Kubrick Unchained: From Duels To Orgies

Time for the second half of my look at Stanley Kubrick’s mature output as a director – defined as his output post-Spartacus, when he’d become a big enough deal in Hollywood that he could enjoy extensive freedom as a cinematic auteur but had also had enough commercial success that he could count on an expansive budget. In the previous article I’d covered Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, a quartet of movies which saw Kubrick continuing to gather critical acclaim and commercial success, with the latter two in particular reaping huge profits at the box office.

Now we go into a substantially slower period of his career, when he’d turn out only one or two movies over the course of any particular decade. And we begin in 18th Century Ireland…

Barry Lyndon

It is the midst of the Georgian era. Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) is the scion of a well-established but not magnificently wealthy family in Ireland, his father having died in a duel when Redmond was young. As he comes to adulthood, Redmond enters into an intense flirtation with his cousin Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton), but becomes intensely jealous when she begins a serious courtship with Captain John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), a British Army officer whose advantageous social position would do wonders for the Brady family. His masculinity slighted, Redmond insists on challenging Quin to a duel; the Brady family and Quin conspire to convince Redmond that he’s shot Quin dead, so that Redmond will flee and stop making trouble.

This begins a series of adventures which sees Redmond robbed by highwaymen, joining the British Army, deserting the British Army, press-ganged into the Prussian Army, joining the Prussian secret police to spy on the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), betraying the Prussian secret police to aid the Chevalier when he turns out to be a fellow Irishman, and joining forces with the Chevalier to travel across Europe, working a professional gambling grift. It’s in the latter context that Redmond encounters Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), a rich noblewoman trapped in a loveless marriage to Sir Charles Lyndon (Frank Middlemass). Redmond deals with Sir Charles by baiting him with veiled insults and references to cuckoldry until Sir Charles, whose health is in a perilous state, gets so angry that his heart gives out.

The way is cleared for Redmond to marry Lady Lyndon, take on the name Redmond Barry Lyndon by permission of King George III, and thus become the master of her household and the stepfather of her son, who with the death of his natural father is now Lord Bullingdon (Dominic Savage as a child, Leon Vitali as a grown-up). Soon Barry Lyndon is burning through the Lyndon family fortune, keeping Lady Lyndon isolated, siring a child on her, little Bryan (David Morley), and trying to get himself ennobled in his own right. Lord Bullingdon is acutely aware that he is at risk of having his inheritance frittered away and his place in the world displaced by Bryan. Eventually, he must demand satisfaction – and this time, the duel will be no fake…

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So, one thing which should have become apparent over the course of these reviews is that Kubrick very much went in for literary adaptations. In fact, after his first couple of features – Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss – every single one of his movies would be adaptations from a novel or novella except for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that had Arthur C. Clarke attached to develop his novel in parallel with the movie. In this case, Barry Lyndon is based on The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray – except that, as with Dr. Strangelove, there’d be some creative decisions which makes the movie arguably a poor reflection of the novel. Sure, adaptations of stories are going to introduce major differences – but we’re talking what is potentially a total shift of tone and atmosphere here, as drastic as the transformation of Peter George’s Red Alert from a serious-minded thriller into a comical farce in Strangelove.

Take the narration. As I mentioned in the previous article, the narration here is cool, neutral, and from an omniscient third-person perspective – the narrator is Michael Hordern, who was Gandalf in the BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. This is an immediate and stark difference from Thackeray’s original novel, which uses Barry himself as an unreliable narrator. Kubrick did this because he didn’t want the movie to be comedic – but if he didn’t want to go for comedy, why would he ever choose a picaresque novel as the source material for the project in the first place? The picaresque is very much about social satire and dry wit as we accompany a roguish protagonist on a series of episodic adventures, if you want something with a serious and sober tone it’s just not a genre which is going to support those aims.

See, I don’t personally believe that Kubrick was actually so in love with The Luck of Barry Lyndon that no other story would do. Before this, he’d done preliminary work on a project based around Napoleon which was eventually abandoned, as well as toying with the idea of adapting Vanity Fair. Given the nods to the 18th Century Kubrick slipped into previous works – such as the mysterious bedroom Dave Bowman finds himself in at the end of 2001 before he becomes the Starchild – it’s pretty evident that Kubrick just wanted to do something in the general vicinity of the Georgian period because he loved the aesthetic. That being the case, surely any story would do – so why not pick out something which would have matched the tone he wanted to go for?

That’s not the only odd thing – despite Kubrick claiming he was steering away comedy, humour creeps in around the edges anyway. Leonard Rossiter plays a prominent role, after all, and unlike his stint as a Russian official in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he plays it fairly low-key, he’s blatantly going for laughs here – and the odds of Kubrick letting that slide if that isn’t what he wanted are, given everything we know about Kubrick’s approach as a director, essentially minimal. I suppose a certain dry irony arises from the narration at points, but again this seems to be an instance of taking out Thackeray’s particular satirical approach and looping in Kubrick’s instead.

In addition, especially in the second half, Kubrick can’t keen a certain irony out of the narration anyway, as Hordern matter-of-factly intones the increasingly tyrannical and abusive stance Barry takes as patriarch of the Lyndon household – so since there’s going to be that disparity anyway, why not lean into it? Perhaps he didn’t trust O’Neal to pull off the ironic style that would be needed to match unreliable narration to visuals telling a different story – but why cast him in such an important role in that case?

