by David Mikics
STANLEY KUBRICK
Stanley Kubrick
American Filmmaker
DAVID MIKICS
New Haven and London
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Frontispiece: Stanley Kubrick directing A Clockwork Orange (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)
ALSO BY DAVID MIKICS
Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (editor)
Bellow’s 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
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. I Know I Can Make a Film Better Than That:
Killer’s 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. Let’s 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 It’s Big—Lon Chaney Big:
Full Metal Jacket
9. Frightened of Making the Movie:
Eyes Wide Shut
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
STANLEY KUBRICK
Introduction
“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! He’d 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 couldn’t carry it. He had to go back.”1
A piquant fairy tale: male defiance is quickly foiled by fate, which brings the man back to where he started. Kubrick’s 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 Kubrick’s 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. Strangelove’s nutjob generals, Jack Torrance’s 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.
Kubrick’s 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 Kubrick’s movies were and are hugely popular: 2001, intensely slow, quiet and abstract, became one of MGM’s 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.
Kubrick’s detractors argue that his movies don’t 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 Kafka’s writing—and 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 can’t get over a dame, the brave heroine blinking back tears. Kubrick doesn’t 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 Kubrick’s 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.”2
Kubrick’s aloofness coexists with a kid’s heart and a kid’s 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.
There’s 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 Alex’s: 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.
Stanley’s childhood rebellion began early. In first and second grade he often refused to go to school, attending only about 60 percent of the time. Headstrong and utterly sure of himself, the boy must have baffled his first-generation immigrant Jewish parents, who owed their middle-class lifestyle to taking education seriously. Remarkably, his doctor father, Jack Kubrick, seems to have given him leeway to stay home with his mother Gert, while remaining as mystified by his self-assured child as Jack is by Danny in The Shining or we are by 2001’s Starchild. Sta
nley’s independent streak would only become more marked as he grew older.
Young Stanley grew up on the Grand Concourse, the Champs Élysées of the West Bronx. The great boulevard was eventually ruined, long after Kubrick left, by Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway. Among the Grand Concourse’s monumental features was a temple of cinema called Loew’s Paradise. (Another, the RKO Fordham, was just east of the Concourse.) Loew’s was a vast and sumptuous faux-baroque theater with projected clouds moving across its ceiling. The neighborhood also had the usual soda fountains, Chinese restaurants, and bars, a Bickford’s diner with its cluster of bookies, and the Villa Avenue Gang, Italian-American delinquents that Jewish kids like Kubrick had to watch out for.
“I was such a misfit in high school,” Kubrick told an interviewer years later.3 The other teenagers belonged to clubs with names like the Zombies and the Hurricanes, and played stickball and baseball in the streets. What consumed Stanley instead, from the time he was twelve, was photography. That year his father gave him a Graflex camera, a big antediluvian box that you had to look down into so that you could see the image on the ground glass. Stanley fitted it with a 35mm lens, and he was off. The next year Jack Kubrick taught his son chess, and this too became a passion.
Jack Kubrick was “a very nice man, a bit conservative and a worrier,” Kubrick’s widow Christiane remembered in an interview. His mother was Stanley’s source of strength, Christiane added: “He was a gifted boy, brilliant and independent, and she, in her wisdom, succeeded in implanting in him a strong belief in himself.”4 While Stanley’s father seems nothing like that flamboyant ogre Jack Torrance, both Jacks were serious worriers. Kubrick’s father didn’t understand his ambitions, and hopelessly wanted him to become a doctor; his mother realized that Stanley was on his own path.
Steven Marcus, later a literature professor at Columbia, was Stanley’s classmate at William Howard Taft High School, where Kubrick asked day after day to copy Marcus’s homework. When Marcus finally asked, “Stanley, why aren’t you doing your homework?” Kubrick responded, “Well, I’m not interested.”5 Stanley just didn’t respond to education by command. If he liked something, he threw himself into it. If not, he was hopeless.
Along with photography and chess, movies possessed Stanley. He attended Loew’s and the RKO religiously, often skipping school to see a double feature. This was the early forties, a shining summit for Hollywood movies. Among Kubrick’s favorites from those years, he told Cinema magazine in 1963, were Welles’s Citizen Kane, William Wellman’s Roxie Hart, Olivier’s Henry V, and Edward Cline’s The Bank Dick, with W. C. Fields. Stanley liked jazz, too, and drummed in a band fronted by a teenage Eydie Gorme, a Taft classmate.
Stanley graduated Taft with a 70 average, too low to get into college in the GI Bill years. He was no slacker, though; he knew what he wanted. “Stanley had a demonic belief in his own capacity. Demons were driving him. Nothing could stand in his way,” said Marcus. Michael Herr, who knew the grown-up Kubrick, concurred: “You’d have to be Herman Melville to transmit the full strength of Stanley’s will.”6
The teenage Stanley was disheveled, a bohemian in too-large pants and jacket and uncombed hair. After high school, when he married his sweetheart Toba Metz and moved to Greenwich Village, he fit right in. He played charades at Diane Arbus’s house on Saturday nights, and he got to know Weegee, James Agee, and Dwight Macdonald.
