Stanley Kubrick

Adapting the Sublime

Elisa Pezzotta

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781496800763
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Stanley Kubrick's last six adaptations— 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur. In particular, he can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, author Elisa Pezzotta concludes that, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.

Chapter One
A HISTORY OF KUBRICK ADAPTATIONS

KUBRICK: I don’t like scripts that just give you dialogue and stage directions, stage directions and dialogue. I need to know more about the whole … what’s going on. I even want to know what people smell like, you know? Anything you can think of that … might be relevant. Or irrelevant, but … know what I mean? You’re a novelist. Make it like a novel, not like a Hollywood script.

RAPHAEL: If that’s what you want. But it may get pretty long. They don’t like that.

KUBRICK: Who’s they? There is no they. There is me and there’s you, and that’s it.

—(Raphael, 1999: 80)

The first Kubrick documentary short, Day of the Fight (USA, 1951), is based on a director’s pictorial that was published on January 18, 1949, in Look magazine, about a day in the life of boxer Walter Cartier. The screenplay is by Robert Rein (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 74). The other two documentary shorts, Flying Padre (USA, 1952) and The Seafarers (USA, 1953), are based on original material, and Will Chasen has writing credits for the latter short (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 116–117, 316–317). Similarly, the director’s first two feature-length films, Fear and Desire (USA, 1953) and Killer’s Kiss (USA, 1955), are based on original material. Kubrick and Howard Sackler, a playwright and a friend of the filmmaker from high school, collaborated on the scripts of both films, although Sackler does not share writing credits with the director for Killer’s Kiss (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 111, 181). All other Kubrick films are adaptations of novels.

Although at the beginning of this chapter I briefly mention The Killing (USA, 1956), Paths of Glory (USA, 1957), Spartacus (USA, 1960), Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (UK, 1964), I do not discuss them in this book for stylistic and historical reasons. First of all, these films do not share all of the features that characterize Kubrick’s last six adaptations, analyzed in the following chapters. For example, their plots are usually not constituted by tableaux vivants and/or unrelated episodes, which is to say, by scenes that are not linked by a causal chain and that are strongly divided by ellipses. The Killing is a perfect example of a film in which every sequence and flashback is causally and temporally linked to the other scenes, and in which almost all of the ellipses are filled in and/or are determined (which is to say, their presence is signaled by the text and the time of the story not narrated remains implicit [Genette, 1972: 135–161]).¹ The same happens in Dr. Strangelove, where events that take place in different spaces at the same time constitute an ensemble of causes that leads to an inevitable end of the world. Similarly, in Paths of Glory and Spartacus the sequences are usually causally linked to let the spectators follow the heroes’ deeds. And the protagonists of these films are not passive wanderers in dreamy diegetic worlds: the characters who organize the robbery in The Killing are resolute, and also determined are Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) in Paths of Glory and Spartacus. The characters in Dr. Strangelove are certainly not heroes and do not succeed in stopping a nuclear war, but more than passive dreamers, they are caricatures of military and political men in a black comedy. Moreover, The Killing, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove do not present plots divided into different, recognizable parts, as for example in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they do not have symmetrical plot structures in which the end mirrors the beginning, as in Eyes Wide Shut. Lolita opens and closes with Quilty’s (Peter Sellers) murder by Humbert. Cause and effect chains are looser than in the previous films because the plot follows a man’s obsession for his young stepdaughter, an impossible relationship that often leads him to act and behave in an impulsive, irrational way. He can be depicted as a passive wanderer, at least when he drives hopelessly away with the object of his desire, in the dreamy world of his car, towards a dreamy future that exists in his mind only. But in Lolita, as in the other films mentioned above, music is not foregrounded, characters and objects’ movements do not follow the rhythm of music and, consequently, there is no a visual and aural spectacle, a ballet of bodies, a dance of the montage. Words are still adopted for their meaning and not for their sound. Characters do not remain in contemplation of a cinematic spectacle created by the director. It is since 2001: A Space Odyssey that Kubrick definitively creates cinematic sublime experiences. As is discussed in this chapter, this science-fiction film cannot be considered a “classical” adaptation. Perhaps the filmmaker, thanks to this experience, further from the written medium than in his previous films, had the chance to better exploit all of the potentialities of the cinematic medium, and to develop the structural and stylistic features that characterize his last films. What is more, 2001: A Space Odyssey was first released in 1968 and, as is discussed in the last chapter, the director can be considered an exponent of the New Hollywood, which developed in the late 1960s. This Hollywood Renaissance was influenced by the European art cinema, and the links between the director and art cinema, especially the European avant-garde of the 1920s, are highlighted in this book.

Knowing how Kubrick made choices about what novels and short stories to adapt, how he wrote scripts and worked with co-screenwriters and/or the authors of novels and actors, offers invaluable insights in understanding how the process of adaptation was, for the director, of the utmost importance for the realization of his films. He not only took great care in choosing a book to adapt, but he also spent a long time moving from the written to the cinematic medium and he continuously revised his scripts during shooting. The process of adaptation lasted for years during the pre-production and production periods, and it was often the cause of the long spans of time that passed between the release of one film and the beginning of the next project, and of the huge delays during the making of a film.

