Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  “Why Stanley waited, I never knew,” D’Onofrio says.31 Full Metal Jacket was released in June 1987, six months after Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Stone’s movie was a huge moneymaker: it cost only $8 million, with a domestic gross of $138.5 million. Full Metal Jacket, which cost $17 million, grossed $38 in its first two months of release. This was not bad at all, but coming on the heels of Stone’s massive hit hurt Full Metal Jacket.

  Kubrick and Stone in fact argue against each other, with Stone providing the traditional Hollywood catharsis that Kubrick refuses. Kubrick’s movie is an anti-Platoon: think of the portentous voice-over in Stone’s film, or the too easily iconic depiction of Elias (Willem Dafoe) as a Christ figure shot by the Vietcong, arms stretched out as if on the cross. Stone’s taste for the grandiose contrasts with Kubrick’s understated manner, both satirical and sensitive.

  In place of the giant heroic-scale dramas in Platoon, Apocalypse Now, or Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Full Metal Jacket is about a sheepish, regular-sized character. Significantly, Joker looks steadily at what he does as he kills the sniper. We have moved from Pyle’s insane glare to Animal Mother’s thousand-yard stare to Joker’s newly mature eyes, which he keeps open. Yet the epilogue, with its too-plain claim to happy life, suggests Joker’s retreat from his act of slaughter.

  Kubrick’s final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, will also be about looking. It presents another version of the boyish hero who, like Joker, is not sure how much he dares to see, or how much he wants to know. Like Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut is about coming to maturity, and in both films Kubrick asks how a free grown-up mind reckons with what happened, what it did and what it saw.

  9

  Frightened of Making the Movie:

  Eyes Wide Shut

  KUBRICK DIDN’T MAKE a movie for twelve years between Full Metal Jacket in 1987 and Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. He was happily ensconced in Childwickbury, busy with young grandchildren, Katharina’s and Anya’s children. (His first grandchild was born in 1985, the same year both his parents died.) On the cusp of late middle age, Kubrick was thinking hard about what movies he wanted to make next. He devoted himself to caring for his old films. Kubrick and Vitali restored Dr. Strangelove by photographing each frame of Kubrick’s print with a Nikon camera. Kubrick was as usual taken up with his many cats and dogs, worrying incessantly if one got sick. He would often drift down to the lawn to watch Christiane paint. Her portraits of Kubrick frequently show him with a book in his lap, absorbed in reading. “I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes and take things off the shelf,” Kubrick told a Rolling Stone interviewer. “If I don’t like the book after a bit, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised.”1

  Kubrick eagerly kept up with new movies and, on the phone, with Hollywood gossip. “Knowledge is power,” the agent Sandy Lieberson said about Kubrick’s phone habit, adding that Kubrick didn’t pursue scurrilous details, but had to know everything significant that was happening in the industry. Warner Bros executive Steve Southgate commented that Kubrick “was the one person who knew how the film industry worked—in every country in the world. He knew all of the dubbing people, the dubbing directors, the actors.”2

  Kubrick was concerned with the industry in part because he wanted films shown in more ideal conditions. He complained as usual about the bad state of movie projection: “Fifty percent of the prints are scratched. Something is usually broken. The amplifiers are no good, and the sound is bad. The lights are uneven,” he groaned. Kubrick’s concern with how his movies were shown was not “some form of demented anxiety,” he insisted, but a reasonable response to an awful situation.3

  Kubrick liked to see as many movies as he could, and he admired some directors very far from him in style, like Mike Leigh and Claudia Weill, whose Girlfriends (1978) he praised rapturously. A fan of American football, he also much appreciated the Super Bowl ads, especially, he told an interviewer, the Michelob commercials. Kubrick remarked that their editing and photography were “some of the most brilliant work I’ve ever seen. Forget what they’re doing—selling beer—and it’s visual poetry. Incredible eight-frame cuts. . . . If you could ever tell a story, something with some content, using that kind of visual poetry, you could handle vastly more complex and subtle material.”4

  The Kubricks’ marriage was still a happy one. “I was the best entertained woman ever, and I think I was also the best loved one,” Christiane said after Stanley died.5 Yet Kubrick’s final movie shows the trouble and the promise that disrupt marriage. Even after forty years of talking, something still remains unsaid between a couple. Intimacy brings with it the danger of saying too much, saying the wrong thing, or being too silent, and it makes us wonder how much we really want to know about the other person. Kubrick in his last movie fully depicts these grown-up risks, for the first time in his career.

