human solidarity.

The symphony has been given numerous interpretations, to the extent that Theodore Adorno gave the Ninth as an example of a work that has been destroyed by its use in society. It became the symbol of the French Revolution and of the freedom of choice and society thereafter; it became an anthem for the allies against Germany in World War I (Camille Muclaire, 1915); it was perceived as a flag of

6 See Mario FALSETTO, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (London: Greenwood Press, 1994), 151-158.

7 Roland BARTHES, Musica Practica, L'Arc 40 (1970): 16.

G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179 177

Western democracy, as may be identified by Leonard Bernstein's performance fol- lowing the fall of the Berlin Wall; it was played on the loudspeakers at Tiannamen Square while the soldiers were advancing to break up the demonstrations; it was performed as part of a multinational satellite broadcast during the Atlanta Olym- pics. At the other extreme, it has been subjected to Marxist interpretations, which see the ideal of joy through suffering as akin to >>victory through struggle.<

It would seem that few symphonies in the history of Western music have been so used for ideological and political causes as Beethoven's Ninth, as Ruth Solie, referring to another Kubrick film in her article )>Beethoven as a Secular Humanist,< has stated:

The Ninth is so much discussed, it looms large during the three quarters of the century after its composition, undergoing symbolic readings that vary enormously (often contradicting one another) but never slacken either in frequency or polemical force. One might imagine the piece as a reflecting glass or, better, something like the mono- lith of Stanley Kubrick's film ,,Odyssey 2001<< - always present, hugely, at the center of discourse, inviting the attachment of meanings, almost as though it were a blank surface.8

In the last decade, twenty years after Kubricks's Clockwork Orange, in which the Ninth arouses extreme fantasies of violence and sex, it has provoked a polemic over music, gender and sexuality, with a reading of the Ninth as rooted in mascu- line libidinal impulses.9 Susan McClary, in her book Feminine Endings, states that

>,the ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlight- enment.< She later interprets the point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth as >>unleashing one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the his- tory of music... the entire first key area in the recapitulation is pockmarked with explosions. It is the consequent juxtaposition of desire and unspeakable violence in this moment that creates its unparalleled fusion of murderous rage and yet a kind of pleasure in its fulfillment of formal demands.<<10

This provoked responses such as that by Pieter C. van den Toorn, who, desiring an unmediated aesthetic experience, much in the tradition of Schenker and other music formalists, asserted that the meaning of music is beyond the reach of meta-

8 Ruth SOLIE, Beethoven as a Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nine- teenth-Century Criticism, in Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon, 1988), 1-42.

9 See Susan McCLARY, Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1991), 112-131, and the debate it aroused in Pieter C. van den TOORN, Politics, Feminism, and the Contemporary Music Theory, Journal of Musicology 9 (1991): 275-299, Ruth SOLIE, What do Feminists Want? A Reply to Pieter van den Toorn, Journal of Musicology 9 (1991): 399-410, and Pieter C. van den TOORN, Feminism, Politics and the Ninth, in Music, Politics and the Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 11-43.

10 McCLARY, Feminine Endings, 128.

178 G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179

phors, analogies, and symbols. Musical works in his view >>can become objects of affection, faith and love. They can speak to us directly, cut through to the heart without deliberation, without verbal approximation, and they can speak to us as individuals, as single beings, not as representatives compromised by partisanship. Indeed they may appear to serve no purpose beyond that of the relationship that is

struck.•<" This is a response to all hermeneutic analyses of the Ninth and of music

in general. Kubrick, though presenting his protagonist in strong agreement with

McClary's sexual, gender-oriented reading of the Ninth, takes a stand closer to that of van den Toorn on the question of the subjectivity of music. Music, he claims, through its use in A Clockwork Orange, does not have meaning beyond that which

every human being awards it. The same Ninth encloses in its musical and textual elements an ode to humanitarian brotherly love alongside violent and aggressive messages. The complete person is allowed a choice in the meaning it furnishes. Culture and aesthetics are not, to Kubrick, a representation of man's supremacy, delicacy and sophistication, which distinguish him from barbarity and animalism, but rather simply one of the two faces of the human being concealed in the basic character of man, who is allowed a choice. When choice is eradicated there is no more sense to life and he desires to die. In A Clockwork Orange, the 'cure' that con- ditions Alex against violence and the Ninth, also causes him to feel worthless, de-

pressed, numb, and deprived of any hope for the future, all clear symptoms of clinical depression. The deprivation of both music and violence makes his life mean-

