For this second installment of Week Watch, I decided to shed a light on my favorite three Kubrick feature films: The Shining, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. These are not unpopular choices among many opinions regarding Kubrick’s best works, however it is undeniable that with this particular director, great arguments can be made in favor of most of his movies as to which are the best, and it is certainly not wrong to argue that many of them reach the level of masterpieces that shaped the face of cinema.
While massive essays could be written analyzing each one of these works, for this article I’ll go over the specific aspects that make these movies stand out for me, and why they define my favorite things about the style of direction that Kubrick employs. It goes without saying that I recommend all of these movies to anyone, so definitely check them out if you haven’t yet, and leave your thoughts on them in the comments or on any other works of Kubrick that you are particularly fond of.
The Shining (1980):
The Shining is the kind of rare movie whose quality is matched by how widespread its notoriety is. You’ll be hard-pressed to find people who even without having seen it, have never heard the title. Moreover, references to this movie are littered all over pop culture, meme culture, general culture, you name it, making it safe to say that pretty much all of us have been exposed to The Shining, in some way or another.
This iconic presence in the conscience of so many is well deserved. The genre of Horror has been, throughout the decades, somewhat trivialized by the abundance of lower-quality, small productions, aiming at high profit margins through low budgets. But among those numerous movies that fall into obscurity, those that distinguish themselves shine even brighter. The Shining is perhaps the supreme example of this.
Telling the story Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, who accepts the position of winter-caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, which closes during that season, the movie is a deep dive on the effects of the isolation this big lonely building inflicts on Jack, his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). The setting itself is so perfectly realized by the production team with lean decoration and very symmetrical compositions, and it is shot in such an equally eerie way by cinematographer John Alcott that the hotel would instill a sense of unease and dread even if nothing happened to the characters inside it.
But something does indeed happen, and many people will have differing opinions about exactly it is. Taking the story at face-value one could simply say that Jack becomes engulfed in cabin fever, which combined with tales of a previous caretaker who murdered his family, fuels a madness that compels him to also try to kill his wife and his son. But Kubrick crafts a narrative, based of course on Stephen King’s writing, that instills upon the viewer the sense that something else is actually going on, something that affects every element of the family and is perpetuated after the story is over, making the ending that much more haunting.
We see this effect play out with Danny, as he is said to possess “The Shining”, basically a psychic ability that enables him to somewhat read minds and tap into the past and future. He starts to experience visions within the hotel charged with violence that trouble him greatly and that compound his fears of his father, who has in the past abused him and his mother. While one could accept this apparent supernatural ability of the boy, it could also be interpreted as the effect the isolation within the hotel with a dreaded father figure has on Danny.
Likewise, Wendy succumbs to madness and desperation from these two fronts, as she tries to deal with a violent abusive husband on one hand, and a scared, lonely son who’s experiencing these haunting visions on the other. While her love for Danny is real, as is her desire to protect him, it’s hard to argue that she is totally mentally there by story’s end, and so when she and Danny escape Jack’s madness you don’t get the idea that they’ve come out at the other end unscathed and that the madness of the hotel has left them. Rather, it stays within them, within us and within the hotel itself.
That’s perhaps what I like the most about The Shining and how Kubrick directs it. It’s a horror movie that is not trying to scare you. It’s trying to haunt you, to stay with you. The characters are alone in that dreadful place, and because they are alone, they feel like something else is there with them, but in the end, the spiritual presence of the hotel or within the hotel poses no physical threat to them. There are no ghosts pulling things off the walls, dragging the characters down hallways to maim, or torture, or kill them. The true evil, maddening presence lies within the characters themselves and the cause is just the place itself and each other. The hotel doesn’t need anything besides those within it to wreak havoc on their minds, just like the movie doesn’t need overly graphical demonic entities to stay with us after it’s over.
The actors themselves are able to portray this just as well given their experience of shooting on location, for over a year, with just each other and a director who was bent on getting that energy, emotion and feeling just right, every day. I would imagine it to be a very intensive, grueling and at times maddening experience, and judging by some cast interviews it definitely was.
Ultimately what’s scary about ghosts and ghost stories is not what they do to their victims physically, that’s just the inevitable climax of the narrative, but it’s what they do to them mentally, the build-up to the explosion, the fear, the dread, the desperation, the madness. The fact that The Shining is still able to instill that feeling and have us talking about it, all these years later, is a testament to Kubrick’s success.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964):
I had never realized that Dr. Strangelove was a comedy before I sat down to watch it. I knew it involved nuclear weapons and the famous War Room set, but apart from that I really didn’t know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a pretty brilliant satire that employed some of the most effective and economic film making techniques I have seen, combined with a sharp wit and expertly crafted script, to produce a movie that has me chuckling throughout with how wonderfully ridiculous it is.
