User:Cslroy/Kubrick: Inside a Film Artists Maze

Kubrick: Inside a Film Artists Maze is a film criticism book about the director Stanley Kubrick written by Thomas Allen Nelson. Nelson analyzes the director's 13 feature films, including his early documentaries, and breaks down the often confusing conceptual aesthetic of Kubrick films.

The book was first published in 1982, with a new and expanded edition coming in 2000 after the death of Kubrick. The expanded editions contains chapters on Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick and The Aesthetics of Contingency

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

I hope to trace through the following chapters how Stanley Kubrick's film imagination increasingly took the shape of a series of conceptual and formal paradoxes. As early as the Look photographs and Day of the Fight, his film work aspired to be both realist and formalist in structure and style. From the time of Paths of Glory and Lolita, his films increasingly would balance a traditional humanism against the surrealist's fondness for satiric dislocation in their poignant and ironic depiction of the tragicomic nature of human experience.

From Fear and Desire to Paths of Glory

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

Paths of Glory marks the full emergence of a distinct film intelligence, and to a greater degree than his earlier work, Kubrick makes his presence know and felt in the complex worlds of the film. Through a visual definition of conflict, he integrates a series of disparate perspective through which the audience can respond to the emotional or psychological directions of character and, simultaneously, understand the film's paradoxical blending of irony and affirmation.

The Decent of Man

Nelson makes a case that Dr. Strangelove showed a significant change in Kubrick's directing style that the director himself was interested in:

The real image doesn't cut the mustard, doesn't transcend. I'm now interested in taking a story, fantastic and improbable, and trying to get to the bottom of it, to make it seem not only real, but inevitable.

The sexual concepts in the film is one of the largest aspects of Strangelove, which is taken to satiric characterizations. General Jack D. Ripper, named after the "history's most notorious sex offender." We see Major "King" Kong for the first time reading Playboy. The name of the primary bombing target is called "Laputa", which is Spanish for "whore". Major Kong continues the sexual motif when he takes out the survival kit and then straddles the bomb as it hits its target, creating what Nelson calls a "doomsday orgasm." General "Buck" Turgidson decodes as "swollen male animal who is the son of a swollen male animal." The sexual allegory along with eating and food, Nelson states, connect Kubrick's fictional world together.

Nelson analyses what he calls the film's major theme of man's descent into time. Firstly, with the way the characters are portrayed. Turgidson constantly apelike stances and slapping his belly while standing over the Playmate. Ripper crawling on the floor on all fours. Strangelove, for the first time in a Kubrick film, connects man and his fascination with machinery. The relationship, Nelson points out, helps cause man's decent back in time. Each of the three main settings become a dark cave or womb, where the machines that were once served as tools, become functions of destruction.

Nelson concludes the chapter stating:

In Dr. Strangelove, however, the machine assists a descent into time rather than an scent into space, one where the perfection of its logic and the beauty of its form paradoxically objectify a human retreat into fantasy and death. It stimulates Ripper's desire to play God and turn the clock back to a world of purity and the stasis of death. It creates the illusion in the War Room that mini-universe can be created and insulted from existensial truths (i.e., death no longer is even real) outside computerized gameboards.

The Ultimate Cinematic Universe

Nelson Concludes the chapter by stating:

In the final images of the film, the camera shows the Moon before it tilts down to reveal Earth on screen right - reversing the upward movement of the camera in the opening titles - and suggests the beginning of a new cycle, only now the Star-Child assumes its cosmic perspective... The Star-Child's bubble rotates like a planet, and his huge eyes look not only toward Earth below, its home and destination, but directly into the camera, like a humanized monolith mutely imploring the audience to ponder its mystery.

The Performing Artist

Nelson makes the case that A Clockwork Orange could be "nothing less than a psychological case study." The use of image and sound shows how Alex and the other characters in the film transform their psychological landscape:

     1. Exaggerated acting style and costumes;
     2. Stylized sets (Korova Milkbar);
     3. Ironic locations for symbolic purposes (an audio-visual theater used for Alex's treatment);
     4. Severe backlighting for night scenes, photolamps for interior scenes;
     5. Extreme close-ups and Wide-angle lenses;
     6. A variety of subjective shots (opening scene and in HOME rape scene);
     7. Violence through editing, choreography, and music;
     8. Obtrusive editing style (while Alex is masturbating to Beethoven);
     9. The sound and music composed on the Moog Synthesizer. 

