Kubrick Stanley - The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick

Understanding the Enemy: The Dialogue of Fear in Fear and Desire and Dr. Strangelove
Elizabeth F. Cooke

Chaos, Order, and Morality: Nietzsches Influence on Full Metal Jacket
Mark T. Conard

Existential Ethics: Where the Paths of Glory Lead
Jason Holt

Where the Rainbow Ends: Eyes Wide Shut
Karen D. Hoffman

Knockout! Killers Kiss, the Somatic, and Kubrick
Kevin S. Decker

The Logic of Lolita: Kubrick, Nabokov, and Poe
Jerold J. Abrams

Rebel without a Cause: Stanley Kubrick and the Banality of the Good
Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler

The Big Score: Fate, Morality, and Meaningful Life in The Killing
Steven M. Sanders

Spartacus and the Second Part of the Soul
Gordon Braden

The Shape of Man: The Absurd and Barry Lyndon
Chris P. Pliatska

The Shining and Anti-Nostalgia: Postmodern Notions of History
R. Barton Palmer

Nihilism and Freedom in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
Daniel Shaw

Please Make Me a Real Boy: The Prayer of the Artificially Intelligent
Jason T. Eberl

Nietzsches Overman as Posthuman Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Jerold J. Abrams

First, I would like to thank all the contributors for their hard work and excellent essays. I would like to give special thanks to Mark Conard for his incredible editorial support and his continued philosophical dialogue. For editorial guidance and wisdom at every stage of the process, I am grateful to Steve Wrinn and Anne Dean Watkins at the University Press of Kentucky. Ron Mandelbaum at Photofest provided an excellent cover shot of Kubrick. Christopher Erisson provided valuable technical support. ElusiveDVD.com cleaned up and made available Kubricks once-lost first film Fear and Desire. I am also extremely grateful to Elizabeth F. Cooke and Chris Pliatska for many rich conversations on Kubrick, cinema, and philosophy in general.

Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest American film directors. He is the undisputed master of the tracking shot, the reverse zoom, and the painting technique. Kubricks images are indelibly imprinted on the pop-cultural unconscious: the creepy mannequin warehouse of Killers Kiss; the stash of money blown all over the airstrip in The Killing; Kirk Douglas crucified in Spartacus; pedophile Humbert Humbert painting a little girls toes in Lolita; the cowboy pilot joyously riding the atom bomb as it falls through the sky at the end of Dr. Strangelove; the ape throwing a femur into the sky at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey; Alex and droogs drinking Milk Plus at the Korova Milk Bar, preparing for a night of ultra-violence, in A Clockwork Orange; Barry Lyndon bravely standing off in a pistol duel; Jack Nicholsons famous Heeeeeeres Johnny in The Shining; Sergeant Hartmans cruel training of the maggots in Full Metal Jacket; and the haunting orgy in Eyes Wide Shut.

Looking back on this remarkable filmography, it is clear that it has the distinctly architectonic quality of any great philosophical system: it says something about everything. All the facets of human nature are revealed in their wide-ranging diversity: high and low culture, love and sex, history, war, crime, madness, space travel, social conditioning, and technology. Yet, as internally diverse as Kubricks filmography is, taken as a whole, it is also quite coherent. It takes all the differentiated sides of reality and unifies them into one rich, complex philosophical vision that happens to be very close to existentialism. Existentialism emerged with the works of Sren Kierkegaard, who rejected the nineteenth-century view of the world as a massive mechanical system working out its own logic through history. According to Kierkegaard, this view failed to do justice to the most basic fact about human nature: that each person is ultimately alone and free, and philosophical truth has meaning only if it is