In Memoriam: Stanley Kubrick

	Stanley Kubrick died on Sunday, March 7, 1999 at Childwickbury—a vast manor house on a 172-acre estate north of London. With his passing, one of the world's great directors has ended a career that, with the planned release this summer of the controversial Eyes Wide Shut, will have spanned five decades. All of Mr. Kubrick's films were notable, some of them truly deserving the appellation great. Some have called Mr. Kubrick's new film "the most ardently awaited event in modern film history" (Peter Lennon, "Kubrick's Secret," World Press Review 43, no. 8 [August 1996]: 45-47). As a callow young college student, I was completely bowled over by 2001, A Space Odyssey. This film and a few others I first saw in college (Blowup, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, and Jules and Jim) engendered in me an abiding love for film and convinced me that film was an art form equal to that of the novel. I also acquired then a deep respect for film as a medium of social protest and a vehicle for political change.
		Director Stanley Kubrick at work on Full Metal Jacket, 1987

 

	Film critics have differed widely on the merits of several of Kubrick's films, especially The Shining and Barry Lyndon. Most dismiss Barry Lyndon as a film that just doesn't rank with Kubrick's others. Stephen Holden mirrors this attitude when he writes, "Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange were the high-water marks in a career that stumbled with Barry Lyndon (1975), a visually stunning but static film" ("Stanley Kubrick, Film Director With a Bleak Vision, Dies at 70," The New York Times, March 8, 1999). One critic who believes that Barry Lyndon integrates evenly with the rest of Kubrick's films is Thomas Allen Nelson, whose Kubrick: Inside A Filmmaker's Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) is both sympathetic and astute. Nelson writes of Barry Lyndon that "Unlike the first person involutions of Nabakov's Lolita and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Thackery's use of the unreliable narrator [which Kubrick successfully captures in the film] turns into a thinly veiled disguise for more encompassing satire directed against the excesses of the romantic imagination. His novel mourns [as does Kubrick's film] the loss of eighteenth-century dream of order rather than his narrator's shallow ambitions or personal tragedy (166)."
		Jack Nicholson in "The Shining"

 

While it may be true that Barry Lyndon—to me a fine film in the tradition of Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963)—has not been as popular as other Kubrick films, either critically or at the box-office, The Shining has occasioned more heated critical debate. Greg Smith argues cogently that "with The Shining Stanley Kubrick has created a film that is unnerving precisely because of the tension produced by the conflict among the horror film conventions in its surface plot, the indictment of American racist and sexist ideology in its subtext, and the satirical streak that runs throughout this political commentary and surrounding time-honored Gothic trappings. Perhaps most impressively, Kubrick also manages to implicate us as an American audience in this tragi-comic scenario in many ways, some visceral and some intellectual, all of which serve to expose our race and gender stereotypes; and it is no surprise that Kubrick, a director who indulges his penchant for using mirrors as cinematic devices in The Shining, ultimately suggests that his film is horrific not because it's about ghosts, but because it reflects us, its audience, as Americans" ("'Real horrorshow'": The juxtaposition of Subtext, Satire, and Audience Implication in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining," Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 4 [1997]: 300-306).

	Stanley Kubrick the film maker was a man whose work was viewed and enjoyed—or at least considered important and energetically discussed—by the entire world. But Mr. Kubrick himself was somewhat of an enigma. As Patrick Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times ("The Kubrick Mystique," 3-10-99) states, "Like Joe DiMaggio, who was Kubrick's boyhood idol growing up in the Bronx and who died within a day of the director, Kubrick had a fierce sense of privacy that gave him built-in mystique. He was as imperious as Hitchcock, as aloof and mysterious as Garbo. When he drove, he wore a safety helmet. He refused to fly after a near-fatal crash landing at an airport in New Jersey. In later years, he stayed up most of the night and slept during the day."
		On the Set of "Dr. Strangelove"

 

But other people contend that this popular view of Kubrick as obsessed and introvertive—a spiritual brother to the notorious Howard Hughes—is simply not true. Bernard Weinraub ("All Eyes for a Peek at Kubrick's Final Film") provides contradictory testimony from Warner Brothers executive, Julian Senior (senior vice president for European marketing). Mr. Senior reported: "To say [Kubrick] was reclusive is not true. He didn't want a photo spread about himself in Hello magazine, but he was aware of everything going on and especially with what was going on with his beloved New York Yankees. He loved life, he loved chess, he loved documentaries. You'd go over to his home and there'd be John le Carré in his kitchen. He was not reclusive at all."

 

	Director Stanley Kubrick in action

Copyright © 1999-2001 by T. Larry Verburg

lverburg@mindspring.com