There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
MARIO SAVIO, December 3, 1964
This chapter examines aspects of the fundamental ambivalence toward human cultural productions conveyed in Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic works. Through exquisitely distilled images and innovative soundtracks, the films articulate a fascination with such topoi (in Aristotle’s sense: places to go to construct an argument) as the machine, symphonic music, the labyrinth, and various kinds of ritual as sublime forms of cultural expression. At the same time, Kubrick’s films depict these cultural forms as arising from or intricately linked to what we might call foundational violence. But violence is only one, though perhaps the most important, of what I will term the “obscene” social underpinnings that subtend Kubrick’s work.
While the etymology or historical meaning of obscene is unclear, it has been related both to the notion of filth and to that of being “off scene,” or hidden. The pessimism that Kubrick’s work exudes derives from its continual reminders that humankind’s greatest achievements depend on a logic of repression of that which is most appalling in our histories and cultures—such that the horrific and the sublime are finally indistinguishable. The surface beauty and technological perfection of these films, particularly in the case of 2001, are fraught with tension, as the shifting relationship between horror and awe articulates the director’s use of cinematography, sound, setting, and other elements of mise-en-scène. The idea of reason that guides technological progress, like evolutionary law, the restrictions of gendered behavior, and the creation of works of art, is portrayed as both compelling and horrifying, sterilized, and, finally, obscene. Whether Kubrick supports or subverts the kind of cultural apparatus he depicts is, in the final analysis, open to interpretation: are his films a form of social protest—or does he, as some have felt, really want us to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb?
Although 2001 paints its portrait of civilizations on the broadest canvas of any of Kubrick’s films, like all of his works this one foregrounds the paradoxes of civilized life. 2001 illustrates this seeming paradox—culture as violence—in many ways, most strikingly in the celebrated edit that transforms a primitive weapon, a bone, into a gorgeously complex spacecraft which, like other Kubrickian machines, is both appealing and repellent because it represents a kind of frozen “ultraviolence” (to use Alex’s word in A Clockwork Orange, 1971) (figures 3 and 4). At the moment of becoming human, of picking up the bone tool and striking the dried bones of the dead tapir, the ape-man violently fantasizes about killing his prey. The next, seemingly natural step is for this ape to turn the weapon on his own kind—to make it ammunition in a definitive territorial dispute in which one group falls back, losing its purchase over the valued waterhole and perhaps its very ability to survive.
To put it simply, Kubrick’s hominids move toward civilization by learning to kill efficiently. The notion of civilization as institutionalized violence may seem counterintuitive. This is especially true if we regard civilization as the channeling of primitive aggressive and sexual urges into more socially acceptable behaviors, as it is described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents:
Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.1
But Kubrick’s films depict civilization’s way of organizing aggression not as a weakening but as a concentration of its implicit violence. His films abound in double-bind structures that flow logically from this premise. When, for example, his characters, including Moon-Watcher (the ape in 2001), astronaut Dave Bowman, A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, The Shining’s Jack Torrance, Barry Lyndon, Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, break out into violence that in another film might spell relief from social constriction, they find that they are more than ever simply a gear in the clockwork’s mechanism. Moon-Watcher throws the bone in a violent gesture of liberation from hunger and oppression, but the bone becomes instantaneously enmeshed in the technological superstructure that comes to dominate man. Dave rebels against and dismantles the emblem of that technology, HAL, only to find himself caught in an experiment in evolution that may be guided by more advanced life forms. Alex, who acts out against society using its own cultural instruments, nevertheless is finally, cozily knitted into the political power structure. When Jack Torrance wields an ax to massacre the family he can no longer control, he assures his own status as a permanent fixture in a maze beyond his understanding. Barry Lyndon tackles his stepson, furious that his bids for acceptance by the nobility are being threatened, only to find that their ranks close even more tightly after his momentary, though inevitable, lapse. Pyle shoots Sergeant Hartman, but the latter had already proudly claimed mass murderer Charles Whitman and assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as Marine Corps marksmen: in death, Pyle is more than ever a marine.
