Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 113

on political books
any of the things he used to do without getting sick. Once he's released
from jail, however, his former victims
find him and torment him until he
can't take it anymore-and he tries to
commit suicide.
Pretty soon, the news media picks
up his story, civil society is outraged,
and the menace becomes the victim:
the subject of the minister's brutality.
The government then has to "uncondition" Alex to save face. The state's plan
completely backfires. The film ends
with Alex being re-released into society just as dangerous as he was before.
Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange were clearly political. But many
of Kubrick's revolts were personal. His
final movie, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), is
centered around the theme of adultery. The film-the last to star Nicole
Kidman and Tom Cruise as a married
couple-follows Cruise as he ostensibly sets out on a voyage to cheat on
his wife after she tells him she once
considered having an affair. That includes him infiltrating a secret society's masked orgy. Complications,
however, get in the way, and he never follows through. When he confesses
his adventures to his wife, she seemingly forgives him (the final lines of
dialogue are some of Kubrick's finest).
But it still becomes an archetypal Kubrick story of failed rebellion. As Mikics writes, the film is essentially "a
piquant fairy tale: male defiance is
quickly foiled by fate, which brings the
man back to where he started."
For today's aggressive conservative
protestors-the mostly male demonstrators who march on statehouses
bearing arms-Kubrick's macho plot
lines could prove prescient. Try as
they might to act against others and
increase their power, the rebels in Kubrick's films are rarely able to get their
way, or at least what they truly want.
This may also be the case for Donald Trump himself. The president already seems like a character out of Dr.
Strangelove. The question is whether
Trump's unsteady revolt against American political institutions will end like
the general's-in unfathomable catas-

trophe for the world-or like The Shining's Jack Torrance's revolt against his
own mediocrity-in self-destruction.

hallmark of Kubrick's rebels is
that they almost always lose control of the situation. Johnny Clay's
heist itself succeeds, but is upended by
a swerving luggage cart. The minister
in A Clockwork Orange manages to reprogram Alex, but his efforts are then
undone by societal backlash.
Mikics suggests that Kubrick's preoccupation with catastrophe stems in
part from his New York Jewish upbringing. One of the most Jewish tendencies, after all, is to fear that things
can go wrong even when they are
seemingly going well. "Gentiles don't
know how to worry," Kubrick once remarked.
T hat may ex plain
why Kubrick, unlike his
characters, was a perfectionist. He was an
exacting director who
demanded dozens of
takes. For the Vietnam
set in Full Metal Jacket, which he filmed near
his estate in England,
he refused to use plastic props and instead
imported 100,000 tropical plants from
Hong Kong and more than 200 palm
trees. He would edit and reedit his
films seven days a week.
Toward the end of Kubrick's life, this
neurosis became as talked about as his
films themselves. He rarely left his
Hertfordshire mansion. Gossip columnists wrote about him breathlessly as a
recluse who was destroying the lives of
everyone around him. (People close to
him have always disputed the rumors
of his mental descent.)
But Kubrick's perfectionism was an
indelible part of his filmmaking identity. In essence, it was a manifestation
of his belief in hard work-that the
way to successfully overcome adverse
odds when rebelling is through carefully considering every little thing.
This was one of the reasons he loved
chess. He once said the game "teach-

es you . . . to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something
that looks good," but to "think just as
objectively when you're in trouble."
Perhaps that's the message for today's progressive protesters. They
have all the momentum on their side:
Trump's polling has hit the rocks;
they have already affected societal
change (after decades of resistance,
the Washington football team has finally changed its name); and state and
municipal governments are, in fact,
altering their laws and policing policies. But there is always a need to
think methodically through the ways
in which things can boomerang.
That hardly means they should give
up. Kubrick, after all, wasn't anti-rebel.
Rather, he loved telling cautionary

Today's progressive protesters
have momentum on their side.
But Kubrick's message is that
there is always a need to think
methodically through the ways
in which things can boomerang.
tales of how rebels can go wrong. In a
speech during the final months of his
life, the director paid tribute to Icarus,
the great rebel of Greek mythology,
who tried to fly higher than his father
by creating wings with wax and feathers but who plummeted to his death
when the wax melted in the sun.
In most classrooms, the story is
taught as a lesson on the dangers of
overreaching and needless ambition.
But Kubrick shared a different analysis. He said, "I've never been certain
whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, 'Don't try to fly too high,' or
whether it might also be thought of as:
Forget the wax and feathers and do a
better job on the wings."
Eric Cortellessa is digital editor of the
Washington Monthly.
Washington Monthly 113

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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