On Kubrick

James Naremore

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

On Kubrick provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). The book offers provocative analysis of each of Kubrick's films, together with new information about their production histories and cultural contexts. Its ultimate aim is to provide a concise yet thorough discussion that will be useful as both an academic text and a trade publication. James Naremore argues that in several respects Kubrick was one of the cinema's last modernists: his taste and sensibility were shaped by the artistic culture of New York in the 1950s; he became a celebrated auteur who forged a distinctive style; he used art-cinema conventions in commercial productions; he challenged censorship regulations; and throughout his career he was preoccupied with one of the central themes of modernist art – the conflict between rationality and its ever-present shadow, the unconscious. War and science are key concerns in Kubrick's oeuvre, and his work has a hyper-masculine quality. Yet no director has more relentlessly emphasized the absurdity of combat, as in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the failure of scientific reasoning, as in 2001 (1968), and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality, as in Dr Strangelove (1964) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The book also argues that while Kubrick was a voracious intellectual and a life-long autodidact, the fascination of his work has less to do with the ideas it espouses than with the emotions it evokes. Often described as 'cool' or 'cold, ' Kubrick is best understood as a skillful practitioner of what might be called the aesthetics of the grotesque; he employs extreme forms of caricature and black comedy to create disgusting, frightening yet also laughable images of the human body, creating a sense of unease that leaves viewers unsure of how to react.

Part One

PROLOGUE

I. The Last Modernist

The Art House Transmission that Stanley received so deeply in the forties was still manifesting in the early sixties, when I spent my nights and a lot of afternoons rocketing between the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Thalia, the New Yorker, and the Museum of Modern Art . . . . And so if I got weepy when the end credits rolled on Eyes Wide Shut and the waltz played one more time, it wasn’t just because the movie was over, or because it was the final work of a man I admired and loved, but because that tradition, with its innocence, or anyway its naivete, and a purity that only someone born before 1930 could continue, had come to a certain end, as most traditions do. It’s gone and it won’t be returning.

Michael Herr, Kubrick, 2000

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) was, in several ways, a paradoxical and contradictory figure. Though he rarely appeared in public, he achieved stardom. A fierce autodidact who possessed intellectual sophistication and breadth of knowledge, he was also a showman and businessman who, for most of his career, maintained at least some rapport with the popular audience and the Hollywood studios. His pictures seemed both hand-made and technologically advanced and, despite his apparent eccentricity and iconoclasm (fear of flying, aversion to Los Angeles), he became a sort of brand name. His successes, moreover, entailed a certain estrangement from the centres of movie-industry power. A native New Yorker who never lost his Bronx accent, Kubrick lived in apparent exile from America from the 1960s onward, creating visions of space travel, the Vietnam War and New York City all within driving distance of his English country home.

During his lifetime Kubrick was often depicted by the press as living in Xanadu-like isolation or as having retreated into Axel’s castle. He gave interviews to publicise his films and made himself available to a few scholars and critics, especially to Michel Ciment, Gene D. Phillips and the late Alexander Walker, but most of his published remarks have the feeling of carefully chosen, editorially polished statements. He was photographed many times and his picture appears on the covers of several of the books about him, but he rarely appeared on TV and never acted in his or anyone else’s pictures. Most of his socialising was done at his own dinner table or over the telephone. In the best record we have of his working methods, his daughter Vivian’s documentary, The Making of ‘The Shining’, which aired on the BBC in 1980, he seems both authoritative and shy, standing at the margins during the social interludes, hidden by a scruffy beard and a baggy jacket. Despite his apparent reclusiveness, however, a powerful aura surrounded his name and bizarre legends began to accumulate about his activities. In the US, a conspiracy cult maintained that NASA never landed a man on the moon; the TV broadcast of the voyage, the cultists argued, was staged and directed for the government by Stanley Kubrick. (Ironically, Peter Hyams directed Capricorn One [1978], a movie about a fake TV broadcast of the moon landing, and later directed Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 [1984].) Kubrick also became the victim of identity theft. In the early 1990s a pathetic con-man named Alan Conway, who looked and sounded nothing like Kubrick and barely knew his movies, was easily able to impersonate him. Introducing himself to various Londoners as ‘Stanley’, Conway obtained dinners, theatre tickets, drinks, drugs and gay sex from people who thought they might profit from knowing the great director. After his con-game was exposed, Conway became a minor celebrity, whose impersonation was documented on the BBC and turned into a film, Color Me Kubrick (2005), written by Kubrick’s long-time associate Anthony Frewin, directed by another associate, Brian Cook, and starring John Malkovich.¹

