The Kubrick Gaze J.F. Martel You don't find reality only in your backyard, you know. In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it. -Stanley Kubrick, 1969 [1] A lot of ink has flowed over the contradiction that is Stanley Kubrick. He seems to be the kind of artist everyone wants to have pinned, yet slips out of every critical grasp. Interpretations of his work tend toward the extremes: Kubrick has been called a right-wing propagandist and a left-wing militant, a misogynist and a feminist, a fatalistic cynic and a quasi-religious optimist. Few directors have attracted so much vitriol, adulation, controversy and analysis. Kubrick's own silence about the meaning of his films, combined with his notorious reclusiveness and his disregard for social responsibility before critic, church and state, only added to his mysterious aura. If it is true that Kubrick's films are rigid and cold, as many like to point out, it is also true that they are mercurial, dreamlike, and deeply personal. Their atmosphere is a necessary outcome of the filmmaker's approach in making them. From Dr. Strangelove (1964) onward, that approach can only be called holographic. What you see in a Kubrick film is the conscious manifestation of an unconscious play of forces taking place beneath the celluloid surface. Kubrick is more concerned with psychic forces – archetypal, philosophical and cosmic – than he is with the emotional life of his characters or the diversion of his audience. The relevance of art in society is a burning question today. In a world on the brink of annihilation or possible transformation, what role does the artist play? Should she forego the ideals of self- _expression_ in order to create what is essentially propaganda, fuzzy New Agery or pointed didactic? Should he give up the ghost and occupy his time doing something more productive than playing the fiddle while Rome burns? Can art effect change, or can it really be relegated to mere entertainment, devoid of transformative power? It is in response to such questions that I bring up Kubrick now. At the risk of seeming idolatrous, I hold him up as a model of how vision and conviction can make art that is relevant, spiritual and transformative. His genius, combined with his refusal to submit to the dictates of Right or Left, or even to the dark satanic mills of Hollywood, produced some of the most revelatory images of postmodern art. My goal is to show that Kubrick's vision is as relevant today as it was when his films were released – perhaps more so. The Gaze Kubrick once told Jack Nicholson, We're not interested in photographing the reality. We're interested in photographing the photograph of the reality. [2] Stanley Kubrick's films are not fictions but psychic documentaries. Suspending our disbelief – à la Hitchcock or Spielberg – was never his priority. Nothing in a Kubrick film is supposed to feel like it's happening in a physical world analogous to our own. Their setting is the mind itself. Kubrick's work belongs to the Gnostic hyperreal; it aspires to direct cognizance of pure thought. As psychedelic tours of history's dream galleries, his films are inherently political, dealing with power and the creation and destruction of values. Most importantly, their core is mystical, even shamanic. Kubrick was one of the few filmmakers to take up André Bazin on his famous ideal of the Holy Moment, which posits that the motion picture camera can extract a slice of space-time and en_frame_ it in Plato's hyperspace, creating a reality that supercedes the historical moment originally captured on film. Some of the most potent Holy Moments Kubrick filmed feature the Gaze, that uniquely Kubrickian device that appears in all of the films post- Strangelove, most famously in the first shot of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and in that one-shot scene in The Shining (1980) where Jack Torrance begins to slip over the edge. Kubrick valued this posture so much that he often assumed it himself in photographs, giving us the image of a man who is seeing beyond, which is precisely what the Gaze signifies. Whether they are looking into some unfathomable distance or straight at us through the camera lens, the characters who adopt the Gaze are piercing through the illusion of conscious life to spy the deep archetypal forces that shape reality. In most cases, characters react to the truth that the Gaze reveals by going insane. It's as if the eyes are gateways through which the spirit world can pass into the mind and take control. The challenge is to lift the veil of Maya while retaining our humanity. There is a moment in Eyes Wide Shut when Alice, Nicole Kidman's character, adopts the Gaze before the mirror while her husband (both real and fictional) initiates sex with her. In the seconds before the screen fades to black, she turns to us. In that moment we know that she sees everything, and that the