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Discipline equals freedom vinyl10/4/2023 By ultraviolence, Alex means rape and violence, which he and his “droogies” are so fond of. The narrator tells the audience that the kind of drugged milk they drink gives them the energy they need for the good old “ultraviolence”. This distorted language and setting meets perfectly with the synthesizer version of Purcell – the distortion of harmony, melody and order. So far, we are seeing and hearing arbitrary and extraordinary things and words, a total challenging of concepts of normality, order, language (therefore perception) and society. There are four of them including Alex, and they are all in white clothes. Quite Shakespeare-like, Alex – who is also the narrator – uses made up words to introduce us to his “droogs”. The milk comes out of their breasts, and there are certain drugs in it. Alex’s fake eyelashes represent his troubled perception and the question governing the film: “a free society likely to commit crimes or a controlled society free of crime?” The camera pans out into the Korova Milk Bar where there are white plastic milk machines in the shape of a naked woman posing seductively. The film opens with Wendy Carlos’ synthesizer version of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (Purcell is a leitmotiv for an omniscient perspective of Alex), after the opening titles, we see Alex staring right into the camera with fake eyelashes on one of his eyes while Purcell’s piece sets the tone. To be as clear as possible I would like to explain my way of analysis of the use of classical music in A Clockwork Orange : I will give a summary of the film mainly based on what piece of classical music is used where and for how long (in terms of events that take place during the course of the music), while doing that I will present a short account of what Foucault established in his works that I think has clear connections to the film and in the meanwhile I will be explaining the reasons why the uses of Henry Purcell, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gioachino Rossini, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Edward Elgar’s music adds another dimension to the film while still supporting the film’s governing idea: a society of control versus a society of freedom. Stanley Kubrick, using cinematography at its very heights, presents us with a work of art that not only incorporates these ideas into a two dimensional way of expression, but also adds it a third and even a fourth dimension using classical music (both the original and the synthesized versions). In A Clockwork Orange, there are many issues to be discussed and tackled with such as violence, sex, order, primitiveness, panopticon and panopticism, Foucault, society, politics, perception in general, and knowledge-power relations. The film starts with the Msiuc fro eth uneFrla fo eneuQ aMyr, as an antithesis of order, harmony, and tranquility that permeates every corner of society.
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