Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  Kubrick had in spades the toughness that moviemaking requires. He could throw a screaming fit if it served his purpose, but he was mostly a calm problem solver. Steven Berkoff, who played Lord Ludd in Barry Lyndon, remarked, “Stanley has a kind of slightly rabbinical air. . . . He’s an intellectual, and intellectuals don’t get riled.”12 Kubrick, who started as a photographer for Look magazine, said that photography was perfect preparation for moviemaking because it made you figure things out. Playing chess, he added, also taught him how to evaluate ideas practically, to solve problems.

  Problem solving in Kubrick can be creative, as when Dave outmaneuvers HAL in 2001. But problem solvers, who love to be in control, often destroy human beings for the sake of an idea. The scientists of A Clockwork Orange clear up the question of evil through behavioral programming. Lieutenant Hartman of Full Metal Jacket reshapes teenagers into robotlike savages. For Strangelove, like the generals in Paths of Glory and HAL in 2001, humans are expendable. Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut stands for all the powerful men who see and manipulate without being seen. These are all examples of chilling uncreative mastery, in contrast to the masterful director Stanley Kubrick, who was always ready to draw on actors, writers, and the other filmworkers who clustered around him.

  Kubrick once compared filmmaking to writing War and Peace in a bumper car. Yet he loved bouncing off other people’s ideas. Every great director knows how to collaborate, but Kubrick took particular pleasure in the joint work of moviemaking. His actors suggested key moments in many of his films, like the “Singin’ in the Rain” routine in A Clockwork Orange (McDowell’s idea) and HAL’s lipreading in 2001 (suggested by Gary Lockwood).

  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. That’s Jack Torrance typing away in The Shining, a hollow man who doesn’t know how to work or how to play. Kubrick, when he made his movies, did both at once. One of Kubrick’s favorite parts of moviemaking was developing a story in cahoots with writers like Michael Herr (Full Metal Jacket) and Diane Johnson (The Shining).

  Such companionable work-as-play is usually absent from Kubrick’s films themselves. A Kubrick movie is often a highly programmed world that severely controls the people in it. Their responses radically altered, they become captive to this world’s emptiness. We see initiation into the soldier’s ritual brutality (Full Metal Jacket), absurd military gameplaying (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove), behavioristic social control (A Clockwork Orange), an aristocracy ruled by rigid customs (Barry Lyndon), a hotel that possesses its inhabitants (The Shining), and a secret society that claims the power of life and death (Eyes Wide Shut).

  Kubrick’s vistas look narrow and constraining even when their scope is vast, like the spacescapes of 2001. A number of Kubrick movies end with the hero trapped or immobilized: The Killing, Paths of Glory, Lolita, The Shining. Others present in their last scenes an ambiguous rebirth that feels at once freeing and frightening: Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket. Only Kubrick’s last testament, Eyes Wide Shut, and his first mature film, Killer’s Kiss, offer a humane encouragement in their final moments.

  More than any other director I can think of, Kubrick makes us work to grasp the relationships among his films. Each Kubrick movie is a world unto itself, yet deeply and cryptically related to the others. Dave Bowman’s trip through the Stargate transforms Major Kong’s whooping ride on his warhead in Dr. Strangelove, just as Bowman’s rebirth as the Starchild answers Strangelove’s rise from his wheelchair to salute the new nuclear day. And when Alex turns his eye on the audience at the start of A Clockwork Orange, he echoes the Starchild’s uncanny gaze.

  Because Kubrick is so lucid yet at times so enigmatic, a few of his movies seem tailor-made for conspiracy theorists. This makes a strange kind of sense, given his focus on obsession and problem-solving. Legions of web-based crackpots long ago fell in love with The Shining, which is said to prove that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 moon landing for NASA. Now they adore Eyes Wide Shut because it warns us about the Illuminati, or Hollywood pedophile rings. More subtly, The Shining, we are told, is “really” about the Holocaust. But Kubrick’s films cannot be decoded in this way. They are open-ended works of art, not puzzles waiting to be solved.