experience will either lead her (and, as it turns out, her husband) to enlightenment, or into a deeper dark. Strangelove, Odyssey & Clockwork: The Star Child Trilogy This primacy of the eyes reveals an obsession on Kubrick's part with clear vision. The skeptical and often ruthless attitude that he adopted with his cast, crew and co-writers is symptomatic of this obsession. Nothing can be taken for granted; everything must be broken down, examined from every angle and photographed in its most naked state. For Kubrick, film was a lens through which one can know the world. If he often spoke of the importance of _object_ivity, he invariably meant his personal _object_ivity. You can see this in the _title_ of the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), in which one insane general provokes a nuclear war. The first-person _title_ refers to Kubrick's own disillusionment in the face of rational materialism, a doctrine whose inbuilt absurdity the movie exposes with the existential hysterics of a Laughing Buddha. Kubrick said that his original intention was to make Strangelove a serious thriller. It was only when he realized how fundamentally insane the military-industrial complex was that he decided a comedy would better express the gravity of the post-war situation. The final film, however, went beyond the Cold War in its condemnation; it is a critique of the rational materialist doctrine of which the state apparatus of the Cold War was a direct product. How could a truly rational society give birth to such a lose-lose situation, let alone make an atom bomb in the first place? From the credit sequence showing the mating rituals of military aircraft to doomsday, Strangelove is a damning send-up not only of the military establishment but also of the governing logic of the modern world, a logic rooted in a deep denial of the irrational depths of the soul. Dr. Strangelove set the stage for two more films, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), which complete Kubrick's science-fiction trilogy. It also set the stage for the cinema of the mind that dominated his work until his death. As if to make it clear that nothing can be the same after the disillusionment of Strangelove, Kubrick ends the film by destroying the world. The mushroom clouds let us know that only a complete collapse of the system – be it in the form of collective awakening or of the destruction of the planet - can make possible a new appraisal of life and humanity. We'll meet again some sunny day, Vera Lynn croons as the world explodes. Dark humor aside, it's as though Kubrick were promising us a solution. From the first shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the story of humanity's journey from ape to overman, it seems that Kubrick intends to keep that promise. We're back together on a sunny day, but we're not in Kansas anymore. The sun rises over the barren savannah of prehistoric Africa, where a tribe of frightful man-apes, our early ancestors, mingles with the plain animals. Evidently, the demon of Strangelove can only be confronted by returning to our origins. In a Joycean time warp, Kubrick's Strangelove apocalypse brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the Dawn of Man. Here, the famous Black Monolith will make its first appearance in history, bestowing upon us a new power. Most critics assume that what the Monolith teaches is tool making. This isn't wrong but it misses the point: most importantly, the Monolith bestows imagination. The film makes this clear in the scene where the man-ape smashes the skeletal remains of an animal with a bone. The magic of the moment lies in the primate's sudden ability to imagine a connection between the skull and the living creature to which the skull once belonged. Intercut into the scene are shots of tapirs falling dead; these are taken right out of the man-ape's mind. But the film uses the tool to symbolize imagination, and it is in the nature not just of film critics but of human beings in general to mistake the symbol for the thing. In fact, the worship of our creations is what leads the humans of 2001 into an abusive relationship with the supercomputer HAL, whose self-righteous attempt to take control of our destiny is a direct consequence of our blind adoration of technology at the expense of the visionary power that gave it birth. 2001 is Kubrick's most overtly mystical film, and it has always seemed strange to me that his other films are only rarely assessed in light of it. At the time of its release, many people found the film too ambiguous for words. Kubrick himself thought this frustration stemmed from the literal-mindedness of contemporary filmmakers and audiences. It's time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play. Too many people over thirty are still word-oriented rather than picture-oriented, he said in a 1969 interview.[3] To Kubrick, becoming picture-oriented represents an evolution in consciousness, the development of an ability to go
