Every once in a while, you've just got to get a good list of your chest, you know? I've done a couple of these before, once for
R.E.M. and once for
the Coen brothers, and while I'm reasonably pleased with the former, that Coen brothers post has remained a thorn in my side that gets a little thornier every time a Coen brothers film hits theaters—it's a pain to revise the list every time one of their movies comes out, and it's darned unsatisfying to leave it without their complete filmography, so I've decided that, as with the R.E.M. list, I'll wait until an artist is retired or dead to rank their works (to be continued, Coen bros. post). Lucky for me, Stanley Kubrick is both.
Well, only lucky for the purposes of this post, because in every other way, the world is a poorer place without Kubrick's presence as America's finest European auteur. My first memory of Stanley Kubrick is watching
Paths of Glory with my grandfather when I was in elementary school and the movie happened to be on TCM. Of course I had no clue at the time that this was a Stanley Kubrick movie or even that the fact of it being a Stanley Kubrick movie was significant, but that didn't matter; as I watched, I was transfixed and distressed in a way I had never been by a film before. Rarely has a movie seared itself into my brain like that movie did.
Then, a few years later, my dad showed me Kubrick's other great b&w war film,
Dr. Strangelove, which went over like gangbusters, because what self-respecting middle-school nerd doesn't love the "precious bodily fluids" and "you'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company" lines?
A few years after that, as a senior in high school, I went to Blockbuster (obligatory nostalgic "you kids these days don't know" note) and rented
2001: A Space Odyssey after having read and loved Arthur C. Clarke's companion novel. This is the first time I connected Kubrick's name to a movie, since the introduction to the book mentioned his collaboration with Clarke in the adaptation of Clarke's story "The Sentinel." And as I watched this film, for the first time consciously registering the fact of a Stanley Kubrick movie, I was bored to tears. I decided then and there that Kubrick was a pretentious snob.
The funny thing was, I continued to watch Kubrick movies, watching them in a slow, drip-feed succession of one every year or so, sometimes realizing they were directed by the man of the hour as I went in, other times only realizing so on the other side of the movie. I didn't always love them—you can read my original ambivalence at
A Clockwork Orange from when I covered it for my AFI project
here (and for fun, you can see me kind of regretting my early dislike of
2001 here in that same project). But I kept watching. And watching. And watching, until sometime in the middle of grad school, I suddenly realized that I'd watched every single Stanley Kubrick feature there was and that he'd sneakily become one of my favorite filmmakers of all time. So here we have this list. I still don't love all of his movies, but each and every one of them has something interesting to offer and displays a self-possessed vision rarely seen in American filmmakers, even among the more independent scenes.
I mean, does the world
need another film geek guy ranking Kubrick's movies? No. And as rankings/analyses go, this is far from essential. But I had fun with it. And hopefully you will, too, reading and discussing it.
So here we go. Enjoy. Disagree. Etc.
13. A Clockwork Orange
Coming a few years on the heels of
2001: A Space Odyssey,
A Clockwork Orange finds Kubrick again in sci-fi mode, and the overriding philosophy behind both these pictures are the same: a complete indifference to the human experience as we know it. Kubrick's reputation as an icy-hearted robot who used film to observe people in the same way that a scientist observes and dissects a bug under a magnifying glass is, I think, overblown, a consequence of people viewing a lack of Hollywood-style sentiment as a lack of emotional engagement. But taking only
2001 and
A Clockwork Orange into account, it's not hard to tell where this reputation came from. And while this philosophical preoccupation leads to the profound framing of humanity against the vastness of the universe in
2001, the results of that approach in
A Clockwork Orange are perhaps less profound and decidedly less tasteful. Absent the moralizing (but essential) final chapter in Burgess's original novel, Kubrick's film is an exercise in detached observation of human suffering, something the movie brings us back to time and time again but maybe no more quintessentially than in the first rape scene, in which a woman is stripped and raped in extreme long shot, no one to help or pity her, not even the camera itself. There's no question that Kubrick absolutely achieves what he sets out to do, and with stylish aplomb; whether or not you think this is worthwhile has to do with whether or not you think objectified misery and sadism is a valuable use of one's cinematic time. I do not.
