Eyes wide shut for women?
By Ruvani de Silva. Stanley Kubrick stands today as one of the most revered names in film direction. The man is a legend. So few films, so much hype. And all for some thirteen movies in a career spanning close to fifty years. Having recently passed away, the legend of Kubrick is growing fast, and his fans are adamant that his achievements warrant the mystique and veneration which they most often receive.
Kubrick began life in the Bronx, and started his career as a photographer for Look magazine before starting to put together his own short films, eventually quitting his job to pursue directing full time. After making several short films, including Day of the Fight and The Seafarers, he made his first studio movie Fear and Desire in 1953. These preceded Kubrick's rise to stardom, which came with the Kirk Douglas war movie Paths of Glory in 1957. Kubrick tried his hand at everything. He made films about war, a Roman epic, explored the psychosexual, the future, tried his hand at horror, black comedy and period drama and managed to find new ideas to bring to each genre, making his films stand alone as something rather different.
It is the question of what made Kubrick's films so unique which is perplexing. How did he manage to produce a consistent standard of quality regardless of genre or of when the film was made? Perhaps it was being so selective with his material that assured Kubrick's success, choosing only that which he knew held something above average in itself, and which he could make come to life on the screen in imaginative and memorable ways. Or it could be suggested that by spending so much time making a film, considering the project and preparing for it, Kubrick made his successes simply through extra-careful planning. There is no doubt that both choice of material and planning played a major part in Kubrick's success. By finding, adapting and creating such incendiary, controversial, passionate and intriguing storylines, Kubrick kept his films ahead of the mainstream. The style of Kubrick's filming, too,is unique. His efforts managed somehow not to be experimental, but as if the experiment had already succeeded. Think of the psychedelia in 2001, the tricycle-mounted camera in The Shining, complete with terrifying cut-away shots to the twins, the chilling image of Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick tried to make films which were more than artistic, which made points and brought issues and hypothesises into focus. 2001, for example, aims to explore the primal essence of human nature. The minimisation of dialogue attempts to deconstruct communication to its most basic form. The relationship between man and machine also demonstrates his ideas about evolution and humanity, showing how humans are debased by technology which brings the two closer together, with HAL appearing more human than the astronauts, who are conceivably closer to machines. In Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick expounds the futility of the Vietnam war and the army training conscripts went through by building up mirror images of the two experiences, both of which culminate in wasteful, demoralising death. The film is split into two halves, the first depicting the brutal, spirit-crushing, and pointless process of training, the second the exact same process in the war. By ironing out the differences between the two, Kubrick highlights the senselessness of both. The suicide of the most promising recruit at the end of the first half and his prophetic final words hammer home the tragedy of the situation as the second half fulfils his fears. The artificial setting adds to the feeling of unreality and stupidity, and the implication that war is no more real or meaningful than the training which precedes it. In making these points, Kubrick saw himself very much as an auteur. Although the concept has been downscaled in recent years, Kubrick's idea that 'One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film' can be seen to sum up his philosophy on cinema and his personal role therein. But Kubrick's belief in this notion and his consequential self-importance can help to explain his main weaknesses as a director.
However, not everyone is a Kubrick fan. Much of his work is obviously an acquired taste due to its violent nature, but this is not his only flaw. Lolita, for example, may have been an incendiary and risqué project in 1962, and may also show off some fine individual performances, but the film itself is slow as it fails to dig deeply enough into the plot, relying too heavily on the contemporary shock factor of the content. In his final movie, 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, there was not even a storyline to under-develop in this three hour visual bombardment of naked women. With nothing going on and a ridiculously long script, Eyes Wide Shut is a true waste of three hours of anyone's life, not to mention all the time and money spent on its pointless creation. Overly self-indulgent, the film is supposed to depict the fulfilment of every man's fantasy. For obvious reasons, and however stereotypical and prudish it may sound, the blatant exploitation of the women in the film alienates a female viewer in a way that cinema nudity would normally only shock the likes of Ann Widdecombe. The scenes which consist of naked unknown actresses wearing masks and performing sex acts just so they could say they got a part in Kubrick's last picture, although they didn't even get to show their faces, just smacks of him being a dirty old man. I have seen toenail clippings which come closer to art than this. Indeed, the women in even his undeniably excellent offerings come under some rather shady light.
Kubrick's choice of material can be seen to display rather more than an eye for a good story, as the presentation of women in the majority of his films testifies. In almost every one of his films there are no more than a couple of female characters, and in several there are no significant female characters at all. A Clockwork Orange, 2001, and Full Metal Jacket are men-only stories, while Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, and The Shining all minimise active female presence. The only times when women play a central part in Kubrick's films, they are as victims, wives, or whores, and often a mixture. Kubrick's perception and depiction of women is consistently negative. In Lolita and The Shining, Shelley Winters and Shelly Duvall play feeble, needy, dim-witted and ultimately pathetic wives, and in the second case the five-year-old Danny is capable of outwitting the psychotic Jack where his mother failed. In Eyes Wide Shut Nicole Kidman is the slutty wife, while Marie Richardson's Marion is again needy and pathetic. Lolita is another slut, while the scenes of rape in A Clockwork Orange and orgy in Eyes Wide Shut speak for themselves. The negative depiction of women in Kubrick's films is a clear underlying feature of his work, but the degree to which it impinges upon perceptions of his work is difficult to surmise. In viewing a film like A Clockwork Orange or Eyes Wide Shut, the misogynistic overtones would be more likely to affect a viewer's opinion than by watching The Shining or 2001, where it is less blatantly stated. It is the viewer's decision whether the overall pattern should be allowed to detract from the individual films.
In many respects there is still a great deal of merit in much of Kubrick's work. The Shining still ranks among the best horror films ever made, while the stylish and provocative A Clockwork Orange has only just been allowed back into the country since its original release in 1971. 2001 will remain one of the great science fiction epics and Full Metal Jacket holds its own in the competitive clique of Vietnam movies. Spartacus, recently restored, and Lolita, which surpasses the recent remake by leaps and bounds, both contain outstanding performances, while the Cold War comedy of Dr. Strangelove is as tangible today as it was in 1964. Although Kubrick's prejudices towards and consequential depiction of women was flawed and chauvinistic, his talent as a director was undeniably considerable. He was not the mysterious genius he is often portrayed as, but his moments of excellence will shine for a long time to come.
5th Oct 2000