ingless. When choice is eliminated, so is humanity, which, according to Kubrick, includes violence and insanity on the one hand, and culture and aesthetics on the other. Kubrick's message is clear: violence and sex, as well as music, and specifi- cally that which represents moral and humanitarian ideals, are a normal part of

society and unite on many levels. Alex is an extreme representative of sex and violence, and deviates from the boundaries set by society, but he is also an extreme case in his adoration of Beethoven and other cultural symbols. When 'cured' by behaviorist therapies, he is deprived of choice, for better or worse, and is therefore

deprived of his humanity, which includes culture and violence concurrently. It is

interesting to note that Kubrick assigns this message to the chaplain, who tells Alex in the library: >>The question is whether or not this technique really makes a man good, Goodness comes from within - goodness is chosen. When a man can- not choose, he ceases to be a man.<<

Freedom of choice includes the choice of violence and destructiveness as well as the choice of culture and aesthetic pleasure. The two coexist in all mankind and this is the joy to which we should aspire. Freedom of choice is also inherent in musical work, and even Beethoven's Ninth, moral, sublime and humanitarian as it is, also contains aggressiveness and impulsiveness, and thus allows a choice for each to hear or see it as one wishes.

1 Pieter C. van den TOORN, Politics, Feminism, and the Contemporary Music Theory, 275.

G. HANOCH-ROE: BEETHOVEN's NINTH AND KUBRICK, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 171-179 179

Safetak

BEETHOVENOVA DEVETA: 'ODA IZBORU' KAKO JE PREDSTAVLJENA U FILMU PAKLENA NARANCA STANLEYA KUBRICKA

Film Paklena naranCa Stanleya Kubricka rabi mitski status koji je postigla Beethovenova Deveta simfonija kako bi, s jedne strane, Sokirao gledatelja povezivanjem toga djela s krajnjim nasiljem. S druge strane, to tini i s pomoCu simbolizma koji sadr2i, ukljuiujuCi sve tekstualne i glazbene elemente, s namjerom da postavi bitna pitanja u pogledu glazbe i zapadne kulture

opdenito. Rijetko je koja simfonija u zapadnoj glazbi bila toliko upotrebljavana u ideolo9ke i

polititke svrhe kao Beethovenova Deveta. U posljednjem desetljeCu, dvadeset godina nakon Kubrickove Paklene narance, izazvala je rasprave o glazbi, rodu i spolnosti s titanjem Devete kao ukorijenjene u muSke libidinozne impulse. Kubrick je, iako predstavljajudi svojega protagonista u uskoj vezi sa spolno i rodno orijentiranim 6itanjem Devete, zauzeo drukeije stajaliSte o pitanju subjektivnosti glazbe. On tvrdi da glazba, uporabom u Paklenoj naranCi, nema znaCenje s onu stranu onoga koje joj pridaje svako ljudsko bide. Ista Deveta, uz silovite i agresivne poruke, u svojim glazbenim i tekstualnim elementima ukljutuje i odu ljudskoj bratskoj ijubavi. Kompletnoj ljudskoj osobi dopuSten je izbor u znaCenju s kojim ga snabdjeva. Prema Kubricku, kultura i estetika nisu predstavljanje Covjekove supremacije, istaneanosti i profinjenosti, Sto ga razlikuje od barbarstva i animalnosti, nego jednostavno tek jedno od

dvaju lica ljudskoga biCa skrivenih u karakternim temeljima Covjeka kojemu je dan izbor. Kada je izbor iskorijenjen, 2ivot vise nema smisla i on 2eli umrijeti.

U Paklenoj naranei veza izmedu radnje i Devete osjeda se na nekoliko razina, a Deveta oznaeava dramatski razvitak radnje i cijeli je film konstruiran da bi podsjedao na strukturu Devete. Izabravai upravo Beethovenovu Devetu i rabedi je na dubljim strukturnim i simboliCkim razinama, Kubrick sugerira da sloboda izbora ukljueuje isto tako izbor nasilja i destruktivnosti kao i odabir kulture i estetiCkog u2itka. To dvoje supostoji u cijelom CovjeCanstvu i to je radost kojoj valja da svi te2imo. Sloboda izbora je takoder urodena

glazbenom djelu, pa Cak i Beethovenova Deveta, kako god moralna, sublimna i humanistiCka bila, takoder sadr2i agresivnost i impulzivnost, te tako svakome dopusta izbor da Cuje ili vidi kako on/ona to 2eli.