Working in some of Barry’s unreliable narration could again have given Kubrick exactly the sort of scope necessary to put his own stamp on the story. For instance, at one point Barry ends up in an impromptu bare-knuckle boxing fight with a fellow soldier. The way it pans out, nobody particularly likes Barry’s opponent, everyone cheers when Barry wins, and Barry gets all the offense in and essentially doesn’t take any punishment in return, totally dominating his opponent. I’ve not read the source novel, but I would not be shocked if such an incident showed up there; I would also be unsurprised if the unreliable narrator device were used to have Barry outwardly and overtly claim that he thrashed his opponent handily, whilst Thackeray wove in subtle hints that perhaps things were not as one-sided as Barry claims. Likewise, Barry’s stepson Lord Bullingdon is portrayed here as a spoiled little wussy-boy without a shred of masculine fortitude, which feels a lot like how Barry would prefer to see him; presented with such a depiction in prose by an unreliable narrator, I’d be inclined to question it.

Is Kubrick really following Thackeray’s authorial intentions in presenting these things objectively? Clearly not, the whole point of the narration in the original novel is to enable the unreliable narrator device and that’s not something you use when you want to present a story unambiguously and objectively. Is Kubrick really exercising the best use of his creative faculties in taking Barry’s account at face value? I don’t think so. Watching Barry fight a one-sided boxing match hardly warms us to him as a protagonist, and isn’t even an especially compelling use of time; if the fight had been a bit less of a foregone conclusion it could have been much more compelling.

Moving away from considerations of whether it’s much good as a reflection of 18th and 19th Century picaresque novels, Barry Lyndon is incredibly self-indulgent as far as period drama goes; it crams about 90 or so minutes of tightly-paced plot into over three hours of sprawl. But that’s kind of how you need to approach Barry Lyndon – not as a well-honed story, I think the dirty secret of Kubrick is that he isn’t actually that interested in cinema as a narrative medium – for him it’s more about the technical exercise involved and the aesthetic and atmospheric ambitions you set yourself, and the narrative is just the framework you hang all of that on.

Such is the case with Barry Lyndon: it’s a massive exercise in technique and aesthetics, rather than necessarily a tight and well-honed piece of storytelling. Although the movie got a plethora of awards and nominations, its Oscar wins were in the visual categories – Art Direction, Cinematography, and Costume Design – as well as in Best Scoring. In all the other categories it was nominated in – Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director – it lost out to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The costumes are, indeed, grand, and if they’d been giving out an Oscar for location scouts that year, it’d have surely scooped that too, because both in terms of the interiors found to shoot in and the gorgeous outdoor landscapes found it’s masterful. Kubrick also tried to go for authentic lighting as much as possible, to the extent where he and his team experimented with using special lenses developed by NASA to achieve some shots.

With magnificent backdrops and finely turned-out actors, Kubrick arranges shots in an interesting fashion. Just as he opened A Clockwork Orange with Alex and the droogs in a sort of tableau vivant, so too did he continue to look to historical artforms in devising this; here, several key scenes and shots are purposefully modelled on William Hogarth paintings. It also has to be said that when a truly important story beat does happen in Barry Lyndon, it really lands – you just have to wait quite a while for that to happen. Kubrick really milks the tension of the duelling sequences for all they are worth in particular, and his decision to add in a duel between Bullingdon and Barry at the end is a good one, because whilst it’s a departure from the novel it does provide the story with some vivid bookends.

Is Barry Lyndon something I see myself rewatching frequently? Patently not – nobody has that much spare time. I’d never rank it in the top flight of Kubrick’s efforts, but he clearly hits his goals when it comes to the technical and aesthetic side of the production and only really falls down on the narrative – which doesn’t actually seem to be his top priority. That’s something which was true of 2001 as well, and as we’ll see it’ll be true of several other works before Kubrick’s career ends.

The Shining

High in the Rocky Mountains nestles the Overlook Hotel, a sprawling luxury affair which is a lovely getaway during the summer months. Over winter, though, the weather is foul enough to deter tourists and the hotel shuts down until the weather warms up. Irascible writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has taken on the job of being the off-season caretaker this year, tasked with staying in the hotel whilst it’s shut to attend to any repairs or upkeep that prove necessary in the bad weather. Jack’s bringing his whole family along to keep him company during this long, isolated task – his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd). As hotel manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) shows the family around, Danny gets talking to head cook Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), who recognises him as a kindred spirit – for Danny and Dick both have what Dick calls “the shining”, a certain psychic capability which can provide a useful source of communication and intuition but can also attract the attention of negative forces if care isn’t taken.