These double-bind structures in Kubrick’s films can be usefully examined as shifting manifestations of what Slovenian philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek has termed “the obscene shadow of the law.”2 To put it briefly, Žižek, following in the traces of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, points to a split between the symbolic, official law and the obscene, secret law which actually permits the official law to function. According to Žižek, the law always brings with it its “obscene shadow.” The relationship between law and its obscene shadow has a deep structural importance in a number of Kubrick’s films, including Paths of Glory (1957), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), as well as 2001. All show how secret rituals and “forbidden” forms of desire serve to prop up government, the family, the military, class structures, and the organization of gender. Paths of Glory’s trial of three ordinary French soldiers cynically demonstrates that the law’s obscene shadow falls very close to its official representatives, the generals who allow this politically exigent, bloody charade to take place. In Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick dwells on the obscene complicity of Sergeant Hartman in torturing Pyle toward fullblown madness, an illegal (or marginally legal) practice designed to produce a fighting machine in the interest of the larger project of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia: that the marines also produce crazed assassins is a predictable but unimportant by-product. The marine recruits themselves internalize the necessity of policing their own. When Pyle screws up one too many times, they take it upon themselves to beat him savagely in his bunk under the cover of night.3
The achievement of civilization depends ultimately, for Stanley Kubrick, upon disciplinary systems inculcated through indoctrination, reinforced through ritual, and expressed as official law, its obscene shadow, and its unofficial surveillance systems. In 2001, Kubrick finds a compelling metaphor for this mysterious nexus of constraint and opportunity in the black monoliths that accompany humans on their evolutionary adventure. Michel Chion has described 2001’s monolith as a “Tablet of the Law without commandments, this stele [an upright stone often used in ancient times as a funerary marker] without inscriptions.”4 The monolith is, according to this reading, a clean, geometrical figure that represents (among an almost infinite number of possible readings of its meaning) the law: the set of social codes under which citizens of a state are required to live.5 Although the monolith incites culture-founding ritualistic worship as well as violence in the ape-men, who began to wage war under its apparent tutelage, it remains smooth, impassive, and silent until men on the moon trigger its raucous beacon by digging it up. According to this perspective, the monolith triggers the functioning of a certain kind of evolutionary law, a Darwinian struggle for survival that is continually, problematically figured by Kubrick as a clash between dominant males. HAL, on the other hand, with his soft voice, omnipresent eye, and cybernetic precision, is a rather maternal implement of technical/state violence, controlling the lives of well-disciplined astronauts who don’t even know the real reason for their mission to Jupiter but carry out everyday rituals in obedience to their training.6
HAL exemplifies near-perfect indoctrination in the form of programming. He is the reverse forerunner of Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. HAL is a machine who would be human. Pyle is a man-become-machine who has a “major malfunction.” The failures of each of these mechanisms is implicit to the systems that produced them. In that sense, HAL is right in saying that “human error” is at fault in his apparent failure. Specific forms of human error—the push toward domination and violent destruction—are part of the evolutionary process that created HAL himself. Thus, HAL’s “failure” is not really at issue in 2001 except insofar as it reveals that his evolution is, like man’s, founded on a violence that may be hardwired into every circuit. “Human error” is, of course, already revealed as built into the systems driving Dr. Strangelove. When General Ripper goes “a little funny in the head” and consequently sets the Doomsday Machine into motion, he is enacting the logic that produced and named it. The nuclear device in Dr. Strangelove, like the lovingly reconstructed control panel of the B-52 bomber that delivers it, is at the service of Major “King” Kong—who, with Slim Pickens’s comic, deadpan brio brings together man as-ape and man-as-technological/bureaucratic cog. In a humorous send-up of the futility of human hierarchical behavior, following an indoctrination that is clearly as thorough as Pyle’s will be and as deadly, Kong obeys the ritual of procedure and presents global annihilation to his men, in a homey pep talk, as an opportunity for career advancement.