When asked about how he chose novels to adapt, Kubrick answered, “I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don’t like the book after a bit, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised” (Cahill, 1987: 195). The director used to choose the stories that he found interesting, stimulating, and that he thought could be adapted without losing their originality. Those impressions that he felt while reading books for the first time guided his preproduction and production periods, animated his scripts and the making of his films, becoming his major source of inspiration and the principle of his films’ coherence.

What I like about not writing original material—which I’m not even certain I could do—is that you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time. You never have this experience again with the story. You have a reaction to it: it’s a kind of falling-in-love reaction. That’s the first thing. Then it becomes almost a matter of code breaking, of breaking the work down into a structure that is truthful, that doesn’t lose the ideas or the content or the feeling of the book. And fitting it all into the much more limited frame of a movie. And as long as you possibly can, you retain your emotional attitude, whatever it was that made you fall in love in the first place. (Cahill, 1987: 196)

A brief discussion of how Kubrick came to know about the novels and short stories he adapted (and about the stories and successes of these books before they were adapted) shows that the director did not look for a particularly successful text, but, rather, for a story that would surprise him and arouse those enduring, strong feelings that would keep him inspired during the entire process of filmmaking.

The Killing is adapted from Clean Break (1955) by Lionel White, a police reporter, newspaper editor, and crime novelist. It was Jim Harris who found this novel in a bookstore and asked Kubrick to read it (Hughes, 2000: 37). The director collaborated with another crime novelist, Jim Thompson, who is credited with additional dialogue, to adapt the novel. After The Killing, which was Thompson’s first screenplay, the writer worked again with Kubrick at the adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory (1935) (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 368–369). In this case, the filmmaker had read the book during high school and, years later, happened to find a copy in his father’s studio (Hughes, 2000: 52). Calder Willingham, a novelist and screenwriter, and Cobb himself share writing credits with Thompson and the director (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 398). If White is a famous crime novelist, who is credited in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (USA, 1992) as a source of inspiration, and his Clean Break can be considered a classic heist novel, Paths of Glory is the only book published by Cobb. Although this novel was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, was praised by Elizabeth Bowen and other critics, and was adapted for the stage by Sidney Howard, it did not have great popular success (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 286).

After Paths of Glory, Kubrick, as mentioned in the Introduction, was asked by Kirk Douglas, executive producer and star of Spartacus, to direct this film after shooting had already begun. The film is adapted from Spartacus (1951) by Howard Fast, a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and historian. Fast himself first tried to adapt his own book because the novel had been optioned by Edward Lewis, the film producer, in 1957, and when the option was running out, Fast conceded a two-month extension in exchange for adapting his book and for a symbolic one dollar. But, according to Douglas, Fast’s version was unfit for the cinematic medium, and he asked the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to adapt the novel, using Edward Lewis as a front for Trumbo. The producer, during a meeting with Kubrick and Douglas, expressed his uneasiness at being identified as screenwriter, and the director suggested adopting his name instead of that of Lewis. According to Kubrick, “I directed the actors, I composed the shots, and I edited the movie,” so his role was nearer to that of a screenwriter than a producer (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 374). Finally, during shooting, Douglas claimed that Sam Jackson, one of Trumbo’s pseudonyms, was the screenwriter. But, before the first release of Spartacus, Otto Preminger claimed that Trumbo had the writing credits for Exodus (USA, 1960). As a consequence, Douglas listed Trumbo together with the other screenwriters of the film (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 372–375). There was not only a quarrel between Fast and Trumbo about the latter’s writing credits, but also between Laurence Olivier (Marcus Licinius Crassus in the film) and Charles Laughton (Sempronius Gracchus). It was Peter Ustinov, who played the role of Lentulus Batiatus and who was also a screenwriter, who made some suggestions to Trumbo to enhance his own role and to balance those of the other two English actors (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 389–393).

Among Kubrick’s feature-length films, Spartacus is the only one in which the director did not collaborate in writing the screenplay. In his next film, Lolita, although he does not share writing credits with Nabokov, he revised his script during the pre-production and production periods. Indeed, the first Nabokov script was about 400-pages and, following the filmmaker’s suggestions, the author shortened it by half. But, according to the writer, Kubrick used only 20 percent of his revised script. As in the case of the novel A Clockwork Orange, Lolita (1955) did not easily find a publisher because of its content. Despite Nabokov’s relevance in the literary world, the book was rejected by four American publishers, and it took one year to be published by the Olympia Press in Paris, which specialized in erotica (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 259–261, 216–217). Moreover, it was banned in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, and Burma, but after numerous positive reviews, it was published in the United States in 1958 by Putnam. It was Willingham who first recommended the novel to Kubrick and, when the director and Harris optioned the book, it was already acknowledged as a masterpiece and a bestseller, although it was still considered a scandalous novel. By 1964 Playboy reported that two-and-a-half million copies of the book had been sold in the United States alone (Hughes, 2000: 88–89).