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OFF TOPIC. This is Jonathan Rosenbaum's cached review of Apocalypse Now. I'm just posting it here for storage reasons in case it gets taken off the internet. ___________________________ Apocalypse Now Redux Rating *** A must see Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Written by John Milius and Coppola With Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, G.D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford, Colleen Camp, Cynthia Wood, Christian Marquand, and Aurore Clement. By Jonathan Rosenbaum It’s hard to think of many movies where the great, the not so great, and the simply awful coexist quite as brazenly as they do in Apocalypse Now. This was true in 1979, when the movie clocked in at 150 minutes, and it’s true 22 years later, when the new version, Apocalypse Now Redux, runs a third longer. If anything, the longer version–not so much a rethinking of the material as an expansion, with a minimum of reshuffling, by the adept Walter Murch, who also worked on the original–is better and worse, emphasizing both the ambitious scope and the fatal flaws of Francis Ford Coppola’s achievement. Among the more substantial additions are a ghostly sequence set on a French plantation (featuring Aurore Clement and the late Christian Marquand) that tries, with mixed results, to poeticize the futility of outsiders, French or American, getting involved in the Vietnam war and a silly and rather inconclusive sequence involving a couple of Playboy Playmates (Cynthia Wood and Colleen Camp) that adds nothing. We also get to hear more of Kurtz (Marlon Brando) rattling on and even reading choice excerpts from Time magazine to a nearly comatose Willard (Martin Sheen). Some critics have claimed that this is the best new movie we can expect to see this year, an idea so revolting I can only wonder about the ideological desperation that produced it. (One more excuse to stay away from everything but Hollywood products?) I’ll grant that the expanded movie is processed in glorious Technicolor (which Hollywood abandoned for obscure reasons just after The Godfather, Part II–though you can still find it in some Chinese and Korean pictures because the equipment was sold to various Asian production facilities). I’ll grant that Murch’s sound work here is some of his best, that Michael Herr’s narration is the second-best thing he’s written (after Dispatches, the nonfiction book about American combat in Vietnam that got him the assignment in the first place), and that Coppola’s direction is full of superb environmental (i.e., theme-park-ride) effects. I’ll even grant that these and related virtues are superior to what we can find in contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, though I realize this isn’t saying much. Still, to imply that this movie’s highly entertaining obfuscations of American and Southeast Asian history have more value than anything filmmakers could possibly tell us today is to place a pretty low premium on the truth, the world, and the present–not to mention movies and ourselves. I keep hearing that this movie is supposed to provide some definitive kind of statement about Vietnam–what it was, what it means, and so on. But considering that Vietnamese people aren’t given even a hint of a voice in the statement–an absence that goes entirely unremarked–this is monumental chutzpah. Five years after this country pulled out of Vietnam–relieved, though not admitting defeat–seeing Coppola’s movie as some sort of ideal to aspire to was justifiable, or at least understandable. Clinging to it as that today is tantamount to pulling a blanket over our heads. Maybe I’m being hard on this movie because I feel implicated, and maybe I feel implicated because it gets to me. Like Taxi Driver, another “incoherent text,” as critic Robin Wood might say, that came out only three years earlier, it makes random slaughter look romantic, spectacular, and downright artistic–so goddamn cinematic you can tap your toe to it. It opens with a frank illustration of how beautiful a tropical jungle silently exploding into flames can look, especially when the explosion is combined with a tune by the Doors that follows the spiffy stereo effect of helicopter blades faintly whipping past. “Far out,” we’re tempted to say, helped immeasurably by the fact that the filmmakers have thoughtfully shielded us from seeing whether human flesh is being devoured by the napalm. After all, this is entertainment we’re talking about. In 1980 Pauline Kael wrote, with some justice, “Trying to say something big, Coppola got tied up in a big knot of American self- hatred and guilt, and what the picture boiled down to was: White man– he devil.” (Unfortunately, she never got around to explaining what a more appropriate sentiment regarding American