Near the end of last year, Sony's rollout for Spider-Man: No Way Home came with a few surprises for many viewers who had no interest in seeing it, or who had already seen it and had no interest in seeing it again. Suddenly, they found their reserved tickets to Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 noir novel Nightmare Alley canceled, the showtimes for that laboring flop bumped in favor of giving the Marvel leviathan an even bigger swath of the box office territory. Unfortunately, we live in a time where the hyper-consolidation of the film industry - to the point that it has been all but completely supplanted, no longer even occupying a significant subsidiary status to the multimedia and communications giants - means that all too many of us, even the optimists, took these events for granted as merely cold market logic, commerce bullying art. Too few of us were keen to note that, while No Way Home is technically a co-production of Sony's Columbia Pictures and Disney's Marvel Studios, that both it and del Toro's film, distributed by Disney's Searchlight Pictures (formerly Fox Searchlight Pictures), are, effectively, Disney products.
Even to one who is somehow hotly anticipating another of del Toro's mediocre passion projects, one can not ignore how even this slim pretense of not only an entertaining, but also an artistic and intellectually stimulating cinematic experience has been snatched away from its niche hopefuls, written off like the space-truckers of Alien as an expendable asset. To the multimedia conglomerates, the cinemas are little more than breeding grounds for the all-assimilating blockbuster. As regular theater attendances further approach a flatline, and with no credible action being taken against their anti-competitive machinations, the majors would be damned if they were to allow even a scrap of earnings to go to smaller films, much less good ones. Disney in particular is more than ready to establish the precedent that the theaters are to be for the big tentpole gambles exclusively, every other type of work classified as a loss-leader to be shoveled into the streaming package. Hypothetically, the smaller and mid-budget films can earn their keep over time in the passive stream of subscription fees, just as home video rentals and purchases could balance out their underwhelming box office performance in the days before streaming. But without the tangible connection between a single film and profit, the ability for creators to negotiate creative control will become ever flimsier, especially as more sophisticated mechanisms for monitoring views and algorithmically predicting more profitable content in turn maximizes efficiency in terms of what products to develop and produce. The need to compete in these circumstances, in turn, has a negative feedback on the independent sphere as well, which must increasingly pursue topicality and sensation, becoming more cynical exploitation film market than an earnest art film circuit.
There is no debating that the movies have already suffered from these circumstances, in the same way that they did in the '50s and '80s in their own cycles of market consolidation and conservative retrenchment. The only question is whether this period of retrenchment will be followed by an organic period of recovery, a radical explosion in the narrative, thematic, and formalistic diversity of low- and mid-budget films. If such a revival of artistic spirit seems impossible to imagine, it is because, in our present case, it is not just the movies themselves that are in decline. It is the cinema, the venue through which the movie once projected its totemic significance as an art form far above and beyond television, that has grown malnourished. It is impossible for films to get better if they are increasingly perceived, even by cinephiles themselves, as privatized and impersonal experiences to be enjoyed via the convenience of a T.V. or tablet. For the films to be better, they demand not only the scope of the theater, but also the investment of a journey into the social world.
As cinephiles - optimists and pessimists alike - we can rest assured that we share an inordinate amount of the blame for the death of cinema, and thus the death of the film as an art form. The COVID-19 pandemic was merely the extreme catalyst of a trend that was occurring for a long time, which is that it has proven to be individuals with the most investment in films as an art form who have the least motivation to leave their homes. These patterns are, of course, tied to economic and geographical circumstances. Many of us, and, indeed, an increasing number of us, have virtually nowhere to go even if we want to see a "real" movie, except at relatively extreme expense. Those expenses are magnified as precisely that cohort of cosmopolitan-minded, college-educated millenials that are most likely to patronize the low- and mid-budget movie, or the independent or arthouse film, finds itself subject to in an increasingly precarious, proletarianized employment market. Their suburbanized parents and grandparents could at least say they were feted by the comfort of the living room and the television. Economic desperation, on the other hand, coupled with the ravenous specter of a modern plague, contributes to a far more dispiriting sense of indefinite sacrifice.