12. Lolita
Let's just set aside how this compares to the Nabokov novel (it pales, reader). The bigger issue is that this just isn't great. It's good, sure, but not
that good. It's overlong and tedious in stretches, never mind the way that the movie never quite figures out Lolita herself, which is a capital offense in a story like this, turning the titular character into a kind of set piece shuffled around among the male characters instead of a living, breathing human victim of male exploitation.
Lolita just doesn't seem up to the challenge (whether from the censorship pressures of the early '60s MPAA or the film's own myopia) of engaging fully with the questions raised by its premise, and that's ultimately its downfall. Thankfully, it's plenty stylish, both from a camera and especially a costuming point of view—images from this movie are justly iconic. But as powerful as style is, it can only elevate a movie so far.
11. Fear and Desire
Kubrick famously disowned his debut feature, and I guess it's not hard to see why. It lacks a lot of the formal precision of the rest of his work, and, worse, it features plenty of moments that clearly
reach for formal precision but don't quite get there. It's one of the few Kubrick movies with mistakes, in the sense that you can tell that Kubrick wanted to accomplish something he didn't have the chops to pull off without stumbling. The screenplay is also largely gobbledygook. But there's so much energy here;
Fear and Desire is the most avant-garde Kubrick would be until
2001: A Space Odyssey—he still has one foot in the world of his previous career, photography, and the most arresting moments in the movie are essentially photographic, oftentimes edited into more conventional shots. That kind of go-for-broke experimentalism is admirable and, for all its flaws, ultimately successful. Plus, I'm a sucker for "war movie as existential freakout" flicks, and this is nothing if not that.
Character-wise, I guess I'm with Stephen King here: Jack Nicholson's performance is boring and obvious, and none of the changes (mostly dehumanizing ones) the film makes to King's original cast of characters improves the movie substantially. But
The Shining has never been my favorite King novel anyway, so I've got no loyalty to its form in general, which means that unlike King, I'm positioned pretty handily to admit that it improves on the book in a number of ways (or at least goes in interesting directions)—specifically, the way it transforms the humanist horror of the book (i.e. the terror of losing one's mind, either to ghosts or alcohol) into something much more elemental. It's the sublime, horrifying feeling of coming face-to-face with incomprehensible and otherworldly forces and realizing that human significance is an illusion born from those forces, bound to be consumed by them, the malevolent corollary to
2001's "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence. It also stars Shelley Duvall, who is the absolute best in general and is without a doubt best-in-show here, too. King talks about the sexism inspired by some of the narrative changes made to his story in the movie, and maybe rightly so. But the real sexism is Duvall's "Worst Actress" Razzie. Boo.
9. The Killing
Like so many Kubrick features,
The Killing is perfect in the sense that it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do—in this case, to create a modest heist flick. I've heard people call this movie one of Kubrick's best, and, well, I obviously don't agree. It lacks the totemic power of Kubrick's "mature" features and the piercing dramatic thrust of his earlier films. But there's something kind of brilliant about a film that's content to be as thoroughly straightforward and unambitious as this one is, and it's got a mean ending that cuts to "The End" with brutal efficiency. Plus, you've got that stunning B&W cinematography, which is aces.
8. Killer's Kiss
You know, honestly, it's probably sheer contrarianism motivating me to rank this one over
The Killing. That, and the jaw-dropping mannequin factory finale, which is one of the most memorable images in Kubrick's oeuvre, a filmography with no shortage of memorable images to compete with. But really, I don't think there's any way to separate these two, his pair of mid-'50s noir-ish crime features. It's also a significant step in Kubrick's career (and especially the development of his notorious control-freakishness), being the first of his narrative features to have him direct, write,
and produce, a combination that would become commonplace for him but that he wouldn't be able to replicate until
Dr. Strangelove, nearly a decade later. I dig it.
