Kubrick Analysis

Essay A

In the Prologue chapter of the James Naremore book, On Kubrick, Naremore talks primarily about Kubrick's upbringing and what brought him to film. Throughout the majority of the chapter, it is argued that Stanley Kubrick is undoubtedly one of the most prominent auteurs of cinema. “Even though Kubrick was one of the cinemas most indisputable auteurs, a producer-director who supervised every aspect of his films from writing to exhibition, he never benefited from the support of auteurism (Naremore, 2).” Kubrick never benefited from any of the gratifications of the time being labeled as an auteur in film. It was also heavily argued that Kubrick differed from the traditional auteur in the sense that because of the fact that his films were literary adaptations, and that the themes and narratives of each one of the films were so wildly different, from a futuristic space odyssey, to World War II, and even a different aspect of contemporary London society. Because of this lack of consistency in his choice of narrative, many disputed his label as an auteur.

Another argument in this chapter is that Kubrick is considered one of the last successful modernist directors who also worked for Hollywood. Much of the chapter goes on to discuss the ways in which he contributed to the modernist picture of Hollywood film until he ultimately decided to move on and live in England. The chapter also talked about how Kubrick’s background in photography helped build his auteurist style of filmmaking, by being able to get certain shots and point of views primarily seen in photography.

The last argument in this chapter is highlighting the importance of the grotesque in his films, and how a major theme is dealing with images and ideas that humans find repulsive. We see this theme of the grotesque through not just things that are traditionally grotesque like in a horror movie, but ideas such as in the Clockwork Orange when we witness sexual assault and human brainwashing that are inherently repulsive.

A Kubrickian auteurist characteristic that can be seen throughout his films is the stylistic choice of long shots in his films that seemingly go on forever. An example of this characteristic in action would absolutely be the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where David Bowman arrives at the monolith where he is instantly transported through what seems to be multiple dimensions of space and time. This scene is meant to really bring out another auteurist theme of Kubrick films, which was previously discussed, the grotesque. These long shots are meant to draw out the uncomfortable feeling the audience gets when watching Bowman is being shot through space and time through the monolith as he transcends into a new stage of human life.

Another example of this characteristic taking place is during the Shining, where the camera is tracking Danny on his tricycle through the building, creating suspense and dread in the stomachs of the audience. This shot also highlights the feelings of the grotesque for Kubrick films as well, placing the audience on Danny’s vulnerable point of view, as we know to expect a point in time where we will be confronted with a feeling of unease.

Another thematic motif that shows his auteurist tendencies in Kubrick's films is the fascination around bodies and bodily images. The Naremore reading highlights an instance in particular in The Clockwork Orange, and the use of female bodies as furniture in the Korova Milk Bar (Naremore, 34). This fascination of bodies, as well as the longshots, tie into the idea of the grotesque. This instance where we see female bodies as just objects in this film is interesting because once we grasp how this world values female bodies, we are also stricken with the scenes of Alex and his friends breaking into houses and sexually assaulting women, treating the bodies the same as if they were in the Korova Milk bar, but because of the brutality of the attacks, we as the audience are made to sympathize with the images of female bodies in the milk bar as we can see the blatant disregard to women in this world.

This idea of bodily images ties around to another thematic motif of dehumanization, also heavily represented in the Clockwork Orange as well. As we witness in the first part of the film, Alex has an obvious disregard toward women's bodies, and when he gets locked up after killing the cat lady, he is then subject of this disregard to human bodies, or rather in this case human minds, after he agrees to participate in the brainwashing experiment to get a lighter sentence. Alex is then subject to the same disregard and dehumanization after he is forced to watch with his eyes pried open, violent videos that will teach him to act and think differently. The idea around this brainwashing experiment was essentially to free up space in the prison they were staying at for more political prisoners. This, of course, is another way that people are dehumanized in this film, treating bodies as cattle that either needs to stay in a cement prison, or to be subject to horrible torture in order to reform back to society.

The final auteur characteristic of Stanley Kubrick is the theme of human fallibility, or rather, human error. In this case, I am going to talk about the Clockwork Orange again, and the ways that it contributed to this fallability not necessarily on Alex’s side, but rather the attempt to ‘fix’ Alex through the brainwashing methods he received while in prison for murder. “The report revealed the wide range of experimental brain research programs underway in the US… These programs were staged with negligible ethical guidelines, and treatments like Alex’s were frequently imposed without prisoners' consent or knowledge (Strange, pp. 226-227).” The scene at the very end of the film when the audience confirms that the treatments that Alex received to get out of prison early did not work is an example of how human fallibility is present in Kubrick films, with even the fallibility of the government is apparent.