  Kubrick was a Jewish director, though he would never have said so. He read obsessively about the Holocaust, and came close to making a movie about it based on Louis Begley’s haunting novel Wartime Lies. “In a sense Kubrick even married into the Holocaust,” remarks Kubrick scholar Nathan Abrams. Kubrick’s third wife, Christiane, his companion for the last forty-two years of his life, was the niece of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, who directed the antisemitic propaganda movie Jud Süss. Before Kubrick met Harlan in 1957, he drank a big glass of vodka, and he told Christiane, “I’m standing here . . . looking like ten Jews.” Among fellow directors he felt closest to Allen and Spielberg, who completed Kubrick’s project A.I.: Artificial Intelligence after his death. The smart-alecky black humor of Dr. Strangelove aligns him with Lenny Bruce, Joseph Heller, and the sacred-cow bashers at MAD. Christiane said that “the girls [the Kubricks’ daughters] and I used to tease him by saying his body language was like that of Tevye the Milkman—he would clasp his hands and sigh . . . with a big ‘ochhh’ while looking up toward God with accusation and melancholy. We imitated him and laughed.”13 As a Bronx Jew on his country estate in Hertfordshire, England, Kubrick must sometimes have felt just as out of place as that Irish upstart Barry Lyndon.

  Kubrick tackled most of the crucial American genres: film noir, historical epic, war, science fiction, horror, and what philosopher Stanley Cavell calls the comedy of remarriage, about the reconciliation of a couple on the rocks. The remarriage theme is most noticeable in Hollywood’s screwball comedies, but Kubrick transmutes it in his uncanny and troubled last film, Eyes Wide Shut.

  A Kubrick film provokes thought without being at all fake-intellectual, like certain anomie-laced European movies that incline us toward a predictable brooding over human malaise. Kubrick the American is attuned to the cultural neuroses that mark our culture for better and worse: the self-made man stuck in a hollow life, adolescent rebellion, regeneration through violence.

  Yet there is another side to Kubrick too, a European one. Stanley Kubrick, the second child of Jacques (Jack) Kubrick and Gertrude Perveler Kubrick, was born in New York City on July 26, 1928. But his sensibility, as critic Michel Ciment points out, comes from eighteenth-century Europe, which dreamed of reshaping humanity along strictly rational lines. From Dr. Strangelove to 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket, he is fascinated by schemes to radically manage or transform human nature. Kubrick, like the Enlightenment philosophers, knows that the schemes all fail, since reason turns out to be dangerously extremist, and therefore irrational.

  Reason keeps on metamorphosing us, from the Stone Age to the cyberspace present. Now, in the twenty-first century, new machines are infiltrating our emotional lives, and the self might soon be modeled on the computer’s algorithms. Kubrick appeals to our ambiguous shudder, both excited and fearful, when we confront reason once again remaking our inner world.

  Choosing the greatest movie ever made is a mug’s game, but still the choice reveals a critic’s taste. For me two films are tied for first place, and they couldn’t be more different: 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Rules of the Game. Renoir’s film is humane, funny, and grandly touching, reassuring in its dignity and ease. Kubrick’s 2001, static and sublime, is none of these things: it goes beyond the human, and courts uncharted spaces. Since I first saw it at age twelve, a few years after its release, it has chilled and inspired me like nothing else on a movie screen.

  Kubrick belongs to the school of alienation, rejecting the warm humanity that Renoir prizes. With his clean, contoured style he knows as well as Antonioni and Bergman how to value empty spaces. Kubrick rejected Hitchcock’s stylish adeptness and inclination to charm and Welles’s taste for grandeur, but he absorbed from these two masters a will to control the information we get as
viewers.

  Think of the antiques that clutter Charles Foster Kane’s mansion after his death, a setting Kubrick echoes when he depicts Quilty’s house in Lolita: everything gets in the way of grasping the mystery of the man. Kubrick, like Welles and Hitchcock, Bergman and Antonioni, makes sure we know only what he decides to tell us, and that we remain aware of this constraining power. He is the antithesis of a Renoir, who seems to open the world to us.

