If you’ve ever enjoyed shouting out your version of Jack Nicholson’s version of “Heeere’s Johnny!,” if limitlessly foulmouthed drill sergeants crack you up, if you can tell the theme of Also Sprach Zarathustra from the first note (even if you don’t know its name), if you’ve ever used words like “strangelove” or “horrorshow,” and if you’ve ever described a night out to your buddies as “an eyes wide shut party,” then you’ve fallen under the influence of one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick.
And if you’re old enough to remember Kubrick’s heyday, the Sixties, then you also remember how those films mirrored and even helped define the era, its desires, its fears, its hopes, and ultimately an awareness of a deeper darkness closing in.
Kubrick’s first Sixties movie was Spartacus, although because that movie was controlled by its star, Kirk Douglas, and at first had a different director, Anthony Mann, he never considered it one of ‘his’. But as a hired gun Kubrick brilliantly orchestrated a film that broke from the saccharine religiosity of most Hollywood epics, took the genre into angry and tragic territory, and unforgettably depicted the terror of the ancient Roman army’s phalanxes and the wiliness and viciousness of Roman politics. Douglas’ heroism and Kubrick’s atmosphere combined to create the best Hollywood epic until Lawrence Of Arabia.
With Lolita and its cheeky, scabrous reflection of the Sixties’ sexual revolution, Kubrick was back in his own hipster territory. Vladimir Nabokov adapted the screenplay from his novel, but the movie shows the Kubrick touch in the comedy of a man caught in a maze of his own illicit desires. The movie was softened by the censorship of the times, but its fascination came not from explicit sex but the way in which James Mason’s superficially civilized Humbert Humbert ensnares his adored way-too-young “nymphet” Lolita, only to have Lolita escape and trap him in a nastier snare with the help of Peter Sellers’ far more depraved Clare Quilty. The film invited its audience to a decade-long party while warning them about monsters of the id beneath.
Kubrick would flourish during the Sixties in part due to the greatly increased education and literacy of movie audiences. As part of its consequent adventurousness, that audience welcomed topical sick humor and satire as delivered by Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Mad Magazine, one of the cultural touchstones of the time. No one embraced that sensibility more than Kubrick, and his Dr. Strangelove, a comedy about America unintentionally attacking Russia with nuclear weapons, was a sensation when it opened, and was dubbed a Mad Magazine view of nuclear Armageddon.
MAD also stood for Mutually Assured Destruction, the Sixties Pentagon’s absurd but accurate concept that the nuclear-armed United States and Soviet Union would never go into battle because they would be too successful—as in destroying each other and the entire planet. Strangelove was full of that kind of absurdity: perfectly ordered sets as the background of lunatic actions, and verbal absurd-isms like “You can’t fight here, this is the war room.” Peter Sellers plays three roles: the President, the eponymous weapons scientist Dr. Strangelove, and Lionel Mandrake, an archetypal Kubrick protagonist: a smart, sane, but comically faltering British military man caught in a maze of codes and regulations that protect the madness as he tries to stop the nuclear attack machine. It’s no surprise how Dr. Strangelove ends – what seems surprising in retrospect is how much Sixties audiences could enjoy it, acknowledging as it did their own worst fears about nuclear doomsday.
But for all the lusts and fears of the era, there was also great hope embodied in humankind’s leap into space, and Kubrick captured that in his most beloved film. A supreme film technician, Kubrick took full advantage of Sixties innovations in filmic special effects — the 1963-1964 World’s Fair and Montreal Expo 67 exhibits reveled in “trick photography” and multiscreen experiments — to create 2001, a giant-screen sci-fi epic with the immersive spectacle of a World’s Fair ride movie, whose story was nothing less than a journey from the beginnings of human intelligence to infinite space. When it opened it seemed a disaster, panned by critics, satirized by Mad Magazine as “201 Minutes of Space Idiocy.” But in part due to a clever ad line, “The ultimate trip,” that both described its staggering visuals and referenced the LSD drug trips that every hip young baby boomer was aware of, the film broke through to younger audiences and became another classic.
The story by Kubrick and Arthur Clarke had its own man-machine battle between an astronaut and the computer HAL, who decides, with true Kubrickian absurdity, that man’s greatest mission is too important to be left to humans. But the fruit of the astronaut’s victory over the machine is a final meeting with the black monolith that periodically beckons human intelligence to its next step, and a transfiguration that suggests the supposedly cynical Kubrick wanted to convey an almost spiritual belief in the perfectibility of the human mind.
In his next science fiction film Kubrick’s muse grew far darker. A Clockwork Orange, premiering in 1971 but developed from Anthony Burgess’ novel in the late Sixties, tells the story of Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell, a vicious young criminal made “good” by behavioral conditioning, but also turned into a powerless victim for a society that then takes revenge on him. The film pits the visual splendor of Alex’ hyper-mod “ultraviolent” world against a satirically envisaged corrupt (and very dingy) regime and Alex’ own extremes of behavior, all to propose that the human passion for art and freedom of choice comes at the price of the urge to violence, but still is preferable to total repression. When I was young I responded not only to that liberating thought but the excitement of an American film dramatizing with dazzling power such a sophisticated philosophical point (it was like hearing Dylan’s lyrics on Top 20 AM radio). Over forty years later I still find the Clockwork Orange view of humankind’s ‘juiciness’ as tied to potential violence but far more threatened by the machine within and without a bracing paradox and a timely warning.
In his three subsequent films Kubrick stuck with variations of that dark vision of civilized (or semi-civilized) characters fighting to escape the black hole of innate chaos and violence. The exquisitely photographed Barry Lyndon, with its tale of a passionate but low-class rake achieving wealth and status only to be destroyed by the aristocrats of his elegantly murderous society, remains a Kubrick movie that it seems only photographers and hardcore Kubrick fans can love. But the horror masterpiece The Shining and the Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket became hits, perhaps in part because they’re reminiscent of Kubrick’s great Sixties films. The Shining is almost the shadow of 2001 in its sense of space, pace, eerie music, and its story of a hapless writer and his family sucked into the Overlook Hotel’s nightmare ghost maze, which seems the opposite of 2001’s monolith, devolving the writer into a homicidal maniac. And Full Metal Jacket recalls Strangelove’s black antiwar humor, as a marine recruit whose wit and grit earn him the name Joker in the end can’t beat but only join what the Vietnam War machine does to his platoon.
That kind of worldview earned Kubrick what Michael Herr, in his terrific articles about Kubrick following the director’s death, lambasted as “strangely disrespectful” obituaries and tributes.* The putdowns constituted myopic criticism that never was as smart about Kubrick as the moviegoing public, and never even grasped his return to a more optimistic view in his last imperfect, possibly unfinished, but still gorgeous and haunting Eyes Wide Shut, a movie where the lusts and jealousies of Lolita are resolved in familial reconciliation. When Tom Cruise strays from his scornful wife Nicole Kidman the maze that catches him up is a kind of sexual fever dream that’s often a nightmare — but he does awaken and return to his wife, and when he asks her what they should do about where their relationship is at that point, she replies, in the last word ever spoken in a Kubrick film, “Fuck.”
Not a bad way for the Sixties’ finest filmmaker to leave us.
*For Michael Herr’s excellent and truly in-depth appreciations of Kubrick as an artist and a man, see the August 1999 VANITY FAIR article, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/classic/features/kubrick-199908, and the April 2000 VANITY FAIR article, available at http://mentalfoto.tripod.com/herr/herr.html.