What's more, though, is that an entire generation of filmgoers has been weaned on a well-meaning but ultimately toxic ideology that has killed its incentive to take a side in the war between art and commerce. Unlike the cult film cycles of the past, the new cinephile does not reject the binary between "high" and "low" culture in order to venerate a diversity of artistic visions that fall outside the homogenized mainstreams of either pop culture or the academy. Rather, they do so in the service of the mainstream and its meritocratic fallacies. They have accepted the Devil's bargain in which mass appeal grotesqueries of the market are a necessary evil in order for artists to be entrusted with their passions, gambled on in exchange for the surefire hit. But when the Devil comes to collect his due, when he points to the fine print of our passions themselves becoming more muddled by cynicism, it becomes all the more necessary to possessively invest in the dehumanizing grotesquery itself as a legitimate art of its own, worthy of the sunken cost of our scrutiny. Cinema thus died on the vine because it became exclusively about the most accessible, navel-gazing interpretation and discourse about it, not the experience of art. We have earnestly debated whether Batman v Superman is a work of Randian propaganda, or whether Black Panther is an anti-radical psyop, instead of just ignoring them to focus our critical energies and investments elsewhere. We completely lost sight of the fact that it is not enough to simply vote with our dollars at the independent or arthouse or classic film revival screening. It is just as, if not more important, that we don't give our money to bullshit artists. Even within the limiting scope of capitalism, it is not enough that we want the artful niches to have our money. We need to want the cynics to not have it, or at the very least not have it in the way they would obviously prefer for their own ease of predicting what they should give us next.
For what little good filmmaking there is to not only remain, but to also thrive anew, we need to be willing to choose a side, to go to see some things and to not go to see other things. We need to be willing to assume the self-evidence of cynicism. It's not enough to just talk about the films we do think are good, and to be able to talk about what we like about their art. We need to be able to not talk about other films, to earnestly say that we didn't even bother seeing The Matrix Revolutions or the G.I. Joe spinoff or whatever the Hell The 355 is supposed to be.
For what little is left of cinema to survive, we need to be willing to uncouple ourselves from the pathological urge to engage with films primarily through debate and interpretation. We need to remember them instead as experiences, and the cinema as the essential medium of its impact.
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As the aperture of new good cinema becomes increasingly narrow, it becomes increasingly necessary for the modern cinephile to avail themselves of pretty much every opportunity to eschew the new in favor of the old. Again, these are not matters of nostalgia. In addition to simply looking and feeling objectively different from the homogeneity of the present, older films are relatively unburdened by the same pathological demands for discourse. Which is to say, they can be better appreciated experientially, as works of art rather than dialogs with the spectator. Even if one must view them at home, one can immediately appreciate the rift in aesthetic valuation over time. The look of film, of the film stock itself - even when, in terms relative to the times in which they were made, the photography is flat or overly functional - is immediately preferable in its texture to the smooth tableaus that digital cameras and post-correction can offer. Even more recent film stocks, as manufacturers have chased after the over-valuation of "definition" in digital image quality, pale in comparison; and digital "restorations" of older films are all too frequently mired by the same elimination of texture.
Sound, too, especially in terms of film scoring, is objectively more diverse, or at least temporally less standardized, than it is now. Even as our contemporary musicians continue to dabble, experiment, and fuse genres, the scores and soundtracks of our films are seemingly anesthetized from the same impulse. Even the indies and arthouses offer little more than sonorously unenthused ambience in response to the bludgeoning rhythms and choral affectations of mainstream blockbusters. There may never again be a time like the American New Wave, where the nascent application of contemporary folk pop and psychedelic rock in The Graduate and Easy Rider evolved right alongside everything from the funk and soul of Blaxploitation, to the rekindled appreciation of classical orchestra and leitmotif spearheaded by John Williams, to even the juxtaposition of all these forms with the adolescent electronic score, and even elements of Musique concrète. These clashes between high and low, between classical and modern, between pop and avant-garde in the American New Wave sound, often cropped up in what would, in retrospect, seem to be the most unlikely of places.
