The Books of My Life: On Kubrick

 

As I have mentioned several times previously, I have been a cinephile or film head since the 1960s. Relatively early in my film watching "career" I discovered the joys of the art cinema of foreign film auteurs like Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Trufaut, Alain Resnais, and Eric Rohmer. Around the same time I also learned that art films were not solely a foreign product, that there were also art films by American directors like Stanley Kubrick, an American director born in the New York City in 1928 and who settled in England in 1961, and John Cassevetes and Woody Allen, also New Yorkers, and that there was even an art cinema beyond Americas shores in other English speaking settler societies like Australia and New Zealand, an art cinema reflected in the work of directors like Peter Weir and Roger Donaldson.

In those days of yore when one could only see older Hollywood films on television, particularly independent American TV stations, in America's second run cinema houses and particularly in American college towns, whether in film classes or in local cinemas, I sought out the films of Kubrick, Allen, and the Australian and New Zealand new wave, but particularly Kubrick, in the same way that I had earlier sought out the films of Alfred Hitchock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Anthony Mann. Soon I had seen most of the films of Stanley Kubrick. I saw The Killing (1956), Kubrick's film about rational criminal planning being trumped by contingent and irrational chance, a film Kubrick regards as his first serious film. I saw Paths of Glory (1957), Kubrick's film about the irrational "rationality" of war. I saw Spartacus (1960), a film Kubrick came to disavow because Kirk Douglas, more than he, had control over the film, a film about a former gladiator named Spartacus who leads a rebellion against patrician Rome. I saw Doctor Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), a film that was X rated at the time of its first release in the US but which I nevertheless managed to get into despite the fact I was underage at the time. I saw Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 

I have never, by the way, even though I have all of Kubrick's films on DVD or Blu Ray, been able to bring myself to watch Lolita (1962), Kubrick's and his then partner James Harris's adaptation of the famous and famously infamous 1955 novel about an older man obsessed with a twelve year old girl written by Russian emigre writer Vladmir Nabokov, a book which I simultaneously much admire while also finding it a product of self-indulgent navel gazing, because I just don't see how a film, that suffered the slings and arrows of the film censorship of its time could do justice to the book, itself the subject of battles over censorhip. And if said censorship tears the guts out of the book why adapt it in the first place other than as a way to get certain demographics into cinema seats thanks to cross marketing and branding? Why not instead do a film on a similar subject from an original screenplay that is already tamed and tailored for the world of film censorship?

As is the case with Nabokov's Lolita, I have long had a rather ambiguous relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I admire Kubrick's sense of composition, his cinematic compositions themselves, and his artistic reach. On the other hand, I find Kubrick's films too mundane and too banal for my socialised eye of the beholder taste, though I realise that mundanity and banality are, to some extent, the point of Kubrick's films, something made clear by Kubrick's penchant for retake after retake after retake, retakes which seem to me to emphasise a kind of determinism, which, in turn, seems to make all marks of real spontaneous and emotional humanity persona non grata in KubrickLand. This realisation, however, doesn't make Kubrick's films any more pleasurable for me. It simply makes Kubrick's films less human for me. It makes them different from a television show I enjoy because I think it really does capture real humanity with all its messiness and greyness, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Additionally, I find Kubrick's films far too full of a misanthropy that is too misogynistic for me. I don't think Kubrick could have written a well rounded female character to save his life, though that again may have been, in part, the point as well. This too makes Kubrick's world very different from the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a world, perhaps, that has a lot more of the post-modernist in it.

Despite sharing a misanthropy with Kubrick, I have long had a love and hate relationoship with Kubrick's art films. I quite like Doctor Strangelove, for instance, a film about the madness of those who plot and pilot America's wars and the sociopathy and psychopathy of the American sapping our body fluids American right, a right that has increased in power and impact since the film came out. Strangelove continues to seem to me, despite the fact that it is almost sixy years old now, the sociopathy, psychopathy, or madness of human beings and the insanity of the worlds they have created. I like A Clockwork Orange, a film about a near future filled with gangs speaking a hybrid of English and Russian, and who nightly engage in a bit of the old ultra violence. My trouble with this film, apart from its deterministic patterning--what Alex did happens to him--something one sees again and again in Kubrick's films, involves Kubrick's jettisoning of the final chapter of Anthony Burgess's utopian and dystopian book, a chapter that counterpoints the tyrannical state attempt to cure Alex (Malcolm McDowell),  something Kubrick seems to be aiming his poison arrows at, to Burgess's more humane religious cure for the old ultra-violence (1962). Kubrick's elimination of the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange seems to me to reveal something important about Kubrick and his art. It reveals an art that is simultaneously detached and ethically and morally challenged and hence disturbing, but again this may be the point. I like Full Metal Jacket, a film about the horrors of the transformation of teenagers into killers via the intense socialisation (some might say brainwashing) of boot camp, and the horrors associated with the wars these now terrifying warriors fight, in this case the American war in Vietnam. Full Metal Jacket, like Strangelove, reveals the madness at the heart of human behaviour, well male human behaviour, in war. 

I am lukewarm about Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's adaptation of William Thackery'a novel about the rise and fall of a roguish and above his station Anglo-Irish low status aristocrat trying to make his way in a world of insufferable eighteenth century English high status aristocrats. I am also lukewarm about The Shining, Kubrick's adaptation of a Steven King novel that takes us into a grotesque and uncanny world of male mental breakdown and patriarchal insanity which may be linked to a ghostly past. 

