How good was Stanley Kubrick?

It's one thing to get your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but another to get sort of the full-dress canonization that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has bestowed on the late Stanley Kubrick. Well, film is an art— at least occasionally— and Los Angeles is the place to celebrate it.

But museums exist to provide critical perspective, not simply adulation. So amid the acre of space devoted to the props, stills, costumes, equipment, storyboards and videos from Kubrick's 13 actual films, plus abandoned projects, the question remains: How good was Kubrick?

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) started out as a Bronx wunderkind with a camera and little else, shooting films on the cheap. His very first feature, though, drew a superlative from the literary critic Mark Van Doren, who remarked that a single set-up shot showed such genius that it marked Kubrick for greatness.

Gay innuendo

It didn't take Hollywood long to discover him, and Kubrick soon had studio backing and the talents of Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Lawrence Olivier at his disposal. In Spartacus (1960), the film that clinched Kubrick's commercial reputation, Olivier played one of his finest film scenes ever as a decadent Roman aristocrat trying to seduce a slave played by Tony Curtis. Olivier was at his lubricious best, and Curtis was seduced, for a change, into acting.

Of course, that scene— certainly the best in the film— had to be shot as innuendo, given the anti-gay codes of the day, but still it was too much for the censors and wound up on the cutting-room floor, not to be seen for decades.

From the beginning, Kubrick showed his propensity for cycling through styles and genres; there was never a characteristic look to any of his films, as there was to, say, one by Orson Welles. You might say that this was to Kubrick's credit, as he sought to give each of his films its own distinctive frame— indeed, worked so hard at doing so that studio bosses worried whether he'd ever actually finish the product.

Opera without words

Spartacus was Kubrick's fifth film, and he was 30 when he completed it; only eight more followed over the next four decades. He got the effects he wanted, but at a price: There were 13 different Kubricks in the end, with little sense of a common project or connection.

In the same way, 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. About the only thing he never got around to was a musical, unless one counts 2001, which is so bathed in sound that it becomes at times an opera without words.

Kubrick's eclecticism has led to debates about whether he should be really classed as an auteur, the French coinage for a director who shapes every aspect of his film and achieves a signature style. The answer is yes by the first criterion, and no by the second one.

Ear for music

As the Museum's exhibit makes clear, Kubrick determined every detail of his productions, even inventing new lenses to capture the look he sought. He rarely used an original screenplay or score, and reportedly spent hundreds of hours listening to Baroque music to get the background he wanted for Barry Lyndon.

In the same way, he gave his actors considerable freedom on the set but insisted on legendarily long takes for every scene until he got (or discovered) exactly what he wanted from them. He imposed nothing but demanded everything.

Still, attention to detail isn't the same as vision. Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus, Kubrick's first two big Hollywood features, are conventional in their outlook, the first an anti-war saga in the mold of All Quiet on the Western Front and the latter a dig at the McCarthy era in the guise of an ancient slave uprising. Kirk Douglas— always better as a villain— is the picture of jut-jawed moral righteousness in both films, but Kubrick was never to have a hero again.

Bent for satire

With his underrated Lolita (1962) and with what I suppose is his masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove (1964), Kubrick discovered his real bent, satire, and his real stance, misanthropy.

It's instructive to compare James Mason's Humbert Humbert in the Kubrick Lolita with that of Jeremy Irons in the later Adrian Lyne version. Mason's Humbert suffers from his passion for Lolita but never elicits our sympathy; the general distaste, not to say revulsion that he exhibits for everything but the object of his desire makes us repay him in coin. By contrast, Irons emerges as a genuinely vulnerable and an at least quasi-tragic figure.

In Strangelove, everyone is straightforwardly a villain or a fool, and there's no possible question of sympathy for any of Kubrick's characters, or indeed for the human race as such. Technically, Strangelove can be classed as an anti-war film, but it is really an apocalyptic, not to say a nihilistic one.

Farewell to politics

Kubrick can't be faulted for this attitude; it's difficult to imagine any other suitable response to the insanity of the Cold War atomic stalemate, embodied in the acronym for the strategic doctrine of MAD— Mutual Assured Destruction. At the same time, Dr. Strangelove could only have been produced in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, when a sobered leadership on both sides of the Atlantic was at last prepared to step back from brinksmanship.

