Copyright © 2002, 1999 by Michael
Segers, all rights reserved
Usually,
my articles on film are inspired by openings, but this article is in response to
a closing. In recent days, we have seen the passing of great ones: Joe DiMaggio,
a baseball player whose name is recognized by people who usually recognize
violinists’ names, Yehudi Menuhin, a violinist whose name is recognized by
people who more likely know the names of baseball players. And then, there is,
there was Stanley Kubrick, a director whose name is recognized by the audiences
who all so often do not recognize the names or the significance of the work of
directors.
Few
directors have had more impact on the role of directors before the audiences and
before the moguls of the studios alike. Across four decades, Kubrick earned and
deserved a reputation as obsessive, domineering, and along the way, sheerly
amazing, as he insisted on a degree of integrity and autonomy that Hollywood has
allowed very few directors. At his best, his films transcended the old dichotomy
of the movies—winning critical and popular appeal alike, while shaping the way
we look at movies as well as at life.
In
his limited body of works—limited only in number—Kubrick created icons that
are deeply imbedded in the consciousness of movie-goers, perhaps even of people
who don’t go to movies. There are the dancing planets of 2001 as well
as HAL’s breakdown; the strange, uncomfortable sensuality of Lolita;
Jack Nicholson’s face leering through the wall he has just demolished in The
Shining.
Few
directors can control such almost uncontrollable material. In fact, he seemed
drawn to finding the counter-logic of illogical situations: of war (Paths of
Glory and Full Metal Jacket), of the cold war (Dr. Strangelove),
of a complete breakdown of culture and language (A Clockwork Orange). He
drew on writers as diverse as Nabokov, Thackeray, Howard Fast and Stephen King
as the basis, sometimes perhaps no more than a starting point for his
reflections on evil, violence, and the loss of the basic bonds of human society.
In many ways, Barry Lyndon, the title character of that film, and Alex, of A
Clockwork Orange, are similar outsiders, separated by the centuries, using
the old ultra-violence in different ways.
Over
the years, various friends of mine have been champions of various Kubrick films.
Perhaps for a whole generation 2001 combined the hopes and fears that
technology inspires—and gave new life to Strauss’s Also Sprach
Zaarathustra among apes and disco dancers. Spartacus—the first film
on which scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo’s name appeared after he got out of
prison—transcends the sword-and-sandal genre and even managed to get itself
censored. Just how good Kubrick’s Lolita
is was shown by the recent
not-so-good remake. And yes, in Barry Lyndon, some scenes were shot by candlelight. If anyone knows anything
about Eyes Wide
Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and scheduled for summer
(1999) release, please let the rest of us know!
My
favorite is still A Clockwork Orange, a
film that I first went to see so that I could salivate over a failure. There was
no way, I was sure, way back in the early seventies, that anyone could begin to
capture Anthony Burgess’s fable about free will on film. But, I walked out of
that theater (yep, young’uns, an old-fashioned one-screener) with my eyes
aching and my mind in a turmoil.
For
those not familiar with the novel, it was written in the early sixties by
Anthony Burgess, multi-lingual scholar, wit, raconteur, who, to create a fantasy
future, created a fantastic, futuristic language. A few words of quotation from
the first page may be worth a thousand words of description: “There
was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim
being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar, making up our rassoodocks
what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter….”
To
my surprise, Kubrick kept orange-speak, which turned out to be so much easier to
follow spoken than written. Even more surprising was that Kubrick created a
visual equivalent of Burgess’s language, outrageous, gaudy, painfully
beautiful. As if the film hadn’t held enough surprises for me, when I saw it
again, some two decades later, Kubrick’s horrible vision was not so outrageous
as it had seemed. No longer was it some sort of sociological science fiction.
Now, it was a reflection of the violence and ugliness, in spite of the beauty,
that I had experienced so often in the interval. A friend of mine insists that
Kubrick in this film singlehandedly created the whole Punk aesthetic. As I
remember it, he may have laid the foundations for MTV. By the time Kubrick
finished with the William Tell (or Lone Ranger) Overture in A
Clockwork Orange, it wasn’t
just for Kemo Sabe anymore. For me, more than any other film, A Clockwork
Orange freed me from my tendency to read
a film as I read a novel and to appreciate the sheer
movie-ness of a movie.
Kubrick
was a genius, with all the baggage that goes with that word. A poet, a
visionary, he seems, as with A Clockwork Orange not to mention Dr.
Strangelove, to have captured the essence of a time without being drowned in
it. He exercised such control over his actors that he brought some of them,
particularly Malcolm McDowell (who has often been his own worst enemy on screen)
in A Clockwork Orange, to the peaks of their craft. I suppose that my one wish about
a film involves The Shining, not a real favorite of mine. I wish I could
have been on the set, to see whether that frenzy came out of Nicholson, with
Kubrick trying to rein him in, or Kubrick—no stranger to the portrayal of rage
in other films—used Nicholson as an instrument. Perhaps (my bet) Nicholson’s
fury sprang from a meeting of two great artists.
And
yet there is always something hard and hollow at the core of Stanley Kubrick’s
films. They are too virtuosic. Perhaps Kubrick lost something in his refusal to
collaborate, in his insistence on making his films as nearly the product of a
single individual as a poem is. His filmic universe is always too framed, too
centered, too staged—and perhaps that is no complaint (again, see A
Clockwork Orange ). He was a clockwork Kubrick, a man fascinated by codes,
computers and the finer points of technological control. After all, from one
side of the theater, 2001 sounds like a love song about a relationship
with technology that goes horribly wrong.
But,
ultimately, when we watch Stanley Kubrick’s films, and how blessed we are to
have them, our eyes are connected to our minds, not our hearts. Heart is the
dimension of movie-ness that sets
this great wild, trashy, loving, lovable art form so far from its sister and
brother arts, not only in its conception but also in its reception. Stanley
Kubrick, maverick, trail-blazer, and so often such a success at what he set out
to do, may well be remembered as a director’s director, but as an audience’s
director, a far distant second.
This
week, instead of links to the web, I’m turning to another technology, mere
words, to list some films by Stanley Kubrick, and I choose my words carefully.
His films were not so much directed by Stanley Kubrick as they were truly by
him: Paths of
Glory, Spartacus, Lolita,
Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001:
A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. You
can probably find most of these at most video stores.
Wherever
you rove, on one web or another, whatever you rave about, movies or otherwise,
keep your feet dry, and your heart full of noble thoughts of people like Joe
DiMaggio, Yehudi Menuhin, and Stanley Kubrick. Yes, there are--these
were--giants among us.