Ultimately, Kubrick presents many ways that show he is obviously an Auteur in his own sense, being the one who controls the way his films are presented and different stylistic and thematic motifs that are apparent in all of his works. Highlighted by the Naremore readings, we see that Kubrick was very much regarded as an auteur, however was never really one to benefit from this term being that he worked with Hollywood. In the end, Kubrick is recognized in the film community as one of the most inventive and innovative filmmakers of the time.

Works Cited

Naremore, James. On Kubrick, British Film Institute, 2008, pp. 1–49.

Strange, Carolyn. “Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as Art Against Torture.” Screening

Torture, 2012, pp. 143–164., doi:10.7312/columbia/9780231153591.003.0008.

Essay B

Three of Stanley Kubrick’s most prominent war set films were Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket, all of which highlight points of war that usually demonstrated some of the fears and anxieties of war that were common in the popular viewpoint at the time they were released. All three films deal with the common theme of dread in war, and the anticipation and anxiety around war.

In Dr Strangelove, this feeling was highlighted throughout the entire film and really in the rest of the film's title “how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.” This title is meant to brush off the terrifying feeling of a nuclear bomb wiping out all of the world, yet the title also adds to the anxiety that many Americans during the cold war had. This title looks at how both Americans and also Russians had to deal with their everyday lives of the possibility of a nuclear bomb lingering on our heads always.

A way that Full Metal Jacket takes a look at this theme of anxiety is seen during the scene where Joker comes to the American camp in Vietnam with rafterman, a friend he had while on the ‘island’/bootcamp. We are presented with the group of men hanging around and resting and waiting on their next order, when one of the men reveals a dead Vietnamese soldier. This scene stuck out to me particularly because of the disregard to human bodies and lives. In the Desser reading, it mentions how American soldiers often had this attitude going into combat during the Vietnam war, and there would be many publications on how American soldiers treated the Vietnamese poorly, and how much of the outrage back in the states around the war was because of this blatant disregard toward human life (Desser, 93). This represents anxiety in war primarily because it is a foreshadowing on how soldiers can transform into monsters because of this lack of empathy. We are later confirmed of this fear when Joker is on a plane with another soldier who shoots at Vietnamese civilians carelessly, only wanting to kill and not what the US army was meant to do there.

Another way that Full Metal Jacket demonstrates this theme of fear and anxiety is the feminization of the VietCong. The first scene where we are presented with this is when Joker is in the Vietnamese city and a prostitute approaches him and Cowboy, and Joker tells off that she is probably a part of the VietCong. This image is confirmed later in the film when the infantry surrounds the VietCong sniper who wreaked havoc on their troop. “The image of the VC as a woman, the ubiquity of VC who are women, is a near hysterical shock to the (masculine) American psyche, that this physically smaller, technologically inferior race, could defeat the hypermasculinized, hypertechnoligized American soldier (Desser, 96).” Kubrick shows the fear of femininity defeating the social norm of masculinity in an activity that is traditionally tied to masculine traits of aggressiveness and violence.

Paths of Glory is an interesting take on this theme, especially since it is not explicitly referred to. In the first part of the film, where the solders are essentially sent on a suicide mission, there is highlighted the fear and anxiety around corruption in wat. Paths of Glory, is more of a melodrama, so its representations of certain themes are not as obvious to a comedic level like Dr Strangelove or Full Metal Jacket, however this feeling is heightened, and makes us question the true intentions around war and whether or not it is all completely fair and just.

These three films range in different parts of Stanley Kubrick's career, with Paths of Glory demonstrating an early part, and Full Metal Jacket, being a more recent, post Vietnam war take on war film. These films are also representative of different eras of war film, being that they all hold a similar attitude around war, yet the narratives and stories get more complex showing the raw bones of those who were a part of the wars mentioned. Kubrick's political and artistic expression evolves with these films, with Paths of Glory being a film that places the blame on the individual and themes around betrayal and not necessarily blame on the state or government that is following through with these atrocities.

