Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - and Zombies!

A scene in George Romero's (1985) Day of the Dead in which we see the zombie affectionately nicknamed 'Bub' grasp his own reflection in a mirrored surface and mime the act of shaving offers both a symbol of Bub's dawning subjectivity and a hint that this third in the sextet is the most Lacanian entry in Romero's career-long attempt to rewrite Sigmund Freud's essay on 'Infantile Sexuality' (from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) for zombies.

A later moment in his awakening sees Bub listening, on headphones, to a tape of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He is clearly caught up short by the music, suddenly rapt, becoming visibly less hunched, less slavering - could we say more refined? Even more human?

Genre cinema, loosely defined, has had a curious relationship to the symphony that Wagner saw as the gateway to the future. The "glorious ninth" is an oft-repeated refrain in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Walter Carlos's day-glo rendition accompanying, and in some ways, in its different articulations, summing up, each stage of Alex's progress. In Dusan Makavayev's (1974) Sweet Movie, we see the Vienna Actionists delightedly singing the 'An Die Freude' as they engage in an orgy of coprophagia. It crops up also in the final scene of Tarkovsky's (1979) Stalker, masked by the noise of a running train, in which, according to Tobias Pontara, it functions simultaneously as the master signifier of rational scientific progress, and a satiric swipe at the very same.

The Ninth is used fairly rarely in cinema compared to the Fifth, or even the Sixth and Seventh - especially if you exclude documentaries and TV movies. And it may be because this quality is never quite absent - of a strident pomposity that can't quite help deflating itself. The Ninth has baggage which, like Alex after his treatment, inevitably makes us a little queasy. But does this self-parodic reflex mean the end of the era - and not just in music - inaugurated by it; or might it still be possible, like Bub, to hear the piece once more with fresh ears?

Are they by any chance related? I think we should be told.

Franz Liszt
William Hartnell (as Dr Who)

Come to think of it ...

Richard Wagner

Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor)

and even ...

Ludwig van Beethoven

Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor)

This one is perhaps a little more tenuous ...

Pierre Schaeffer

Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor)

Now I'm really scraping the barrel ...

Gustav Holst

Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor)

Ferruccio Busoni

Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor)

'Your friend Beethoven patronized him, the son-of-a-bitch. Told him to keep on writing tunes, that was what he was good for. All Rossini was doing at the time was trying to give him a lift, so he wouldn't have to live like a hog in the dump he found him in.'
'If he patronized him it was right.'

'The hell it was. When a Beethoven overture is as good as a Rossini overture, then it'll be his right. Until then, let him keep his goddam mouth shut.'

'Lad, lad, you're profaning a temple.'

'No, I'm not. You say he's the greatest composer that ever lived, and so do I. He wrote the nine greatest symphonies ever put on paper, and that makes him the greatest composer. But listen, symphonies are not all of music. When you get to the overtures, Beethoven's name is not at the top, and Rossini's is. The idea of a man that could write a thing like the Leonora No. 3 high-hatting Rossini. Why, when those horns sound off-stage, it's a cheap vaudeville effect that makes the William Tell Overture sound like a Meistersinger's Prelude, by comparison.'

'I confess I don't like it.'

'Oh yeah, he would show the boys how to write an overture, wouldn't he? He didn't have overtures in him. You know why? To write an overture, you've got to love the theatre, and he didn't. Did you ever hear Fidelio?'

'I have, and it shames me - '

'But Rossini loved the theatre, and that's why he could write an overture. He takes you into the theatre, - hell, you can even feel them getting into their seats, and smell the theatre smell, and see the lights go up on the curtain. Who the hell told Beethoven he could treat that guy as somebody with an amusing talent that he ought to cultivate?'

- Serenade, James M. Cain