The law, as expressed in the disciplinary systems legally available to the state as a means of producing and controlling its citizens, ranges from subliminal presence to all-out obsession in Kubrick’s films. The Killing (1956) is the second of Kubrick’s films, after Killer’s Kiss (1955), that adopts film noir’s visual palette and its sensibility, based on the urbanite’s psychological angst. The film’s extreme fatalism is generic—perhaps even a parody of the film noir genre, in which category this is a late and self-conscious entry. While The Killing depicts criminals on a caper who are far from being controlled by a disciplinary system inculcated by the state, their actions are ultimately, flamboyantly determined by what looks like fate (one man dies, after killing a horse, because his car runs over a horseshoe), and the law is figured in this film as an agent of chance or destiny. Chance reveals its obscene side as, true to Kubrick’s vision of contingency and lack of human agency, it ruins the beautiful heist designed by the protagonist (Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay). At first, things move like clockwork, but the works are bigger than the individual can see, and perfectly timed small disasters—a woman’s betrayal, a broken suitcase lock, an escaped poodle—lead Clay to the brink of failure and capture. The final shot of the film shows two plain-clothes detectives moving in relentless symmetry toward Clay: they are the very embodiment of a “system” (though perhaps not only a governmental one) that must, in the noir universe, ultimately win. They are in no hurry: a perfectly timed phone call tips them off to Clay’s whereabouts; they move in a measured pace to apprehend him, like the chess pieces invoked earlier in the film by the philosophical wrestler Maurice Oboukhoff. But the obscene result of Clay’s gamesmanship is a pile of human bodies riddled with bullets and a suitcase of money blowing in the wind.
Dr. Strangelove’s obscene shadow is political in nature. The film depicts a republic that steadfastly regards itself as the world’s guardian of democracy. During the course of the film, however, we learn that totalitarianism and the death drive flourish very near the heart of that democracy. Robert Kolker has described the historical persistence of fascism at the core of the Cold War conflict depicted in Dr. Strangelove:
At the peak of the last cold war, at a time when the great, grim myth of communist subversion was the operative, castrating force in America’s ideology and culture, Kubrick suggests that fascism is stirring as the ghost in the machine. The glorification and celebration of power and death that feed politics and form the urge for domination define the fascist spirit. In the film it is resurrected in the body of Strangelove, just at the point when death dominates the world. This is a chilling idea and perhaps difficult to comprehend for those who tend to look at fascism as a momentary historical aberration that died with Hitler and only appears in the appalling actions of skinhead gangs. Kubrick is suggesting that death was fascism’s disguise and that strength was drawn from its ability to hide in the guise of anticommunism and the cold war. This was a brave insight for the time. Its validity remains undiminished.7
Kolker points here to a crucial instance of Kubrick’s revelation of the obscene shadow of legal and political systems: Strangelove, a mechanically enhanced fascist, sits at the side of the shambling president who easily stands in for his Führer, as no doubt would any leader. Strangelove himself is linked to shadows and to hiddenness in the film. At the moment of mass destruction, he is unfolding another obscene little plot: for all of the men of power to take refuge in mine shafts with attractive women capable of reproduction.
Lolita’s obscene secret is not a political one but one that upholds the scandalous, secret laws of Western male desire. One reading of Nabokov’s novel might maintain that Humbert Humbert’s lust for the underage Lolita is not anomalous but normative (he is, it turns out, “normal”). The rationalizations that he seeks in literary sources—Dante’s Beatrice, Poe’s child bride—are actually legitimate, if shocking, readings of the history of adult male passion for female children. Nabokov’s Lolita is terrifying because it does not, finally, make Humbert Humbert an alien creature. But the degree of this obscenity was censored from the film by making Lolita a teen rather than a child, and it sometimes comes off as a rather tired saga of doubling between two men with a crush on a teenager rather than as a revelation of the pedophilia lurking in the hearts and minds of suburban men.