Early on, Kubrick gravitated to the world of New York artists and intellectuals. But he wanted to do more than make rarefied art house films. His goal was to speak to mainstream America, and he reached it by making the art house sensibility mainstream, especially in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He shared with Coppola, Spielberg, and Woody Allen—all directors he admired—the need for his work to be iconic, central to the culture. Central means chasing something crucial about America, the cinematic equivalent of Huckleberry Finn, or The Scarlet Letter, or Moby-Dick. Kubrick is, as my subtitle implies, an American director, in spite of his decades-long exile in his country estate in Childwickbury, England. He had videotapes of American pro football flown to him across the Atlantic, and he particularly liked the Super Bowl commercials. He read the New York Times every morning. “I don’t feel that I’m not living in America,” he told an interviewer.7
Kubrick has often been called an ice-cold filmmaker. A longtime critical enemy, Pauline Kael, liked to refer to his “arctic spirit.” When he died in March 1999, just after finishing Eyes Wide Shut, the adjectives “cold” and “chilly” surfaced frequently in his obituaries. The charge is misguided. The week of his death the music critic Alex Ross said about Kubrick’s movies, “They make me happy, they make me laugh. . . . If this was cold, then so was Fred Astaire.” Cinema scholar Robert Kolker writes that Kubrick’s films “are in fact deeply moving, but the emotions need to be accessed through the intellect: by seeing more, understanding more.” Kubrick “seems to want us to see everything,” Kolker adds, but we can never quite make full contact with his films.8 They tantalize, and so we go back and watch them over and over.
Kubrick’s career was made possible by the plunge in the popularity of movies after 1948, when American households flocked to the TV screen, captivated by the new invention. Between 1948 and 1954 the movie audience declined by about forty million. With the major studios in trouble, the movie business opened up as it would again decades later in the seventies. Hundreds of art house cinemas sprouted up in cities and college towns during the early fifties. Foreign films were in, and “arty” became a term of praise. Many of the movies had sexual content that Hollywood hadn’t dared to include since the pre–Production Code years, and that didn’t hurt audience loyalty either. Week after week foreign film fans kept coming back. For most of his career Kubrick relied heavily on the art house audience, which had by the late sixties colonized huge swaths of middle America. He never churned out blockbusters aimed at a preteen audience, like those seventies whiz kids Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. 2001 was the ultimate art house triumph: no one knew what it meant, yet everyone saw it and talked about it.
Kubrick’s great sixties–early seventies trio of iconic films, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange, rode on another revolution in Hollywood. After Hitchcock’s Psycho, the Production Code fell apart, and films could be more shocking, violent, and sexual. Like Hitchcock, Kubrick broke taboos, but in contrast to the sophisticated master of suspense, he rarely winks at the audience. Dr. Strangelove, with all its MAD magazine–style antics, is anything but a game; 2001 even risks solemnity, and wins. Unlike Hitchcock or Orson Welles (who called the young Kubrick a “giant”), Kubrick is rarely ingenious: his shots have the rightness of perfect design, but he doesn’t play tricks. His madcap scenes never descend to devil-may-care whimsy, like so many sixties movies (think Richard Lester’s Help!). Kael called A Clockwork Orange the work of a Teutonic professor, and so be it. Kubrick is always in earnest.
Inner torment is never glamorous or sexy in a Kubrick movie. Instead it feels like a malfunction. That’s why the awkward Tom Cruise, who lacks a hero’s grace, was the right choice for Eyes Wide Shut. Kirk Douglas, who starred in Spartacus and Paths of Glory, has a streak of the maladroit too, and a grinding quality that pushes away subtlety. These two actors show their need to be in control, and so their control starts to wobble. In Kubrick’s canon only Malcolm McDowell as Clockwork’s Alex feels assured in his playful masculinity. Kubrick’s other leading men are stymied rather than stylish, pushed and pulled from within and without.
Kubrick required endless devotion from the people who worked on his films. His perfectionism could be maddening, since his own dedication to his art was total. Michael Herr, who cowrote Full Metal Jacket, said, “Everyone earned their pay with Stanley . . . but nobody earned their pay the way Stanley earned his pay.” Dan Richter, who played Moonwatcher, the lead ape in 2001, remarked, “What would be compulsion in others is single-mindedness in Stanley.” Ken Adam, Kubrick’s art director for Dr. Strangelove, said, “We w
ere expected to obey his orders like Rommel’s Afrikakorps. He was somewhat of a sadist, especially with people he loved.” Terry Southern, who worked on the Dr. Strangelove script, remarked that Kubrick “scarcely let as much as a trouser pleat go unsupervised.” For Kubrick there was “no detail too mundane, all the way down to stationery and paper clips,” Herr agreed. Lisa Leone, who worked on Eyes Wide Shut, said, “As much as you gave, it was always more, and more, and more.” “He’s a genius, but his humor’s black as charcoal. I wonder about his . . . humanity,” McDowell muttered. And then there was Kirk Douglas, who groused, “Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit.”9
Kubrick had his Rasputin side, no doubt about it. Those pitch black, sleep-deprived eyes bored right into you. Kubrick did not tolerate fuckups, and he inspired real fear. But he was also “congenial, accessible, bemused, sardonic,” said the young film critic Jay Cocks (later a screenwriter for Martin Scorsese), and he could be a pal on the set, too. “When you shook hands with Stanley it was warm and gentle, it was just like a buzz went through you,” said Leon Vitali, who played Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon and then became Kubrick’s assistant for the next thirty years.10
Kubrick talked eagerly about a lot of things, from Wittgenstein to pro football, but most of all he knew about making movies. Geoffrey Unsworth, 2001’s director of photography, admitted that he learned more from Kubrick in six months than he had in twenty-five years as a top British cinematographer. “He is an absolute genius,” Unsworth marveled. “He knows more about the mechanics of optics and the chemistry of photography than anyone who’s ever lived.” Kubrick had a spooky, preternatural grasp of camerawork, lighting, sound, and, it seemed, every other technical aspect of filmmaking. On the set of Full Metal Jacket, actor Arliss Howard remembered, “He could come into a room and say, ‘We’re two stops off in this light.’ They’d say, ‘No, we just checked the camera.’ He’d say, ‘We’re two stops off,’ and they’d be two stops off.”11