Here's Stanley!

       In 1996, to commemorate the first centenary of motion pictures, the Vatican published a list of 
                45 films that it considered of special merit.  Heading the list was Kubrick's 2001.  Indeed, Pope 
                John Paul II hosted a screening of 2001 at the Vatican on the occasion of the movie's worldwide
                release during the year 2001. 
                                                                     
                                                                          -- Gene D. Phillips of Loyola University, in his introduction 
                                               to The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick, written by Phillips and Rodney Hill.



The New York Times Theater gave a special showing of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining last night, and I found that my patience with one of my old heroes had finally reached the breaking point.   The honeymoon, or perhaps more accurately, the artistic marriage was finally over.  Nevertheless, I will always owe Kubrick a great deal for the changes his work wrought within me as far back as my early adolescence.  What had gone wrong?

     For many teenagers growing up in the 1950s, "going to the movies" was a Friday night ritual.  Loew's Premier (pronounced pree-mee-er by the locals) was located on Sutter Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn.  Not the most baroque movie house, not nearly as elaborate as, for example, the nearby Loew's Pitkin in Brownsville, the Premier was nevertheless an archetypal movie palace replete with baroque trappings and an unforgettable Italian renaissance pool of goldfish in the center of the lobby.  Each Friday night saw the place filled with teenagers present as much to scope one another as the latest reels from Hollywood.  Everyone dressed for the occasion, doused themselves in perfume or cologne (Chanel on the girls; Canoe on the boys) and puffed away on Kent cigarettes looking, we trusted, every bit as cool as the movie stars who were our models.  Today, a white teenager would stand out on that corner of Sutter Avenue about as much as a giraffe in Antarctica, but in those days the street was a lower middle class version of the Miracle Mile, resplendent with ungated shop windows lit through most of the night for the perusal of strollers.  (I was recently rewarded for my trip back to the old theater to find the vista of an empty, rubble-strewn lot amid the surrounding ruins of what was once a vital thoroughfare.  An idle group of black men looked on curiously as I got out of my car to take a picture.)  To no small extent, Kubrick's genius lay in the fact that the virtually cataclysmic events that would, among other things, spell the end of American cities as we had known them, come to resonate in one after another of his films.

      And film is the key word here.  I no doubt missed the distinction between movies and film through many earlier trips to the Premier, but for me and many others of my generation,  at least those of us who read books, Kubrick's Paths of Glory was a breakthrough event.  Although our jaws dropped merely by virtue of its cinematography, its screenplay played out more like literature than a movie.  We had seen Kirk Douglas many times before, as a cowboy, a boxer, even a Viking, but we had never before seen him in a role that made him more the protagonist of serious novel than a mere leading man or movie icon.  The scenes of battle resembled newsreels more than staged events--grainy, jumping about in a manner that suggested a hand held camera even before we were aware of its possibility as a technique.   More than anything else, though, the poignancy of the injustice it portrayed excited our newly emerged, raw, adolescent awareness of the evils of which authority was capable.   For us, Kubrick was a man who dared to tell the truth, the eternal holy grail of adolescent seekers.
    Paths of Glory (1957) was released when I was in my first year in high school.  Eisenhower was in the White House and the young Elvis was debuting on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Kubrick's next major film, Spartacus (1960), came out just as I was starting college and a fairy tale prince was entering the White House.  If there was a ticking time bomb barely audible beneath the surface of events during those much vaunted "happy days," (nightmarish echoes of The Great Depression and World War II that--in spite of every effort to deny, repress and sublimate--clearly lingered alongside, within a very short period of time, the real bomb, Korea, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Rosenberg executions, growing racial tension and the "Beats," just to cite the most obvious),  that bomb would finally explode with, to switch metaphors, young Jack's brains bursting forth like the newborn Athena out of Zeus's head, shouting a call for violence and war.

      Like all works of genius, Kubrick's pre-1963 films came to seem prophetic, at least well ahead of their time.  My generation, later to be labeled "the New Left," during that time had yet to be tutored by the Old Left of the 1930s to more fully understand the politics of Spartacus; we had not yet heard of Rosa Luxemburg or read E.J. Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels or the essential Marx and Lenin.  Nor should one overlook the fact that it was during this same period that students and college educated Americans were being exposed, in the then still extant abundance of small "art houses" complete with complimentary espresso and cookies served in their lobbies, the emergent post-war products of the Italian, French and, outstandingly (even if somewhat surprisingly) one particular Swedish director.   The work of such as Fellini and Antonioni, Truffaut and Bergman clearly consisted of films rather than movies and were treated with the appropriate reverence.  Yet, for American film lovers, Kubrick had a special status.  He was an American; he was ours; he came to speak for us.

     Kubrick's first post-Kennedy assassination film was Dr. Strangelove (1964).    By 1964, a mere seven years after the release of Paths of Glory, enough admirers of Kubrick had gathered to create an atmosphere of great anticipation when word got out that another of his films was to be released.  Even before Strangelove, a good part of the excitement about Kubrick that had begun to form was that he was, in a word, a child of the left, at least if being a leftist was synonymous with being anti-war, anti-establishment and anti-Hollywood commercialism.  His films seemed to be in a symbiotic relationship with the young left who were still honing their ideological mind-set, at the same time influencing our thinking and giving us, shall we say, moral support.  By the time, at the conclusion of Strangelove, Slim Pickens rides a nuclear ICBM waving his cowboy hat on his descent to oblivion, we were convinced that Kubrick spoke for us.  Embedded in the trappings of a dark comedy, Kubrick had exposed the military industrial complex and subjected it to a kind of derisive laughter that not even Chaplin had achieved in his pre-war satire of fascism, The Great Dictator.  And, though satire, Kubrick had also embedded in this latest work, once again in black and white, chilling, jarringly realistic scenes of battle (as U.S. troops attempt to take back one of their own bases from a paranoid general determined to take out the Soviet Union) that prefigured the television footage from the jungles of Vietnam that would soon be seen every night on the news for the greater part of a decade.
     Four years later, in 1968, Kubrick would release the film that would later be cited by the Vatican as first among the forty-five most outstanding films of the twentieth century.  2001 was released in a large movie house in Times Square.  On that very same night, crowds left the movie, still somewhat dazed by its impact, to receive yet another shock. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated,shot to death on the balcony of  a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
     The year 1968 would come to be called "the year the world ended."  One thing that certainly ended for my generation, as we shall see in the next post, was our adolescent fantasy of a marriage, even a marriage to art, that was free of complications.