  In his acceptance speech for the D. W. Griffith Award given by the Directors Guild of America, Kubrick noted that Griffith, who liked to do things his own way, was sometimes compared to the hubristic Icarus. “But at the same time,” Kubrick continued, “I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘Don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘Forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings.’ ”14 Kubrick’s patient, perfectionist artistry allowed him to fly higher, and more securely, than the other filmmakers of his time. His movies, like that black monolith, will be objects of fascination as long as cinema is still an art form.

  1

  I Know I Can Make a Film Better Than That:

  Killer’s Kiss, The Killing

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DIED on April 12, 1945, nine months before Stanley Kubrick graduated from high school. The next day Stanley walked past a news kiosk displaying the headline FDR DEAD. Stanley coached the newsdealer into a dejected posture and snapped a photo, which he promptly brought to the offices of Look magazine. Look’s photo editor, Helen O’Brien, took a chance on young Kubrick, and before long he was a staff photographer.

  Still only seventeen, Kubrick had snagged what he later called a “fantastically good job” at Look, and he would stay there for the next four years. Meanwhile, he was having trouble getting into college. “My father, who was an alumni [sic] of NYU uptown, took me to see the Dean. . . . Nothing worked,” Kubrick remembered. But skipping college turned out to be a huge plus. Photography “gave me a quick education in the way things happen in the world,” Kubrick later said.1

  Look, unlike its more wholesome rival Life, specialized in the gritty and pessimistic. Spurning Life’s feel-good stories, it often featured grim cityscapes. The magazine was full of “unemployment, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, divorce,” notes the journalist Mary Panzer.2

  In his photos for Look, Kubrick loved depicting limbolike places: a dentist’s waiting office, a subway platform. Sometimes the pallid, confrontational feel of the photos echoes Diane Arbus, as when Kubrick photographs a row of artificial limbs at Walter Reed hospital. A stolid man stares straight into the camera, his pencil behind his ear, while a soldier on crutches haunts the background. In one Kubrick photo a boxer down for the count, foreshortened like Mantegna’s Christ, groans in agony. In another, two young men in ties face the camera, one solemnly adjusting his pompadour, the other staring right at us.

  Kubrick also photographed stars for Look. He profiled Leonard Bernstein in August 1949. Here’s Lenny clowning in swimming trunks, making a Hitler moustache with one hand and heiling with the other; sitting in his bathrobe, abstracted; pensively holding a book by Erich Fromm. In March 1949 Kubrick showed Monty Clift, then twenty-eight, in his New York apartment, sitting blankly in front of a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk, then lying on the floor next to an unmade bed, legs splayed, pretend-drinking from a wine bottle. Kubrick also shot Frank Sinatra and Rocky Graziano, George Grosz and Jacques Lipchitz, and the radio star Johnny Grant, “Johnny on the spot.” (Not all those photos made it into print.)

  In his work for Look, Kubrick used canted camera angles and, often, artificial lighting. He brought lights into a Central Park West subway stop for a noirish shot of an embracing couple. In 1947 he photographed the shooting of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. Dassin’s film was deadpan and evocative, and a clear influence on Kubrick’s noir films of the fifties.

  Kubrick’s photographic style is stark and clean, foreboding in its precision. But it also had room for drama. He did a series on the socialite Betsy von Furstenberg, featured in the May 1950 Look. In one shot she is lolling, fashionably bored, on a couch with a young man in a tuxedo, with Picasso’s painting of Angel Fernández de Soto staring out at us from the wall above. Betsy in shorts, sitting in a window with a script—she was an aspiring actress—looks like Lolita’s Sue Lyon. She does an impression of rapture while clutching the script to her chest, absently scratching a cat’s head with one hand, her painted toenails curling.

  From a Kubrick feature on the circus for Look magazine (Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York)

  In June 1946 Kubrick shot another dramatic photo spread showing what goes on at a handwriting analysis booth. In just six images, he gives us a full-fledged encounter, with emotions that run the gamut. He focuses on a young serviceman and a woman handwriting analyst who seem to be heading toward a first date: we see their rhythm of shy flirtation, averted eyes, fervent appeal, indecision. (Look published only one of these photos, the following summer.)