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Written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, per the original film poster, concerns "the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven." Set in London in the indeterminate near future - which is to say, the near future to the film's release in 1972 - our protagonist is Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), an unapologetic teenage sociopath and leader of a gang of three other ne'er-do-wells. After his gang betrays him, Alex finds himself unhappily carted off to prison for murder. Guileful and unrepentant, he figures he's found the perfect avenue out of the glasshouse when he volunteers to be a test subject in a radical new behavioral modification program being funded by the incumbent conservative government as a solution to their overcrowded judicial system and rising crime rates. Shot up with a special serum, Alex is forced to watch films depicting acts of violence and sex until he becomes involuntarily sick at even the thought of it. Deemed "reformed" by science, rather than by active moral choice, Alex is unhappily released back into society, and ends up facing many of those he harmed in the past, but without the means to assert or defend himself. What's more, the procedure had an unintended side effect. One of the films Alex watched, Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, contained extensive use of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, Alex's favorite piece of music. In other words, Alex can now only experience agonizing pain from the things that once brought him joy, not just the anti-social things, but also "the glorious 9th."
It goes without saying that A Clockwork Orange features one of the best film scores and soundtracks of all time. Kubrick's selections from Gioachino Rossini, Edward Elgar, and even psychedelic folk trio Sunforest are married perfectly to Wendy Carlos's pioneering Moog synthesizer and vocoder rearrangements of Henry Purcell and, of course, Ludwig van Beethoven. Though no less surreal, they go further in suggesting the tangibility of the film's setting than the location photography and set designs. Kubrick, a formal perfectionist, imparts on the viewer a disquieting sense of alienation through the blocking of his performers and his consistent use of extreme wide angle lenses to emphasize depth and distance, which also distorts our comprehension of the size and spatial relationship of performers and objects, unmooring us from a sense of naturalism. It is by the rallying of sound, however, that Kubrick tethers us to the just as disquieting authenticity of his surreal tableaux vivants.
This conceptual distance is narratively and thematically motivated. Though Alex and his parents seem to lead a life that is comfortable enough, their apartment block is a shambles, filled with trash and derelict property, and vandalized to the extent that its common uses, like the elevator, are inoperable. If this is the same future as 2001, Alex and his "droogs" (their street-urchin slang for "friends") certainly aren't going on any business or diplomatic trips to Mars. Kubrick's first science-fiction epic, written in parallel to Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name, tied mankind's giant leaps in intellect and technology to providence rather than his natural will. Beneath its anthemic sweep there was always a bleak kernel to 2001 that would find itself amplified in Kubrick's sci-fi follow-up, which concerns the story behind the veil of "mankind's" ascension, the world in which most of mankind remains and is being left behind. Seen from this vantage, "the future" is remote not only because it is not "the future" for its inhabitants, but also because the signifiers of this future are themselves totally remote and impertinent to daily life. They exist only as allusions. Similarly, the ponderous, cryptic quality of 2001, in which questions of the meaning of life and the nature of humanity seem to have such gravity, has no parallel in the treatment of free will versus social control in A Clockwork Orange. With a devious smirk and shallow affect, Alex has as little concern for these things as he does for a map to the stars, and his diabolical, hedonistic indifference to the grand pageants of moral and political conflict that occur around him underscores the film's pitch black sense of humor.
The world of A Clockwork Orange is not a typical sci-fi future of its time in that the conceptual framing of "the future" does not convey a forward momentum, either in the progressive or deleterious sense. Its framing of London is all too apparently its present. And like the "present" London, this "near future" London is only at the cusp of a decisive shift that is signified but is as yet paralyzed from fully taking hold, and is thus unable to relinquish us from the existential dread of anticipation.
