Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  Then there was the piece by the Hungarian Jewish avant-gardist György Ligeti, which Christiane heard on the radio and brought to her husband’s attention: Ligeti’s hymnlike haunted chorale attends the apes’ dance around the monolith, and Aram Khachaturian’s plangent Adagio accompanies Frank’s jog around the Discovery as the Jupiter mission begins. The timpani beats of Richard Strauss at the movie’s end, heralding the Starchild, take us back to the apes’ bone banging, bluntly invading our head and opening us up to a strange future.

  Kubrick employed some colorful characters on 2001. The sleek space helmet, based on men’s Ascot riding hats, was invented by Harry Lange, a German scientist who had followed Wernher von Braun to NASA’s base in Huntsville, Alabama. Lange had a confederate flag and a model of a V-2 rocket in his office, until the British crew threatened a walkout and Kubrick made Lange remove the flag and the rocket.

  Another memorable personality was Dan Richter. Kubrick hired Richter, a professional mime, for the production’s climactic adventure, figuring out how to turn human actors into Stone Age apes. One of Richter’s big hits was the Pinball Machine, in which, scuttling and rolling around with his knees up to his chest, he played four balls with distinct personalities. Richter and his girlfriend were drug addicts under legal supervision in Britain, and the doctor who gave them heroin, he recalled, was “an aristocratic lady in tweed suits and a gold lorgnette.”14

  Like Kubrick himself, Richter was a fanatic about getting things right. He remembered that as a child he once spent all afternoon trying to jump over a large box in his backyard. Finally, after hours of trying, he put together all he had learned that day and cleared the box. Kubrick had found the man for the job.

  Richter spent many weeks studying primates at the zoo before he figured out how to become Moonwatcher, the ape who propels his cohort into murder and meat eating. Stuart Freeborn, who devised the ape costumes, was as tireless as Richter. Making the apes look real required letting them bare their teeth, snarl and grimace, which seemed impossible to do while wearing rubber masks. After long trial and error, Freeborn found his answer to the dilemma: seven tiny, tilted field magnets behind the actors’ teeth, along with powerful elastic bands, gave the apes a full range of expression.

  Richter as Moonwatcher is a superb actor. He touches the monolith gingerly, like a hot stove. This is his delicate, electric moment of initiation. A little later he plays with a tapir’s bone, banging and flipping the animal’s skeleton. Then the world historical lightbulb flashes on, celebrated by a montage of the raised paw gripping the bone, then a falling tapir (Kubrick echoes a famous shot of a cow being slaughtered in Eisenstein’s Strike [1925]).

  Here is Richter on Moonwatcher’s crucial moment of problem solving:

  I let Moonwatcher play with the bones. He gets the feel of a bone in his hand. He has never held a bone in his hand before; he has never used a weapon. This is not only the first time for him, but it is the first time any creature has ever picked up a weapon. He feels it, smells it, and lets it fall against the other bones. He begins to sense the weight in his hand, the power, the release from an eternity of fear and groveling in the dirt for food.

  “Action.”

  I give it all I have as I move forward into film history.15

  The question is, what comes after Moonwatcher’s exultant claim to violence as creation, what new human phase?

  Man in the beginning fought for his tribe, like the apes or like Spartacus. Then he became a passenger, a role that sums us up, Kubrick implies: anywhere you look, in the modern urban age, you see passengers. 2001 is full of passengers, from Floyd to Bowman, who finally passes through existence and is transformed into the iconic Starchild.

  Dave moves from being a passenger, then, to becoming a god. There is no telling what the Starchild will do. (“But he would think of something,” reads the final line of Kubrick and Clarke’s novelization of 2001, rather ominously.)16 What looks like playfulness and splendor to the Starchild might be untold suffering for us. Kubrick implies that violence and creativity are twinned in a double-edged, potentially lethal way: for us, for Moonwatcher, for the Starchild.

  2001 answers Dr. Strangelove not with optimism but with a rich ambiguity that surpasses the earlier movie’s nihilistic flair. The destiny of humankind is now open to Nietzschean speculation, and the film’s ending spurs wonder rather than Strangelove’s pitch-black ecstasy.