Another paradox: even though Kubrick was one of the cinema’s indisputable auteurs, a producer-director who supervised every aspect of his films from writing to exhibition, he never benefited from the support of the auteurists. Thismay have been due to the fact that his films seemed different from one another, or to the fact that most of them were literary adaptations – although only one was based on a book of such international fame and artistic excellence that most critics would say it reads better than what the director made from it. The Cahiers du cinéma critics, including Jean-Luc Godard, thought Kubrick was overrated; Andrew Sarris placed him in the ‘Strained Seriousness’ category; Movie never listed him in their pantheon; and David Thomson described him as ‘sententious’, ‘nihilistic’, ‘meretricious’ and ‘devoid of artistic personality’.² Even the anti-auteurist Pauline Kael relentlessly attacked his films, and many others in the New York critical establishment, from Bosley Crowther in the 1950s and 1960s down to Anthony Lane in the present day, have been either slow to appreciate him or hostile towards his work. His chief journalistic supporters in the US have tended to come from the alternative press or from newspapers outside New York. In Britain his leading advocate was Alexander Walker, and in Paris his admirers have been associated with Positif, a film journal with historical links to surrealism and left-anarchism.

Whatever the critical reception of Kubrick’s films, and whatever might be thought of his desire to retain his privacy, he has left a mark on the popular culture of the past fifty years that few directors can rival. The mad scientist Dr Strangelove and the Strauss music that opens 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are known by everybody, and several Kubrick films have been endlessly parodied or quoted in all sorts of media. (Tomention only a couple of recent examples from television: The Simpsons has made several episodes based on Kubrick, and Bartholomew Cousins has made an MTV video filled with references to The Shining [1980].) Passing time has also revealed Kubrick as the last major representative of an important artistic tradition that Michael Herr seems to be describing in the epigraph above. In making this statement, let me emphasise that I’m not saying good movies are no longer made; my point is simply that Kubrick can be viewed as one of the few – arguably the last and the most successful – of the modernist directors who worked for the Hollywood studios.

In using the term ‘modernist’, I refer not to what David Rodowick and other scholars have called the ‘political modernism’ of directors like Jean-Luc Godard, who broke radically from the conventions of illusionist cinema;³ nor to the avant-garde provocations of Andy Warhol, who was born in the same year as Kubrick and became a more revolutionary figure; nor to Fredric Jameson’s claim that the celebrated auteurs of classic Hollywood were all modernists. I have in mind a more ordinary notion of ‘modern art’ usually associated with the first half of the twentieth century, which had a demonstrable impact on Kubrick’s work. Several writers, among them Jameson, have argued that Kubrick’s late films are ‘postmodern’, but if that term designates retro and recycled styles, waning of affect, lack of psychological ‘depth’, loss of faith in the ‘real’ and hyper-commodification, then Kubrick was a modernist to the end. He was an avid reader of the Anglo-European and largely modernist literary and philosophical canon of dead white men that was established by mid-century (plus a great deal of pulp fiction and scientific literature), and he maintained a lifelong interest in Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, most of his films are rather like ‘late modernist’ manifestations of the aesthetic detachment we find in Kafka and Joyce, or of the ‘cold’ authorial personality in Brecht and Pinter.⁴ A similar point could be made in more specifically cinematic terms: a gifted cinematographer, Kubrick began his career as a photo-journalist in the heyday of New York street photography, which has been hailed as a form of modernist art; and as a director he made pictures that, however much they might resemble Hollywood genres, were very close in spirit to the Euro-intellectual cinema of the 1960s.

Like the high modernists, Kubrick forged a distinctive style, which evolved, as all styles do. He also showed a preoccupation with several of the leading ideological or aesthetic tendencies of high modernism: a concern for media-specific form, a resistance to censorship, a preference for satire and irony over sentiment, a dislike of conventional narrative realism, a reluctance to allow the audience to identify with leading characters and an interest in the relationship between instrumental rationality and its ever-present shadow, the irrational unconscious. His pictures often tell the story of how a carefully constructed plan fails because of what the surrealists called ‘objective chance’, or the conflict between reason and the masculine libido. (In Robert Kolker’s words, the films are about ‘a process that has become so rigid that it can neither be escaped nor mitigated – a stability that destroys’.)⁵ Two of his favourite subject swere war and scientific technology, the privileged domains of rational planning and male authority; and partly for that reason Molly Haskell has placed him along with Orson Welles and John Huston in ‘the mainstream of American misogyny’.⁶ Nevertheless, he made three films about the American nuclear family, all of which are satires of patriarchy. Few directors have been more critical of military and scientific institutions, more sharply attuned to the fascistic tendencies in male sexuality and more aware of how machines function in male psychology as displacements for Eros and Thanatos.