The music of the film captures the same tension, but proves to go further than its visual component in terms of grounding the spectator in the ephemeral predicament of this "near future." Commencing with Carlos and frequent collaborator Rachel Elkind-Tourre's electronic arrangement of Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, the film literally opens with a royalist commemoration of old, but in the idiom of the state-of-the-art, the original piece's swelling anthem turned to a spiraling, synthetic dirge to announce McDowell as Alex, holding court over his droogs in a booth at the very end of bar where the tables and taps are designed to look like sculptures of nude women. That Alex will posture himself as a connoisseur of the classics, that he is a mere working-class ruffian who aspires to the noblesse of a true libertine, calls upon and responds to the score's own collision of signifiers. Just like the period in which he lives, Alex is on the threshold of a great becoming. But this becoming will not be heralded by a progress or descent. Rather, it is a becoming in which the signifiers of past and future enfold upon an interminable present, self-satisfied in its indolent hedonism, luxuriating in the decay of meaning in a society which has no real future.
The next piece is also telling, because while it is not new, it is also not, precisely, a classic. Paul Farrell's Tramp will be given his own mini-musical number just before Alex and his droogs come along and beat him senseless, bellowing "Molly Malone." This late 19th-century Irish ballad is a nostalgic ode to not only a woman, but also the city of Dublin, and is by itself thematically fitting as a preamble to a scene in which a gang of teenage punks wail on an old man who criticizes their generation. But the irony is that the folk music permutations of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack are not confined to the old and lost exclusively, pitted at odds with the present and new. Indeed, Kubrick specifically sought out the band Sunforest to re-record two of their songs for the film, "Overture to the Sun" and "Lighthouse Keeper." Mixing affinities for folk music, pop, and the progressive direction of rock music, the sound of Sunforest is contextualized in Kubrick's film as the perfect, ironic bridge between past and present, and another foul suggestion of what "future" really means. An example of the new appropriating the old, these songs suggest something just as unsettling as the Tramp's eulogy for the lost, which is the infinite regression into tacky facsimiles of the past as somehow purer, less corrupted, more innocent. Indeed, the juxtaposition between the frivolity of Sunforest's music and the explicit violence of Kubrick's visual narrative implies both the perversion of appropriating the past as well as the occult horrors of the past itself. Much like the work of Paul Giovanni and Magnet for The Wicker Man two years later, these supposedly innocent, bucolic Sunforest songs conjure up memories buried in deep time of British folk culture's pagan origins. The violent undercurrent of this deep past is betrayed by Alex's very own bloodlust, and his journey allegorically mirrors the cycle of his society's historical attempts to dominate, impose upon, and, ultimately, sublimate primitive instincts.
For Carlos's part, her "future music" would prove to be not only the most futuristic, but literally the most prophetic aspect of the movie. The next few decades didn't really map onto all of the eccentricities of Kubrick's visualization of the near future. What he and Burgess got right was the decline of Britain's social support state into austerity, the ascendency of a new political order that combined conservative reaction with progressive overtures, and, moreover, the sclerosis of time and place itself, our own "near future" predicament of being desperate for radical changes but finding any such thing impossible to imagine or motivate. Otherwise, A Clockwork Orange is certifiably about the present "near future," its own present moment of existential dread, neurosis, alienation, and sclerotic resistance to change. The soundtrack of the film, however, was what the future would sound like, both in terms of Carlos's electronic music - influencing everything from krautrock to synthpop and New Wave - as well as in terms of the materially dependent collision between the old and the new. The sound of A Clockwork Orange completes the picture, filling in the crucial, culturally and historically specific gaps to authenticate its "near future" visuals and make them credible. The sound of the film is so vivid, and so perfect in its complement of the visual, that it could be said to create visuals itself, suggesting surreal, invisible impressions that map over the film and heighten the nightmarish proximity of its daring narrative.