Soon, the guests and the regular staff are all gone, and Jack, Wendy, and Danny are alone in the Overlook Hotel. Jack’s alone with his writing and his craving for a drink; Danny’s alone with his imaginary friend Tony, which is how he externalises and rationalises his psychic intuitions. And Wendy’s alone with her family, with Jack being increasingly bad-tempered and surly and Danny being all strange. Still, maybe they aren’t so alone after all. Maybe Lloyd (Joe Turkel), the dapper bartender, can fix Jack a drink and he can get some sage advice from Grady (Philip Stone), the former caretaker/family exterminator turned butler. Maybe Wendy’s dull routine will be jazzed up when Danny starts yelling about “!redruM” and Jack does his Johnny Carson impression. And maybe Danny will make friends with Grady’s murdered daughters (Lisa and Louise Burns), who can play with him forever and ever and ever…

Different authors had different feelings about Kubrick’s treatment of their work when he adapted them; Stephen King is the lifetime president of the Stanley Kubrick Butchered My Story Club, and was infamously so grumpy about it he pushed to get that somewhat low-rent miniseries adaptation of his novel made in later years in order to get what he regarded as a truly loyal adaptation out there. King, to my mind, is being an ingrate: sure, Kubrick’s take on The Shining changes up a ton of plot points, strips out masses and masses of expository material covering character backstories and the dark history of the Overlook, and replaces all of those with vague allusions, weird imagery (like the guy in the horrible fursuit who shows up at one point), and vibes.

At the same time, though, I’d say it’s also a textbook example of how to do a divergent adaptation right. Sure, it’s a very different experience from the novel, but it was always going to be because watching a movie is different from reading a novel, and it manages to have enough in common in terms of plot ideas, archetypal concepts and themes, and atmosphere (tons and tons of atmosphere!) that it feels like each version of the story can enrich the other. If you read King’s novel first, the movie can offer a vividly dread-inducing journey through edited highlights of hits horrors which your knowledge of the backstory can enrich; if you watch the movie first, you can enjoy its dark enigma and then read the novel to delve deeper into aspects of the history and character biographies only hinted at here.

The version I own on Blu-Ray, and the one I was primarily used to seeing before getting the disc, is the European cut, in which several scenes were trimmed from the American versions to improve the pacing. These predominantly involve scenes which said the quiet part loud so that less thoughtful audiences would catch aspects of the story that might go over their head – for instance, a doctor’s visit early on which establishes that Jack’s had a drinking problem previously during which he was violent and abusive towards Danny, or a shot of cobweb-strewn skeletons towards the end to emphasise hey, these are ghosts. Tightening the pacing is all to the good as far as I am concerned; Kubrick can be slow, and slow is fine, but there’s times when he can belabour the point if he isn’t self-disciplined. (Barry Lyndon has that problem by the bucketload.) Likewise, removing the skeletons seems to be a good idea – they’re far away the least original and distinctive of the hauntings and their inclusion would make the whole thing seem much more hokey and old-fashioned than it otherwise is.

As far as King’s problems with the adaptation go, he was apparently very, very unhappy with Jack Torrance’s arc – believing he was too obviously cracked during the job interview scene at the start, so it’s not a story about a person on the verge of a breakdown breaking down so much as it’s someone who’s already off the hook carrying on like that. This seems unfair to me – Jack’s maintaining a semblance of being able to carry on a reasonable conversation with others at the start, he very much isn’t at the end – and is predicated on King’s assumption that people would assume Jack was insane from the get-go because he’s played by Jack Nicholson and audiences would vividly remember him seeing him in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I think is a very uncharitable assessment of Nicholson’s acting range.

King’s distaste for Kubrick’s handling of Jack more generally seems to be a product of King’s over-identification with Torrance, since his handling of The Shining, the adaptations where he had more creative control, and its sequel Doctor Sleep have very consistently found him trying to find redemptive angles. One might suspect that this is in part a product of King using Torrance as a vehicle to express his own guilt about mistakes or bad decisions or dreadful deeds he did as a parent, which he has alluded to in the past, though to be honest perhaps Joe Hill – the original model for Tommy – is the horror author who ought to be tackling that story, not King himself.

There’s better basis for questioning Kubrick’s handling of the character of Wendy, which is intrinsically connected to his horrible behaviour towards Shelley Duvall for the sake of extracting that performance from her. He spent the entire production process behaving cold and harshly towards her, and actively encouraging others to do the same, as a sort of exercise in imposing non-consensual method acting on her. Essentially, he wanted her to provide an authentic “abused housewife” performance by… abusing her.

This aspect of the production is infamous and inexcusable; Duvall is by no measure an incapable actress and the idea that you need to drive an actor to emotional distress in order to get the most powerful performances out of them is nonsense. Everything I have seen and heard about, say, David Lynch’s film shoots suggests that he’s entirely pleasant to work with, even when – and perhaps especially when – shooting traumatic scenes. (If your first feature film project is Eraserhead, a film which would have never been made were it not for the enthusiasm and generosity and commitment of a cast and crew and crew that believed in the project just as much as Lynch did, you might learn the lesson that you get the best results when you treat people with decency and gratitude for what they’re offering you in return.) At the time of the movie’s release, however, these behind-the-scenes stories hadn’t circulated, leading to an unfriendly critical reception for Duvall’s performance in some quarters. The Razzies nominated Duvall for Worst Actress, but they belatedly rescinded the nomination in 2022 in light of “extenuating circumstances”.

