There are only five directors with four or more films in the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 films of all time. One of them is Stanley Kubrick, by any measure one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. His films, including such masterpieces as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining, are stunning in their psychological acuity and grand narrative sweep, as well as in the painterly attention to detail that Kubrick brought to every shot and composition. Indeed, the director may have been the first to realize composer Richard Wagner’s vision of a “gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art, in the medium of film. There is so much to take in in any single Kubrick film that Martin Scorsese has asserted that “one of his pictures are equivalent to 10 of somebody else’s.”
By the time Kubrick died in March 1999, shortly after completing Eyes Wide Shut, he was widely regarded as a master filmmaker. But Kubrick himself was a recluse — critics pored over his films, but relatively little was known about the man. This began to change in 2001, with the release of the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, directed by Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and frequent executive producer. Since then, books, biographies, and films about Kubrick have proliferated.
The most recent addition to this growing library is David Mikics’s Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker. Mikics, a professor of English at the University of Houston and a columnist for Tablet magazine, uses interviews and archival material to examine the human side of Kubrick’s life and work. Along the way, he traces the outlines of Kubrick’s biography, from his modest upbringing in the Bronx to his early career as a photographer for Look magazine and his later career as a director. Throughout, Mikics offers incisive analyses of Kubrick’s films, as well as a number of big-picture arguments about the themes and concerns that unite them.
According to Mikics, “Most Kubrick movies are about rebellion of some kind.” They tend to center around intelligent characters struggling to break free from what is enclosing them, only to become even more trapped within the system they were attempting to escape. “His movies are about mastery that fails,” argues Mikics. “Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents or hijacked by masculine rage.” Kubrick’s gallery of rebels — Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Dave Bowman in 2001, Jack Torrance in The Shining, Barry Lyndon in Barry Lyndon, Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut — are like butterflies trapped in airtight bottles: The harder they try to break free, the closer they come to bringing about their own undoing.
Mikics’s major contribution to our understanding of Kubrick is to show how these themes are linked to the director’s own life. Kubrick’s deep interests in chess and photography, for example, furnish us with “a key to the Kubrick universe. His films have the aura of the kid who has spent his time thinking and tinkering, trying to get things exactly right — a skill you need in both chess and photography. But when the grown-up world looms and boyhood hobbies yield their place to the facts of life, which include not just sex (as in Lolita, another movie about a child) but war and mass death, then you grow up fast.” Kubrick, Mikics explains, was a hyperintelligent thinker and tinkerer who rebelled early and often: against high school, where his grades were so poor he couldn’t get into college; against his Jewish heritage (he declined to have a bar mitzvah, writes Mikics, “from sheer lack of interest”); against the Hollywood studio system; and arguably, by dint of his permanent relocation to England, against the United States itself. The “deep-frozen impersonality” that some attribute to the director’s films is really, Mikics argues, Kubrick’s “rejection of Hollywood pathos” and other American filmic conventions. Instead of this pathos, Kubrick gave us bewildering scenarios in which characters attempt to rebel against totalizing systems, the machinery of which can be seen nowhere but the effects of which are felt everywhere.
Although Mikics helps us better understand Kubrick’s films, we’re still left somewhat in the dark about the director’s life. Kubrick grew up comfortably middle class and never experienced “war and mass death” (though he was, as Mikics points out, “obsessed” with the Holocaust). Where did his feelings of alienation and rebelliousness come from? Were they simply a result of Kubrick being a “misfit” in high school, as he once told an interviewer? Or was there something deeper in his psyche that we can only venture to guess?
I have always felt there was a great affinity between Kubrick’s films and Franz Kafka’s fiction. This is especially true of Eyes Wide Shut, which, though adapted from a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, has the feel of a film heavily inspired by Kafka’s The Trial. Both feature a seemingly innocent man suddenly wrenched from his everyday life and placed in circumstances beyond his capacity to deal with; characters who mysteriously appear for brief but crucial moments before inexplicably disappearing; long, sinuous, ultimately futile attempts to penetrate an invisible but omnipresent system of power; and characters of enigmatic authority who attempt to explain to the protagonists precisely why it is that they are out of their depth. Mikics briefly refers to Kubrick’s fondness for Kafka, but I wish he would have explored this connection further.
Some of Mikics’s most fascinating insights do, however, concern Eyes Wide Shut. It was Kubrick’s final and most personal film and was, Mikics shows, one he had been thinking about for much of his career. We learn, for example, that Ruth Sobotka, Kubrick’s second wife, may have been the one who told Kubrick about Schnitzler’s Dream Story, over which he obsessed for decades; that Kubrick met his third wife, Christiane Harlan, in a masked ball in Munich; and that Kubrick had sketched out the basic plot of Eyes Wide Shut in an anecdote told to Kirk Douglas as early as 1954. In some ways, all of Kubrick’s life and work were leading to Eyes Wide Shut, but it is only in retrospect that this becomes clear.
“Everybody pretty much acknowledges that he’s the man,” Jack Nicholson said about Kubrick, “and I still feel that underrates him.” Mikics’s informed, enlightening, and engaging book brings us one step closer to understanding the man behind the camera.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