  Kubrick’s shot of a couple embracing in the subway (Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York)

  Kubrick the photographer liked visual parables: people raptly gazing into a monkey house, with the monkeys off-camera. There is something parabolic, too, about a shot from his series on student life at the University of Michigan: outlined by the stark artificial lighting that Kubrick liked to use, a woman lights a man’s cigarette. Above all, Kubrick knew how to convey a sense of closed-off emotional turmoil. For a photo essay called “First Loves of Teenagers” he shot a girl with her back to us, her face hidden. She has just scrawled I HATE LOVE! in lipstick on a wall, and the hand holding the lipstick droops in defeat.

  Betsy von Furstenberg, by Kubrick, for Look (Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York)

  In May 1948 the twenty-year-old Kubrick married his high school sweetheart, Toba Metz. Kubrick’s friend Gerald Fried, who later wrote the music for his early movies, commented that when Stanley and Toba began their relationship, “they were still in their teens—it almost didn’t count. It was a legal marriage, but they were, like, dating. There was no exchange of any deep affection.”3 The couple moved to Greenwich Village, where Kubrick tagged along with the bohemian intellectual scene. He also sat in on literature classes at Columbia taught by Mark Van Doren and, probably, Lionel Trilling. He got to know some of the Partisan Review crowd, like Dwight Macdonald and James Agee, as well as Weegee and Arbus.

  Kubrick’s photo of Aaron Copland and Oscar Levant at a party (Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York)

  Kubrick had now plunged into reading literature and philosophy, and after a few years he could give the high-octane New York intellectuals a run for their money. “I spent an interesting three hours with Stanley Kubrick, most talented of the younger directors,” Macdonald wrote in 1959, “discussing Whitehead, Kafka, Potemkin, Zen Buddhism, the decline of Western culture, and whether life is worth living anywhere except at the extremes—religious faith or the life of the senses; it was a typical New York conversation.”4

  By 1950 Kubrick was becoming dissatisfied with his job at Look. In four years at the magazine, he pulled in no more than $150 a week. (“They pay lousy salaries, anyway. Off the record,” he told interviewer Robert Ginna years later.) Even apart from the low pay, Kubrick was restless. As a child he had dreamed of being a writer like Conrad, but now he knew he wanted to make films. “For a period of four or five years I saw every film made,” he remembered. “I sat there and I thought, well, I don’t know a god-damn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that.”5 A friend reported that Kubrick sometimes read the newspaper in the movies when he got bored by what was on screen.

  The young Kubrick taught himself how to make movies, a rare thing among major directors. He read Pudovkin on film editing and Stanislavski on acting. “In those days there were no film schools,” remembered Gerald Fried. “We had to learn by going to movies. Our discussions af
ter seeing them were primarily listening to Stanley kind of smirking at the tasteless sentimentality of most pictures.”6 As an antidote to Hollywood sentiment, Kubrick had also seen all the foreign films at the Museum of Modern Art, most of them more than once. Now he was ready.

  In 1950 the twenty-one-year-old Kubrick made his first movie, Day of the Fight, a 12½-minute newsreel about a boxer named Walter Cartier. Kubrick’s high school friend Alex Singer worked the camera. Kubrick made Day of the Fight for about thirty-nine hundred dollars and sold it to RKO-Pathé for four thousand. This was much less money than he and Singer had expected, but still he was elated.

  Day of the Fight still holds up. Cartier’s knockout punch at the end is spectacular, but it seems almost an afterthought. Before that Kubrick grips the viewer with Cartier’s routine in the hours leading up to the fight. He wakes up next to his identical twin brother, goes to morning mass, where he gulps anxiously before he receives the communion wafer, carefully examines his nose in the mirror, and goes to the doctor for his prefight checkup. Kubrick makes tense human drama out of these details. “Time has a way of staring you in the face as it barely moves along,” a voice-over intones as Vince, the twin brother, gives Cartier a rubdown before the fight. Cartier is a twenty-four-year-old kid, hopeful and anxious, the first in Kubrick’s line of young men trying to make their mark: Barry and his stepson Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange’s Alex, Joker in Full Metal Jacket, and finally, that boy in a man’s marriage, Dr. Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut.

  Nine months after Day of the Fight, Kubrick quit Look, determined to make it as a director. He went on to make another short for RKO-Pathé, The Flying Padre, about a priest in New Mexico who visits his flock by airplane.