Stanley Kubrick’s visions of America
No film director has had a grasp of the human mind or an understanding of human culture as Stanley Kubrick. His depictions of America are especially poignant, and speak to issues about American culture that most of the time go largely ignored. Looking at some of his movies helps to reveal many important aspects of American life. [Warning: spoilers for some of these movies]
Two of Kubrick’s earlier works — Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) are openly critical and downright subversive of American cultural habits. In Dr. Strangelove, the insane General Jack Ripper decides that he wants to start nuclear war with the Russians and orders bomber planes to attack the USSR. The film switches between General Ripper’s offices, the War Room in the White House (where the President and his generals are attempting to gain control over the situation), and a lone fighter bomber that has lost its communications systems. Kubrick is unabashed in his depictions of American bravado and nuclear weapons — the President (played by Peter Sellers) can barely keep control over his trigger-happy generals; meanwhile, General Ripper has clearly lost his mind, explaining to a British exchange officer Captain Lionel Mandrake (also played by Sellers) about the need to keep his “bodily fluids” pure from the communist threat.
But the critiques presented by Strangelove go deeper than these depictions of a gung-ho attitude towards war. The presence of Dr. Strangelove, a German scientist who used to work for the Nazis (and also played by Sellers), is key towards understanding Kubrick’s deeper point. Towards the end of the movie, Strangelove’s behavior turns bizarre and openly totalitarian, and he starts shouting in German for victory and raising the Nazi salute. His presence in the film seems to make the point that Americans are not primed for aggression but are simply naive when it comes to military might, easily led by charismatic figures (such as Dr. Strangelove) who are more subtle in their intrigue and loyal only to their own to their own investigations and wants. The fatal American cultural flaw that presents itself is nothing sinister, but simply a willingness to unthinkingly sacrifice oneself to causes that just aren’t that worthy. This is best shown in the last few minutes of the movie, when the captain of the lone bomber seems to go to extra lengths to ensure that his mission is completed, even when the viewer knows that the consequences will at that point be disastrous.
This is an extraordinarily relevant message for today’s world, especially within the context of the Iraq War. The war itself was sold to a compliant public that unquestionably fell into lock-step behind President Bush and his theories of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is amazing that in a country that values individuality as much as America, people are so quick to follow the orders of authority figures. And now that so much has been sacrificed, it becomes harder to admit that going to war was wrong, and that the war needs to end.
Lolita is a film that is as subversive as Dr. Strangelove but geared towards an examination of American attitudes of sex and suburbia. Based on the famous novel by Vladimir Nabokov (Nabokov also wrote the screenplay for this film, changing the story in various ways), Kubrick creates a staid and vanilla world of American suburban live that barely contains a pulsing and deviant sexual energy. In almost every scene, seemingly innocent everyday interactions between typical suburbanites — a school dance, someone checking into a hotel, a conversation between two strangers — are thickly layered with innuendo and crackle with the hint that something else is going on.
Kubrick uses the eyes of a foreigner, Professor Humbert Humbert, as a means of showcasing the existence of this explosive and forbidden sexuality. Professor Humbert is a boarder at the house of Charlotte Hayes, and while living there becomes instantly attracted to her 14-year-old daughter Lolita. Humbert, played by James Mason, is creepy and loathsome, and his lust for Lolita is not depicted favorably in any sense.
Yet the message of the film isn’t a simple morality tale. Early in the movie, the viewer is introduced to Clare Quilty (played by Peter Sellers), who seems to be as deviant in his sexual mores as Humbert. But unlike Humbert, Quilty is charming and has an easy manner, and these attributes grant him easy access to a hidden sexual world where infidelity, group sex and homosexuality are all hinted at — perhaps not scandalous today, but certainly out of the question for an earlier time.
What exactly is going on? The film takes place in an America that is beginning to flee to the suburbs, and Kubrick and Nabokov are challenging their audiences to question why people want to escape to their own private enclaves outside of the cities. What lies behind the desire for the suburban man to take his family out of the city where he can have his own castle and keep his wife and kids under lock and key? Culturally we believe that suburbia is a white-picket fence and two dogs running outside, but Kubrick suggests that there is something a lot dirtier being repressed and hidden. The idea that we can be happy having one sexual partner and raising kids for our entire lives is a costly illusion that produces tremendous harms — it is in suburbia, after all, that Humbert gets his chance to pursue Lolita, something that might not have been possible in a community with stronger human ties. The viewer dislikes Humbert, but ignores the fact that Humbert just wants in on the big secret that everyone else, especially Quilty, seems to be enjoying.
Kubrick reveals his most philosophical understandings of the direction of American society in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The story revolves around the discovery of various black monoliths at various points in time. 2001 is a long movie and it delves into many issues, but what is most relevant for this discussion is Kubrick’s depiction of a world 30 years from his. It is a world of unprecedented technology — colonization of the moon, a fully functional space station with commuter access from the Earth, video phones — yet there is little genuine human connection. In two scenes, we see scientists have conversations or view messages from loved ones — Dr. Heywood Floyd with his daughter and Dr. Frank Poole with his parents — yet the images are cold and without any sense of love. HAL, the famous computer, acts as human as the actual flesh-and-blood humans themselves, perhaps not an indication of his humanity as much as an observation of the machine-like way in which people appear to be interacting with each other. Despite great technological innovation, the basic problems of human loneliness and the need for love are still unaddressed.