  Kubrick’s spectacular vision of the future was costly. When the shooting was done, he had spent more than two times 2001’s projected budget of five million dollars. The future of MGM was balanced on the fortunes of 2001, since the studio was still hurting from a series of big-budget flops in the early sixties. When Kubrick unveiled his masterpiece, studio executives, bored to tears by the movie, were sure they were doomed. Droves of MGM suits walked out during the first New York screening in April 1968.

  A disheartened Stanley retreated with Christiane to a hotel room, where, she remembered, he “couldn’t sleep and couldn’t speak and couldn’t do anything.” She told him that the movie would find its audience, even though the middle-aged Hollywood brigade didn’t get it.17

  Christiane was right. By the next afternoon reports started to stream in: audiences under thirty were flocking to 2001. Word of mouth spread like a fever, and soon an advertising team devised a new slogan for the film: “the Ultimate Trip.” People were watching 2001 over and over, and always, it seemed, in an altered state. Before long John Lennon remarked, “2001, I see it every week.”18

  2001 premiered in 70mm Super Panavision with a 2.21:1 aspect ratio at a series of theaters that had a special curved screen with five stereo speakers hidden behind it. The best approximation to this experience is seeing the film in IMAX: you will feel you are hanging off the edge of space with the stranded Frank Poole. An IMAX viewing of Christopher Nolan’s restored 2001 reminds us how Kubrick’s outer space vistas combined the ideas of harmony and abandonment, like no other movie before or since. Grand and eerie, the planets turn, their movements precisely calculated like fine watchworks.

  2001 also opened in regular 70mm and, later on, in 35mm. It became one of MGM’s five top-grossing films, joining Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz. Four years after its opening, the movie was still in release, playing every day across the country. In the seventies, MGM rereleased 2001 five times.

  With 2001 Kubrick became against his will a prophet for sixties youth culture, though a rather wary and skeptical one. As usual, he refused to appear on television, make speeches, or otherwise pronounce on the Zeitgeist.

  The New York critics were not nearly as impressed by 2001 as its youthful audiences who saw it again and again. Kael savaged the movie remorselessly, and Andrew Sarris was also doubtful about the merits of 2001, though after seeing the movie a second time “under the influence of a smoked substance,” he wrote that he had started to appreciate Kubrick’s vision.19

  Stanley Kubrick’s “mythological documentary,” as he called 2001,20 will probably live on as long as movies are made and watched. It’s one of those achievements that Ardrey talks about in Kubrick’s favorite passage of African Genesis:

  We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles and irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies, however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams, however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.21

  2001: A Space Odyssey is evidence of that brief transcendent elevation.

  5

  Let’s Open with a Sicilian Defence:

  A Clockwork Orange

  IN SEPTEMBER 1968, the Kubricks were living in Abbots Mead, near Borehamwood Studios outside London. Kubrick had decided to take on the most famous hero in European histor
y: he wanted to make a movie about Napoleon. Paths of Glory and Spartacus were historical movies with large set piece battles. Now Kubrick was moving on to another vast subject, Napoleon’s wartime career. He had been reading deeply for years in military history, and he was particularly obsessed with Napoleon.

  Kubrick had been thinking more than ever about how to show war on film. A few years earlier, in August 1964, he wrote to MGM’s Ron Lubin to turn down a film about Simón Bolívar that the studio wanted him to make (“My only problem is I have no real interest in the old boy,” he said). Kubrick remarked to Lubin that “representing a broad panorama of history has always proved to be the undoing of film makers.” He recommended that the movie, whoever was to direct it, have voice-over narration, not too much dialogue, and a “documentary visual style.” Kubrick added that “costume war scenes tend to look like so many extras thoughtlessly dressed on a beautiful hill. . . . The thing that usually makes movie battles idiotic is that the terrain is senseless. Almost all battles are shaped and finally decided by the terrain itself.”1

