soundtrack analysis on A Clockwork Orange

Along side The Shining, Stanley Kubrick`s A Clockwork Orange has an exeptional soundtrack! here is my semi-indepth analysis for that movie, its characters, and most above...its soundtrack!!


Clockwork Orange begins with it’s title song “Ultraviolence” a song that has a certain melodramatic essence to it. While Alex and his three droogs are sitting motionless in the Korova Milk Bar, the title music backgrounds their expressions dramatically. The juxtaposition of the song and the virtually immobile characters give them a sense of insanity, making it seem as though there are some sick and twisted thoughts going on behind their eyes. The next scene to use this piece of music is where Alex rapes the writer’s wife and beats him. Attending this class made me fully aware of exactly why Stanley Kubrick decided to do this. By calling back to that initial shot of Alex staring into the camera via the use of music, we realize that it was this type of “Ultraviolence” as he puts it; that had been waiting inside his mind from the very beginning. The last time this piece is heard is later on in the film when Alex’s two former droogs have become policemen, and they take him out to a forest where they beat him and nearly drown him to death. Accompanying this music is a strange form of non-diagetic sound effects that sync every blow of the policeman’s baton. These sound effects sound very similar to the rest of the soundtrack, only more punctual. They begin punctually with a high pitch frequency and gradually decay into a low tone that lingers through echo and reverberation. This allows the audience to at least relate to the kind of pain Alex experiences in this situation, while the music “Ultraviolence” symbolizes now not just a theme for Alex, but a theme for all forms of Ultraviolence that take place in this dystopian modernistic society. Another very interesting use of sound in this film is Kubrick’s use of reverberation on the voices in situation one might not expect to hear it. In fact the only scene in which the reverberation makes sense is when Alex sings “Singing in The Rain” in the bathtub after stumbling wet, beaten and bruised into the house of the writer. This reveals the purpose of the reverberation as a method to indicate the depth in which the characters are in their own minds. Usually the more comfortable the character is in his surroundings the more comfortable he will be at inflection and the reverberation is expanded. These few examples are only a scratch on the surface of the way Stanley Kubrick used sound to express meaning in this film, and for that matter, all of his films.