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I have seen A Clockwork Orange on the big screen at least once before, probably when I was in college. It's currently screening at the IFC Center in New York City until the 13th, but it was not originally my intention to see it this Thursday. Of course, it was an option in the back of my mind, but always as a prospective second bill to a double-feature, if I felt like I could grab a bite between its early afternoon showtime and the letting out from the film that I had originally come to see. While A Clockwork Orange has been playing at the IFC since New Year's, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was concluding its engagement that day. I hadn't seen that since I was a kid, and never on the big screen. Of course, I did end up making it a double-feature, and I had a perfectly ghoulish, stimulating time.
The ideal double-feature is always two films that, in all respects, radically diverge from one another, but nonetheless cohere in a strange, unpredictable way. Such is the case with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and A Clockwork Orange. I'd go so far as to call the continuity between them baffling. With Wonka released in the summer of 1971, Kubrick's film premiering that December, they have each attained a kind of definitive status as products of the early-'70s. Each had a fairly mixed, even polarizing reception upon initial release; and while Clockwork was an immediate economic success and Wonka proved a flop, both developed strong cult followings that saw their significant reappraisal over the course of the next two decades, and became classics of the family film and the adult art film respectively. Each was based on a work of English literature from the previous decade, both were relatively inexpensive for their time, and both, despite major studio distribution, were more or less independent productions. Both contain unique, eccentric, colorful production designs, with iconic soundtracks to match. Both certainly tread the line between dream and nightmare, between frivolity and darkness, between the comic and the macabre. More striking, however, when the two run together, with Wonka getting top-billing, is their thematic continuity...
Both Wonka and Clockwork are, at their heart, the stories of "at rick," wayward youth. Charlie Bucket, the impoverished protagonist played by Peter Ostrum in the former film, adapted from Roald Dahl's 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, certainly shares no common pathology with McDowell's vile Alex DeLarge. They are both, however, lost souls of a kind, stuck in circumstances that hold little hope for positive change. That is, however, until providence offers both characters the keys to something better. In Charlie's case, this comes in the form of a fantastical lottery, the lucky receipt of a Golden Ticket inviting him to see inside the majestic factory of the mysterious and eccentric candy mogul Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder). In both films, neither protagonist has much expectation that this lottery will yield anything more than a hedonic restitution for their previous lack. Alex just wants to get out of jail so that he can go back to his old libertine pursuits. And Charlie, like the other four recipients of the Golden Ticket, is content to know that he has a lifetime supply of chocolate coming to him. But nestled behind each lottery, behind the gloss of the Golden Ticket, is a climactic twist that promises both sufferers, the Gallant and the Goofus, the chance at not just temporary happiness, but rather social advancement, lasting stability, and privilege. That is, as long as they prove themselves amenable to the interests, and egos, of their benefactors.
At their core, both Willy Wonka and A Clockwork Orange are morality tales. This is more obvious in the former only because its prospective target is so much clearer, its message more didactic, and its aesthetic more whimsical. As we follow Charlie and the other four Golden Ticket winners through the factory, each of the other four falls prey to their own greed or disregard for good manners, with Wonka's colorful dwarf workers stepping in to underscore the moral of their downfall explicitly with a brief musical interlude. In one of these sequences, the filmmakers even opt to visualize key words in the song to drive home their message. It is, however, notable that, in this instance, they are keen to underscore the same point as Roald Dahl does in the comparable scene from his book. In "teaching by negative example," the message of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not narrowly concerned with the bad manners and naughtiness of children. An essential part of the film's persistence as a relevant family entertainment through the decades is precisely because it doesn't condescend to children, but rather attempts to stimulate them to both take pleasure in the punishment of the naughty children, while also understanding that niceness and naughtiness are not essential characteristics. By the same token, the film may both appeal to the narcissism of parents, while also condescending to their own childishness. Just as with Dahl's novel, the film revels in a providential sense of rewards for good behavior and punishment for bad behavior, but also makes sure that, along the way, this spectacle will reinforce the idea in children's heads that people are, in part, a product of their nuturing. "Blaming the kids is a lie and a shame," sing the Oompa Loompas. "You know exactly who's to blame: The mother and the father!"