  While planning his epic Napoleon, Kubrick brooded over the terrain he could use for the film. Most of the actual Napoleonic battlefields had been turned into suburbs or industrial parks, so Kubrick looked elsewhere, to Romania and Yugoslavia. His dreams for the movie were gigantic: he planned on “fifty thousand extras” supplied by the Romanian military. He wanted cinematic diagrams of the battles, showing with maps and voice-over narration how Napoleon cut the Austrian forces in two at Austerlitz. The “sheer visual and organizational beauty” of the battles was important to Kubrick, but also, he told the interviewer Joseph Gelmis, the clash between these rational patterns and the dismal human reality of war.2 Kubrick was once again on to one of his basic themes, the split between reason’s all-controlling plans and the blunders and chaos that mark actual life.

  Kubrick had a scholarly interlocutor for the Napoleon project, Felix Markham, the Oxford historian. In addition to reading a small mountain of books about Napoleon, Kubrick hired Markham’s graduate students to provide notes on hundreds more sources.

  Kubrick’s interviews with Markham on Napoleon make fascinating reading. At one point he tells Markham about the “in-between” move (Entzwischenzug) used by chess players, and asks him whether Napoleon’s Achilles’ heel was his inability to make such a move: Napoleon was comfortable attacking or defending, but remained at a loss when he was prevented from doing either. (Kubrick’s description of the Entzwischenzug is rather misleading: in chess it is part of a tactical sequence, not a delaying maneuver.) Markham agrees with Kubrick that Napoleon had a hard time standing still.3

  Kubrick’s script begins with Napoleon the alienated child who suddenly grows up and plunges into action. (Many Kubrick movies and unfilmed screenplays, from The Burning Secret to Lolita to The Shining, share this pattern.) Kubrick begins with a scene of the four-year-old Napoleon “dreamily suck[ing] his thumb.”4 Then we glimpse Napoleon at boarding school in France insisting that someone has put glass in his pitcher of water: the Corsican boy had never seen ice before. A few quick scenes later, after the storming of the Bastille, Napoleon coolly shoots in the head a leader of the revolt, one “Citizen Varlac”—a thoroughly fictional incident.

  In Kubrick’s retelling Napoleon makes his way effortlessly to the top, and soon he is giving Tsar Alexander military tips as they sit naked together in a sauna. The script ends with Napoleon’s death, and then a maudlin shot of his grieving mother surrounded by her son’s childhood wooden soldiers and teddy bear. Earlier, Kubrick described the four-year-old king of Rome, Napoleon’s son, sitting alone and playing with his soldiers, never to see his father again. The Napoleon screenplay is haunted by childhood, and perhaps suggests that Napoleon’s conquering of Europe was a boyish fantasy come true. After Napoleon lost his empire, Kubrick implies, he once again became a mere boy, bereft of power. He proved to be not a godlike Starchild but instead an all-too-human figure whose life expands grandly and then shrinks back to its minor-scale origins.

  Napoleon’s “sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler,” Kubrick said to Gelmis.5 (Schnitzler wrote thousands of pages recording each of his sexual encounters.) In the screenplay Napoleon meets Josephine at an orgy, though Kubrick refrains from depicting explicit sex. Kubrick verified with Markham that such an event was historically possible: Josephine, the lover of the rakish politician Paul Barras, traveled in fast circles.

  But Napoleon’s rapturous desire for Josephine never seems quite real in Kubrick’s script, and he treats their infidelities with clumsy prurience. Despite several sex scenes in mirrored bedrooms, nothing here sizzles. Kubrick’s heart is instead with Napoleon the brilliantly innovative general, a personality rather like Stanley Kubrick the film director. “There is nothing vague in it. It is all common sense,” the Corsican says about the art of war. “Theory does not enter into it. The simplest moves are always the best.”6 This Napoleon is an elegant, cold-blooded calculator. His disastrous Russian campaign is depicted, briefly, but left unexplained: if Napoleon was such a genius, how could he have erred so mightily?

  Kubrick completed his Napoleon script in September 1969. The next month, he estimated the budget for the movie at four and a half million dollars if it was filmed in Romania.

