At lunch the other day we somehow went from talking about Pixar films to talking about those of director Stanley Kubrick. Some people love Kubrick’s films, but I don’t, having seen five and not enjoyed any of them.
Whenever I think of Kubrick, I recall my high school film class teacher (who introduced me to my favorite film, North by Northwest) who said something to the effect that Kubrick was more concerned with where his electrical wires were going than with the script or acting.
Yes, Kubrick’s films do look great, but I realized over lunch that my basic problem with them is that they feel emotionless, even downright soulless.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a great example of this: The characters are flat and colorless. Dave Bowman is memorable only because Keir Dullea is an interesting-looking guy, and the orange spacesuits are distinctive. But the most human-seeming of the character is HAL, the computer. The film looks great, but it also feels lifeless, the direction and editing carefully constructed to make the whole film seem alien. It’s not about humanity’s encounter with the alien, it’s some weird zombie form of humanity encountering the alien, and evolving into something even more alien. The sequel film 2010 is a much warmer and more human film, and is more fun to boot. Not to say it doesn’t have plenty of flaws, but I’d much rather watch it again than its predecessor.
Full Metal Jacket, which certainly deals with powerful subject matter (the Vietnam War), felt decidedly bland when I saw it. Ironically, the IMDb summary of the film starts with the phrase “A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War…”, where it seems to me that Kubrick does a pretty good job of dehumanizing the characters in his films anyway.
Of the Kubrick films I’ve seen, I’d say I liked The Shining the best (and I don’t really care for horror films). The sense in Kubrick’s films that we’re seeing all this happen from a distance, that the people are just little chess pieces being moved around by the plot, perhaps plays better in a horror film, where the humans are often not the ones in control. I don’t think it’s a great film, I have no desire to see it again, but I thought it worked well enough for what it is.
(The other two films of his that I’ve seen are Dr. Strangelove, which I found neither insightful nor funny, and A Clockwork Orange, which I detest more than any other film I can think of.)
Overall my most charitable description of Kubrick’s films would be “well crafted”. But then, there are lots of directors who craft films well, and many who imbue their films with more humanity than Kubrick was able to. Usually I place a high value on craft in storytelling, but Kubrick’s films deploy his craft in the most superficial manner, completely failing to evoke any feeling in me as a viewer other than being impressed with the polish he brings to his settings. And that’s not nearly enough to make a great – or even good – film for me.
Huh. I found Dr. Strangelove very funny and disturbingly insightful; think A Clockwork Orange is quite horrifying; and like 2001 more than 2010. I agree none of the characters are deep, but for me that wasn’t a handicap: they were deep enough to make it clear what they were representing. 2001 is a movie where the emotionless antagonist (HAL) is more human than the protagonists because that’s the conflict that drives the story. Alex in ACO is amoral, conscienceless – inhuman, really – and in the end is victimized by being cast down into humanity. And so on.
Maybe it’s that none of the stories are about persons, they’re about people (collectively), and what humanity is like.
I agree with this blog post. I think that his films have been influential and taken a space in cultural conscious, and are visually striking. That said, I’ve always felt bored. I don’t feel anything about any of his chatacters. People always respond to that by saying “It’s about concepts, not emotion”. But I think if art is metaphor, the art is lost in cold explanation. I felt bored during the violence of Clockwork Orange, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible. I also hate the weird sexuality of his films and the way he uses female bodies. It’s just so shitty and beret-wearing-Art-School-dropout-dude to me. I liked the Shining ok (minus the eye roll inducing naked ghost scene) until the end, which was extremely stupid. All of his films also have close ups of peoples faces making exagerated terrified or menacing faces and that is always unintentionally hilarious to me.
Dr. Strangelove and Lolita. I find some of his films (and I’m a huge film buff) rather cold. (No, I’m not speaking of the winter in The Shining) But let’s consider The Shining. The book is psychologically much scarier. It’s hot with emotional and blood. The movie didn’t capture that feeling. The choice of actors was also odd except for the African American character. I ended up not caring about what happened to the family. But, in the book I was completely engrossed in their welfare.
This was written fucking ages ago, but I don’t care, because I came looking for something like it. It’s an added bonus that your favourite film is (or was) also my favourite film. NXNW is just the perfect blend of everything, isn’t it.
Onto Kubrick, though. I’ll start a little irregularly by saying that I recently saw 2001 on the big screen and fucking loved it. Yes, although the characters were cardboard and shallow, it was a monolithic ode to humanity’s capabilities and/or failings and/or destinies, depending on how you look at it, and it didn’t need warm authentic human dynamics to prop it up. The extended cuts of happenings within the station whilst the Blue Danube played were like taking a soft drug. Musical pleasure mixed with visual pleasure. I’d happily sit through an hour of something like that.
But I fully agree with your sentiment on his characters’ warmth/soulfulness. He couldn’t write genuine humanity and he couldn’t convey everyday human emotion at consistent junctures throughout a film if he had a thousand years to try. Hell, Floyd Hayward in 2001 didn’t even tell his daughter, who was on a different fucking PLANET to him, that he loved her. Instead, a lukewarm ‘take care and tell your Mother I called.’ The closest he got to a sequence of genuinely believable human dynamics that I’ve seen so far was the phone interplay between the President and the Russian President in Dr. Strangelove. That had a ring of finesse and wit about it, and I’m not sure where he pulled it from, having seen the rest of that film and several others.
I have no idea why his inability to write humanity/soul and convey it through the camera seems to be dismissed and ignored so readily by his hordes of fans. It’s an essential part of who we are. Art needs to have a soul behind it, or it’s indistinguishable from some glib piece put out by an AI. There’s JUST enough soul in 2001 for me to have been able to overlook its woodenness and appreciate it (greatly), but his other films that revolve around people and relationships do not have that luxury. For me, a fatal flaw in what was clearly a prodigious filmmaking mind, but many others don’t see it that way. Isn’t it interesting the way we perceive such things.