The manifestation of law-as-disciplinary system is subtle but pervasive in Lolita. In Nabokov’s novel, as in Kubrick’s film, Humbert Humbert is a child molester with an intricate intellectual life. The novel is more successful than the film in achieving reader/audience identification with Humbert—and more explicit in its legal context, in that the entire novel is addressed to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury trying Humbert for child molestation. In the film version, James Mason’s sympathetic performance and the fact that the film remains mostly within the character’s range of knowledge does place us to some degree—uncomfortably—in his skin. The legal system subtracted from the frame narrative is reintroduced by Kubrick as Humbert encounters what he believes is a representative of the law at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, where he first has sex with Lolita. As though the world were a paranoid projection of Humbert’s guilty conscience, the appropriately named desk clerk, Swine, announces that they are “very proud to have the overflow of the State Police Convention” (a detail missing from the novel). Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers in one of his many incarnations in the film), the protagonist’s lecherous double, pretends to be one of those state police officers and rambles on to Humbert about being “normal.” Humbert has internalized the potential gaze of the authorities, the idea of being monitored for normalcy.8 The joke of the film is that, as in the famous story of the paranoid who is really being persecuted, Humbert is really being monitored, but by Quilty, not by the police.
So, too, is every movement made by the astronauts in 2001 being monitored. HAL’s ubiquitous eyes work first to inform the state (ground control) and then come to represent a separate and aggressive entity that will compete for survival with the humans he observes. Like Quilty, HAL is never a neutral observer. Instead, he’s opinionated and gossipy as the representative of ground control, then jealous and vengeful as his “instinct” for survival kicks in.
Confronted with the labyrinthine nature of social and physical systems, Kubrick’s characters make choices that pull them deeper into the maze. As Kolker notes, Kubrick “sees men … mechanistically, as determined by their world, sometimes by their erotic passion.” His worlds tend to be made up of “spaces that themselves create closed and inflexible worlds, predetermined and unalterable.”9 While both Lolita and 2001 present the effects of certain forms of indoctrination on their protagonists, by showing us Humbert’s fear of the police and the astronauts’ lack of affect, A Clockwork Orange, like Full Metal Jacket, exposes the violence beneath the mask of civilization. Orange’s Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is at every point in the film the enactor of the paradoxes of his culture. He fully embodies the negative utopian version of England in which he and his droogs live. The objectification of the female body represented by the submissively exposed mannequins who dispense drug-laced milk, the highly eroticized and intoxicating soundscape, the artworks that reify human sexuality—all are part and parcel of the culture Alex inhabits. Cultural products like the giant phallus in the Cat Lady’s home express the repressive violence of patriarchy, of the class system, and so on. Thus it’s both refreshing and horrifying when Alex obscenely challenges their high-art status by turning them into weapons—or simply uses them as the weapons that they already symbolically are.
As is very much the case in 2001, the cultural context of the music in A Clockwork Orange affects significantly the meaning it brings to the film. Again and again in Clockwork, Kubrick points to the agonizing paradox of the flexibility of the meaning of cultural artifacts like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The penetrating beauty of the “Ode to Joy,” sung by a middle-aged woman in the milk bar, seems to awaken in Alex a higher self: it inspires his only expression of respect—albeit a violent one—for a female during the entire film. But “Ludwig van” also produces visions of rape and torture in the young man. Beethoven’s Ninth, which incorporates a Turkish military march as well as the beatific “Ode,” has been a contested cultural property for at least 150 years. For example, while the Nazis laid claim to Beethoven as a cultural hero, the Allies used his Fifth Symphony as Morse code for the letter V, for Victory. It may have been this very contest over the ideological associations tied to Beethoven’s music that led Kubrick to focus on it as Alex’s obsession, while Anthony Burgess’s novel makes him an aficionado of classical music more generally. But while Alex is aware of the music he hears and acts consciously and ironically according to its violent imperative, the music track of 2001 is entirely nondiegetic, unheard by the characters, and acts as more evidence of their completely unconscious indoctrination into the ideals of their civilization. All unknowing, they move through space to the rhythms of the nineteenth century, the founding moment of the scientific and cultural movements dominating the twenty-first century that Kubrick imagines.