Based on the book “Red Alert” by Peter George, which incidentally, is not comedic, the movie revolves around a harrowing situation in the midst of the Cold War, when a crazed war-mongering general orders on his own initiative that bomb-carrying planes attack Russia. The rest of the narrative comes back and forth from the General’s office in his air base, which is locked down by the General himself, the perimeter of the air base, the inside of a B-52 bomber ordered to carry out the attack, and the War Room, where American political and military leaders scramble ridiculously to try to understand what has come about and how to stop it.
The movie does indeed succeed in its subtitle, as it is hard to take something like nuclear holocaust seriously once you’re presented with this take on what happens behind the scenes. The comedy, therefore, comes from how absolutely serious these men are and how seriously they take themselves contrasted with how comically they are acting and speaking to us, the viewers.
They fight, they stumble, they yell, they give big speeches, they are flamboyant and overly expressive, but still fully within the boundaries of realism, or at least, the realism of this version of the world. The words they are saying are timed perfectly and are very fun within context, but the delivery makes them even better. It’s clear that the actors really understood what Kubrick was going for and they deliver on the ironic and sarcastic tone that the movie permeates throughout, with perhaps the best example being the famous line “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”, spoken by the President (Peter Sellers) with complete sternness, making me smile just thinking about how it’s said.
Kubrick also adds some silly touches to the film beyond what’s done in the script to make the whole situation more amusing, like allowing his actors to overact their expressions through the use of close-ups, not telling the actor playing Major Kong on the plane that the film was a comedy, to make his patriotic speeches sound even more grandiose and absurd, or simply the decision to have Peter Sellers play three characters in the movie, including the titular Dr. Strangelove, an ex-Nazi strategist working for the Americans, whose right hand springs into Nazi salutes randomly, as if it has a will of its own, to hilarious results.
But despite all the well-placed comedic aspects of the movie, it is actually just one half of the “black comedy” category this movie fits nicely into.
The second half hinges on the sobering fact that Kubrick aims at relaying to the audience, which is that these larger than life figures, whether from the political, military or any other spheres, who have all of our lives in their hands, are far more fallible than many people would like to believe they are.
Likewise, the systems of coordination and communication between these entities can actually hinder our ability to combine efforts and make the world a better place, exemplified when Captain Mandrake tries to warn the President of the imminent bombing via phone call but can’t reach him because the Pentagon doesn’t accept the collect call, and he doesn’t have the correct change.
It encourages a healthy skepticism of the system by presenting the viewer with the conclusion that: if the world is truly run by these types of people, we are sure to all perish in a nuclear holocaust out of sheer stupidity. In the case of the movie, that indeed comes to pass, and it is hard to argue that the real world is not in danger of facing the same result.
It’s astounding to see a director have such a full grasp of a genre I would never have expected to see him excel at. Of course, Kubrick is great at telling many different types of stories, but comedy or satire relies on commanding the elements beyond the script just as well, such as camerawork, timing, and of course guiding the actors towards the desired performance. Dr. Strangelove accomplishes all of the above in an almost effortless way, given how the movie is pretty much just men in 4 different locations talking to each other. It’s perhaps the one of Kubrick’s works I was most surprised by and it certainly earns its spot in my top 3.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):
It’s hard to say what exact type of movie 2001 is. On its most basic level, it’s a science fiction movie, and that might be the most accurate way to describe it. However, given everything that Kubrick does, says, presents and comments on in this movie, I would say it’s also not inaccurate to call this an epic. It’s an epic about humanity, about our history, our nature, our flaws, our evolution and our future. The term ‘Odyssey’ in the title does seem to indicate that’s one angle Kubrick was trying to explore.
The movie is lean on narrative moments, just as it’s lean on dialogue. Through the course of its one hundred and forty-nine minutes, a person can usually single out only a handful of story beats that take place from start to finish. That’s arguably because Kubrick did not intend to overstuff his movie with long bouts of explanations and exposition. It’s rare that one sees a movie rely and trust so much in an audience’s intelligence and their ability to be open-minded to something they are not accustomed to in movies and do not expect to see.
The conclusion all these years later is that Kubrick’s approach paid off. 2001 is widely regarded as a cinematic landmark, possibly the director’s magnum opus, and one of the most visionary movies ever made. But back in 1968, it really wasn’t the case, and it’s a curious turn of events how this movie came to develop the prestigious standing it has today. Critics were harsh on 2001. Some actually walked out of the New York premiere, with Kubrick frantically going back and forth from the projection booth to adjust the focus while the movie was being screened, and co-writer Arthur C. Clarke leaving in tears at the intermission, disappointed at how Kubrick had cut pretty much all of his writing to the barebones.