There is also a powerful social commentary as well. The world of 2001 is a place where every aspect of society is managed from above. There is no presence of the common man — in fact, the film centers around elites who are intent in keeping secret the potential power of the monolith from other humans. Mark Miller writes:
“If it were re-released today, 2001 would be diminished by the multiplex not just because of the smaller screen and poor acoustics, but because the very setting would implicitly subvert the film’s subversive vision. Even if it were brought back to some quaint old movie palace, however, 2001 still could not exert its original satiric impact because the mediated ‘future’ it envisions is now ‘our’ present, and therefore unremarkable: a development not merely architectural but ideological. The world of Doctor Floyd (like the new dorm, mall or hospital) is a world absolutely managed — the force controlling it discreetly advertised by the US flag with which the scientist often shares the frame throughout his ‘excellent speech’ at Clavius and also by the corporate logos — ‘Hilton’, ‘Howard Johnson’, ‘Bell’ — that appear throughout the space station. In 1968, the prospect of such total management seemed sinister — a patent circumvention of democracy. Today, within the ever-growing ‘private’ sphere the movie adumbrates, that ‘prospect’ seems completely natural.”
It is, in fact, the world of today. As Miller notes, this film was released just as the student protest movement of the 1960s was reaching its fever pitch, in America and throughout the world. The audience who would have gone to see this movie — college educated young people — were the same people who at the time would have been challenging the status quo. Kubrick’s depiction of the future, a place where corporations and government work hand-in-hand to govern and control, would have been upsetting. Sadly, it was a prescient vision.
Finally, it is worth talking about Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), perhaps his least understood work. The film centers around Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise), his relationship with his wife Alice (played by Nicole Kidman), and his fantastical sexual experiences one night out in New York. At the beginning of the film, Dr. Harford and Alice are at an extragavant Christmas party, and both find themselves flirting with other people. Dr. Harford meets two models who wish to take him “to the end of the rainbow,” while Alice talks to a charismatic and older Hungarian gentleman. Bill and Alice come back home, and after having sex Alice confides to Bill about a fantasy she had about a naval officer while on vacation with Bill. She asks him if he has had similar fantasies, and he says that he has never had any stray thoughts. She gets angry with him and calls him a hypocrite. Their reverie is interrupted by a phone call made to Dr. Harford, and at this point he begins his journey through various sexual depravaties that the film is famous for (including the sex party outside the city).
Eyes Wide Shut is accused of being cold, meandering, and confusing, judgments of the film that are accurate to some degree. The viewer never connects with any of the characters — Alice Harford is frosty and moody, and it is impossible to make rhyme or reason of Bill’s adventures. Bill seems to be searching for some sort of release throughout the entire film, and at the end it is unclear whether his experiences out in New York were real or simply a product of his own imagination.
The film itself is based on a short novel written by a psychiatrist named Arthur Schnitzler, who is said to have anticipated many of Freud’s ideas about sexuality. This background helps reveal that the film should be best understood as a psychological examination of the modern American psyche. The movie strongly echoes Lolita in addressing sexual desire and lust within American culture, but its themes are different, simply because the America of the late 1990s (and of Eyes Wide Shut) is a different place than the America of the early 1960s. If Lolita sought to question the panic in finding security and safety in the suburbs, Eyes Wide Shut asks the viewer to question our modern culture of constant sexual stimulation and commercialization. After the argument with his wife, Dr. Harford witnesses an orgy, encounters a woman who he has never met yet who claims to love him, and sees a teenage girl being pimped by her father, among other things. These experiences represent basic archetypes of many sexual fantasies that permeate modern American culture — a man sleeping with more than one woman, the “love at first sight”/”finding one’s true soulmate” message that pervades most modern romantic stories, and the emphasis on young sexuality made famous by such acts as Britney Spears and the Olsen twins. Yet despite encountering what should be very fulfilling fantasies, Dr. Harford never finds any release, nor is there any lesson learned. In a culture that is inundated with sexual images and messages, is it even possible to have a sexual desire or thought that is not colored by pornographic consumerism? Is a true sense of sexuality even possible?
And there is the larger social critique as well. Dr. Harford belongs to the elite, to the monied class of Americans that can throw lavish Christmas parties and who have the means to host orgies with beautiful models out in the suburbs. His only genuine human connection is to his wife, but this is severed when she candidly admits to an extramarital fantasy. It is at this moment that his world is shattered and when he begins his dark sexual journey. Why should that moment affect him so? It is because he had sought refuge in his own little world where his career and money afforded him a small sense of security. Yet this security was always false — his wife was probably always distant and even a little cruel, and his colleagues had almost certainly been buying affection from plastic women for a long time. His eyes were always open, but he chose never to see the truth — they were “wide shut,” in other words.
Modern America is a place where escapsim into fantasy is almost a televised sport, a place where consumerism uses sex as a way to sell products and provide cheap pleasures, but ones that are ultimately fleeting and unfulfilling. It is not just Dr. Harford’s eyes that are shut — an entire culture seems to have just tuned itself out, letting those with powerful interests control it by manipulating base desires in ways that will provide a profit.
Kubrick knew that Eyes Wide Shut would cause a lot of controversy because of the sexual images — some parts of the the movie were famously censored in America — and he also knew that the average consumer would walk in knowing little more about the movie other than it had a lot of sex. And in fact, the average viewer walks away almost completely unsatisfied. It is likely that Kubrick meant the entire process of making the film, from the shooting to the marketing and hype surrounding it, to act as a subversive statement against the programming of sexualized consumerism. He asks: Why are you paying $10 to watch this movie? What are you expecting to get out of it? Why are you disappointed?
At a time when ignoring what’s going on in the world is leading to horrific consequences — politically, economically, socially, and environmentally — Kubrick’s films become more relevant than ever. They prompt much needed cultural self-examination, and can help Americans better understand their own place in the world, individually and as a nation and a culture.
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