For his part, Stephen King thought Wendy had been reduced to someone who just screams and cries a lot rather than the more rounded character he’d tried to depict in the novel. Here, I think King has the right of it. Given Kubrick’s rotten treatment of Duvall, we can probably assume he wanted a very specific performance out of her, and that was more or less what we got here, so we can infer Kubrick’s intentions from Duvall’s performance. (The alternative is to abandon the idea that Kubrick was a particularly fussy or exacting director, which means jettisoning more or less everything we know about his production methods in general and this shoot in particular.) When I first saw The Shining I thought Duvall’s character was shrill and annoying, and as I rewatch it I think that’s Kubrick’s intention; Kubrick wants Wendy to put our teeth on edge a little because on some level he wants us to have a slight touch of empathy with Jack when he lashes out at her.

That sounds bizarre when he also has Nicholson playing Torrance in such an obviously malign fashion, but there it is; Nicholson is shot and presented in a way which makes him seem hulking and powerful, a primordial force of violence. He is also the character who has, by far, the most direct interaction and communication with the ghosts, what with his long conversations with Lloyd and Grady; Danny picks up on them too, and thanks to his “shining” appears to be wise to their presence even before Jack is, but Wendy only gets brief glimpses of the ghosts right towards the end. Perhaps part of the idea is that Danny inherits his psychic potential from his father’s side, but either way it gets across the idea that Jack and Danny are the spiritually perceptive and thus a tad more enlightened members of the family, whilst poor Wendy isn’t really attuned to higher forces except in extremis. In essence, the haunting itself is focused on Jack and Danny, and therefore treats them as being the most important; Wendy is regarded as a bystander who has stumbled into a situation she has no hope of understanding. On a cosmological level, she is nothing more than a pest, her destruction a means to an end for the ghosts who want to claim Jack as one of their own.

On top of all that, Duvall’s makeup and costume and general presentation seems designed to make her seem frumpy, mousy, small, and powerless. I guess that makes it seem like more of a David and Goliath struggle when Jack finally snaps and goes for Wendy, but it still feels like Wendy gets badly short-changed in the early phases of the movie when Danny and Jack get the lion’s share of the characterisation. It feels like narratively speaking we could have done with at least some hints at Wendy’s resourcefulness and resilience in the first two thirds of the movie to better establish the reserves she draws on in the final act, but as it stands “resilience” is the last word you’d apply to her character Duvall is required by Kubrick to portray here. Even when she’s standing up for herself, Kubrick tries to make her look pathetic, so when she bonks Jack on the head with a baseball bat when he’s overtly declared murderous intent it looks like an accident, not purposeful self-defence.

Admittedly, once Jack’s on his rampage, the movie very much becomes about Wendy surviving and getting Danny out of there; this makes The Shining more or less the only Kubrick movie where a woman can really be said to be a major protagonist – even in Lolita Delores is presented as an object of desire, someone to motivate Humbert rather than a protagonist in her own right. On the other hand, I’m not aware of any stories of Kubrick treating his male leads in a comparable fashion to the way he treated Duvall during this production in order to get intense performances out of them; Kubrick seems to have trusted that men can act, but didn’t extend the same trust to Shelley Duvall.

This is not the only instance in which Kubrick treated a woman disrespectfully during the production process here. Wendy Carlos comes back to do the soundtrack, a mixture of classical adaptations and novel compositions, some orchestral and some electronic. With most of a decade of progress in synthesiser music to call on, Carlos’ electronic music sets a particularly funeral tone over the opening aerial shot of Jack’s tiny car winding its way to the Overlook. It’s generally less beholden to the classical music which she got her start in this time, probably because classical music is less significant to the subject matter than it was in A Clockwork Orange. She ensured this time that her long-time producer and creative partner Rachel Elkind got co-writing credits, Elkind having been a particular help this time around. Unfortunately, the production would leave a bad taste in Carlos’ mouth, with Kubrick having shown Carlos and Elkind a range of scenes which never made it anywhere near any of the final cuts and having them score them anyway, in common with Carlos’ experiences on A Clockwork Orange. (This is in stark contrast to more standard working procedure, where soundtrack artists can at least count on seeing a rough cut that’s close-ish to the final shape of the movie before they set to work.)

As far as poorly-served characters go, we have to talk a bit about Dick Hallorann. I don’t mind that he gets abruptly and unceremoniously killed off after going to all that effort to get back to the hotel to try and save the Torrance family; as I say above, once Jack starts rampaging it’s Wendy’s story, and from that perspective killing off Hallorann makes a bunch of sense, even though he survives in the novel and plays a crucial role there, because dangling the idea that Hallorann might come in and help out only for his death to snatch that hope away intensifies the pressure that Wendy is under.

No, the big problem with Dick Hallorann is that Stephen King wrote him as a textbook example of the “Magical Negro” archetype, a trope which appears several times in King’s fiction. (Indeed, The Green Mile is one of Spike Lee’s go-to examples when discussing the concept.) Kubrick’s direction does little or nothing to dial back on this. Crothers does the best he can with the hand of cards he’s dealt, and his conversation with Danny is a memorable and genuine moment of connection between two people who have a unique connection, but fundamentally Hallorann as a character fits the parameters of the archetype near-perfectly, and on top of that his bedroom is decorated like a blaxploitation set.