This is only the most obvious way in which the film teaches by negative example, but there are also more subtle ways in which it positively reinforces certain values. Charlie only gets the Golden Ticket about a half hour into the film, a little under a third of the way through its running time. The film's first act is almost entirely concerned with the lottery for the Golden Tickets themselves, hidden in random Wonka chocolate bars distributed around the globe, igniting a consumer mania. Though the screenplay for the film is credited to Roald Dahl, it was, to the author's dismay and offense, heavily revised by ghost-writers David Seltzer and Robert Kaufman. It's easy to see why Dahl was so revolted by the results and made no secret of disowning the film. Though the filmmakers attempt to faithfully adapt Dahl's idiosyncratic combination of fairy tale whimsy and often morbid humor, within the first half hour Willy Wonka is already padded by a much drier, sardonic tone, exemplified in non sequitur vignettes that can't help but use the film as an opportunity to satirize consumer culture. This tact is in one sense wholly motivated, but in another sense comes at the cost of cruelly undermining our identification with Charlie, particularly because it is he who wants to win a Golden Ticket, if only because he wants to win just for once in his sad little life. And then in comes a TV evening reporter to say, "We must remember that there are many more important things, many more important things... Offhand, I can't think of what they are, but I'm sure there must be something." These scenes are funny in context, but they are ultimately a distraction from telling the story through a child's perspective.
At the very same time, though, while the perspective of the film is distracted, its reductive moral clarity never wavers. Charlie does want to win more than anybody else, but his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) is wrong to say he deserves to win because of it. Tellingly, it is only when Charlie thinks the last Golden Ticket has already been found, when he has given up all hope, that he finally, providentially, lucks upon a silver dollar on his way home. Stopping in the candy shop, he first buys some chocolate for himself, and then, thinking of his grandfather, spends the rest of his money on a Wonka Bar for him. It is this bar, bought on someone else's behalf, rather than his own, that produces the miracle. When Charlie wants for himself, only out of envy of others, he loses. When he acts out of graciousness and love for others, he wins.
Wonka is really most faithful to Dahl's novel in the fact that, as a morality tale, it reflects a veritably Victorian obsession with the cultivation of morality. Wonka's enchanted factory of impossible delights and Rube Goldberg devices is really no more or less than the Gingerbread House of the Hansel & Gretel story, a decadent object of desire that, once you are inside of it, reveals itself as a den of perils, filled with trials to test one's moral fortitude. Even Charlie himself succumbs to the temptations of this Garden of Earthly Delights, notably at the prompting of his Grandpa Joe, and must prove himself through a final act of grace and restitution. Part of the reason that the film developed such a strong cult following to the extent that we're almost shocked to find out it was not originally considered a classic is precisely because of its apparent willingness to probe the darker, even sadistic tendencies of the spectator, both adult and child alike; to get them to not simply weep and cheer at the graceful young hero's victory, but to also revel in the Alighieri-esque punishments meted out to the losers. Even now that the film has been canonized into the mainstream, it maintains an off-beat, even counter-cultural veneer. Its presentation of moral binaries is at once so naked that it also becomes deeply ambiguous. The nature of Wonka himself, magnificent and sinister at turns, is never really resolved in our minds to a sufficient degree. In the obsessive cultivation of morality, Wonka, and the film itself, become spoiled by their own allegorical decadence, corrupted by a desire to perfect the human spirit in the manner of scientific or mechanical process. He's "as queer as a clockwork orange," if you will.
