THE KILLING is positioned like a chessboard. There are many pieces in the game that serve different functions at different times. Each piece (or player) is employed in a larger pattern of strategy, where everything needs to be perfectly timed in order to pull off a "foolproof" checkmate. As a master chessman himself, Kubrick moves the players on his gameboard with clockwork precision, allowing them to feel like they're in control of a tightly planned heist when in reality they're just pawns in a capricious world of chance and accident. The gameboard metaphor is philosophically important to Kubrick's worldview, both here and in later work. It sets up the logic of a closed system (in this case, a robbery scheme) that depends upon everybody following the game plan with step-by-step exactness, and where trusting the plan allows for a feeling of rational control over every piece of the "jigsaw puzzle." 

Kubrick's pessimism towards rationalism and the Enlightenment doesn't bloom till DR. STRANGELOVE and 2001, but you can see his skepticism of the mechanical universe take shape as early as THE KILLING. In the anti-hero, Johnny Clay, we learn that life cannot be rationally predicted or controlled. Logical positivism turns out to be a sham. Johnny's plan may be well-oiled, but the humans who execute it are not cogs in a well-oiled machine. To the contrary, these hard-boiled robbers are what the existentialists called "irrational agents” playing a game of luck, chance and absurdist parody, blinded by fatalistic despair when exposed to the reality outside the gameboard of their plans.

The story is set against the backdrop of a racetrack heist, emphasizing with chess-like fashion the gamble of possibilities. Seven men are bent on executing the perfect robbery that requires them to possess expert control, logical rigor, and most importantly a working knowledge of all the possibilities and permutations of the racetrack environment. Like expert chessmen, these cons have to think several moves ahead of their opponent if the $2 million dollar prize is to be theirs. The plan feels solid going in, everyone and everything appears to be in the right place, there's just one catch. This setup comes from a filmmaker who isn't impressed by the cleverness of the mechanical universe, nor is he impressed with those institutions that uphold its tenets as sacrosanct or beyond criticism. Orderly, rational systems collapse because of their failure to account for the disorderly, irrational human agents who govern them. 2001 and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE perfect this theme, and here it means a perfect crime will be ruined because of one man's inability to keep his mouth shut. 

Noir is a perfect genre to mock Johnny's carefully planned theft. Typically the genre bugs me with all its elusive red herrings and tired exposition, but Kubrick is at the helm which means we move meticulously through the genre's convoluted structure with clarity and purpose, never once feeling lost in the film's ambitious non-linear style. Schemes exist within schemes, plots exist within plots, but the storytelling is so clear and perfectly-executed it never flies off the rails like so many do. Deliberately told and expertly controlled, Kubrick does noir in a way that helps to deepen (not flatten) the emotional and conceptual content of the film. 

The strongest feature (also the most noir-based) is the visual design. Vertical compositions repeatedly draw lines of shadowy prison bars through and around Johnny and his band of robbers, foreshadowing their demise long before they realize it themselves. We see them framed behind the bars of a window, bars of a bed frame, and bars of a parrot cage, each criminal source-lit in a way that accents their entrapment as their temporal scheme begins to unravel. Such carefully placed mis-en-scene isn't just a matter of Kubrick experimenting with temporal space. This visual logic creates objective correlations to the psychological headspace his characters inhabit. Kubrick also throws in a twist of irony: These criminals think their flawless plan is gonna make them rich if they simply follow the recipe, but the mis-en-scene around them tells us a different story—a cynical story where foolproof plans and cold determinism are ultimately mocked by a sense of cosmic fatalism. 

The climax of the story totally lampoons all the logical striving we've seen in this otherwise surgically precise universe. With the farcical combination of a faulty suitcase and a stranger's poodle, Johnny's mechanical control over his world is hilariously fed to the propellers of parody and despair. His world is no longer governed by a taut plan with an easy escape hatch, but by an amusing accident that simply laughs at the folly of human error. It's funny because we know he's tried so hard to stack the odds in his favor, but like most gambling habits, it ends in sham. "What's the difference?" he mumbles as he faces his captors. He's just watched the winds of fatalism blow his treasure into the gears of a machine, which sheds a special irony. Johnny's cog-like control is destroyed in the cogs of a literal machine, acting as a dark poetic justice that transforms his tightly-planned chessboard strategy into a cage of imprisonment. Nihilism, not mechanism, wins out. The universe is stranger, more recklessly irrational than the authority of our most trusted plans.

Apart from being a highly entertaining, insightful genre film, what I love most about THE KILLING are the secrets we learn about Kubrick himself. Johnny's cool, mechanical control and perfectionist plan doubles as the blueprint for Kubrick's "plan" in later films. Through this criminal mastermind, we see a filmmaker who knows every piece on the chessboard, every detail of the heist, and every mechanism needed to pull off the dynamic and emotional elements of a story with deliberate control. Johnny is to THE KILLING what Kubrick is to his entire filmography —two control freaks with a taste for clarity and precision.

THE KILLING is one of the sharpest examples of Kubrickian irony in his catalog, a story not just made by a control freak, but a story about the logical, self-destructive consequences of a rationalist, all-controlling idealism. The story ends like an absurdist parody because Kubrick was more of an existentialist than he was a rationalist, a position on how he felt about the Enlightenment. 

We'll see this thematic pattern return many times throughout his career, for if there was one thing he was skeptical of and wanted to satirize and indict, it was mankind's overreaching confidence in the plan, the ideal, the institution, and the so-called authorities on human progress.

Kubrick Ranked