Kubrick does something no one else does. He combines hyper-controlled clarity with a variety of ambiguous cinematic meanings, and he does this by tapping into the commercial form of genre myths while elevating them to the level of arthouse perfection. He played in the wide range of genre specifically because he understood the power of film to embody both our shared public archetypes AND our private collective unconscious. He captured the tensions between interior and exterior space, that which appears as grimly real and terrifyingly surreal, at the same time. This is why there’s something so uncanny about those infamous Kubrickian Glares: they probe into uncertain psychological surfaces to locate repressed fears and desires, showing us how fragile the relationship is between sanity and insanity.

Kubrick didn’t become Kubrick in a vacuum. He evolved his complex personal vision over time, learning and drawing most from both a). the highly subjective, theoretical works of Eisenstein, and b). the logical clarity and organizational control of Pudovkin. Of “Film Technique” he said: “It is the most instructive book on film aesthetics I came across.” One might even mistake the following statement for Kubrick himself, but it was Pudovkin’s belief (that Kubrick borrowed) that a director must achieve a “compulsory and deliberate guidance of the thoughts and associations of the spectator.” “Compulsory.” “Deliberate.” Words that capture Kubrick’s obsessive nature to a tee. Like Pudovkin, Kubrick wanted to guide audiences towards a clear understanding of a story’s theme and vision, but like Eisenstein, he also wanted to produce ambiguous interpretations that would lead to “puzzles, enigmas, and allegories” of the human condition. This is to say Kubrick was both a realist and a formalist in cinematic structure and style.

Aesthetically speaking, there’s a special irony in the way Kubrick juxtaposes the thematic content of his work versus its style of presentation. Stylistically, he’s a god-like filmmaker in complete control of his craft and uses airtight precision and gorgeous visuals to explore characters who are anything but god-like. Substantively, his characters are completely chaotic, uncontrolled specimens in their environments. They’re primitive agents who fail pretty much in every way to live up to their creator. This ironic use of form vs. substance allows Kubrick to examine his characters with a cold, clinical eye, but it’s interesting to note that such examinations always rely upon masterful compositions, sumptuous photography, and elegant mis-en-scene to create that tension. His style of presentation encourages hope and symmetry against the darker, more nihilistic layers of his thematic content and characters.

My good friend Hutch brilliantly put it this way:

“Kubrick’s films…consistently exhibit a meticulously clear-sighted — to the point of being clinical — approach to facilitating our attention. His films are exemplary in their omniscience and thought-through design, even to the point of their godlike cruelty towards his subjects. His films use a form of “mastery and control over the world” they show, in which people routinely fail in their efforts to exhibit the same standards…it does tickle me to think that the mastery displayed in his films is an antithesis of his own thesis. Without wanting to overstate it, there is something ironic in the way he spotlights human failure through our institutions, hubris, arrogance and irrationality while succeeding with his own grand designs.”

Watch for the shade Kubrick casts upon the Enlightenment throughout his work, specifically the tenets of rationality, knowledge, progress, liberty, etc. From the Enlightenment we get the notion of people having a presumed mastery and control over the world, but in Kubrick’s films we repeatedly see a general collapse of faith in these principles. One interpretation of 2001 finds our faith in human progress obliterated as a result of hostile and subversive technology. DR. STRANGELOVE satirizes our inability to rationally communicate and end disagreements by throwing civilization to nuclear holocaust. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE has no faith in our secular institutions to reform evil. PATHS OF GLORY and FULL METAL JACKET are also suspect of our institutional systems, blunted by the immoral, psychological effects of military indoctrination. If anything, humans haven’t become more human since the Enlightenment, they’ve become more fragile, irrational, and dehumanized.

Thematically, Kubrick feels like a nihilist with an existential bent for reflecting our tendency to self-destruct. He’s highly skeptical of rationalism and its defenders who believe in the power of reason to solve our problems. He focuses our attention on the irrational and paradoxical side of the human condition, sorta like a counter-reaction to the logical positivists of the 20th century.

Tim Kreider says “Kubrick’s films are never only about individuals…they are always about Man, about civilization and history.” From DR. STRANGELOVE on till the end of his career, Kubrick cast shade on the Enlightened-Rational Man in a way that gives birth to what I call the “Star Child thesis.” Which is this: Within the ambiguous glare of the Star Child at the end of 2001, there exists an infinite number of rebirths as humanity strives to avoid the cataclysms of DR. STRANGELOVE. Each film after 2001 thus becomes another iteration of the Star Child’s future. How do we interpret the Star Child’s gaze? Does it pessimistically portend the extinction of the human race? Does it optimistically suggest hope that we’ll do better in the sequels? If you’ve seen practically any Kubrick film, it’s not difficult to guess which way the cookie often crumbles. More often than not, humanity is either a) caught in a repeating cycle of self-destruction, or b). caught in a chaotic dystopia nearing cyclical self-destruction. Or maybe neither. Kubrick still ambiguously holds out for more optimistic interpretations of his work, but it’s rare to find him ever recoursing to explicit acts of humanity or twists of paradoxical moral courage. The point here is to recognize the general and eternal pattern of Kubrick’s characters who are “forever and ever” stuck in a cycle of self-destruction. Which is to say human evolution in Kubrick’s films often looks more like an endlessly repeating circle than it does a linear line on a continuum. 