Still, it took courage and a goodly dose of Swiftian indignation to make Strangelove. But Strangelove was also a film about the renunciation of politics. From that point on, although Kubrick would continue to be fascinated by violence, his standpoint would be anthropological, as in 2001 (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

My favorite among Kubrick's later films is Barry Lyndon (1975), which is generally regarded as a failure except by film buffs enamored of its technical virtuosity. What appeals to me is precisely its formalism; there's no real human engagement in it, and even its not inconsiderable violence and cruelty is so elegantly framed as to remove much of the sting. Kubrick literally translated dozens of 18th-Century paintings to the screen, giving a quite distinctive twist to the idea of the tableau vivant.

Where are the women?

For sheer compositional control, Barry Lyndon rivals the work of even the greatest of formalists, the French director Robert Bresson. The difference, of course, is that Bresson's art was in the service of a deeply humanistic vision, whereas Kubrick no longer had much to say.

It was to be downhill from there. The Shining (1980) does give one the creeps, but it's a cold and repellent film, tediously drawn out, and shocking in its misogyny. One can't help wonder whether its demented protagonist, the blocked writer Jack, doesn't represent some of Kubrick's own artistic— or, in this case, autistic— frustrations; certainly, the savagery with which he turns on his hapless wife bespeaks a quite gratuitous hatred of the female sex.

Kubrick was said to be a happily married man who often spoke affectionately of his own wife, but that of course is quite beside the artistic point. It may mean something, too, that a man so devoted to the camera left behind exactly one photograph of himself with his family. Certainly it's no coincidence that you will search Kubrick's entire oeuvre without finding a single memorable or independent female character.

Basic training

Kubrick returned to the subject of war in Full Metal Jacket (1987), and that film's brilliant 15-minute opening only throws the debacle of the remainder into high relief. The quarter-hour that's worth watching concerns the brutality of basic training— that is, of forced bonding in a coercive, all-male setting.

For whatever reason, this subject powerfully engaged Kubrick, but the stimulus didn't carry over into the body of the film, whose violence was merely episodic and disjointed. War itself, it seemed, had become too messy a subject for him to deal with, its inherent chaos no longer lending itself to compositional control.

A dozen years intervened before Kubrick's next and final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a work whose title seems a good prescription for how to watch it. Here the subject is orgy, a form of combat that lends itself to greater stylization, and whose consequence is the disintegration of a marriage.

Confronting Jewishness

On a subtextual level, Eyes Wide Shut is in some respects a retelling of The Shining, but without the manic spark. It was dutifully praised— at this point, criticism of Kubrick was almost an act of lèse majesté— but it flopped at the box office, and a few months later Kubrick died of a heart attack.

In between Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick planned but never executed a film about the Holocaust to have been called The Aryan Papers. As was typical of him, he poured a great deal of research into the project, and some of the memorabilia are collected in this exhibit. Explanations differ as to why Kubrick abandoned it; some have argued, unconvincingly, that the appearance of Schindler's List led him to conclude that the market for Holocaust films would be saturated.

It was also reported that Kubrick had fallen into depression while working on it. Judaism doesn't figure as such in any of Kubrick's other work, although it has been I think truly said that his own Jewishness lay in many respects at its core. Perhaps he simply found he couldn't confront it directly, but we'll probably never know.

Like Antonioni

Van Doren was right; Kubrick was touched with genius. Walking through the exhibition rooms, one is reminded how many of his images are iconic for us today, from the black monolith of 2001— actually a rather modest-sized rectangle— to the typewriter of The Shining, with the ominous sheet of paper stuck in it that famously reads, over and over, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Most impressive, perhaps, is the long display case of Kubrick's many cameras and lenses, a reminder of his inventiveness and perfectionism, and of the care he took with each frame of film. If the whole of his career wasn't quite the sum of its parts, he never took small risks, and his legacy will be debated for a long time to come.

Like his elder Italian contemporary Michelangelo Antonioni, Kubrick's subject was anomie, the ways in which we fail to connect. It was a large 20th-Century theme, and it made both for his success and his failure.♦


To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, see his Editor's Notebook.
To read responses, click here.