This movie is, by most traditional metrics, boring. But this movie doesn't care, and there's something weirdly compelling about that—i.e. I believe we call this "slow cinema." What's even more compelling is how it all looks: a kind of 18th-century companion piece to
A Clockwork Orange's elaborately designed mise en scène, each shot a meticulous and sumptuous window into a world so fully realized in its 1700s fuffery that the screen basically disappears. It also extends
Orange's proclivity for using slow zoom-out shots as painterly tableaus set to striking music, and as such, it represents the maturation of the final major technical piece of Kubrick's repertoire. Each successive Kubrick film (and there were only three more) would use this shot, making
Barry Lyndon, if for nothing else, one of the more important entries in Kubrick's filmography. I'm talking about this really academically, and I suppose that's appropriate, given the movie. But make no mistake: as "boring" as this can sometimes be, there's something magnetic and hypnotic about the movie that I kind of love. So it's not all head over heart here.
6. Spartacus
Stanley Kubrick famously disliked this movie, and of all his movies, this is the one over which he had the least control, being that Kubrick was brought in mid-production after the firing—or resignation, depending on who you're asking—of Anthony Mann (the first choice for director was David Lean [who declined], and, well, we can dream, can't we?). But anyway, even transcendent prodigies of the medium are wrong every once in a while, and folks, Kubrick is wrong about
Spartacus. It's not a great Kubrick movie in the sense that it fits in well as an iteration of themes and devices developed throughout his career, but it is a great
movie movie and without a doubt, the best ancient-history epic of the era (and were it not for one
Lawrence of Arabia, the best historical epic of the era, period). The battle scenes are exciting, the romances are sweeping, and the scenery is grand. I also find the "I'm Spartacus" moment tremendously moving, which I suppose makes me a sap but oh well. Sap has its place, even in a Kubric movie. This movie's awesome.
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey
There are some movies whose grip on pop culture is so tight and all-encompassing that, often through overexposure, normalization, and/or relentless parody, it's easy to lose track of the fact of how audacious they were when they first rattled audience bones upon first release.
Star Wars is just such a movie, and
2001: A Space Odyssey, the chillier older cousin to
Star Wars as far as Baby Boomer sci-fi goes, is yet another. I alluded to as such in a footnote to this blog's
original treatise on 2001, but as a rationale for why I disliked the movie. Well, times have changed, and my old boredom at the dancing space ships has been replaced by flat-out awe. Blame my pretentious hunger for esoteric, patience-testing cinema, I guess. Many movies attempt to grapple with the transcendent unknowability of our world; precious few attempt to do so through a cosmic lens, framing the vastness of non-terrestrial space against the minuscule human experience we all live; and of even that rarefied bunch, only Terrence Malick's
The Tree of Life has managed to evoke that equally frightening and humbling feeling of encountering the inhuman, inscrutable Great Beyond at the fabric of our universe as effectively as
2001 does. Yes, its prominent position in film culture has robbed this movie's surprises of their shock (and maybe made some of the classical music cues a bit self-parodic), but they've lost none of their power. "A Space Odyssey"—I don't think we recognize enough just how hilariously understated this title is. This movie is nothing short of an epiphany set to film.
4. Full Metal Jacket
I have never been in a war, so I can't comment on the experience (or how closely this movie adheres to it). But the
idea of war—not the self-defense kind but war as an act of retaliation or of politicking—is horrifying. Which is what is so terrifying about the Vietnam War in general, the idea that rational Americans thought the conflict was a valid extension of foreign policy for over a decade, and why it is so appropriate that
Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick's final treatise on the absurdity of war, is essentially a horror movie. More specifically, it is a horror movie that, in each of its bifurcated halves, deconstructs two of the biggest cinema narratives about the value of war: the camaraderie of soldier peers and the honor of combat. It's not that such things don't exist, but the movie makes it sickeningly clear that their existence is bought through tremendous sadism and agony inextricable from whatever hollow "good" comes out of it. This is one of the very few war movies that professes an anti-war bent and backs it up stylistically. It's a terrible, miserable experience that baits you into thinking it isn't so until, all at once, you're reminded that of course it is. War is hell, and not the metaphorical kind—actual Hell, the eternal torment of souls.
