In Squid Game, the worst moment is the prettiest. The players file up those candy-colored staircases toward the next round, knowing most of them won't come back down, and the show plays them along with a graceful Viennese waltz. Elegant, grand, the sound of a chandelier and a ballgown. Underneath it, a death game. You know the tune the second it starts.
That waltz is "The Blue Danube," properly "An der schönen blauen Donau," by Johann Strauss II. Squid Game didn't write a sinister cue for that staircase. It reached for the most genteel ballroom music in the world and pointed it at a slaughterhouse, and the gap between the two is what makes your skin crawl.
The same waltz once scored a spaceship, and meant the exact opposite
Forty years before Squid Game, the same tune was doing the opposite job. In "2001: A Space Odyssey," from 1968, a Pan Am shuttle drifts up toward a slowly rotating space station. Nothing explodes, nobody is racing a clock, and over the top of it Stanley Kubrick lays the same Viennese ballroom waltz. He took the most earthbound piece of music imaginable, three-four time worn smooth by a century of weddings and chocolate-box Vienna, and scored outer space with it.
It should not work. A 19th-century ballroom waltz has no business in a vacuum. That is exactly why it lands. The space station is turning, and a waltz is a turning dance, three beats to the bar, round and round. Kubrick heard the rotation and matched it to the one piece of music built entirely around going round. The shuttle doesn't dock so much as it asks the station to dance, and the station, slowly, says yes. Strauss wrote turning music for people in a room. Kubrick pointed it at the cosmos and let the turning do the rest.
So one waltz, two films, two opposite worlds. In Kubrick's hands it's serene, weightless, machines waltzing in the dark. In Squid Game's hands it's a horror, all that elegance laid over people walking to their deaths.
The music doesn't change. The thing you point it at does.
The original score Kubrick threw in a drawer
Here's the part of the 2001 story most people never hear. Kubrick didn't stumble onto "The Blue Danube." He had done the responsible thing first. He hired the composer Alex North and commissioned a complete original score for "2001," written for the film the way film music is supposed to be made. North wrote it. He delivered it. And Kubrick never used a note of it.
While North was working, Kubrick had been cutting the film against a set of classical recordings, temporary music, what the trade calls a "temp track," the placeholder you drop in so the editing has something to breathe against. He built a showreel to those classical pieces. The studio saw it and loved it. And somewhere in post-production Kubrick made the decision every director is warned against and almost none has the nerve to follow through on. He kept the placeholder and dropped the real thing.
North's commissioned score, written for the film, paid for by the film, went unused. The temp music stayed. So the sound of "2001," the sound that for millions of people simply is the sound of space, is a stack of recordings Kubrick was never supposed to keep, with a Viennese ballroom waltz at the center of it. Spare a thought for Alex North, who wrote a whole score for one of the biggest films of its era and never heard a bar of it in the place it was meant for.
Why a 19th-century waltz keeps stealing the scene
A purpose-written score tells you what to feel. That is its job. It swells when the film wants you moved and tightens when the film wants you tense, and a good one does it so well you never notice the hand on the dial. "The Blue Danube" does none of that. It does not care about the spaceship, and it does not care about the death game. It is just turning, serenely, indifferent to whatever is happening on screen.
That indifference is the trick both films lean on. Kubrick wasn't making the docking exciting; he was making it calm, vast, almost funny in its grandeur, while the music paid the hardware no mind. Squid Game does the inverse with the very same indifference: the waltz keeps being gorgeous while terrible things happen, and the gorgeousness is what turns the screw. A score written to either scene would have tried to help. The waltz, by refusing to, helped more.
Hear the whole waltz, with nothing rotating or dying overhead
If "The Blue Danube" has only ever been the staircase music or the spaceship music for you, then the films have lent it to you and never given it back. The waltz is older and grander than either use, and it rewards being heard on its own.
The full thing is on the Essential Classics channel below, sitting in a run of Johann Strauss's best, so once the Danube has had its turn there is more of the same world waiting on the other side of it. The clip opens straight on the waltz you know, played in full by a real orchestra, no staircase and no spaceship attached.
The next time a film or a show makes elegance feel like a warning, or makes a machine feel weightless, listen for the waltz under it. There's a good chance Strauss got there first, and a director just borrowed the turning.