These movements, culturally determined and culturally destructive, grow on and feed conflict and violence. In his final version of 2001, Stanley Kubrick deliberately played down the overt political conflict depicted in Clarke’s novel, based on the screenplay. The end of the film does not, for example, depict the star child blowing up the arsenals of nuclear weapons surrounding the Earth, as does the last scene of the novel. The rituals of war starkly depicted in Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket are muted in 2001, appearing only in the hominids’ discovery of weapons, in the symbolic “waterhole” dispute of the Soviet and American scientists over drinks on board the space station, and in HAL’s preemptive strike against the astronauts. But this muting of strife does not mean that it is unimportant. The alert, indoctrinated subject is ready for warfare, prepared for the calm, surgical aggression with which Dave dismantles HAL’s brain (figure 22).
Building on the logic of 2001’s and A Clockwork Orange’s contrasting presentations of the subject’s indoctrination into violence, Full Metal Jacket explores the perpetuation of warrior culture through the ancient tradition of violent ritual. By conflating the young men who are being shaped for war with the weapons they use to fight it, the film’s title (changed from Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers, from which the film was adapted) perfectly renders the emotional tenor of the film and recalls the intersection of human and machine seen in 2001. In Full Metal Jacket, Privates Joker (Matthew Modine) and Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) undergo a brutal conditioning in marine boot camp not unlike that seen in the gladiator training camp sequences of Spartacus or in Alex’s Ludovico treatments and interactions with his prison guards in Clockwork.
We have seen that Pyle takes his training literally and becomes a psychotic killer. Joker, on the other hand, seems to incarnate the conventional ironic observer often seen in war films. He makes the transition from boot camp to Vietnam with his intelligence intact and, despite his having joined in the beating of Pyle, with a modicum of humanity remaining. Joker’s symbolic wavering between full indoctrination in male warriorhood and his conscience’s objection to the carnage of war is represented by the cognitive dissonance between his peace button and the words on his helmet, “Born to Kill.” But Joker’s apparent choice between these two ethical systems may be illusory. While Pyle seems to offer the most powerful critique of the dehumanizing potential of the military, Joker, inoculated by irony, is the more thoroughly conditioned subject. Slavoj Žižek comments:
What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy … in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military machine, “runs amok” and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself…. The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier … who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic “human distance” towards the military machine … shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has finally succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject.10
From this perspective, the apparent choice made by Joker at the end of the film to perform a mercy killing of the wounded sniper is no choice at all, but the familiar double bind, a forced choice. His killing of the young woman is a brutal acting out of his training. His not killing her would have been even more brutal.
The settings of Kubrick’s violence often express its ironies. Any discussion of disciplinary systems in Kubrick’s films must include an analysis of the director’s representation of these spaces, alternately cold and impersonal and embarrassingly reminiscent of our animal selves. Some of the most obscene revelations, as well as some of the most human ones, take place in bathrooms. Full Metal Jacket, for example, enacts its murderous response to Pyle’s scapegoating in the men’s room in the dead of night. The Louis XVI room in 2001, to which I will return more specifically below, is equipped with a blue-grey bathroom which Dave inspects carefully while still wearing his spacesuit: it is a bathroom unsoiled by human bodily functions, perhaps pointing ahead to a time when humans will transcend this especially unsavory aspect of their biological existence. Although this scene is briefly sketched in 2001, it is an important point of reference in both Kubrick’s films as a whole and in 2001 specifically, and its placement in the film will prove very revealing.
Toilet training is one of the earliest and most rigorous forms of discipline endured by developing humans. Kubrick takes advantage of the feelings of vulnerability and shame, as well as the work of sexual difference, in his representation of these spaces. Beginning with Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick’s representations of toilets and bathrooms work to convey subtle information about human beings’ (especially men’s) relationships to their bodies, as mediated by social structures. Along with the privacy usually linked with bathrooms comes associations of hiddenness and filth. Sometimes this obscenity takes a rather adolescent, toilet-humor turn; sometimes it is truly chilling. In Strange-love, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) is in the bathroom when news arrives that the B-52 is entering Russian air space. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), the madman who unleashes the Doomsday Machine, kills himself in a toilet—perhaps in the fear that his “precious bodily fluids” are about to be contaminated by the soldiers invading his base. The toilet is the best place for flushing away contaminants, clearly Ripper’s main preoccupation in life. For him, women, along with communists, are among the most threatening of potential contaminators as the misogynistic associations with his name and his unwillingness to share his bodily fluids with women make clear. While Ripper lives it tragically, the scene is played overall as toilet humor, made more piquant by the British embarrassment of Colonel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), who waits outside in the hopes of intervening in the looming nuclear disaster.