3. Eyes Wide Shut
I suppose that it's eye-rolling for some to spend two and a half hours experiencing a man's existential freak-out at discovering that fact that his wife is, in fact, a sexual being. And I respect that position. But as a man married to a woman, I find that two and a half hours immensely powerful—not, I'd like to think, because I am nearly so condescending as Tom Cruise's character (please, Rebecca, punch me hard if I am), but because it's compelling to imagine how easily I could become so and because it's humbling to recognize lighter shades of Cruise's behavior in myself and to be roundly chastised for it. This all makes the movie sound like some moral scold, but the amazing thing is that it isn't, even with Kidman's tour-de-force monologue scene (and is there any actor who has been more suited to a Kubrick film than Kidman? If so, only barely). In fact, for all its reputation for being a chilly puzzle film with an orgy in the middle,
Eyes Wide Shut is one of Kubrick's warmest, most human features, from the fuzzy Christmas vibes everywhere to the pitch-perfect final scene, a moment of such culminating beauty and shock that it makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Barring his unfinished contributions to
A.I., it's the last thing the director did in his lifetime, and I couldn't have asked for a better curtain call.
2. Paths of Glory
There has been no other film—not in the English language, at least—that has provided so efficient and despairing a critique of Reason as the ultimate foundation of one's worldview. These are rational actors, the men in charge of the court that eventually decides to execute three soldiers for deserting their posts in the face of a suicide mission. These are rational actors, the commanders who order the raid on the Anthill, a raid whose cost is in the rapid extinction of human lives. These are rational actors, the European leaders who have ushered in the entire engine of the Great War to begin with. It all makes sense when your mind is breadcrumbed along through the cleanly demarcated path of statistics and Enlightenment logic that informs the Modern view of things. And of course we see it as absurd. We can see it in the writing bodies of the condemned soldiers just before the firing squad pulls their triggers, hear it in their whimpers just moments before the gun smoke. Absent empathy, compassion, the arbitrary but critical value for human life—qualities not incompatible but certainly not necessitated by "pure" Reason—we are a squalid empire of metal and bone. The fact that the film—Kubrick's most propulsive and viscerally exciting work, even if one of his bleakest—is also anti-war feels almost redundant in the face of this.
1. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
But at least the leaders in
Paths of Glory are competent, eh?
Dr. Strangelove shows us the terrifying, hilarious flip side of this, a situation that essentially posits
Paths of Glory as a twisted kind of best-case scenario, if only by the sheer idiocy of the players in
Strangelove's story. It's the Cold War, baby, and though everyone in the film aspires to rationality, each and every one of them is undone by their own machismo, fears, dick-measuring, insanities, and miscommunications. I guess another way you can look at it is that at least
Paths of Glory doesn't end with the extinction (or near extinction, depending on the virility of the world leaders looking to copulate their respective countries' ways out of a post-apocalyptic "mineshaft gap"—we know for a fact that one character in the film is impotent, and I'm betting that at least General Buck Turgidson is a second). Meticulous pursuit of Reason led us to the Nuclear Age,
Dr. Strangelove argues, but mankind (and specifically
mankind) lacks the capacity to actually enact the already fatally flawed (but essentially stabilizing) mechanisms of Modernity. It's dark and misanthropic and hopeless, and as far as nuclear war is concerned, that seems exactly right to me. The tone also seems exactly right: a stone face Buster Keaton would be proud of, resulting in
the greatest work of English-language cinematic satire, and very nearly the greatest work of English-language comedy. Easily my favorite Kubrick. Pray to God that this movie remains a cosmically frightening what-if, so we don't all die from laughter.
