Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 112

Kubr ic k 's rebel l ion, by contrast,
served him well. He refused to follow
Hollywood's formulaic filmmaking clichés and was unafraid to touch on outré subjects (this is the man who made
Lolita, after all). His films still won
eight Academy Awards (Kubrick himself only won once, for special effects
on 2001). Many were international box
office hits. The most famous actors
in all of Hollywood, like Jack Nicholson, would drop whatever they were
doing to work with him. In the latter
part of his career, he had a unique arrangement with Warner Brothers that
let him make movies on all of his own
terms. He is now widely recognized as
one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers who ever lived.

of movies that didn't meet his standards. "I know I can make a film better than that," he would say. Soon, he
started using the little money he had
in savings-approximately $1,500-
to rent camera equipment and make
short movies.
His first was a 16-minute documentary on a boxing match, Day of the Fight.
He sold it to RKO Production pictures
for $100 more than it cost him to make
it. That inspired him to quit his job
at Look and turn to film full-time. He
made a few more shorts before his first
feature, Fear and Desire, which was a
commercial flop but received enough
critical appreciation that he was able
to continue making movies.
It took his third feature film, The
Killing (1956), about a
met icu lously pl anned
racetrack robbery gone
wrong, for Kubrick to
come into his own as an
artist. The noirish film
follows Johnny Clay, a
veteran criminal who
wants to pull off a final
heist and leave town. It
ends with Clay trying to
get on a flight to Boston
with a bag full of cash.
When he arrives at the
airport, the gate attendant won't let him bring the bag as a
carry-on because of its weight. Eventually, Clay lets him check it. Then,
while he's on the runway, Clay watches
as a woman's dog jumps from her arms.
The baggage cart driver swerves to
avoid hitting it, and the suitcase falls
off and opens. The money goes flying
into the air, scattered away by the airplane's propellers. Clay and his girlfriend quickly try to leave the airport
but realize the futility of attempting
to escape-and are met by cops at the
airport entrance.
This was the first display of what
would become the classic Kubrick
plot. As Mikics writes, the director
was "drawn to macho revolt, and to
anything else that makes well-laid
plans screw up royally." It was a subject that stayed constant even as Ku-

Kubrick's filmmaking life was
marked by a fundamental
contradiction. He was the
consummate model of a
rebel who succeeded, yet he
spent his entire life making
films about rebels who fail.
In other words, Kubrick's filmmaking life was marked by a fundamental contradiction. He was the consummate model of a rebel who succeeded,
yet he spent his entire life making
films about rebels who fail.

tanley Kubrick was born in 1928.
His father was a doctor and the descendant of Polish immigrants, and
the family lived in a spacious Bronx
apartment. His interest in cinema began relatively early in life. While taking photos for Look magazine in the
late 1940s, he started going to movie screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was introduced to
foreign films. He fell in love with
the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Max
Ophüls, and the Greek American director Elia Kazan, but also saw a lot

112 September/October 2020

brick later became an incredibly versatile filmmaker, bouncing from genre
to genre. The director went from an
antiwar movie to a historical epic to
a dark comedy to a sci-fi to a dystopian movie to a period drama. Then he
made a horror film, a war film (not the
same as an antiwar film), and an erotic psychodrama. In each of these movies, men (they were always men) rebel
in some form or fashion against their
reality and surroundings.
A few of them deserve to succeed. In
Paths of Glory (1957), for example, Kirk
Douglas plays a French colonel whose
unit refuses orders to invade an enemy anthill, and then stands up against
the military establishment for seeking to punish his soldiers (had they
carried out the order, they would effectively have been committing suicide). But most of Kubrick's rebels are
far less noble. Many, like The Shining's
Torrance, are full of a kind of masculine rage that destroys their capacity
for rational thought.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) is an especially powerful example. Sterling Hayden
plays a general who becomes impotent,
has a psychotic breakdown, and ignores the chain of command so he can
order a nuclear attack on the Soviets.
He uses the bomb to replace the sexual release. This is a tale not so much
of failed rebellion-his plan does, in
fact, work-but of rebellion as a form
of mental malfunction.
The connection between rebellion
and malfunction is also apparent in
A Clockwork Orange (1971). The film is
obviously about a rebel: a conscienceless youth gang leader named Alex who
takes pleasure in violence and rape.
But the film reaches its apex when he
comes in contact with another rebel:
the government's minister of the interior, who controversially tries to reform Alex through an experimental
aversion therapy called the Ludovico
technique. This consists of strapping
him to a chair, clamping his eyes open,
and forcing him to watch sex and violence on a movie screen while injecting
him with drugs that make him ill. By
the time the trial is over, he can't do

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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