The bathrooms in Lolita are settings for marital and familial alienation and for the private obscenities of male desire. When Humbert, potential roomer, first visits the Haze household, Charlotte gives him a tour of the house’s private spaces, including the bathroom. Striking a pose as a young sophisticate with European tastes, Charlotte laughs merrily as she pulls the chain of the old-fashioned toilet. Little does she know that this very toilet, so far beneath the attention of her cosmopolitan guest, will become the place where Humbert goes to experience a sense of relief from their marital bond. As wife Charlotte whimpers from the bedroom about her loneliness, Humbert sits on the toilet to transcribe his lustful thoughts about Lolita and his disgust with Charlotte into his diary. After Charlotte’s death, Humbert luxuriates in the bath as his neighbors come in to offer comfort, transforming the bathroom into a public space redolent with false bonhomie and fictitious openness. When Lolita, now Humbert’s sexual property, later learns that her mother is dead, she takes refuge and weeps in the hotel room separated from Humbert’s by a bathroom, while her stepfather sits outside, apparently completely befuddled by this display of emotion. This chain of events, mediated by bathroom scenes, emphasizes Humbert’s and his “family’s” essential aloneness despite the prurient invasions of neighbors and the surveillance systems at work to contain transgressive desire.
In reaction to the debasement and brainwashing he undergoes in boot camp, Full Metal Jacket’s Private Pyle murders his drill instructor and kills himself while sitting on a toilet. This is the same men’s bathroom that Joker and his buddy Cowboy had cleaned earlier in the film while kidding around about sex. Joker wants to slip his “tubesteak” into Cowboy’s sister. Too impaired to join in the fun of symbolically exchanging women in the men’s room, Pyle commits homicide and suicide there instead. This reprise of Strangelove’s toilet suicide scene is comparatively ghastly and prepares the viewer for the carnage of war. The film’s second half, depicting scenes of battle, also makes allusion to human waste: being on the front lines in Vietnam is referred to by the men as being “in the shit”—as though Vietnam were a kind of toilet for U.S. (and French) imperialism that finally can’t be flushed.
The two bathroom scenes in The Shining reveal the utter alienation of the married couple and the brutalizing role that men have taken in disciplining their families under patriarchy. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) encounters the previous caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), in a sumptuously decorated restroom near the ballroom, where a gala supernatural event is taking place. The room’s red-and-white decor, shot with the slightly wide-angle lens beloved by Kubrick and edited with somewhat jarring 180-degree shots/reverse shots, is a place of male bonding and mutual support. The dialogue is punctuated by pauses—a technique that works well here to render sinister the brightly lit scene’s ambiance. Grady advises Jack that his son has brought an “outside party” into the deteriorating situation—a “nigger.” He also boasts to an appreciative Torrance of having “corrected” both his wife and twin daughters, whom the viewer knows to have been murdered by their father.
Like the bathroom upstairs, where Jack encounters a woman who first seems alluring and then (as in so many “loathly lady” medieval tales) turns out to be a decaying corpse, this one provides a place for male fantasies of sexual and gender power and vulnerability. Jack, we learn from Grady, has “always been the caretaker.” But Jack is never shown taking care of the chores assigned him in the hotel—his wife does this. Of what is he the caretaker, then? Jack’s mission is to be a caretaker of patriarchy: the hotel becomes more and more the concretization of the institutional power of men. The outsized kitchen and study, which are the man’s and woman’s domains in the film, seem to speak to just what enormous, even impossible undertakings are the roles of women and men in marriage and in the raising of children. Not surprisingly, Jack will later attempt to kill his wife with an ax as she hides in the bathroom in their suite: the most famous shots from the film feature Jack’s sneering face as he announces his presence to Wendy in that bathroom and her gape-jawed horror as she sees the ax break through the door.
