KUBRICK: A RETROSPECTIVE

It seems almost fitting that when director Stanley Kubrick died at home on March 7, The New York Times felt it necessary to report that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. Kubrick always had a reputation as something of a misanthrope, a connoisseur of violence and off-kilter ideas. It's no wonder people translated the Kubrick that they saw on the screen to the Kubrick who lived a quiet life as an expatriate in London. Alas, the real Kubrick died a death less bizarre or shocking than that of many of his characters. But his movies, as mundane as his death may have been, will remain some of the most profound and troubling films in existence long after he is gone.

Ironically, it was his experiences with bad movies that convinced Kubrick to turn to a life of filmmaking. While working as a photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick attended screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and was surprised at how poor many of the films were.

"I was aware that I didn't know anything about making films, but I believed I couldn't make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing," he once said.

Of course, Kubrick did far more than make movies of slightly better quality than those that he saw at the MOMA. Though his filmography is limited (he made only eight movies after 1960), Kubrick's works stand out as some of the hallmarks of film-making in the late 20th century.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that there is not a bold or original movie that comes out today that deals with a theme Kubrick didn't touch first--and with far greater skill.

The biting satire and political commentary of Wag The Dog seems tame next to Kubricks apocalyptic fairy tale, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Even the most sexually-driven movies today, from Basic Instinct to Dangerous Creatures, look childish next to the sophisticated eroticism of Kubrick's Lolita--an eroticism created through words and glances and not a single scene of naked flesh. As for violence, a director like Quentin Tarantino is put to shame when one looks at the cold but gleeful presentation of crime and pain in A Clockwork Orange, which was withdrawn from theaters in England.

And While there is much hype about the realism of recent war movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, neither is so chilling or disturbing as Kubrick's Vietnam War epic Full Metal Jacket. When it came out it was touted as the greatest war movie ever made, and it seems that title still stands, recent contributions to the genre not withstanding.

And, of course, there is Kubrick's magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a science fiction film unrivaled in its scope, majesty, and depth. Indeed, the black monoliths that from the centerpiece of Kubrick's masterpiece have become a cultural symbol of sorts, a sign of something powerful but unknown. And the voice of H.A.L. will haunt our experiments with computers and artificial intelligence for years to come.

What we see in all of Kubrick's work, as varied in subject and style as it may be, is an attempt to create something more than a movie. Kubrick was known for his attention to good storytelling in a screenplay, but the real impact of his films is not in the tales that they tell but the ideas they present. he has often been criticized as being too clinical in his treatment of troubling subjects, of not taking a moral stand against the problems he portrayed. But that distance Kubrick maintained from his subjects was perhaps his greatest strength. It was the distance of a social critic, a diagnoser of modern ills.

Whether it was sexual taboos in Lolita or individual and societal violence in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick used his films to examine the unspoken problems in our modern world, to step back and look honestly at the issues no one wanted to confront in the open. We'll look for the same fierce realism in Eyes Wide Shut, his last movie, due in July and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (see clip below). In a way, Kubrick was the most moral of filmmakers because he was not afraid to be called immoral, not afraid to tred where audiences didn't think they wanted to go. But he brought us along of the ride, and we have never been the same since.