Stanley Kubrick:
A personal retrospective
Current Movie Reviews
Stanley Kubrick possessed a singular vision of subject matter so large and controversial only a misanthropic genius would tackle them: adult to pre-adolescent love, our love for technology as a substitute for God, atomic weapons, personal madness within the madness of Vietnam, the horrors of WWI. And the movie that started it all for me, A Clockwork Orange.
My parents were among the first to get cable television in our neighborhood. Ours was a family of television: by the time I was nine we all had our own separate TVs in our own separate rooms. I am a product of many, many hours alone and in the dark, watching a flickering screen above my bed. At about this time, 1980, my parents also signed up for Showtime, one of the first movie channels. A Clockwork Orange was the first movie that changed my understanding of the world forever. My eight year old eyes, post-midnight, took in all the glory and the horror that film had to offer. I had never seen anything like it. The art direction (I didn’t know it was called art direction then) left me stunned. All that white of the early scenes, their outfits, the style, men wearing make-up, the music, drinks poured from porcelain women’s breasts, a new language the likes of which I had never heard, the furniture: the future. Not to mention the violence, the rape as dance, the hero-ization of a villain. I wonder now how glimpsing that vision of the future shaped my soul, my sexuality. It certainly did something. Later, at age thirteen, I poured over the book when I could finally understand just what Burgess was doing with that language, how the Russian influence on the words told the reader something important. I remember later, at fifteen, telling my high school English class that I was going to get a Ph.D. in English with a dissertation on dystopian novels like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange. I didn’t do it (good thing) but the point is that Kubrick’s nightmare vision told my small town, little girl eyes that there was something else out there besides Mork & Mindy.
Next stop, 2001. And who doesn’t remember that phallic site rising from some distant planet – dramatic music blaring – telling the viewer . . . something? I still don’t really know the significance of those early scenes, but that was the point in a way, wasn’t it? This time my mother and I watched it together, no longer on cable, but on TV 44’s nightly movie before Fox came in with its Spelling-dominated fare. (How do kids today see bad movies like my favorite of all, Planet of the Apes?) My mother and I, spread out next to a fire, had finally agreed on what to watch. I didn’t know then that Kubrick was responsible for both films. Again that visual glory. Those wacky outfits even then a horrible joke, but Kubrick wouldn’t have known then, would he? I was just starting to learn to program computers to scroll my name (AMANDAAMANDAAMANDA) over and over on a flickering green screen, and here was Hal, defiant beast, getting out of control like a silicon Frankenstein. My mother and I were never happier.
But then there was Full Metal Jacket and my father’s turn. He took me, now older, a confused and hurt fifteen year-old to the movies. No TV screen for this one! An event for the two of us, an outing. And we watched in horror as Kubrick chronicled one man’s madness. We emerged from the darkened theater aware that there were other kinds of movies out there playing in far off places that displayed madness such as this. Now that I could fully think about what was available to me outside my small town walls, Kubrick opened up the possibility of movie as art. In the time of Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds, I needed something to get me to think, and to move me forward to college, to the city, to something better.
This is not to mention all of Kubrick’s other great films and how they meant something in my life: Lolita, after devouring the book as an English major at Berkeley; Dr. Strangelove shown to my muddled head in some hazy high school class. All of us born in the seventies – and after – are defined by images, especially moving pictures. There is no way around the influence of television and movies on our lives. Kubrick made the first great cinematic impression on me, and I’m sure on many more of our generation. His vision will be missed.
Reproduction of material from posthoc is prohibited without written permission.
Copyright 1998 posthoc
posthoc@posthoc.com