I don't like 2001 finding it a product of its countercultural cannabis, mescaline, and LSD times, a film in which pop art psychedela meets pop science fiction expansion of consciousness evolutionism (the same pop science fiction expansion of evolutionism that is reflected in Erich van Daniken's "non-fictional" 1968 book Chariot of the Gods and in the several "non-fictional" books of Carlos Castaneda). While recognising the historical and cultural significance and photographic beauty of the film, 2001 has always seemed to me, a mundane and banal film that one has to be in the right state of mind for, in that expansion of consciousness sort of way, in order to enjoy. Nor do I like Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler's novella that takes us into the marriagescape and dreamscape of a successful doctor residing with his wife in late 20th century Manhattan instead of Schnitzler's early twentieth century Vienna. I suspect that the film was transposed to late 20th century Manhattan for marketing reasons and because Kubrick was in ill health. Parts of England play the role of Manhattan in the film. I suspect that controversial Hollywood celebrity Tom Cruise, who I don't think really "works" in the film, and Nicole Kidman, his then wife, were hired for marketing and publicity reasons as well. Such, after all, is the reality of serious filmmaking in late 20th century Hollywood.

When I became a cinephile in the 1960s I not only watched films religiously, I also began to read about them beginning sometime in the early 1970s. If I recall correctly,  the first book on a film auteur I ever read, one that has stuck with me ever since, was Robin Wood's book on Alfred Hitchcock, a book whose mission it was to take Alfred Hitchcock seriously and analyse his films thematically in terms of content and style. Soon I began reading books on Kubrick, I read the first edition of Northern Ireland critic Alexander Walker's 1972 book on Kubrick. In the 1980s I read American academic Thomas Nelson's book on Kubrick (1982) and found Nelson's contention that the labyrinth or maze was at the heart of Kubrick's films an astute and compelling argument. I read bits and pieces of French critic Michel Ciment's combination coffee table book, interview book, and critical analysis of Kubrick's films (1980) in the 1980s and enjoyed it very much. When I found out that James Naremore, who I took a couple of classes with when I was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington in the late 1970s and early 1980s and whose work I have long found amongst the best and least theoretically problematic in academic film analysis and criticism, had written a book on Kubrick I had to read it too.

Naremore's On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007) does what auteurist oriented film criticism, approaches that still remain dominant in academic film criticism and analysis despite the straw man argument that auteurism is a textless individualist romanticism of academic media scholars, always do. It rightly places film directors in artistic and social and cultural contexts. Naremore puts Kubrick in broader context placing him in the cultural context of the New York photographic and documentary schools and of the fin-de-siecle Austria-Hungarian Empire critical modernist culture of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzer, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, and Geza Csath with its obsession with the grotesque, the uncanny, the fantastic, the rational and the irrational, fairy tales, dreams, satirical and parodic dark or black comedy, and the psychic traumas associated with parent-child relations and sexuality. He places Kubrick's work in the context of the transformation of the Hollywood studio system in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling mandating that the studios eliminate their monopoly over film exhibition, the increasing number of widescreen and particularly widescreen epics made in Hollywood in the wake of that ruling and as a way to distinguish itself from television, which was becoming ever more prominent, the increasing distribution and exhibition opportunities available for home grown cinema and foreign art cinema that arose in the wake of that ruling, the increasing globalisation of Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood's increasing role in the post-World War II English film industry thanks, particularly, to the Eady Levy which offered Hollywood a subsidy for making films in the United Kingdom if it used British studios and British personnel to make them. He explores the themes--contentwise and stylistically--of Kubrick's art, the former which revolve around Austria-Hungarian modernism and the latter of which revolve around photographic like compositions,  the use of new and old cinematic techniques and technologies such as the use of widescreen, and a penchant for wide angle shots, zooms, and the handheld steadicam, all of which, Naremore argues, are used to emphasise both the the real and the grotesque. Naremore explores Kubrick's approach to actors and the acting craft, which Naremore argues, reflects Kubrick's obsession with realism, the uncanny, the fantastic, and dark comedy. Finally, Naremore explores the cinematic influences on Kubrick's art including that of the modernist Austrian filmmaker Max Ophuls, the Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, Orson Welles, and documentary realism.

I found Naremore's On Kubrick a worthy addition to the seemingly ever growing literature on the films of Stanley Kubrick. I was particularly intrigued by Naremore's arguments that Barry Lyndon was ultimately a critique of the English class and status system, that The Shining was ultimately a critique of paternalism and patriarchalism, and that Full Metal Jacket was simultaneously a celebration of and critique of the masculine culture of warfare. I found Naremore's implicit reminder that students of the cinema need to remember the distinction between Freudian theory, which its devotees and groupies, including hordes in Literary, Film, and Television faculties these days, claim is universal, and cultural Freudianism, the intentional play with Freudianism by writers, filmmakers, and television auteurs, a point ever worth remembering given the dominance of the Freudian cultural-institutitonal-bureacratic complex in academia, a complex that sees Freudianism as the fundamental and universal interpretive key to unlocking the deeper secrets of seemingly inscrutable texts, but only if that task of unlocking a text is in in the hands of those with the unique ability to decipher the esoteric secrets underlying a text and devouring it from below. Finally, it should be noted that Naremore places the Kent State tragedy two years before it actually occurred and he confuses Richard Strauss with Richard Wagner in the section on 2001. Recommended.