Come to think of it, other than a startlingly young James Earl Jones showing up as part of the B-52 crew in Dr. Strangelove and several of the Marines in Full Metal Jacket being Black, there just aren’t that many memorable Black roles in Kubrick movies, let alone any characters as prominent as Hallorann, and I kind of wonder whether Kubrick found it difficult to cut him from the movie entirely (you need someone to talk to Danny about his psychic powers and that’s one of the things Hallorann does in both the book and movie) but also had no goddamn clue how to depict him without resorting to a grab-bag of clichés.

The best-executed performances in the movie – in which chilling central performances are backed up by impeccable direction – come from Joe Turkel as Lloyd the bartender and Philip Stone as Grady. Both actors were long-standing Kubrick collaborators; Stone had a role as a Lyndon family retainer in Barry Lyndon and was Alex’s dad in A Clockwork Orange, whilst Turkel had been in Paths of Glory and The Killing. (Outside of Kubrick’s work, Turkel would go on from here to play Dr. Tyrell in Blade Runner – the final major role of a storied career – and MST3K fans also know him as the Lou Reed-resembling slimeball who shows up in Tormented to try and blackmail the main character.) As the most talkative of the ghosts, they have a major acting challenge on their hands in terms of delivering the lines they need to without undercutting the mysteriousness of the phenomena they’re the spokesmen for; both of them give utterly compelling performances, full of surface affability with underlying strangeness. The turn when Grady goes from deferentially cleaning up Torrance’s jacket to giving him his marching orders and impressing upon him the need to discipline Jack and Wendy and foil Hallorann (referred to by Grady using a slur) is particularly chilling.

Once again, The Shining is a movie whose technical execution and command of atmosphere I have to respect. The shot where Jack is looking down at the map of the hedge maze and then we cut to an overhead of a tiny Danny and Wendy exploring the maze is particularly good, and the way Kubrick uses the twisting passages and nightmare geometries of the Overlook’s architecture to create a sense of the hotel as a labyrinth in itself is justifiably celebrated. At the same time, there’s major issues with the production process and with the use of cheap stereotypes which undermine it somewhat, and make it increasingly difficult for me to embrace the movie fully the more I think about them.

Full Metal Jacket

It is the 1960s. J.T. “Joker” Davis (Matthew Modine) has signed up (or been drafted) into the US Marine Corps. At the Parris Island training base, Joker and his cohort are placed under the authority of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey), one of the most hardassed, loud, and casually bigoted drill sergeants you’re ever likely to encounter. Despite Joker’s tendency to crack wise, he avoids the full brunt of Hartman’s fury thanks to Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio), whose lack of physical fitness and tendency to be slow on the uptake leads Hartman to immediately rechristen him “Private Pyle” (after Gomer Pyle). Eventually, the recruits graduate basic training – even Pyle – but the mental and physical torments visited upon Pyle have broken him on the inside, leading to a night of violence that leaves Hartman and Pyle dead.

Joker, though, has landed on his feet – rather than being picked out for combat duty he’s ended up being a military journalist, writing for the propaganda newspaper Stars & Stripes. Come 1968, however, all things change – in the massive escalation of the war following the Tet Offensive, Sergeant Joker can’t scrape by writing stories from the comfort of Saigon any more and is sent to cover the front line fighting. He eventually catches up with the Lusthog Squad, a Marine fire team that includes Sergeant Cowboy (Arliss Howard), one of Joker’s buddies from basic training. As Joker gets to know Cowboy’s squadmates and the danger increases, he finds that he cannot remain aloof from the war any more…

As with 2001, Full Metal Jacket is a movie whose most memorable section, in terms of providing an actula narrative, is essentially a side story to the main arc. In this case, the movie – based on Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers – is basically a slice-of-life story, offering a series of incidents in the early Marine Corps career of Joker. Hasford’s original novel blurs the line between fiction informed by reality and thinly-veiled autobiography – Hasford himself was a Vietnam-era war correspondent in the Marine Corps working for Stars & Stripes and other armed forces publications, so the novel was very much in “write what you know” territory. That being the case, it’s perhaps no accident that the movie ends up being, to some extent, a string of incidents which then just abruptly concludes – life isn’t constructed to provide satisfying narratives, after all.

Whilst there’s some semblance of a movie-spanning narrative arc, in which Joker evolves from sarcastic detachment to a fully invested member of the squad, just as involved in the combat and the killing as them, it’s really only the sequence at boot camp with Private Pyle and Sergeant Hartman’s battle of wills that provides a conventional narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The rest is all war ambience, just as 2001 was all science fiction ambience outside of the “HAL’s gone kill crazy” sequence. The second half of the movie has some semblance of bookending where Joker meets a prostitute at the start and jokes about how most of the sex workers in Saigon are Viet Cong officers and then concludes by mercy-killing a Viet Cong sniper who turns out to be a woman, but we don’t get much of either woman’s story and the whole emphasis is on the reaction of the men – it’s another instance of Kubrick essentially not being that interested in women except as accessories to men’s stories.

The boot camp segment is memorable in part because of R. Lee Ermey’s career-making performance. Although Kubrick’s reputation is as a finicky perfectionist, here he gave Ermey extensive creative freedom in interpreting the role. Ermey had originally been hired in to give Kubrick’s original choice for the Hartman role, Tim Colceri, pointers on how Marine Corps drill instructors operated, since that was Ermey’s job back in the Vietnam era before he left the service and took up acting, and Kubrick realised that he had a goldmine of authenticity here, and given the high priority Kubrick put on authenticity you can see why he’d be inclined to make use of that.