Tom Gunning once suggested to me in conversation that Kubrick might be viewed not simply as the last modernist but also as the last of the Viennese auteurs. This observation strikes me as highly relevant. Even though in one sense Kubrick never left the Bronx, his ancestry can be traced to Austro-Hungary and he was intrigued by the proto-modernist, largely Jewish culture that originated in pre-World War I Vienna. In addition to Freud, he was interested in Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler, and he often stated his admiration for the films of Max Ophuls, which are sometimes associated with fin-de-siècle Viennese luxury. The Viennese cultural nexus may not seem evident in a film like 2001, but that film is at least distantly related to Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and the famous image of a shuttle docking in a revolving space station to the music of ‘The Blue Danube’ not only makes a sly Freudian joke but also evokes memories of Ophuls’s La Ronde (1950) and Lola Montez (1955).

Notice, moreover, that as the director of 2001, Kubrick might additionally be regarded as the last futurist. Certainly, his visionary future differs from the future-is-now of Godard’s Alphaville (1965), the retro-future of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and the dystopian future of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). If Fredric Jameson is correct that the death of futurism is precisely the moment when postmodernism becomes the cultural dominant, then we have another reason why Kubrick can be described as a modernist. One of the many oddities of 2001, however, is that it seems to transcend or circumvent the utopian/dystopian distinction upon which futurism depends. Interestingly, its success led Kubrick to spend almost seventeen years developing A. I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a project strikingly relevant to a hyper-modern period when the definition of the human is no longer clear and when the ostensibly opposite fields of machine intelligence and psychoanalysis have begun to illuminate one another. In both A. I. and its predecessor, Kubrick’s generally Freudian and pessimistic view of human relations was ameliorated by his futuristic embrace of android technology, which, paradoxically, allowed him to express an otherwise repressed spirituality.

Kubrick often recommended three writers to fledgling movie directors: V. I. Pudovkin, Sigmund Freud and Konstantin Stanislavsky. His work was influenced by all three, but he also described the director as a ‘taste machine’ – a specialised computer devoted to keeping all the scenes in memory and making hundreds of decisions every day about script, acting, costuming, photography, editing and so forth.⁷ This is a good description of his particular approach to his job, which involved obsessive attention to detail and gave him the reputation of a relentless and sometimes exasperating perfectionist. Aside from William Wyler, no other director was so prone to retakes, always in search of a mysterious I-don’t-know-what that presumably he would recognise. Kubrick’s particular taste, however, has human sources in the cultural environment of New York City during his youth. The major events of his early life, which have been recounted many times (most thoroughly by Vincent LoBrutto), need only brief mention here, but are worth recalling. He was born into a secular Jewish family, the only male child of a Bronx medical doctor, and enjoyed what appears to have been a loving, even indulgent upbringing. Undoubtedly his Jewish ancestry influenced his later artistic development (this is the subject of an entire book: Geoffrey Cocks’s The Wolf at the Door, which has a good deal to say about Kubrick as a post-Holocaust artist), but equally important was his freedom to explore the city and develop his own interests. A poor to indifferent high-school student, he played drums in the school’s swing band and briefly dreamed of becoming a jazz musician (Eydie Gorme was a classmate). He was also a devoted moviegoer who visited every kind of theatre, from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to grind houses. Much of his time was spent engaged in two hobbies his father had taught him– chess and photography, at which he was prodigiously talented. In 1945, at the age of seventeen, his photograph of a New York news vendor mourning the death of Franklin Roosevelt was purchased by Look magazine and he became a member of the magazine’s photographic staff – a job that sent him travelling around the US and Europe and resulted in the publication of over 900 of his pictures.

By the end of the 1940s, Kubrick had acquired a pilot’s licence, married his high-school sweetheart, moved to Greenwich Village, audited Mark Van Doren’s literature class at Columbia and begun thinking of how he might become a film-maker. His immediate neighbourhood was filled with talent and ideas. Also living in Greenwich Village was America’s leading film critic...