involvement in Vietnam might have been, though I think we can safely assume she wasn’t espousing pride or indifference.) Yet when we watch the exhilarating spectacle of the deliciously loony Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) bombing villages to the strains of Wagner while indulging his enthusiasm for surfboards and delivering instantly quotable lines such as “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” we may laugh or cringe, but I don’t think our response corresponds to “White man–he devil.” Indeed, the spirit of John Milius’s original conception is much closer to “White man–he hot shit.” And to be fair, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Milius’s main source of inspiration, is founded on much the same mixture of guilty-liberal anticolonialism and protofascist awe. One of the first articles I ever published was an essay for Film Comment on Orson Welles’s first film project, whose conception, screenplay, designs, and tests occupied him during his first six months in Hollywood, before he started his preparatory work with Herman Mankiewicz on Citizen Kane. It was a contemporary adaptation of “Heart of Darkness,” with an experimental use of a subjective camera to represent the viewpoint of Marlow, the story’s somewhat detached narrator–to be played mainly offscreen by Welles, in his storytelling radio persona–as he penetrates the heart of the African jungle in his search for Kurtz, a crazed white ivory trader who’s lording it over the natives. Welles updated the story to relate it to contemporary fascism in Europe–focusing on Kurtz as a charismatic, proto-Nazi despot before Kane was even a gleam in his eye–and RKO halted the project, finding it both too expensive and too commercially risky. (Welles had already adapted the story, rather lamely, for radio in 1938 and would readapt it for that medium much more effectively in 1945. I believe that parts of both versions can be heard briefly in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.) Working on my article in Paris, armed mainly with a copy of Welles’s _script_, I impulsively wrote to him–he was there editing F for Fake–and had the staggering good fortune of being invited to lunch by him two days later. He told me, among other things, that he’d reluctantly decided to play Kurtz because he hadn’t found anyone else for the part. “I’m still looking,” he said wistfully, after vowing he’d never truly abandoned the project. He also said that he’d originally wanted to shoot the film in either South America or Africa. Clearly the self- interrogation of charismatic authority that had informed his celebrated modern-dress stage production of Julius Caesar in 1937, complete with piercing shafts of “Nuremberg lighting”–and would subsequently inform his ambivalent portrait of Kane, some of it shot with similar lighting–would have got an exhaustive workout in his “Heart of Darkness.” My article appeared, along with a _script_ extract, in late 1972, two years after Milius had written a draft of the Apocalypse Now _script_ for George Lucas at American Zoetrope and two years before Coppola, coming off The Godfather, Part II, decided to direct it. Milius had written a screen adaptation of Conrad’s novella in 1965, so I’m not trying to suggest that my article influenced anyone. But various sources have confirmed that the filmmakers were well aware of Welles’s project, and the film shows many traces of his influence, including a frequent use of Nuremberg lighting and the early upside-down close-up of the head of Sheen’s Willard–this movie’s Marlow equivalent–which duplicates the opening shots of both Othello and The Trial. Some of the newly added footage in Redux, showing children laughing at Willard through slats in his cage, can be traced back to another creepy sequence in The Trial. To confuse matters, the ironic, wisecracking offscreen narration of Willard, written by Herr, may show more signs of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe than it does of Conrad’s Marlow. Willard has been enlisted as a mercenary to “terminate” Kurtz, an American officer fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia who’s gone murderously insane, and as Willard pages through the man’s dossier during his long journey, he implicitly becomes a kind of private detective attempting to solve the “mystery” of the man. Could this be because the American “translation” of Marlow as a mediating moral consciousness somehow leads us to the more noirish figure of Chandler’s hero? Whatever the reason, this isn’t the first time such an arresting thematic and stylistic sea change has taken place in American movies. In 1946 Welles’s innovative subjective-camera idea was finally used throughout an entire Hollywood feature, Robert Montgomery’s clunky Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake. Montgomery missed the whole point of Welles’s interest in the device–as a way of dramatizing Marlow’s and the audience’s ambivalent attraction-repulsion response to Kurtz. In Apocalypse Now, the shift from Marlow to Marlowe