The result is that Colceri was ditched and Ermey was given the role – why settle for a second-hand interpretation of Ermey’s drill sergeant technique when you can have the real deal? In addition, most of Ermey’s dialogue was either written by him or improvised by the spot. Ermey was guided by the plot beats that each scene needed to get across – which of course required him to portray Hartman was an unsympathetic bully who alienates Pyle to the point where Pyle breaks – but otherwise, Kubrick gave him a free hand which would be uncommon in any Hollywood production and was nigh-unthinkable for Kubrick at this stage in his career.

Ermey’s performance both makes you understand why the Marine Corps made him a drill sergeant, and why breaking out in to a career in acting made sense, since he does a fine job of getting across the performative aspect of the job. There’s an inauthenticity to Hartman, born in part from the fact that Hartman himself is always playing a role when we see him. We never get a glimpse of him except when he’s around the recruits, and when he’s with his recruits he’s concentrating on projecting authority and moulding them into ideal killers. He hits a strident tone from the start and doesn’t vary from it, and it’s that lack of emotional variance which is the “tell” – even when he’s annoyed, it feels like he’s losing his temper according to a carefully-honed technique. Is it really plausible that Hartman is like this when he’s out drinking with his buddies, when he’s in bed with his wife, when he’s walking his dog, when he’s visiting his niece? No, obviously not. Ermey is playing a character who is, himself, playing a character, and is able to make that work off the back of having played that stock “drill sergeant” character for real during his military career.

As Hartman, Ermey makes himself the focal presence of every scene he is in, his foghorn voice, harsh attitude, and attempts to get suitable results out of his recruits through berating and breaking them down by any means possible is basically an acting job. You can absolutely believe that Ermey was likewise the absolute centre of attention for his recruits when drilling them in the Marine Corps. Ermey is doubtless playing up the nastier side of the job and Hartman’s personality, given the anti-war bent of the movie, and one has to wonder whether he felt a certain catharsis in this process; if he had any mixed feelings at all about his role in the Marine Corps, this was his chance to exorcise them by presenting Hartman as a dehumanising monster who does his job of forging men into killing machines all too well.

To that extent, a thing which it’s useful to remember is that Hartman is a bad drill sergeant. Yes, we pay attention to everything he says in his speeches, but what do we retain? That he thinks the recruits are trash and Private Pyle in particular will never amount to anything. One can imagine that Ermey, when he really did the job, could give speeches where at the end of it the recruits could cite the finer points of rifle technique verbatim because he kept the focus on the job rather than crushing people’s mental health because he took a dislike to them; Ermey has apparently emphasised that Hartman is not a by-the-book drill sergeant but a screwup, and you can believe that. Ermey is being authentic, but he’s trying to be authentically terrible at his job. If he’s partially exorcising his own past, he’s perhaps even more getting a cathartic stab in at those who made his job more difficult in the past by screwing up their end of the training detail.

Kubrick’s direction in the early segments of the movie emphasises the total psychological control Hartman attempts to assert over the recruits; we hear him bellowing more or less continuously for nearly twenty minutes. The first time we get any reprieve from him is when he assigns Joker as Pyle’s training buddy and tasks him with helping him tighten up his gun maintenance, drill motions, climbing exercise, making his bed… well, just about everything, really, Pyle really isn’t good at most of the tasks he’s given. The reprieve, however, is only brief – it’s too little too late to stop Pyle spiralling, even though it’s evident that Pyle only shows improvement when Joker is tutoring him, and sure enough once Hartman’s voice dominates again Pyle’s spiral continues. Pyle only begins to pull it together once the fellow recruits are mobilised in a “blanket party” to take out their frustrations on him, after they are collectively punished for his mistakes, and this is not presented as a positive development – the more physically capable he becomes, the more his mental health spiral takes a dark turn. And having made himself the centre of Pyle’s world, it’s no surprise that Hartman bears the brunt of the chaos when Pyle decides to bring that world crashing down.

This all wraps up around 45 minutes in, after which the movie has over an hour left to go but doesn’t really have an hour’s worth of narrative to offer as such. This isn’t necessarily a weakness of the source material – the first segment is a pretty close adaptation of the first third of the novel, but the latter two thirds of the novel (each given a distinct heading) are basically mashed together, remixed, and comprehensively rethought to yield the rest of the story. This sometimes results in radical changes, not least because in the novel Joker ends up killing a wounded Cowboy so the squad can pull out without leaving behind a potential prisoner. In the novel Joker gets busted back to Private and kicked out of the journalistic corps, but Kubrick maintains the device of Joker being a military journalist throughout, to enable among other things the “talking heads” segment where the combat squad are interviewed man-on-the-street style around 80 minutes in.

As with 2001, outside of the narratively tight portion of the movie all you have is vignettes and vibes; unlike 2001, you get the tight narrative out of the way at the beginning, rather than the more sandwich-like structure of Space Odyssey, with the result that the latter half of the movie can drag. Nonetheless, as far as unflinching and unromanticised looks at Vietnam go, this is up there with Platoon and Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter.