A Clockwork Orange is a morality tale in its own right. Or, rather, it is a tale just as obsessed with, and specifically about the construction of morality. In particular, like Wonka, Kubrick's film is reflective of a unique obsession with how morality can or should be cultivated in a younger generation, made during a time of pervasive existential pessimism. The contemporary perception of juvenile delinquency on the rise is deeply informative upon both Burgess and Kubrick's "near future" dystopias, and when Clockwork is paired on a double bill with Wonka, one can easily see Alex DeLarge's own allegorical adventures in this colorful, eccentric, modernist world as a insidious maturation of Charlie's own hero's journey. Or, at the very least, one can interpret Alex as a pubescent bridge between the innocent Charlie and the ambiguous Wonka. The obsession with chocolate, and with winning, is now graduated to more libidinal objects of desire. These desires, and the more predatory instinct to socially dominate and perfect his austere social environment to his whim, has not yet been sublimated by an industrious calling. Both stories are, effectively, coming of age stories, parables of youths at the threshold of great expectations and greater becomings. Charlie and Alex must both pass through a fiery crucible of temptation and emotional torture to prove themselves worthy of a higher station in life.
The funny thing is that, as morality tales, it turns out to be the adult-oriented Clockwork that is far less ambiguous. Whereas the moral didacticism of Wonka is subtly undermined by its titular magician's "queerness," there is never any mistaking that the authorities of Kubrick's world lack any authentic concern for Alex's redemption. They themselves are naked in the assessment that morality should be treated as a science, that the human individual should be treated as a machine rather than a spirit. Whether Alex chooses to be good is immaterial, even politically impractical. In this "near future" dystopia, the obsession with cultivating problematic youth (particularly the underprivileged) into law-abiding citizens has completely transcended concern with affecting their nature, and has instead become laser-focused on managing their behavior. The seeds of this deleterious decline, oriented around the obsession with cultivating children rather than addressing the crises of the world around them, are planted in Wonka, but bloom fully in the nihilism of Kubrick's film.
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There is also a parallel between Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and A Clockwork Orange in how dependent both films are upon the transformational effect of their music.
Contemporary critics were wont to note the apparent cheapness of Wonka, which was co-produced by the Quaker Oats Company for only $3 million. Adjusted for inflation, that's around $21.5 million in today's currency, barely scratching the bottom-tier of a mid-budget production. Much like Clockwork, especially in retrospect, Wonka trades heavily on eccentric production design and art direction which, in context, viscerally compensates the spectator for its lack of realism. As with the "near future" of Kubrick's film, suspension of disbelief isn't quite what the filmmakers were aiming for. Rather - and this is a type of film style that has been all but completely lost to the ages - there is almost a contentedness in the artificiality of Wonka's world. Its "fake-ness" becomes part of its humble appeal. We are not so much suspending our disbelief as attenuating our belief to the sublime enjoyment of a world that, because we can see that it has been specially crafted and manufactured, warts and all, feels like it is actually for us. Though artificial, there is nonetheless a naturalistic feel to the film that suspends our cynicism rather than our belief.
Similarly, despite an Academy Award nomination, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse's music for the film won it mixed honors at best from contemporary critics. And it's easy to see why. The only real "showstoppers" in the production are Ostrum and Albertson's performance of "(I've Got A) Golden Ticket" in the first act, and "I Want It Now," sung by Julie Dawn Cole in the third. And the fact that it is the latter song, which isn't even sung by a major character, that has proven to have the more lasting salience, underscores the comparatively anemic sense of showmanship in the rest of the film. Though the film is often praised for its psychedelic qualities, its sensibilities are far closer to a kind of baroque pop. You hear this especially in the recurrence of the Oompa Loompa song. This approach to pop music had been briefly fashionable at the time the book was published, and elements of the style would remain evident in the more bubblegum sectors of contemporary pop music well into the late '70s. But even by 1972, it was rapidly losing its novelty and starting to sound cheap and annoying. And in execution, neither the composers nor the director seemed to have managed to find a way for the reprises of the Oompa Loompa song to feel organic or fluid with the pacing of the rest of the film, especially in contrast to the rest of the film's music. Many of Newley and Bricusse's compositions have a lilting, "easy listening" vibe, clearly gesturing at the pastoral musical scores of the '30s and '40s - especially The Wizard of Oz - but touched by a more tired sense of nostalgic longing and melancholy. Even the musical centerpiece, Gene Wilder's performance of "Pure Imagination," while evoking the power of the child-like mind, unfettered by the cynicism of the modern world, is an apparently sad, even creepy ballad. This is the first and only moment in the musical, until the very end, when we feel like we can trust Wilder's dissonant character, and it reveals Wonka as a sad and lonely figure, rather than a trustworthy or enviable one. The choreography, too, is minimal, and the little time for rehearsal is all too apparent.
