David Mikics - Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker

STANLEY KUBRICK

Stanley Kubrick

American Filmmaker

DAVID MIKICS

New Haven and London

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955073
ISBN 978-0-300-22440-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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Frontispiece: Stanley Kubrick directing A Clockwork Orange (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)

Harold Blooms The American Canon:Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (editor)

Bellows People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art

Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

The Annotated Emerson (editor)

The Art of the Sonnet (with Stephanie Burt)

Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography

A New Handbook of Literary Terms

The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche

The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton

For Larry and Edith Malkin

1. I Know I Can Make a Film Better Than That:
Killers Kiss, The Killing

2. Keep Doing It Until It Is Right:
Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita

3. Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control:
Dr. Strangelove

4. The Tower of Babel Was the Start of the Space Age:
2001: A Space Odyssey

5. Lets Open with a Sicilian Defence:
A Clockwork Orange

6. You Can Talk for Hours about a Thing with Stanley:
Barry Lyndon

7. Something Inherently Wrong with the Human Personality:
The Shining

8. Make Sure Its BigLon Chaney Big:
Full Metal Jacket

9. Frightened of Making the Movie:
Eyes Wide Shut

STANLEY KUBRICK

STANLEY KUBRICK told me a story about a girl he loved, Kirk Douglas recalled. He had a big fight with her, and goddamnit! He felt macho. The hell with it! Hed had enough! That was it! He packed his bag and slammed the door. He went out. As he started walking, that bag got heavier and heavier and he couldnt carry it. He had to go back.

A piquant fairy tale: male defiance is quickly foiled by fate, which brings the man back to where he started. Kubricks anecdote is also the plot of his last and most personal movie, Eyes Wide Shut. In that film the man rebels by seeking sex, but most Kubrick movies are about rebellion of some kind. Usually the rebel starts to look small, despite the sizable energies he lets loose. Being a rebel is not how you solve problems, and problem solving is very close to Kubricks heart.

When he made a movie Kubrick was obsessively focused because he had to find a solution to every problem, but he was also drawn to macho revolt, and to anything else that makes well-laid plans screw up royally. His movies are about mastery that fails. Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents, or hijacked by masculine rage. A rebellious imp of the perverse always lurks somewhere. Kubrick relishes whatever throws a wrench in the works: the antic wiles of Alex in A Clockwork Orange and Quilty in Lolita, the chest-puffing death drive of Dr. Strangeloves nutjob generals, Jack Torrances wild anger in The Shining, the sudden fury that conquers Barry Lyndon at the sight of his stepson Bullingdon. A zestful insanity courses through the rigid champions of order, like Drill Instructor Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Finally, after all this tearing apart, Kubrick comes back home at the end of Eyes Wide Shut, and shows us the intimate, ordinary life of a married couple.

Kubricks movies are outliers, and we look at them differently than most popular films. Whether the Kubrick hero is a rebel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange or a calm problem solver like Dave Bowman in 2001, we observe him across a distance and with ambivalence, instead of rooting for him in classic Hollywood fashion. Kubrick likes to trap his characters, put them on display. He is an arch modernist, allergic to tearjerkers, joyous endings, and scenes full of heart. His work also argues against most film noir and outlaw movies, which prize wicked self-possession and cool, from The Maltese Falcon down to Tarantino. Yet for all these avoidances Kubricks movies were and are hugely popular: 2001, intensely slow, quiet and abstract, became one of MGMs ten biggest moneymakers. Moments from Kubrick movies are as iconic as anything in The Godfather, a film Kubrick loved but which, in stark contrast to his own work, achieves a classic Hollywood trifecta of pathos, violence, and male bravado.

Kubricks detractors argue that his movies dont sufficiently champion the human soul against the constricting routines they depict. Kubrick seems to them to be on the side of oppression, his movies cold, ponderous, and heavy-handed, extreme in all the wrong ways. One could, of course, say the same of Kafkas writingand Kubrick was a devoted reader of Kafka.

The deep-frozen impersonality that some claim to see in Kubrick is really his rejection of Hollywood pathos: the hero who drinks because he cant get over a dame, the brave heroine blinking back tears. Kubrick doesnt do what the movies are supposed to do, give you satisfying cathartic jolts. Nor is he austere in the manner of the European art film, though he admired Antonioni and, especially, Bergman. Film critic James Naremore writes that Kubricks crystal-clear images give a sense of authorial understanding without immersion, as if volcanic, almost infantile feelings were being observed in a lucid, rational manner.

Kubricks aloofness coexists with a kids heart and a kids upsetting energy. His movies show an odd mating of hyperaware adult rationality and the raw feelings of a child. Childhood is telling: Kubrick the mischievous, stubborn little boy is at the core of his films, along with the grown-up director, calm and in control, who liked nothing better than staying home and making movies.

Theres a home movie of Stanley Kubrick clowning around, probably at about age eight, hamming it up for his kid sister Barbara. Wearing oversized pants, he does a slapstick dance routine. At one point his grin looks a little like Alexs: malicious delight. Little Stanley got poor grades in conduct and playing with others. He had a strong Bartleby side: he never had a bar mitzvah, from sheer lack of interest.