As Kubrick's attitude toward war changes with Dr Strangelove, we see that the blame is less on the individual and more on the state. I am referencing in specific how the bomb was dispatched by the group of airforce men. While they were the ones who did the horrific act of triggering a bomb that will kill all life on earth, they are not the ones to blame in this situation. The ones who have the blame are the government members in the large control room who give the orders to drop the bomb and attack. Kubrick's political vision shifts the blame onto a bigger scale perpetrator, which is the governments who partake in the wars that endanger those who participate on a lower scale. “Some laid the blame for the escalation of nuclear weaponry directly at the door of game theory… others asserted it was an expression of abstract rationality ideally tuned to the technological character of the Cold War (Belleto, 335).” This game theory can be seen as a theory that used soldiers as pawns for the bigger picture. The soldiers who are in the plane are ultimately portrayed as almost innocent and lovable characters who admire their country enough to make an ultimate sacrifice like unhatching a bomb manually and riding the bomb down to explosion.

Finally, Kubrick's attitude toward war evolves once more, keeping that blame on more powerful offices who make the decisions on partaking in the war, but rather than portraying soldiers as innocent and just following commands, Kubrick portrays the characters in Full Metal Jacket, as not so innocent, but rather products of a corrupt system that made their attitudes toward ‘the enemy’ so savage and horrific that they are both to blame and also not to blame. “Hartmann's constant taunts reminding them that they are all ‘equally worthless,’ Kubrick emphasises the part of the Marine Corps that forces them all into a collective identity (Perel, 224).” The case of Pyle not fitting into that collective identity is essentially what was a trigger for his transformation into a character that is unrecognizable from the beginning of the film.

Adding onto that, however, fitting into the collective identity is also not something to be reckoned with either, as it is shown during Jokers time in Vietnam that the collective hypermasculine identity of the marine corps can also transform someone into a sociopathic killer with little regard toward anyone but themselves. We see an example of this when Joker is taunted for his lack of a 1000-yard-stare of a marine. This stare is representative of how marines once experiencing battle, or something traumatic, gain a stare that seems as though they are staring 1000 yards in front of them. This stare is something that is ingrained in the collective identity of the marines, and is in a way prized as being a part of the group. What this film emphasizes is that because of the traumatic events endured by the marines, they all are faced with horrific events with this stare, which is represented as a lack of emotion toward these horrible events.

These films depart in a way from their literary counterparts in the sense that Kubrick used the characteristics of his auteur vision for all his films, highlighting human fallacy in all of these films. The reason why Kubrick chose to make film adaptations of these literary works was because they all had some kind of hint or idea that he could work with in order to push these themes, which he consistently places in all of his films. In all three films, whether it be because of an individual's error, or a wide scale error on the government forces involved in these stories, to the failure of keeping soldiers in line, they all include human fallacy that was not so much emphasized in the literary adaptations. Human error is the main contributor to all of the ways that the films show horrific events happening. In Full Metal Jacket, the human error is blatant in telling Pyle's story, and how Hartman while doing what he is expected to do, failed Pyle and ultimately himself by creating a soldier who fell to these brutal practices in his time at the ‘island.’

In James Naremores reading about ‘Wargasm’, he mentions that “The general [in Dr Strangelove] believes that his action will save America from the Red menace, but as the US president subsequently explains to the Pentagon, he could not be more wrong (Naremore, 120).” As we ultimately find out, the actions of the general and overall government in their seemingly persistent act of trying to ‘save’ the US, they doom the entire world through the idea of human fallacy that didn't allow them to see the bigger picture. Because of the actions taken by high ranking officials, who are also human, this theme persists in the way Kubrick portrays humans and war.

Ultimately, Kubrick's vision of how war is portrayed all revolves around his political views of war as being inherently bad, which was a common attitude for the time. Kubrick's films, including the ones mentioned in this essay all demonstrate a certain anti-war message that no matter what, human error and fallacy will always get in the way of doing the seemingly ‘right’ thing. While the shift in blame for these horrific crimes changes throughout his career and in making war films, Kubrick’s stance on war takes a comedic and sometimes serious take. One thing is for certain and it is that Kubrick's stance on the morality and efficacy of war still remains unchanged throughout his films.

Works Cited

Belletto, Steven. “The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State.”

American Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 333–357., doi:10.1353/aq.0.0074.

Desser, David. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Temple University Press,

1991. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14btcb5. Accessed 14 May 2020.

Naremore, James. “On Kubrick”, British Film Institute, 2008, pp. 119–136.

Perel, Zivah. “Pyle and Joker's Dual Narratives: Individuality and Group Identity in Stanley

Kubrick's Marine Corps.” (2008).