This is, though, of course, exactly why Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, in its production design and its music, is so much more popular now than it was upon release. Like one of those many post-psych, proto-prog one-off bands that never penetrated the rock 'n' roll mainstream but are rediscovered with such apparent relish decades later, Newley and Bricusse's score, despite its definitive pop style, was just a little too weird even for the '70s, just a little too ahead of its time, and now hits just a little too close to home in terms of manifesting the conflicted feelings of contemporary listeners. Like the cheap production, it has a discordant texture all its own that makes it feel all the less cynical, all the more specially crafted, all the more personal and natural.
Just like Carlos's scoring and Kubrick's music selection for A Clockwork Orange, Newley and Bricusse's music helps to fill in gaps and elaborate upon the visual component of the film in a way that makes it feel all the more pinned down, specific, and credible as a whole. But the really impressive nature of the sound of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is something that cannot be fully appreciated until one listens to the original music soundtrack album. Produced by Tom Mack, the truly inspiring thing about the Wonka record is that it does not opt to isolate Newley and Bricusse's music from the dialogue and sound effects of the film. And I do not simply mean that, say, Aubrey Woods's performance of "The Candy Man" includes the establishing dialogue that opens it. I mean that Mack, no doubt with Newley and Bricusse's participation, realized that the diegetic sounds of the film were essential to its musicality. The soundtrack album presents itself, in essence, as a conceptual record rather than a mere tie-in, allowing Newley and Bricusse's music to tell the story, while abstractly incorporating dialogue and sound effects to fill in the gaps and elaborate upon the visual impressions given to the listener. They realized that the "music" of Wonka was nothing without the strange sounds of the eccentric inventor's Rube Goldberg machines, or the sputtering of the Wonkamobile, or the screams of the passengers aboard "The Wondrous Boat Ride." Even the more incidental tracks, like "Charlie's Paper Run" or "Lucky Charlie," will include both snippets of dialogue and sound effects, traditional film scoring bookended by discordant fits of Musique concrète clearly inspired by the works of The Beatles, Brian Wilson, and the Moody Blues.
Taken as two separate, though intimately related artistic pieces, it's difficult to say which work is the superior Willy Wonka. At the very least, the structuring and production of the soundtrack album does a much better job of organically incorporating the Oompa Loompa songs. But there's something to be said about the extent to which the Musique concrète of the album would not be possible without the filmmakers' imaginative attention to how their eccentric visuals should suggest complementary, diegetic sounds that, in and of themselves, should convey their own musicality. Just as Clockwork exemplifies the visual potential of film scoring, so too does Wonka exemplify the musical potential of a visual medium. Despite the limitation and discordance, there is a total harmony that all but eclipses virtually any other cinematic experience, whether defined as a musical or not.
Paired together, both Wonka and Clockwork are all but universally accepted "classics" of the film canon that actually proved their avant-garde qualities over time. They are lessons in the truth of a transcendent artistic experience rarely, if ever, being immediately apparent. They persevere through layers of concepts and textures that reward repeat viewing, perpetually and organically new at a time that, as Clockwork portends, we seem doomed to a sclerotic, deleterious regression into derivative, algorithmically-generated self-reference, intractably mired in our own near future.
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