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By Dwight Garner
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Pauline Kael wasn’t a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s films. He lamented his “arctic spirit.” She compared “The Orange of the Clock Paintings” to the paintings of a Teutonic master. In his review of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he wrote, “It’s a bad sign when a director starts to see himself as an author of myths.”
I’m not a member of the Kubrick sect, but Kael’s animosity has surprised me. After all, she’s the review she wrote, in a rejection of Rob Reiner’s 1986 film “Stand through Me,” “If there’s one check that can be implemented in movies, it’s that smart guys never make you feel virtuous.” A user who feels virtuous after watching a Kubrick movie deserves to be prohibited from possessing sharp tools.
“Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker” through David Mikics is a great, cerebral ebook about great intellectual talent. It’s a complete biography, there have been many of Kubrick’s, but a quick examination of his films, with enough life to load context, as well as glitter and bite.
Mikics is a professor of English at the University of Houston and a columnist for Tablet magazine. Her e-book is part of the series of short Jewish Lives biographies, which gave us (yet two) Vivian Gornick about Emma Goldman and Robert Gottlieb about Sarah Bernhardt.
Kubrick (1928–99) was born in the West Bronx to first-generation Jewish immigrant parents. His father a doctor. The circle of relatives lived in the Great Hall, near a huge Baroque imitation palace cinema called Loew’s Paradise, with projected clouds rising from the ceiling. It has become Kubrick’s house at the time. Like Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer,” he was satisfied in a film, even in a bad film.
He was brilliant but a poor student. An herb-based discontent looked like a filthy beatnik before there were filthy beatniks. Chess and photography were his business. Later, broken and in his twenties, he survived the room chess game in Washington Square Park. Kubrick didn’t go to college. He married and became a photographer for Look magazine, a cruellest choice for Life.
Kubrick attended Columbia University and has become acquainted with the party critics audience. There were few or no film schools at the time. He told an interviewer, “For 4 or five years, I saw each and every one of the films that were made. I sat there and thought, well, I don’t know anything about movies, but I know I can make a better movie than that.”
He borrowed cash from his circle of relatives to help fund his paintings as an apprentice manager. He directed two black films in the mid-1950s (“Killer’s Kiss” and “The Killing”) that attracted the attention of critics. The film that put him on the map as a mature skill “Paths of Glory” (1957), a morally tense World War I story starring Kirk Douglas.
The nine films that followed were the ones seen by anyone who worried about living in public darkness, probably more than twice: “Spartacus” (1960); “Lolita” (1962); “Dr. Strangelove” (1964); «2001» (1968); “A Clockwork Orange” (1971); “Barry Lyndon” (1975); “The Shining” (1980); “Full Metal Jacket” (1987); and “Eyes Wide Shut”, which was published shortly after his death in 1999.
Mikics is an expert student in Kubrick’s art. “His films are talking about a failed domain,” he writes. “Perfectly controlled schemes are neglected due to human error or abnormal accidents, or hijacked by male anger.” It shows how Kubrick’s films, full of ungodliness, defy, exasperate and entertain.
Writing about Tom Cruise’s clumsy functionality in “Eyes Wide Shut” reminds us of what he clicks about it: “The inner torment is never glamorous or sexy in a Kubrick movie. Instead, it looks like a malfunction. He points out that Kubrick, though imagining a cast imaginable several years before filming, considered bill Murray for the role.
Mikics has the talent to get a performance. In a scene from “Lolita,” Sue Lyon is “a frantic chewing gum virtuosic, her eyes throwing darts of disdain.” Here’s Malcolm McDowell in “The Clockwork Orange”: “He has a killer style: casual and sharp in his chaplinesco melon, a dynamic boychik who will never realize how stupid he is.
Despite the subtitle of this book, Kubrick, in many tactics, is the least American of American directors. He spent much of his adult life in the English countryside, an hour from London. He discovered it was less expensive to make videos there and hated flying.
He kept in touch with the United States. He enjoyed gossip – “character analysis,” called him Elizabeth Hardwick – and was on the phone in Los Angeles. Videotapes of professional football matches were sent to him. (I admired the edition of Michelob’s commercials). I read the New York Times every morning. When he got bored during a movie, he was known to open a newspaper in a movie theater.
This eBook captures your fanatical side of control. It also shows why other people wanted to paint with him. He had a concept of each and every facet of what he did cinematic paintings.
His voracious reading was very helpful to him. “I literally move on to e-bookstores, close my eyes and pull things off the shelves,” he told an interviewer. “If I don’t like the ebook after a while, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised.
His films may lower the temperature in a room, but Mikics rejects the concept that frosts are all they are. Kubrick has created some of the most indelible photographs in cinema. Mikics quotes music critic Alex Ross, who wrote about Kubrick’s films: “They make me happy, make me laugh,” Ross said. “If it’s cold, then Fred Astaire.
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