Alex, Nelson thearizes, works from the inside out. From fantasy (what Nelson calls Alex's mindscreen) to performance (physical world). That characteristic separates Alex from all the other characters in the film. Nelson's explanation:

He [Alex] does not separate mind from body, reflection from action, the unconscious from social reality; nor does he transfer his sexual or violent urges onto objects and become, like others, a voyeur of his own degradation....Alex may stand and watch, even applaud, the tramp's song or Billyboy's gangbang, but ultimately he is a performer, not a voyeur, and he gives his inner world both a violent substance and an aesthetic form. Performance rather than sublimation defines his mode.

The Ludovico Technique is the films representations of "the horrors of an enforced social contract." Alex states that the first Ludovico film is "a very good, professional piece of skinny, like it was done in Hollywood." But as Nelson states:

What Alex fails to notice about such films, of course, is that they encourage (or force) an identification with victims rather than victimizers. But as a Hobbesian primitive (who is both free and innocent), he lacks the moral awareness to understand such intensions.

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

Kubrick invites his audience to revel in Alex's victory as both Alex's imagination and Beethoven's Ninth are liberated from the tyranny of time's engineers. In what becomes the last image of the film...Kubrick for the first time visualizes Alex's exultation ("I was cured all right") as a play of fantasy and performance.

A Time Odyssey

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

In the end, however, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon leaves its audience with something less tangible but far more enduring: the haunting memory of those last frozen images of Barry and Lady Lyndon, he with his back to the camera and falling into space, she lost forever in a distant mise-en-scene, and both imploring us to gaze with feeling and understanding at two film portraits that refuse to eviscerate humanity in the formal pursuit of art.

Remembrance of Things Forgotten

In the chapter dedicated to The Shining, Nelson makes the case that Jack Torrance descends into madness as he reconnects with the hotel and all the memories within it.

Nelson explains that the maze concept encompasses the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the film:

It not only helps explain Jack's madness (that is, the unconscious as a labryrinth is which the conscious self gets lost) but inspires the the Overlook's floor plan and decor (for instance, the maze pattern of the carpet outside Room 237)... Significantly, Jack wants to stay inside the hotel's maze rather than explore its surroundings (after closing day, he is not seen outside until that final chase through the snow into the hedge maze), to control the center (the Colorado Lounge) like a madly inspired God writing his book of creation. Symbolically, he wants to "forget" himself (Jack Torrance in present time), and to "remember" not how to escape from the center of the maze but how to command its static and enclosed timelessness. In contrast, the film associates both Wendy and Danny with "outside" worlds, with contingency and movement, which means from the beginning that they will either escape Jack's madness, if they "remember" how to retrace their steps, or be cornered in a no-exit hallway if they choose the wrong path.

The scenes in the Gold Room (with Jack and Lloyd), in Room 237 (Jack and the nude woman), and in the red bathroom of the Gold Room (Jack and Grady) represent Jack's unconscious and the hotel, in unison, "awaken". The color yellow becomes an association for Jack's eventual awakening:

The Grady murder corridor is decorated in yellow wallpaper; a lamp next to Jack's typewriter gives the paper a yellow texture; his face and eyes turn yellow like the bourbon in his glass during his talk with Lloyd; the hallway into the Torrance apartment is decorated with yellow-flowered wallpaper; as Jack stands outside the bathroom with the ax; his face and the walls take a yellowish glow from another lamp... and when he moves on his murderous course to intercept Hallorann, the hotel's interior lighting transforms the walls from daytime white into evening yellow.

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

In the mazes of parts one and two, Kubrick doubled Jack the writer/teacher with Jack the Monster, normality with its shadow, present time with a hideous memory lost but not forgotten. Now, past time reflects the image of normality (the 1921 photograph), and present time shows the visage of madness (the frozen. grotesque mask of death in the hedge maze).