What saved the movie in its early years was a demographic that Kubrick did not expect to rally to his defense: young people. Specifically, hippies were the driving force behind 2001 becoming the top grossing movie of 1968, with David Bowie dropping acid before viewing it, and John Lennon stating that he watched the film “every week”. It became an experience for those craving a transcendent journey into the unknown, the different and the futuristic. The studio caught on to this and soon added to the redesigned posters the tagline “the ultimate trip”.
But over the years, 2001 grew to rely less and less on stoned audiences to make its point, or at least, to make a point. Viewers progressively abandoned pre-conceived notions of science-fiction and basic story structure and by doing so, discovered in 2001 a production encourages one to think about, well, a whole lot of things.
Today, the movie arrives to us in that form, that of a masterpiece. Opening in Africa with a group of pre-historic apes as they discover a smooth, black rectangular monolith, clearly made by some other unseen entity. These apes gain from it an understanding of the use of tools for other purposes and soon grab bones to strike at things, and as one ape throws a bone in the air to the sound of Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the bone morphs into a space shuttle, signaling the end of the opening with the famous “longest flash-forward in the history of the cinema”. The rest of the movie in bent on heading in the same direction as the opening. We learn that modern astronauts have discovered a smooth, black rectangular monolith on the surface of the Moon, and come to the same conclusion as the opening apes: this has been made by something else. Eager to establish contact with other intelligent beings, humanity dispatches its most advanced vessel, the Discovery to the vicinity of Jupiter, where signals indicate that these mysterious beings might be.
The ship is crewed by two human astronauts, and an AI computer, HAL 9000, which controls and manages the ship’s systems. Soon the humans begin to worry that HAL’s programming is failing but find it difficult to get around him because the computer is present at all times, in all points of the ship. Soon, HAL becomes aware of their suspicions and computer turns on its makers, killing one of the astronauts but being turned off by the second, Bowman, who is left alone on a pod, arriving at Jupiter to find another monolith meandering through space and a so-called “Star Gate” to which he is pulled into.
This is where the movie enters the realm of the bizarre, intriguing and fantastical. We are presented with a vast array of colorful visuals, of various forms and sounds as Bowman travels through a wormhole for quite a few minutes, a sequence that Kubrick and visual effects artist Doug Trumbull wanted to make the audience “feel like they were actually going to space and on this adventure themselves, not just through the characters, but participating.”. At the end, we find ourselves in a lavish suite, with Bowman on the bed, a young man, and then suddenly old, eating a meal, and finally, on his deathbed, the monolith presents itself one last time. Bowman stretches himself to touch it and in doing so, the movie closes with the final scene of a spectral baby looking over the Earth, the “Star-Child”, which as per most interpretations is Bowman’s represented consciousness, having achieved a new state of being bestowed upon him by the extraterrestrial entities. He has now returned prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.
It is not hard to imagine how this baffled audiences in 1968, but then again, to fully understand every minute of 2001 is not the point of 2001. Somethings in the movie, most obviously the Star Gate sequence are meant to be beyond our comprehension. It’s Kubrick trying to relay the most certain of facts about human awareness of the universe, which is: there is so much we don’t know, and our brains are not at a state where we can comprehend it. That’s the boldest move Kubrick does in this movie that hardly any film maker has the courage to make, to deliberately confuse your audience, but with purpose, confuse them to try to teach them something.
Kubrick does that with every aspect of the film. Scenes linger on routine space travelling procedures, docking maneuvers, games of chess with our artificial creations to the sound of melodic compositions from the great composers of our history. Shots are slowed, as are performances themselves. It’s signifying how far we’ve come and how long it has taken, encouraging us to consider that instead of just craving for the next story element.
It’s that aspect of 2001 that gives its staying power more than 50 years later. That same message is as relevant today as it was then. Likewise is the message regarding Man’s relationship with tools, also established in the opening and concluded with the confrontation with HAL, as humans are forced to let go of the things they had been relying on for so long in order to achieve the next step in their evolution.
Of course, 2001 is not stating that the next step for us is to become godly space babies, but if there’s one thing that 2001 does quite brilliantly and maybe even accurately is immerse its audience (if they want to be immersed) in an experience that makes you contemplate so many aspects of yourself, of your existence as a living, thinking thing, to the point where you might look at your very being alive as a weird phenomenon that you are not quite fully aware of. Not yet anyway.
I can see why hippies liked it so much.