Stanley Kubrick on Words

I watched only four Stanley Kubrick movies: Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.

Spartacus did not feel very much like a Kubrick movie to me even though I had watched only three of his other movies by then. I later learned that it is the only Kubrick movie in which he had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, nor any say in the casting and that partly explained my feelings, or accentuated them.

Dr. Strangelove, the classic satire, is possibly the easiest of his movies for any average film fan to appreciate and a lot of credit also goes to Peter Sellers and George C. Scott.

After hearing of it as the greatest horror movie, The Shining disappointed me and that could be because I am strangely unaffected by Jack Nicholson in any of his roles.

I liked Eyes Wide Shut more than many others did. While all characters seem to have been under-played, as if they were all in a trance, the movie felt most intriguing. Now that I think of it, the degree of intrigue has increased from Spartacus to Dr. Strangelove to The Shining to Eyes Wide Shut as if Kubrick himself may have become increasingly aware of the intrigue in the world.

Among all his other movies, I wish to watch A Clockwork Orange the most, and then Full Metal Jacket. Not 2001: A Space Odyssey. I may not yet be ready to appreciate 2001 well enough.

The following is an excerpt from a New York Times interview with the Genius by William Kloman:

Q. One of the newspaper critics thought that in order to get across a philosophical viewpoint you needed more words than you used.
A. This, of course, is part of the word-oriented reviewer psychology. I don’t have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn’t do it with words. There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the film, and 113 of non-dialogue. There are certain areas of feeling and reality – or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it – which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket. It’s interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off. There’s a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn’t lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience. Man has always responded to it. Religion, mythology, allegories – it’s always been one of the most responsive chords in man. With rationalism, modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some pretty jarring blows to religion. In a sense, what’s happening now in films and in popular music is a reaction to the stifling limitations of rationalism. One wants to break out of the clearly arguable, demonstrable things which really are not very meaningful, or very useful or inspiring, nor does one even sense any enormous truth in them.

I am a young man who still confuses rationalism with rationality and a naïve ambitious writer who has blind faith in the overwhelming power of words. That there are no areas of feeling and reality that are inaccessible to words even though they may be inaccessible to my own. In all fairness, I try to believe that the same is true about music and painting.

Image Courtesy: Wikipedia and IMDB

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