When you hate your own film and want no one to see it, said film will achieve mythic status and guarantee that everyone sees it. “It really is a must-see, because now it’s the picture Kubrick wants to suppress,” said the programming director at Film Forum. FEAR AND DESIRE is the bane of Kubrick’s existence with good reason. Despite being an earnest effort to explore the dehumanizing effects of war in a serious manner, the execution ends up being unintentionally funny thanks to an awful script and some hilariously bad acting. Every line delivered feels ponderously self-important, at times bordering into cringeworthy parody. It’s too serious to be enlightening, too laughable to be taken seriously. Kubrick probably should’ve hired Brando to deliver some of that “horror and moral terror” soapboxing to make these lines resonate. 

Weaknesses notwithstanding, there’s a lot of sincerity here that works as an asset when it comes to the aesthetics on display. Visually, the film demonstrates Kubrick’s talent for creating mental landscapes that look and feel like the psychic inner worlds his characters are wrestling with. 

Stranded behind enemy lines, we watch these soldiers wander through an imaginary forest that doesn’t exist, thwarted by a war that’s never been fought. The theoretical nature of this war is to prevent us from thinking in team psychological terms. This is anybody’s war at any given time on a historical continuum, which gives the story an allegorical flavor. 

FEAR AND DESIRE is also the earliest example we have of watching Kubrick oscillate between meticulous realism and surreal expressionism. His craft for merging these elements is seen most evidently in the casting choice of the two soldiers who symbolically “kill” themselves while in the service of playing the roles of enemy generals. The use of doppelgängers is blunt, but stresses the irrationality of war. Enemies and victims are two sides of the same coin. It’s just a matter of perspective. Pretty ambitious for a first feature, but it also sets up the highly conflicting subjectivity in Kubrick’s future characters.

There isn’t any strong narrative or tonal coherence to what we’re watching. It’s just this dreamy, cerebral experiment that tries to get us into the deteriorated headspace of war soldiers. He’ll perfect all of this later with PATHS OF GLORY and FULL METAL JACKET, so cut the nut some slack. Far from inspired, FEAR AND DESIRE bears all the notable marks of a first feature. Nothing really illuminating about much of it, but it does give Kubrick a chance to exercise some muscles for more herculean efforts down the road.

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