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J.F. Martel You don't find reality only in your backyard, you know. In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it. -Stanley Kubrick, 1969 [1] A lot of ink has flowed over the contradiction that is Stanley Kubrick. He seems to be the kind of artist everyone wants to have pinned, yet slips out of every critical grasp. Interpretations of his work tend toward the extremes: Kubrick has been called a right-wing propagandist and a left-wing militant, a misogynist and a feminist, a fatalistic cynic and a quasi-religious optimist. Few directors have attracted so much vitriol, adulation, controversy and analysis. Kubrick's own silence about the meaning of his films, combined with his notorious reclusiveness and his disregard for social responsibility before critic, church and state, only added to his mysterious aura. If it is true that Kubrick's films are rigid and cold, as many like to point out, it is also true that they are mercurial, dreamlike, and deeply personal. Their atmosphere is a necessary outcome of the filmmaker's approach in making them. From Dr. Strangelove (1964) onward, that approach can only be called holographic. What you see in a Kubrick film is the conscious manifestation of an unconscious play of forces taking place beneath the celluloid surface. Kubrick is more concerned with psychic forces – archetypal, philosophical and cosmic – than he is with the emotional life of his characters or the diversion of his audience. The relevance of art in society is a burning question today. In a world on the brink of annihilation or possible transformation, what role does the artist play? Should she forego the ideals of self- _expression_ in order to create what is essentially propaganda, fuzzy New Agery or pointed didactic? Should he give up the ghost and occupy his time doing something more productive than playing the fiddle while Rome burns? Can art effect change, or can it really be relegated to mere entertainment, devoid of transformative power? It is in response to such questions that I bring up Kubrick now. At the risk of seeming idolatrous, I hold him up as a model of how vision and conviction can make art that is relevant, spiritual and transformative. His genius, combined with his refusal to submit to the dictates of Right or Left, or even to the dark satanic mills of Hollywood, produced some of the most revelatory images of postmodern art. My goal is to show that Kubrick's vision is as relevant today as it was when his films were released – perhaps more so. The Gaze Kubrick once told Jack Nicholson, We're not interested in photographing the reality. We're interested in photographing the photograph of the reality. [2] Stanley Kubrick's films are not fictions but psychic documentaries. Suspending our disbelief – à la Hitchcock or Spielberg – was never his priority. Nothing in a Kubrick film is supposed to feel like it's happening in a physical world analogous to our own. Their setting is the mind itself. Kubrick's work belongs to the Gnostic hyperreal; it aspires to direct cognizance of pure thought. As psychedelic tours of history's dream galleries, his films are inherently political, dealing with power and the creation and destruction of values. Most importantly, their core is mystical, even shamanic. Kubrick was one of the few filmmakers to take up André Bazin on his famous ideal of the Holy Moment, which posits that the motion picture camera can extract a slice of space-time and en_frame_ it in Plato's hyperspace, creating a reality that supercedes the historical moment originally captured on film. Some of the most potent Holy Moments Kubrick filmed feature the Gaze, that uniquely Kubrickian device that appears in all of the films post- Strangelove, most famously in the first shot of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and in that one-shot scene in The Shining (1980) where Jack Torrance begins to slip over the edge. Kubrick valued this posture so much that he often assumed it himself in photographs, giving us the image of a man who is seeing beyond, which is precisely what the Gaze signifies. Whether they are looking into some unfathomable distance or straight at us through the camera lens, the characters who adopt the Gaze are piercing through the illusion of conscious life to spy the deep archetypal forces that shape reality. In most cases, characters react to the truth that the Gaze reveals by going insane. It's as if the eyes are gateways through which the spirit world can pass into the mind and take control. The challenge is to lift the veil of Maya while retaining our humanity. There is a moment in Eyes Wide Shut when Alice, Nicole Kidman's character, adopts the Gaze before the mirror