Always remember the word “forever.”

For example, from the perspective of the Star Child, “forever” in DR. STRANGELOVE means infinitely reducing humanity to a plume of mushroom clouds. In 2001, “forever” means humanity is endlessly caught in the ambiguous glare of the Star Child, undecided whether they will escape annihilation or be buried under moon rubble. In A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, “forever” means endlessly watching the mechanical patterns of humans struggling to achieve autonomy in the face of an oppressive monolithic Institution. In BARRY LYNDON, “forever” means endlessly watching the evolution of a low-brow primitive transform into an artificial elite without any respect for morals or human decency. In THE SHINING, “forever” means sending history towards the blade of an ax by endlessly butchering itself “forever and ever and ever.” FULL METAL JACKET becomes Kubrick’s first work that actually challenges “forever” and its endless cycles of destruction by unambiguously committing itself to humanity, even though it’s evident that dehumanization is just around the corner. In EYES WIDE SHUT, Alice rightfully counters Bill’s “forever” with her own word of caution. “Let’s not use that word…it frightens me.” Alice has obviously seen all of Kubrick’s previous films and knows well the repeating patterns of annihilation filtered through the Star Child’s gaze. She knows that people, at the very moment of keeping their eyes “wide open,” always tend to regress backwards with eyes “wide shut” to the likes of a Ripper, Alex, HAL, Barry, Jack, Pyle, Ziegler, Milich or Red Cloak. 

Watch for the way the Star Child implicitly works itself into Kubrick’s cosmic vision of humanity. Look for the disparities between the enlightened and primitive faces of human civilization. It’s easier to see this when you imagine all of Kubrick’s characters as apes who evolved to men, and then men, cutoff from reason and outside communication, devolve back to apes, who then retreat into primal fantasy, madness and annihilation. Keep an eye out for the unaccounted “human factor” in his films. The “human factor” always relates to the world of accident, contingency or paradox, as opposed to world that is rationally predicted or controlled. The “human factor” almost always rears its ugly head when his characters are trying to achieve mechanical perfection. Kubrick often satirized mankind’s overreaching confidence in the Plan, the Ideal, the Institution, and the so-called Authorities on human progress, and his brand of satirization is almost always related to how the unaccounted “human factor” spoils the deceit of the orderly, controlled, rational and mechanical universe.

In THE KILLING, for example, Johnny’s “foolproof” plan is fed to the jet propellers of parody. The farcical combination of a faulty suitcase and a stranger’s poodle become the “human factors” in an otherwise mechanical universe. In DR. STRANGELOVE, the “automated and irrevocable” nature of the Doomsday Machine built by Ripper-like demagogues becomes the “human factor” that is no longer subject to rational intervention. In 2001 and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the State prefers the efficiency of machines — of HALs, of Alexes — instead of Star Children. In both cases, the State becomes its own “human factor” leading not to mechanical perfection, but accidental destruction. In FULL METAL JACKET, Pyle becomes the “human factor” in an otherwise orderly, controlled boot camp training, someone whose human nature is dispensable yet ultimately the wild card in destroying the systematic order of the platoon. In each of these instances, it is the Systems, made by humans, that fail us. Our unfettered dependence upon authorities, conventions and systems create the illusion of stability subject to profound disillusion and destruction, and I think Kubrick finds it funny that humanity often thinks otherwise.

While there are clear threads of nihilism woven throughout Kubrick’s work, he brings our attention to the human predicament in a way that feels like the first step towards pointing beyond the problem. As one writer put it, “the very act of making films about nihilism’s symptoms and causes is inherently anti-nihilistic.” Kubrick merely reveals to us the problem of nihilism in modern society and does so with unflinching honesty. That requires us to acknowledge “the ugly truth of reality and the consequences of our own numbness, detachment, and indifference.” Confronting these realities is the first step towards extinguishing the problem and thus becoming Star Children who survive the apocalyptic bottleneck, rather than succumbing to it over and over and over again.

Obsessing over the ugly fact that humans are repeatedly objectified, collectivized, and thereby dehumanized by external forces doesn’t make him some craven nihilist, but to the contrary a secret humanist who desperately wants us to escape the patterns and cycles of annihilation. 

To quote the master himself:

“You don’t stop being concerned with man because you recognize his essential absurdities and frailties and pretensions. To me, the only real immorality is that which endangers the species; and the only absolute evil, that which threatens its annihilation. In the deepest sense, I believe in man’s potential and in his capacity for progress. In [nearly any one of his films], I was dealing with the inherent irrationality in man that threatens to destroy him; that irrationality is with us as strongly today, and must be conquered. But a recognition of insanity doesn’t imply a celebration of it — nor a sense of despair and futility about the possibility of curing it.”

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