  The path to Eyes Wide Shut wasn’t a straight one. Kubrick in the nineties was occupied with two other possible films, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the movie he finally handed over to Spielberg, and The Aryan Papers, his planned Holocaust film. He settled on Eyes Wide Shut rather than the others for several reasons, but mostly because he realized that this project was at the core of who he was, something he had to work out before he died. Eyes Wide Shut grapples with the adult fantasies of men and women, whereas the other two movies focus on a young boy. Kubrick was leaving childhood behind, and, in the case of A.I., leaving it in Spielberg’s hands.

  The Aryan Papers absorbed much of Kubrick’s attention in the early nineties. He had read Louis Begley’s recent novel Wartime Lies, based on his experience as a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland. Begley and his mother saved themselves by pretending to be Polish gentiles. (In his novel, and in Kubrick’s planned film, the mother becomes the child’s aunt.) Wartime Lies is harrowing in its depiction of Jewish helplessness. The shrewdness of the boy Maciek and his aunt Tania is not polished but desperate. There are moments of Jewish defiance in the book, but they lead only to disaster: death is everywhere.

  Begley’s story ends with uncertainty about what has happened to the boy Maciek, whether he has anything in common with the middle-aged man who remembers his story. The dizzying gap between past and present, between the boy and the man he becomes, testifies to the impossibility of fully grasping the Holocaust’s meaning: if you weren’t there, you don’t know, and even if you were, you still don’t know.

  The boy in Begley’s novel resembles the one in Zweig’s Burning Secret, another unmade Kubrick film, as well as Danny in The Shining. All try to reckon with a dangerous adult world while still keeping their distance. For the child, refusing to understand certain grown-up facts may be the key to survival, Kubrick implies. Just as Danny holds his hands over his eyes, Begley’s Maciek relies on the aunt who shields him from the untold looming disaster of the Shoah.

  If Kubrick was going to make his long-delayed Holocaust movie, he would have to decide what to show and what to conceal, both from his viewers and from his child protagonist. In some sense Maciek’s innocence, like that of the boy in Imre Kertesz’s novel Fatelessness (1975), reflects our own, since we don’t know how to think about such systematic murderousness, and have a hard time imagining a suitable on-screen presentation of it.

  Kubrick had read many books on the Holocaust, but he felt, like any serious student of the Jewish catastrophe, far from actually understanding it. Many years earlier, in 1976, Kubrick had sent his brother-in-law Jan Harlan to New York to ask Isaac Bashevis Singer to write a screenplay about the Shoah. The famed Yiddish storyteller admired Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, but he told Harlan that there was only one problem with his writing a script about the Holocaust: he knew nothing whatever about the subject. When Kubrick heard this from Harlan, he commented: I know just what he means.6

  Fifteen years later, Kubrick found Wartime Lies and, taking the plunge, wrote the screenplay himself. By the fall of 1993 preparations for The Aryan Papers seemed complete. Filming was set to start in February 1994 in Aa
rhus, Denmark, where wartime Warsaw would be re-created. Kubrick had chosen Joseph Mazzello, who had appeared in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), to play Maciek and the Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege to play his aunt. Then suddenly in November 1993 Warner Bros announced that Kubrick’s next movie would be not The Aryan Papers but A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

  Kubrick dropped The Aryan Papers because he learned that Spielberg was making a Holocaust movie, Schindler’s List, guessed that it would be released about the same time as his movie, and didn’t want the films to compete. Yet there must have been other reasons too. He was, Christiane remembered, increasingly depressed and troubled by the subject matter. “If you show the atrocities as they actually happened,” Christiane said years later, “it would entail the total destruction of the actors. Stanley said he could not instruct actors how to liquidate others and could not explain the motives for the killing. ‘I will die from this,’ he said, ‘and the actors will die, too, not to mention the audience.’ ” One scene from the master script dated October 5, 1992, depicting women being raped by the Nazis’ Ukrainian collaborators, suggests how hard it would have been to film The Aryan Papers: “They raped them publicly, singly, in groups, on the ground, leaning them against broken walls of houses. Some women were made to kneel, soldiers holding them from the back by their hair, their gaping mouths entered by penis after penis.”7

  Had he made The Aryan Papers, Kubrick would have had to depict an authority more coldly inhuman than any he had imagined so far, and a Jewish scrabbling for survival more dismal and compromised than most movie audiences were ready for. Bresson could have made such a movie, perhaps, but not Kubrick. It would have required an emotional nakedness that he had never attempted. The script that he wrote for The Aryan Papers is at times too easily melodramatic to suit the subject matter, and no doubt would have needed much work during shooting.

