Personal History With Kubrick Movies

Most of the films of Stanley Kubrick feel, for lack of a better phrase, ahead of their time. In both the technique and the writing, you always feel as though you’re watching something at least several years newer than it actually is, capable of standing side by side with any modern movie. While there are indeed other films which illicit such a reaction, no one did it more consistently than Kubrick. Paths of Glory, 2001: a Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket remain almost flawless from a visual standpoint. The same can even be said of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, outside of some fake looking miniature work, which even then is almost excusable by the film’s surreal, comedic nature where immersion isn’t exactly the most important thing.

The first Kubrick film I ever saw was The Shining back in 2005, when I was eleven (I also watched Alien and RoboCop when I was eleven. I don’t think I was too negatively affected). It was the scariest movie I’d ever seen up to that point, and I don’t think any movie can ever affect me that strongly again. I was at just the right age. It and the aforementioned Alien were the movies that got me to respect the horror genre, which up until then I had assumed was nothing but gore and jump scares. I realized they could actually be atmospheric, mysterious, and tell good stories with characters you actually cared about. Kubrick’s perfectionism prevents there being any schlocky visuals that could take the viewer out of the experience by breaking their suspension of disbelief. Anything that can’t be portrayed convincingly, like a scene from the original novel involving bushes coming to life, is scrapped (seriously, check out the Shining mini-series made by Stephen King himself if you want to understand why directly transcribing a book to the screen almost never works).

Striving for visual perfection carried throughout Kubrick’s entire career, most notably in the second film of his that I saw, 2001. I must have been in high school when I first attempted to watch it. I remember taking a break after the scene of HAL being shut down, then never getting around to finishing it for years. Not until college did I get inspired to re-watch it when it was offered as a subject for a writing assignment. This time I ended up watching it twice, once alone and once with my brother. I’m now kicking myself for not realizing the movie was almost over at the point I had originally given up. By then I had matured enough to finally see the film’s brilliance. While certainly not the most “fun” space movie of all time, it remains the greatest. Not exactly being “fun” isn’t synonymous with “boring”, and “fun” and “interesting” are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. 2001 doesn’t want you to be passively entertained, it wants you to think, to be engaged, and figure things out for yourself through its visual storytelling. If you really have that hard of a time following it, read some analyses and then come back to me.

2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)

Logan’s Run (1976). NOT KUBRICK

An example of Kubrick’s timelessness: the movie on the top is almost ten years older than the movie on the bottom.

One contributing factor to 2001’s timelessness was the decision of Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C. Clarke to not show any aliens, another example of scrapping things that could become schlocky and dated. They were trying to create something truly great, and part of that entailed realizing that no possible alien designs conceivable by the human mind would be sufficiently “alien”, and so it was best to simply cut out the middle man and not show any. This ultimately worked for the best, enhancing the mystery by letting the audience wonder about the true nature of the beings behind the film’s events. How depressingly dull and disappointing would it be if the movie just outright revealed “it was these stupid looking aliens” or “it was humans from the future” or “it was God”? Not answering every question has given 2001 its staying power, seeing as people are still speculating on exactly what it means to this day. It is one of the few films where you truly feel like you’re witnessing something important rather than just watching a movie.

The next two Kubrick films I saw were Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange, in that order, once again with my brother. The former was again the subject of a writing assignment, while the latter we watched during the summer before my coming to NIU. Like most people who’ve seen it, I find the first half of the Full Metal Jacket more memorable than the second, not that the second half is worthless. I’ve never seen another movie that so distinctly feels like two short films that have been edited together. Both halves each tell their own, complete story with a beginning, middle and end. A Clockwork Orange was a pretty memorable and “different” experience that stuck with me. I liked it enough to get a poster of it for my apartment (you can probably still purchase one at the student center store).

The last Kubrick film I saw before this class was Dr. Strangelove, by myself at my apartment during last schoolyear’s first semester. Paths of Glory is so far the only movie we’ve watched in this class I hadn’t seen yet.