Eyes Wide Shut

Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is a doctor catering to an upmarket New York clientele. Between a rewarding job, high-class social connections, his beautiful wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), and their darling daughter Helena (Madison Eginton), life’s pretty perfect for Bill. One Christmas, he and Alice attend a party thrown by Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), a wealthy patient of Bill’s who’s befriended the couple, and both of them end up flirted with by other guests (and reciprocating a little), though Bill’s good time is interrupted when he’s summoned upstairs by Ziegler to help out Mandy (Julienne Davis), who took an overdose during a sexual encounter with Ziegler.

Rattled a little by a brief insight into his friend’s sleazier side, Bill finds his sense of stability further rattled when, after he and Alice share a joint a night or so later, Alice confesses that a while back she had this encounter with a naval officer whilst on vacation and was seriously tempted to have a fling with him. Coming to realise that the world is rife with opportunities for erotic adventure, Bill decides to pursue some opportunities that present themselves, which leads to him infiltrating a ritualistic orgy in a mansion just out of town, attended by the wealthy and powerful. Can Bill go back to his regular life after encountering this? Can he forget about what he’s seen? Or will that feel like going through life with his Eyes Wide Shut?

Kubrick’s final movie had an even longer gestation period than you might think. Emerging in 1999, mere months after his death, it represented his return to cinemas after spending 12 years after Full Metal Jacket apparently spinning his wheels. However, he’d encountered the source material – Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Rhapsody, AKA Dream Story – back in 1968, as he was full steam ahead on 2001, and had been tinkering with the project ever since.

A question mark does, of course, hang over how finished the final product is. On the one hand, Kubrick had a cut put together before he died, and previewed it to studio executives, Cruise, and Kidman a mere week before his demise, and reportedly he was very happy with how it turned out. That said, some final few post-production tasks like the final colour correction and sound mix remained, and had to be attempted by other hands based on their best understanding of Kubrick’s intentions – and, of course, Kubrick was an infamous tinkerer, right down to making edits to The Shining right after the first screenings had occurred, so it’s wholly possible that Kubrick would have made other significant changes had he lived.

Still, what we get is unquestionably Kubrick-like in its style and approach, right down to his tendency to take source material and mine it for vibes and atmosphere whilst making creative decisions which starkly change the point of the story. On the vibes and atmosphere side of the equation, the elegant high society parties depicted here – both Victor’s classy shindig at the beginning and the horny on main occult gang bang that’s the centrepiece of the movie – are finely executed and highly reminiscent of the sort of gathering the Overlook Hotel is shown as having hosted in The Shining.

Kubrick clearly enjoys that vintage early 20th Century aesthetic enough that it makes his decision to update the setting of the novella to present-day New York rather than simply setting the movie in 1920s Vienna incongruous. I suppose in some respects you can see the distinction between the old-school glamour of the party sequences and the somewhat more grounded city outside their confines as fostering the sense of these parties as being enclosed and separate worlds unto themselves. Except it doesn’t quite land – the Harford’s home, whilst more modern and lived-in, still feels like the residence of a swanky family who are very much part of the 1%, and the grimy New York streets are artificial. Kubrick had, by this point in his life, developed an overpowering phobia of flying, so instead of filming in actual New York he made a fake Greenwich Village set in the UK, sending crew over to New York to measure street features to an infinitesimal degree.

On the one hand, it’s as an undeniably impressive technical achievement, but on the other hand you can tell that they’re shooting on a soundstage rather than filming with an outdoor unit; it’s a lot of effort to get something most of the way to being convincing but not quite closing the loop, and if Kubrick had just gone to Vienna and set the movie there (whether in the 1920s or present day) he wouldn’t have needed to fly and would have been true to the novella. It’s not even like “modern New York” was absolutely and irrevocably central to his concept of the project; he only got in Frederic Raphael to do a rewrite on the script to update the setting in 1994, which means that since he started batting about the idea in 1968 he spent some 26 years – over a quarter of a century! – open to the idea of it not being in modern-day New York.

Another significant shift from the novella is the excision of the Jewish identity of the protagonists. This is in some respects a surprising decision, given Kubrick himself had Jewish ancestry (but was not religiously observant). Admittedly, Fridolin and Albertina (the Bill and Alice equivalents in the novella) are not explicitly stated as being Jewish, but there is a scene where members of an antisemitic fraternity yell abuse at Fridolin and they’ve generally been interpreted as being Jewish, and Frederic Raphael argued for retaining that.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Kubrick was uncomfortable with the antisemitism scene and wanted instead to have them yell homophobic abuse which, perhaps, fits better with the psychosexual aspects of the story and the concept of Bill exploring previously buttoned-down sexual impulses. (The vibe between Bill and Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), the pianist he’d been at medical school with who he encounters at the party at the start of the film, might or might not be intended to suggest “former lovers”, but that’s how it comes across.) However, the excision is made problematic by two factors. The first is that Arthur Schnitzler, who was Jewish himself, decided to write that novella from a Jewish perspective, and depicting Jewish-coded characters in 1920s Vienna, and so setting aside that dimension of the story feels both disrespectful to Schnitzler’s intentions and passes up an opportunity to highlight a community which was about to undergo grotesque horrors designed specifically to excise it from the cultural fabric.