  Christiane remembered that during the negotiations over Napoleon “the studios told Stanley that Americans don’t like films where people write with feathers.” This line, originally the complaint of a movie exhibitor in the mid-thirties who was saddled with yet another costume epic drawn from a classic European novel, had been kicking around Hollywood for decades.7

  MGM was wary of the Napoleon project because Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970), starring a somewhat weaselly looking Rod Steiger, had bombed at the box office. (During the making of Waterloo the Romanians received warnings not to work with Kubrick, but they carried on doing so anyway.) United Artists was interested for a time, but negotiations ended in November 1969. After this point Kubrick still wanted to make the movie. He was dreaming of Audrey Hepburn as Josephine, and for his hero he had in mind Jack Nicholson, also a Napoleon buff. If Nicholson said no, David Hemmings or Oskar Werner would do, Kubrick thought.8

  “Napoleon is a character unfinished, like Hamlet; and like Hamlet, a puzzle—full of contradictions, sublime and vulgar,” writes his biographer Steven Englund. In Kubrickian terms, the contradictory Napoleon has something of both Starchild and ape, as James Naremore suggests. Napoleon’s life gives us “the awe-evoking sense of human possibility, which is a different thing from hope,” Englund judges.9

  Just as Napoleon pushed the world to extremes, so Kubrick expands cinema. It’s possible Kubrick’s film would have been more equal to its subject than any earlier movie about Napoleon, because Kubrick, as he showed in 2001, knew how to approach a giant enigma. Yet his script, which glosses over the catastrophic aspects of the retreat from Moscow, doesn’t inspire confidence. Masses of freezing, starving men could not be harmonized with Napoleon’s heroic image in Kubrick’s mind.

  As his chances to make Napoleon waned, Kubrick realized he needed a new project. Terry Southern and Bob Gaffney, Kubrick’s right-hand man with the Romanians on the Napoleon deal, had both turned Kubrick on to the novels of Anthony Burgess. When Kubrick read Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, he knew right away that this was his next movie.

  A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962. “I was very drunk when I wrote it,” Burgess said. “It was the only way I could cope with the violence.” Burgess added, “I was trying to exorcize the memory of what happened to my first wife, who was savagely attacked in London during the Second World War by four American deserters. . . . I detest that damn book now.”10

  Kubrick closely followed Burgess’s plot in his movie. Alex, Burgess’s teen thug antihero, terrorizes London by night with his gang, and is sent to prison for murder. Scientists then give him the innovative Ludovico Treatment, which manipulates his responses, causing him to feel nausea when he sees violenc
e, which had thrilled him before. Alex is now harmless, but, Burgess implies, the Ludovico Treatment has sidestepped the question of good and evil, ignoring the human soul and opting for rigid social control instead.

  Burgess invented a new lingo for A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, which incorporates smirking, coiled-syntax eighteenth-century inflections (“to what do I owe the extreme pleasure?”) as well as a passel of transmuted Russian words. Alex narrates the book in raw and electric fashion. Listening to classical music, he dreams up a rapturous bout of violence:

  As I slooshied, my glazzies shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them.11

  Kubrick echoes this page when Alex, playing with his pet snake in his bedroom, listens to his favorite Ludwig van’s Ninth Symphony. In both book and movie, the scene ends with our hero masturbating to orgasm. Here once more is the solitary transport felt by Strangelove rising from his wheelchair, by Major Kong riding his missile, by Moonwatcher excitedly pounding a carcass with his bone weapon. All these characters are boys at heart, autistically sheathed in their ecstasy. Kubrick loves these passionate rocketings. Frightened like the rest of us, he makes clear the cost of such savage masculine exultation, but his attraction to it is always there.

  Kubrick was drawn to Burgess’s Alex. He “wins you over somehow, like Richard III despite his wickedness because of his intelligence and wit and total honesty,” Kubrick said.12 Kubrick’s Alex is a ’70s Candide as well, a vicious innocent making his progress. Clockwork is an Enlightenment movie if ever there was one, with its meditation on using science to reshape human nature.