  A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the project that Kubrick finally decided to give to Spielberg, centers on a child, like The Shining and the unmade Aryan Papers: it’s about a robot boy adopted by a human family. Kubrick worked on A.I. on and off for more than a decade, with a series of writers, before he handed the project over to Spielberg in 1995. (Spielberg wound up using six hundred highly inventive storyboards developed for Kubrick by illustrator Chris Baker.)8 Kubrick gave up A.I. in part because he was waiting for CGI technology that could produce the movie’s special effects. But he also must have sensed that A.I. was in the end more a Spielberg than a Kubrick movie.

  A.I. needed Spielberg. Kubrick could never have sustained its heartrending portrait of the robot child David’s rivalry with his real-boy sibling, which climaxes when their mother, Monica, is forced to choose between the two, fearing that David might kill her biological son. When Monica abandons David in the woods, Spielberg echoes Hagar placing Ishmael a bowshot away from her so that she will not see the child die: David is an Ishmael, not a favored Isaac. David does not die, but like Maciek in Wartime Lies he endures persecution, surviving a Holocaust-like landscape where the Mechas, robots like David, are slaughtered for kicks by brutal humans. In a series of drafts Kubrick made clear the analogy between the Mecha pogrom and the Shoah.9

  After the nightmarish massacre of the Mechas, A.I. moves eventually toward a happy ending. David gets to spend a perfect day with his mother, who has been resurrected as a cyberimage eons after her death. The movie fulfills the wish for perfect union between mother and son, and there is no ironic distancing. The poignant sense that this is all just our dearest fantasy means we cling to it even more strongly.

  We want this ending desperately, holding it tightly to our defenseless moviegoing selves. A.I. is the most heartbreaking of films because it so fully conveys a child’s wish for complete parental love. Of all the films I have seen, it is the hardest for me to watch without crying. A.I. is finally a Spielberg movie, one of his best, rather than a Kubrick movie, because it makes sentiment work.

  Yet Kubrick was apparently the source of A.I.’s conclusion. According to Spielberg, “the whole last twenty minutes of the movie,” the blissful day that David enjoys with his mother, “were completely Stanley’s.” Kubrick scribbled a note in the margin of screenwriter Ian Watson’s treatment (dated June 10, 1991). “Tomorrow we’ll have a wonderful day,” Monica tells David during their reunion. But “there isn’t enough time,” Kubrick writes: Watson was picturing the reunion as eternal, while Kubrick, it seems, knew it had to end. Sara Maitland took over from Watson in May 1994. She remembered that “Stanley and I talked endlessly about mother love.”10

  With the end of A.I., which recovers childhood innocence, Kubrick looked back to his earlier portraits of the imperiled, lonely child. He rewrites the disillusioned final moments of Barry Lyndon, where Barry and his mother, like Bullingdon and Lady Lyndon, share an all too mature bond born of hard experience. A.I. also revises the ending of 2001. Instead of the godlike Starchild ascendant all alone, ready to shape worlds, this child wants only for the mother who rejected him to tell him how much she loves him.

  Kubrick had been reading Proust, who begins In Search of Lost Time with the most famous goodnight kiss in literature. But David’s love for his mother is not like the boy Marcel’s. Monica seems like his child, or his toy, saying just what he wants her to when he tucks her in at night. Monica is simply, completely pleased by David, suggesting that the parent is herself a kind of robot. We know that this is all only make-believe, and that David’s day has to end. Yet clinging to this one artificially created memory is all he has ever wanted. There is no hint of playful argument between mother and son, of the kind that animates real parent-child relationships.

  David’s need for his mother’s love in the closing scene of A.I. is so simple and open that, as the critic Molly Haskell points out, we are disconcerted.11 Is this something from a fable or are its roots in human life? Spielberg lets us be unsettled even as we embrace David’s feelings, which give us a window into our deepest, most vulnerable child selves.

