"Mein Fuhrer, I Can Walk!"

Last year, I was lucky enough to see Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) at a rare theatrical showing on a very large screen in Austin, Texas. Certain scenes -- like close-ups of Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper chomping a cigar while babbling insanely about his "bodily essence," and the War Room shots -- carried major freight that's only hinted at on a small screen. Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, on the other hand, works equally well in any venue.

Dr. Strangelove is compellingly odd. Film critic Robert Kolker puts it well in a Diane Arbus/Patricia Bosworth sort of formulation: "The serious is made light of and the ridiculous is made serious."* The currency of this film is astonishing, going well beyond its historical grounding in the Cold War.

At times, William S. Burroughs seemed to see the modern geo-political world in a similar fashion. In "Soul Killer," he ironically observes that the power to use what we now call Weapons of Mass Destruction are, in the USA, ". . . vested in farsighted and responsible men in the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon." Many of whom, as Kubrick also posits, are either deranged or hypnotized by their own farcical rhetoric, or both, and quite willing to abuse their power for irrational ends. All we need do is look around for confirmation of this long-held artistic take on things.

As for Stanley Kubrick (7/26/1928-3/7/1999; born in the Bronx, died in England), I've been grappling with his work ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as a child, along with the rest of my family. I both love and hate him at times, or rather his vision and its rendered details. I admire most of his movies, or at least much of them, and am happy to dismiss Eyes Wide Shut for its senility and silliness. One cannot dismiss powerful Kubrick film like Paths of Glory (1957) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), however. I am also partial to Barry Lyndon (1975), truth be told; I'm not sure what I'd think of Full Metal Jacket (1987) these days, but the last time I watched it, I couldn't shake the misogynistic scenes, especially the one revolving around the capture and subsequent execution of the Vietnamese sniper. Kubrick is, overall, more misogynistic than misanthropic, yet for some reason I find Full Metal Jacket more disturbing than A Clockwork Orange -- maybe because it's set in historical events rather than dystopian fantasy. Still, Full Metal Jacket is unique in that it depicts the urban side of the Vietnam War during the Battle of Hue. Recently, I also re-caught some of The Shining (1980) and found much of it hilarious; I suppose it depends on context and other factors on how the viewer is going to respond. (I laughed at Eyes Wide Shut along with a like-minded friend, even as others took it as a scary movie, so who knows?)

Any way you cut it, Kubrick is fascinating. His films are all literary adaptions, yet he began as a photographer and knew Arbus (hence the Twins shots in The Shining). His films present a compelling combination of words/dialogue and powerful, obsessively shot and composed images.

*Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. Third Ed. (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 122.

Ciao!