Leave the Resurrections to Christ: Kubrick’s Potential Disaster

“My husband,” Christiane Kubrick told The New York Times in 2006, “always had a drawerful of ideas. There were always a lot of stories on the go, things he left started, things he left lying around. It was like being in a waterfall.” Eleven years after Stanley Kubrick’s death, it would appear that the waterfall continues to trickle: Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell have been cast in “Lunatic at Large,” a psychological thriller that Kubrick commissioned in the late 1950s. Although the script lacks a director or a contract with a studio, the attachment of the two actors to the film is strong evidence that it may actually be produced.

It is not enough, apparently, for pop culture to be preoccupied with zombies in films; now we must demand that the movies themselves be sewn together from dead bodies of work and reanimated not by a virus or a spell, but rather the pathogens of greed and commercialism. “Lunatic at Large” provides a reasonably clear-cut case of cinematic tampering, but the arguments against producing “Lunatic” apply to other unfinished works. At the risk of losing the trust of its directors and the respect of its viewers, Hollywood needs to learn to let the dead lie.

To be fair, it is not as if resurrecting unfinished films is a new phenomenon—or one that always results in bad movies. Orson Welles considered the official versions of many of his films to be “unfinished,” and Krzysztof Kieslowski died while his third film cycle was in development. The first two films of the trilogy, “Heaven” and “Hell,” were given to other directors to finish, and while it is problematic to consider them part of Kieslowski’s oeuvre, they are beautiful and engaging in their own right and deserve to be seen.

Lovely though the end result may be, it is difficult to get past the sense of guilt accompanying the release of these undead films. The question transcends aesthetic merit and becomes personal: does a significant contribution to the genre outweigh the ethical concerns of intruding on an artist’s personal work? every artist has the prerogative to decide which ideas to pursue. It’s a right as basic as keeping one’s thoughts to oneself, and to produce someone’s unfinished work feels, at some level, like an extremely personal type of violation.

Creative control over unfinished work is usually given to the artist’s family or friends—as is the case with Kubrick, whose son-in-law, Philip Hobbs, is pursuing the production of “Lunatic.” Though such people seem more likely than others to know the author’s wishes, too frequently they don’t seem to care. Allowing the director’s relatives to make decisions about the cast and crew is a crapshoot in terms of quality. Shared genes do not endow one with any sort of authority about a director’s work. Although Hobbs seems enthusiastic, knowledgeable and well-meaning, allowing him to make decisions about how “Lunatic” will be finished is only slightly better than ceding control to the next person to walk past Kubrick’s old home in Hertfordshire.

“Lunatic” presents another problem typical of unfinished films: it was written 50 years ago. The noir conventions that Kubrick would have played upon seemed trendy and cutting-edge then; to shoot a film like that today is a bold stylistic affectation that would undoubtedly dominate the audience’s attention. Even if the director of “Lunatic” decides to avoid the flashiness of noir cinematography, the piece is still set in 1956, and Hobbs and the production team have decided not to rewrite it. There is no good solution to the dilemma of when to set the film—to rewrite the script would amount to utter stylistic dismemberment, but to film “Lunatic” as a period piece endows it with a very different meaning than it would have had as a contemporary film in 1956. To place the resurrected “Lunatic” in the same category as, for example, a Tarantino film—whose director intentionally sets certain films in the past as a means of exploring certain generic tropes—indicates a troubling lack of comprehension of Kubrick’s place in cinematic history. Such a choice should serve as an ominous harbinger for anyone concerned with the integrity of the director’s work.

If nothing else, the practice of resurrecting films like this poses some interesting theoretical questions about authorship: who deserves credit for a successfully resurrected film like “Heaven?” How can we discuss films like this in terms of artistic intent? But as compelling as unfinished works are as case studies, they often amount to significant violence upon a filmmaker’s oeuvre. Instead of being remembered as prolific, successful, and complete, Kubrick’s career will seem to trail off, leaving behind a collection of troubling uncertainties that will hover over his work long after “Lunatic at Large” has wrapped.

—Columnist Abigail B. Lind can be reached at alind@fas.harvard.edu.