  A.I., the Aryan Papers, and Eyes Wide Shut all present characters who are locked into their roles and cannot be authentic: the robot boy who yearns to be accepted as real, the Jewish child forced to masquerade as a gentile, and the man Bill Harford who cannot quite dare to break through from dreaming about a sexual adventure to actually having one. Like Barry Lyndon, Bill remains on the outside looking in even when he’s at the center of the action.

  The source for Eyes Wide Shut, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese Jew and a rough contemporary of Freud, had for decades been one of Kubrick’s obsessions.

  In his interview with Robert Ginna just after he finished making Spartacus, Kubrick revealed that he was already a passionate Schnitzler enthusiast nearly forty years before Eyes Wide Shut. “For my part it’s difficult to find any writer who understood the human soul more truthfully,” he told Ginna. Schnitzler, he said, “had a very sympathetic, if somewhat all-seeing cynical point of view.” He predicted that Lolita would resemble Schnitzler, with “a surface of comedy and humor and vitality, and only gradually, as the story progresses, do you penetrate beneath this surface.”12 He said that after Lolita he was going to make a movie based on one of Schnitzler’s works. He probably meant Dream Story, which is among the hundreds of books that Kubrick shipped from London when he moved to New York with Christiane and his daughters in 1964.

  The Schnitzler novella centers on a couple with a small daughter. The husband, Fridolin, and his wife, Albertine, exchange stories about their sexual fantasies, and Fridolin, struck by jealousy, sets out to have sex with another woman. He doesn’t succeed: after a series of near-misses, including a visit to a masked orgy, he returns home from this “senseless night with its stupid unresolved adventures.”13 Dream Story ends with Fridolin confessing to Albertine the story of his night wanderings. The couple reaffirm their love and, at dawn, hear their daughter’s laughter coming from the next room.

  The plot of Eyes Wide Shut stays close to Schnitzler, with Frid
olin and Albertine transformed into Bill Harford, a present-day New York doctor, and his wife, Alice. But the mood of the film differs from that of the novel. The ultradomestic Kubrick makes adulterous letting go look both stifled and stifling, while Schnitzler gives erotic fantasy more room to play.

  In a 2012 interview, Kirk Douglas claimed that Kubrick first found out about Schnitzler’s novella from Douglas’s psychiatrist, Herbert Kupper, during the making of Spartacus.14 This could be true, but it is tempting to think that Kubrick’s second wife, Ruth Sobotka, a Viennese Jew from Schnitzler’s milieu, gave him the book.

  However he discovered it, Schnitzler’s Dream Story rapidly possessed Kubrick. He was galvanized by it, but also afraid of it, as was Christiane Kubrick. “Stanley was frightened of making the movie when he first read the novel,” Nicole Kidman reported. According to Tom Cruise, when Kubrick wanted to make Dream Story after Lolita, “Christiane told me she said, ‘Don’t . . . oh, please don’t . . . not now. We’re so young. Let’s not go through this right now.’ ”15

  Dream Story has a stylish air that bespeaks the man of the world, the promiscuous, socially adept author Arthur Schnitzler, but also a naked insight into the fantasies that live within a marriage. This nakedness frightened Kubrick, and Christiane too.

  By the early seventies Kubrick’s third marriage had proven its stability, and it seemed as if he was finally ready to make his Schnitzler movie. In April 1971 Warner Bros production executive John Calley, Kubrick’s main patron at the studio, announced that the next Kubrick movie would be a version of Dream Story. Yet again Kubrick veered off: he decided to make Barry Lyndon instead.

  For decades Kubrick was apprehensive about the self-exposure the Schnitzler project would exact from him. Dream Story was never far from his mind, but he could not actually commit himself to such an intimate, self-revealing movie. In the seventies he fantasized about casting an actor in Dream Story who would have a comedian’s resilience, imagining Steve Martin or Woody Allen in the leading role. The film would be in black and white, perhaps a bittersweet romantic comedy like Allen’s Manhattan (1979). In a notebook from the eighties he listed a series of possible leading men, including Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Alan Alda, Albert Brooks, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, and “Sam Shepherd????”16 Significantly, when Kubrick finally made his version of Dream Story, he cast an actor without a comic bone in his body, the earnest, highly deliberate Tom Cruise. Comedy would have been a weapon for the hero’s self-defense; Kubrick makes him, in the end, defenseless.