As in Lolita and Paths of Glory, in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Kubrick collaborated with the source novel’s author. The film is adapted from Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), a book in which the fear of the outburst of a nuclear war is expressed from a serious, dramatic point of view, and in which there are several descriptions of technical military details (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 298–299). According to John Baxter, unlike in Kubrick’s previous films, it seems that the director, for this particular adaptation, chose the subject more than the novel. Alastair Buchan, head of the London-based Institute of Strategic Studies, gave the director the idea of making a film about a nuclear war and suggested that he read George’s book (Baxter, 1997: 170). But, while Kubrick was collaborating with the novel’s author, he thought to transform the melodrama into a black comedy, and he contacted the novelist Terry Southern to help in this task. Indeed, the filmmaker had appreciated the latter’s black humor in The Magic Christian (1959), a book that he had read following Peter Seller’s suggestions. According to the director, when the film was first released, some reviewers had attributed all of the merits of the screenplay to Southern. When The Loved One (Tony Richardson, USA, 1965), another black comedy on which Southern and Christopher Isherwood share writing credits, was first released, Kubrick responded to the New York Times ad for the film with a press release about Dr. Strangelove in which he claimed that he collaborated with Southern from November 16 to December 28, 1962, but that he continued to revise the script during production with the help of George and the actors, especially Sellers (Phillips and Hill, 2002: 339–343).

His next film, A Clockwork Orange, was adapted from the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess, a book that did not easily find a publisher, remained unsuccessful until the film’s release, and was later blamed for its violent characters and world. The novel was first published in the spring of 1962, but its first draft had already been written by the end of 1960. In this latter version, Alex, who is the protagonist, spoke a slang that was used, at that time, among “hooligan” groups. Because the novel was set in the near future, the author thought that the slang would soon be outdated and, thus, the setting of the book would become unbelievable. After a holiday spent in Russia, where the authorities seemed to have the same problems with violent young gangs as in England, Burgess had the idea of creating a language called nadsat, a word derived from the Russian suffix for “teen,” which was constituted by words derived both from Anglo-American and Russian. Because the novel was full of descriptions of crashing, clashing, rapes, and murders, it was not easy to get it published, even if these violent actions were disguised through the use of language. Finally, the book was sold to William Heinemann Ltd. in London and to W. W. Norton in New York. But the latter agreed to publish it only with the clause of omitting the last chapter, during which Alex decides to abandon his gang and his violent behavior to find a wife with whom to have a child and live a quiet life. The publisher thought that this last chapter was inconsistent with the style and structure of the novel and with the protagonist’s characterization (LoBrutto, 1998: 336–337). Burgess was not satisfied with this decision, but did not object because he needed money. Indeed, at that time, he thought he was going to die soon because he was diagnosed as suffering an inoperable cerebral tumor. The author, however, criticized this omission for two reasons. First of all, according to him, the book became a fable because it failed to show that human nature can change: “When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory” (Burgess, 2002b: 228). The author wrote, not without irony, and stressing the importance of moral choice:

But the American publisher’s argument for truncation was based on a conviction that the original version, showing as it does a capacity for regeneration in even the most depraved soul, was a kind of capitulation to the British Pelagian spirit, whereas the Augustinian Americans were tough enough to accept an image of unregenerable man. (1998: vi)²

Second, the omission of the last chapter disrupted the arithmology of the novel. The book was constituted of three parts, each one divided into seven chapters, so the total number of chapters was twenty-one to symbolize the age of human maturity.

To promote his novel, Burgess agreed to take part in an installment of Tonight, a BBC television program, during which the first chapter of the book was dramatized and a discussion about its theme and language was carried out (LoBrutto, 1998: 336). But, despite this opportunity, the novel did not sell well. According to the author, the success of his book had been impeded by two main reasons. Firstly, the program had revealed too much about the story and, thus, instead of exciting curiosity into its potential readers, had already satisfied them. Secondly, the reviewers had not praised the novel. Therefore, before the release of the Kubrick film, the novel had remained almost unknown and, as will be clarified later, Burgess did not ever accept the fact that his book became known and was both appreciated and blamed for its language and violence only after the film’s release (LoBrutto, 1998: 338–339).

Unlike A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon was adapted from a classic book, from William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., of the Kingdom of Ireland. This novel was first published serially in Fraser’s magazine between January and December 1844 with the title The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Then, significantly revised and with the actual title, the book was published in 1856 in volume two of the author’s Miscellanies: Prose and Verse (LoBrutto, 1998: 377).

The Shining was adapted from another successful book, The Shining, by Stephen King, who is considered, among the coeval authors, one of the more ingenious and, undoubtedly, the most prolific writer of horror novels. The book was first published in 1977, when its author had already become famous thanks to his two previous bestsellers Carrie (first published in 1974) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Furthermore, the former novel had already been adapted to the big screen (Carrie, Brian De Palma, USA, 1976).

Like Barry Lyndon and The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut was adapted from a well-known and appreciated novella: Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Stor...