while her husband (both real and fictional) initiates sex with her. In the seconds before the screen fades to black, she turns to us. In that moment we know that she sees everything, and that the experience will either lead her (and, as it turns out, her husband) to enlightenment, or into a deeper dark. Strangelove, Odyssey & Clockwork: The Star Child Trilogy This primacy of the eyes reveals an obsession on Kubrick's part with clear vision. The skeptical and often ruthless attitude that he adopted with his cast, crew and co-writers is symptomatic of this obsession. Nothing can be taken for granted; everything must be broken down, examined from every angle and photographed in its most naked state. For Kubrick, film was a lens through which one can know the world. If he often spoke of the importance of _object_ivity, he invariably meant his personal _object_ivity. You can see this in the _title_ of the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), in which one insane general provokes a nuclear war. The first-person _title_ refers to Kubrick's own disillusionment in the face of rational materialism, a doctrine whose inbuilt absurdity the movie exposes with the existential hysterics of a Laughing Buddha. Kubrick said that his original intention was to make Strangelove a serious thriller. It was only when he realized how fundamentally insane the military-industrial complex was that he decided a comedy would better express the gravity of the post-war situation. The final film, however, went beyond the Cold War in its condemnation; it is a critique of the rational materialist doctrine of which the state apparatus of the Cold War was a direct product. How could a truly rational society give birth to such a lose-lose situation, let alone make an atom bomb in the first place? From the credit sequence showing the mating rituals of military aircraft to doomsday, Strangelove is a damning send-up not only of the military establishment but also of the governing logic of the modern world, a logic rooted in a deep denial of the irrational depths of the soul. Dr. Strangelove set the stage for two more films, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), which complete Kubrick's science-fiction trilogy. It also set the stage for the cinema of the mind that dominated his work until his death. As if to make it clear that nothing can be the same after the disillusionment of Strangelove, Kubrick ends the film by destroying the world. The mushroom clouds let us know that only a complete collapse of the system – be it in the form of collective awakening or of the destruction of the planet - can make possible a new appraisal of life and humanity. We'll meet again some sunny day, Vera Lynn croons as the world explodes. Dark humor aside, it's as though Kubrick were promising us a solution. From the first shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the story of humanity's journey from ape to overman, it seems that Kubrick intends to keep that promise. We're back together on a sunny day, but we're not in Kansas anymore. The sun rises over the barren savannah of prehistoric Africa, where a tribe of frightful man-apes, our early ancestors, mingles with the plain animals. Evidently, the demon of Strangelove can only be confronted by returning to our origins. In a Joycean time warp, Kubrick's Strangelove apocalypse brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the Dawn of Man. Here, the famous Black Monolith will make its first appearance in history, bestowing upon us a new power. Most critics assume that what the Monolith teaches is tool making. This isn't wrong but it misses the point: most importantly, the Monolith bestows imagination. The film makes this clear in the scene where the man-ape smashes the skeletal remains of an animal with a bone. The magic of the moment lies in the primate's sudden ability to imagine a connection between the skull and the living creature to which the skull once belonged. Intercut into the scene are shots of tapirs falling dead; these are taken right out of the man-ape's mind. But the film uses the tool to symbolize imagination, and it is in the nature not just of film critics but of human beings in general to mistake the symbol for the thing. In fact, the worship of our creations is what leads the humans of 2001 into an abusive relationship with the supercomputer HAL, whose self-righteous attempt to take control of our destiny is a direct consequence of our blind adoration of technology at the expense of the visionary power that gave it birth. 2001 is Kubrick's most overtly mystical film, and it has always seemed strange to me that his other films are only rarely assessed in light of it. At the time of its release, many people found the film too ambiguous for words. Kubrick himself thought this frustration stemmed from the literal-mindedness of
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