The other factor was, perhaps, not one which would have been easily foreseen by Kubrick. Just as 2001 got latched onto by Moon landing conspiracy theorists and A Clockwork Orange got latched onto by mind control conspiracy theorists and The Shining got latched onto by a bizarre variety of conspiracy theorists, so too has Eyes Wide Shut been latched onto by conspiracy theorists who get turned on by the idea that the wealthy and powerful do intense occult sex magic stuff behind closed doors.

Thanks to the efforts of QAnon enthusiasts and the usual suspects, this side of conspiracy theory is particularly close to antisemitic dogwhistles. You need to jump through a few hoops to get from faking the Moon landing to antisemitism, but the basic idea of “secret societies do creepy shit behind closed doors” leaps to variations on the Blood Libel with surprising ease, as one can witness currently with present-day witterings about adrenochrome by people too goofy to realise that Hunter S. Thompson was joking about that. David Icke hopped onto the “Eyes Wide Shut is real, you guys” more or less at the first opportunity – the next book he released after Eyes Wide Shut came out in cinemas was Children of the Matrix, and what do you know, along with wittering about how The Matrix is an accurate depiction of our Gnostic universe, he also claims that Eyes Wide Shut was an accurate depiction of elite sex networks, and it’s been a regular talking point of his ever since. Putting in a sympathetic Jewish character as the protagonist would have not inoculated it against this treatment, but it would at least have forced people to either jump through more hoops to use the dogwhistles or just plain blow them louder (and thus make their agenda more obvious).

The production took place fairly late in Cruise and Kidman’s marriage – they’d been hitched for the better part of a decade when the premiere dropped, and would divorce a couple of years afterwards. Regardless of what you might believe about their relationship behind the scenes – especially in light of later revelations about the Church of Scientology auditioning subsequent partners for Cruise – as a Hollywood couple regularly in the limelight they were at least well-practiced at presenting their relationship the way they wanted it to be perceived in the wild, so they make the chemistry between Bill and Alice very authentic here – and it adds an extra edge of verisimilitude when they both in their own way seem to be flirting with others at the opening ball.

It’s a shame then, that the movie kind of wastes her. The events of the narrative suggest that Alice very much had her own story going on in parallel with Bill’s, but Kubrick doesn’t even try to offer it, rooting the movie in a male perspective. This is, admittedly, true of the source material so far as I can tell, though ultimately it was Kubrick who chose the source material he wished to adapt so that’s not as much of an alibi as you may think, particularly when not one of the authors whose work Kubrick adopted was a woman. The closest we get comes early on, when Bill is flirted with by the suave Mr. Szavost (Sky du Mont) at the ball and she seems to play along a little or when she needles Bill about hitting on a couple of models at the same party, but once we get deep into the conspiracy-hunting stuff Alice fades into the background.

Alice serves largely to motivate Bill’s jealousy and secrecy; on the jealousy side of things, he’s not too bothered about her dancing a bit with Szavost, but is rattled by the naval officer anecdote. That said, it’s Bill who tells lies first, and that’s before the naval officer anecdote comes out – when Alice asks where he sloped off to during Ziegler’s party, he misrepresents the story to gloss over Mandy’s involvement entirely. This establishes Bill early on as someone who is happy to keep the secrets of rich, powerful patrons, even from his own wife – a man who’s obedient to a fraternal bro code which overrides even the confidences of the marital bedroom.

Indeed, it’s evident that Bill and Alice navigate a world of secrets and lies already, before Bill even gets involved with the masked ball. Although the party at the beginning is very much the exoteric equivalent of the esoteric orgy, there’s still weird, off-kilter notes suggestive of deeper mysteries. For instance, the room where Victor summons Bill to help Mandy when she overdoses seems to primarily be a bathroom – at least, there’s a bath and toilet in there – but there’s also a couch and a writing desk, furniture it’s totally incongruous to see in a bathroom, and the arrangement of the furniture in and of itself is baffling, with the sofa placed so that if you’re sat on it you’re staring right at the toilet. Who arranges a room like that? Who even has a room like that in their house?

The big problem with Eyes Wide Shut is that the best part of it – the secret society orgy sequence – doesn’t show up until over an hour in, and then you have over an hour of aftermath after it’s done and dusted. The scene itself is wonderfully staged, with Jocelyn Pook’s eldritch musical score a particular highlight, but it’s a lot of sound and fury which doesn’t signify a whole lot. In the long, drawn-out coda there’s even a scene with Ziegler where, unlike in the novella, a sincere attempt is made to provide a full explanation of the plot as a big elaborate prank, only heightening the sense that this has been kind of a waste of time. And that, perhaps, is a summation of the problems of Kubrick’s movies – they all deliver something powerful and memorable which will sear itself into your memory, like the duels in Barry Lyndon or the orgy here or “Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!!!” from Doctor Strangelove, but Kubrick often defaults to assuming that technical excellence and a fine eye for aesthetics are enough and narrative is a dose of extra spice you put in here or there to taste but which you can do without if necessary. At his best, he’s absolutely right. When he’s not at his best, he couldn’t be more wrong.