Found: Stanley Kubrick's message (a reply)

Was the late Stanley Kubrick a great film director? If so, what made him great?

"There was never a characteristic look to any of his films, as there was to, say, one by Orson Welles, " Robert Zaller notes in BSR. (See "How good was Stanley Kubrick?")

On the contrary, Robert points out, "Kubrick seemed to want to explore every available genre: film noir in The Killing (1956), spectacle in Spartacus, black comedy in Dr. Strangelove, science fiction in 2001, costume drama in Barry Lyndon, horror in The Shining." If a common thread runs through Kubrick's films, Robert argues, it is misanthropy— that is, hatred of people.

As someone who loves Kubrick and people too, I dissent. For all the eclecticism of Kubrick's subject matter, common threads— even humanistic threads— do indeed connect virtually all of his films.

Spielberg's concern

One thread is Kubrick's genuine interest in the subject at hand, as opposed to the mere making of a movie. Because movie making is necessarily a vast organizational endeavor, directors often squander much of their psychic energy on the exhausting task of persuading legions of egotistical people to work together. It's no coincidence, I submit, that Woody Allen and Nora Ephron have been more incisive as essayists than as filmmakers. Yet Kubrick's films are marked by the sort of painstaking attention to detail that you'd expect from a solitary artist or scholar, working alone on a painting or a book.

Steven Spielberg, say, may genuinely care about portraying the face of battle (Saving Private Ryan) or honoring courage (Schindler's List) or bringing history to life (Lincoln), but his overriding priority is making his subject relevant and accessible to his audience. Woody Allen has no interest in his subjects at all, except as backdrops for his leading characters. (Whether they work out their neuroses in Manhattan, London, Paris, Rome or Barcelona is really irrelevant.)

Kubrick, virtually alone among directors, is usually concerned above all with the subject for its own sake. The fact that you can't always figure out the meaning of his films— that black monolith in 2001, or the stately, measured, drawn-out movements of the characters in Barry Lyndon, who seemed more to be posing for an artist than acting in a movie— is one sign of a great director, for it means the director's vision is entirely original; he's not using other films as a reference point.

Resuming the Cold War

To my mind, the consistent theme running through Kubrick's films is not misanthropy but the absurdity of human institutions. It began most explicitly in Paths of Glory (1957), with the World War I execution of three French soldiers who were chosen at random to die for the cowardice of their regiment. Spartacus (1960) portrayed a Roman "civilization" too full of itself to realize that its foundations were built on slavery and cruelty.

Dr. Strangelove (1964) provided the comic spectacle of the world's great powers drawing up plans to resume their cold war after a global nuclear holocaust. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) exploded the belief that man can conquer space or nature. A Clockwork Orange (1971) demolished the notion that thought control can be put to benevolent social uses. Barry Lyndon (1975) exposed the absurdity of 18th-Century Britain's gentlemanly code. Full Metal Jacket (1987) did much the same thing for basic training.

Beauty in art

Professor Zaller acclaims the artistically gorgeous Barry Lyndon as his favorite among Kubrick's films because of its "formalism" and its "sheer compositional control," even though, Zaller contends, Kubrick "no longer had much to say," whereas the equally formalist French director Robert Bresson put his art "in the service of a deeply humanistic vision."

Barry Lyndon— with its careful and loving attention to color, taste and 18th-Century period detail, and its scenes resembling actual paintings by Gainsborough and Hogarth— is one of my favorites, too, but precisely because of its deeply humanistic message. To me, Barry Lyndon is perhaps the most provocative portrayal of a consistent Kubrick theme: the insignificance of the human animal in the mind of God, and the absurdity of the human delusion that we control our own destinies.

The beauty that Kubrick presents in Barry Lyndon lies in nature and in one's built environment, not in people themselves; the characters in Barry Lyndon, powdered and costumed though they may be, are pale, cold and deathly figures, mere statuettes placed rather capriciously in one tableau or another by an unseen artist— a notion Kubrick constantly reinforced by pulling his camera away from his characters until they are dwarfed by the lush beauty of the surrounding hills and valleys.

Long pauses

All that survives of human endeavor, Kubrick seemed to be saying, is the beauty we produce— the paintings, music, sculpture, architecture, dance. The rest— as evidenced by the totally illogical rise of Barry Lyndon's protagonist and his equally illogical subsequent downfall— is vanity.

(Like Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's 2001 ends in a Baroque room, somewhere within the outer reaches of the mind of God but far beyond the grasp of mere mortals like you or me.)

Barry Lyndon also represents a rare film attempt to understand the past on its own terms, rather than through our modern eyes. Does the film seem to move at an excruciatingly slow pace? Do its characters seem prone to unnecessarily long pauses before speaking and moving? Well, what seems slow for the 21st Century may not have been slow at all for an age in which time was valued— and measured— far differently.

Pepys without an iPod

The unhurried pace of Barry Lyndon replicated the feel of the 17th-Century diary of Samuel Pepys, who spent much of his days calling upon British government officials, only to find that they weren't in. Yet this wasted time never disturbed Pepys; he simply took it for granted. In an age without telephones, iPods or even (for most people) watches, people had lower expectations of what they could achieve with their time and thus were in less of a hurry.

Similarly, do the characters in Barry Lyndon seem absurdly impressionable? The glamorous Lady Lyndon, the narrator informs us, fell in love with Barry "six hours after she met him, and with no effort on his part beyond a glance or two." The problems of young Barry himself are set in motion when he glimpses his cousin Nora's breasts and, heady with what he thinks is love, challenges her suitor to a duel, the aftermath of which forces him to flee his home.

But such naiveté and gullibility were the rule rather than the exception before the advent of mass media rendered everyone in Western civilization worldly-wise and street-smart.

Ghoulish glow

Each time you watch Barry Lyndon— and, like most Kubrick films, it repays frequent viewings— it's interesting to note at what point Kubrick's imagery meshes with his message. For me it occurred in the nighttime scene at the gaming table in Spa, Belgium, where Barry first meets Lady Lyndon. Four characters sit there, staring across the table, a Schubert piano trio in the background, their measured movements and pale, impassive faces illuminated only by the ghoulish orange glow of a candelabrum in the dark room.

My God, I found myself thinking as I watched them, these people are light years away from us. And so they are, in a sense.

But then, so are the characters in 2001, Spartacus, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory. What Kubrick did repeatedly was take us some place very far away, and yet also closer than we care to think. We should not be annoyed about the strangeness of the place, but grateful that we can make the journey at all.♦


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