The Kubrickian Thing

The subject of Carl Jung is the primary focus on Nelson breaking down Full Metal Jacket.

The first part of Full Metal Jacket, revolves around the psychological drama between Private Joker and Private Plye's relationship. The "Virgin Mary" scene, the blanket party scene, and the "latrine" scene provide the subtext of Jungian theories, that will come to the forefront in the second part as Nelson explains:

In the events of part two, the film will imply that Joker repressed the violent memory of Pyle's final madness, but without his conscious knowledge it paradoxically bivouacs in the same dark space where Pyle discovered his killer instinct. In the final reversal that produces the climax of Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick will ask us to recall Pyle's acts of madness and to understand their part in a paradoxical journey into Joker's humanity.

Nelson explains that Joker resembles Jung's negative archetype of the Tricker:

He is all reason (Logos) and no Feeling (Eros). Hence Joker's interruption of Hartman's opening monologue -"Is that you, John Wayne? Is this Me?"- represents the rational man's feeble attempt to defend himself against, as well as detach himself from, attacks by the Irrational and the Absurd.

While also deconstructing Private Pyle:

Private Plye lacks the skills of impersonation, and therefore he is all too human. It is not much his innocence, physical ineptitude, or lack of gung ho zeal that make Pyle vulnerable to the rigors of Parris Island, but his lack of sophistication. He can't adopt Joker's pose of ironic detachment, because that requires an intellectual savvy that his innocence does not permit.

The important plot beats of the second part of the film (the Tet offensive, meeting with Lusthog squad, Hue City, the death of Cowboy, and Joker killing the VC sniper) sets to unify the events of part one and two of Full Metal Jacket. Nelson explains:

...We also hear the voice of Joker the character, who is no longer confined by his function as Kubrick's satiric mouthpiece-the one who looked down into the terrible faces of death and eventually confronted his own failed responsibility toward Leonard Lawrence/Pyle. Like Pyle, Joker believes that he lives in "a world of shit," but he also has a modest hope for the future: "I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I'm in a world of shit, yes. But I am alive and I am not afraid.".... Kubrick has Joker confront and acknowledge his fear of death, and thereby save himself from the greater fear of losing his humanity.

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

In the final analysis, such understated nuances of character and theme do not conform to the kind of redemptive ending that an audience expects, and that got in several of the Vietnam films before Full Metal Jacket. Unlike those films, Kubrick's journey into darkness moves through a conceptual and emotional space that lacks those moral or ideological rest areas that provide an audience the opportunity to reconnoiter and to fit the film into a familiar parabolic design... Understandably, they [the audience] then might conclude that his work lacks the kind of "center" found in other films, without realizing that inside Kubrick's mazes, the cneter is everywhere and nowhere.

House Calls

One of the areas Nelson goes into about Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, is Dr. Bill Harford's noctural journey to various places including the Somerton Mask part, Rainbow fashions, Greenwich Villiage, and the Sonata Cafe.

Nelson concludes the chapter by stating:

Kubrick leaves Schnitler's Traumnovelle in the dust by ending Eyes Wide Shut with a final image of Bill and Alice standing together in a toy store decorated in the delights and color of childhood innocence, temporarily outside the stark light or frightening shadows of death. Alice again plays the "knowledgeable" wife to Bill's "absentminded" husband, as she reminds him of the unfinished business of their marriage ("There is something very important we need to do as soon as possible")

Post Script

Nelson's final words on Kubrick:

Death made a house call on Stanley Kubrick before he could complete the unfinished business of his creative life. Within a matter of days after completion, Eyes Wide Shut unexpectedly was transmuted into a brilliant climax for a distinguished film career that had officially begun fifty-eight years earlier, during a thirteenth-birthday celebration. Had he lived into the twenty-first century, Stanley Kubrick undoubtedly would have continued to confuse and to dazzle the world with his wit, his unflinching honesty, his humane understanding, and his film genius.

References

General Reference:

• Thomas Allen Nelson (2000). Kubrick: Inside a Film Artists Maze, Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-21390-7 - paperback