The obscene secret between The Shining’s white men, Grady and Torrance, clearly regards the subordinate status of women, children, and blacks; the deeper obscenity is that this is an enjoyable task. The hotel is a place, as is the mansion where the orgy takes place in Eyes Wide Shut, where wealthy and powerful men have indulged their urges for almost a century—and in The Shining this indulgence takes place literally over the dead bodies of the place’s original inhabitants. In a throw-away line near the beginning of the film, we learn that the Overlook is built upon an Indian burial ground. The proper disposal of bodies by those who buried them in the ground has been contaminated, desecrated by the erection of the hotel. In a sense, the bodies have now become just so much waste.
Eyes Wide Shut returns to the familiar Kubrickian topos of the couple in the bathroom, and it deals with the problems of marriage and coupling more directly and with greater sexual explicitness than did any of Kubrick’s earlier works. In the opening scene, a woman (Alice, played by Nicole Kidman) is sitting on the toilet while her husband, Bill (Tom Cruise), looks for his wallet. As in Lolita, this bathroom is a space where marital intimacy is revealed as problematic: despite the frank exposure of her bodily functions to her husband, Alice remains essentially invisible to him. It is not only her physical being that Bill tends to ignore. He will later come to understand that Alice’s mental life and sexual desire have existed entirely outside his control or even his knowledge, when she reveals a rich fantasy life that excludes him. The obscene shadow of marriage and bourgeois sexuality is figured as the persistence of desires that threaten monogamy.
Eyes Wide Shut also features another bathroom scene—perhaps the most sumptuous of Kubrick’s career—one that follows logically upon the film’s pattern of revealing the obscene side of the life of the rich and powerful. It takes place at the home of wealthy attorney Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). Ziegler looks on helplessly as Bill revives a very beautiful but very doped-up prostitute reclining on the velvet couch in the enormous space of the bathroom, which is furnished rather formally, with couch and paintings. The setting is strangely proper, more parlor than toilet. This sense of propriety is undercut, though, by the incongruity of the setting. As the scene progresses, one is overtaken by the uncomfortable feeling that the young woman is lying naked in public, and nearly dead. The rich man’s obscene desires remain the same as any other man’s: only the setting is plusher. This scene is an interesting variation on one in Barry Lyndon, in which Lady Lyndon bathes under the scrutiny of her chambermaids. So, too, in that scene is the passive female body an object of aesthetic admiration—and Kubrick’s Lady Lyndon is a far more passive character than the original in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel. The semi-public feeling of the Lady’s bathroom, into which Barry intrudes fully dressed and after having committed a sexual peccadillo with a servant, is less shocking than in Eyes Wide Shut because its oddity can be ascribed by contemporary audiences to eighteenth-century manners. But in both cases, the bathroom’s obscenity is linked to male sexual hypocrisy and sexual acting out.
Issues of gender and identity permeate the bathroom and toilet scenes in 2001, though more subtly than in some of the films just discussed. Toilets are represented, directly or indirectly, three times in 2001. On the shuttle to the moon, Floyd encounters the mind-boggling complexity of the “zero gravity toilet,” whose instructions are 710 words long. Just how far humans have come from “instinctual” behavior is made humorously clear in this rapidly sketched scene. Floyd, who must read the long instructions before he can use the facilities, is literally being toilet trained.11 This moment is a good example of the kind of subliminal emotion incited by seemingly calm moments in the film. 2001’s space voyagers are the most perfectly repressed, finely honed human beings in Kubrick’s opus.12 But the repression of bodily functions in the interest of space-age civilization creates an implicit tension, a kind of drama of the body that continues in one form or another until the end of the film, when Dave is transformed.
The next bathroom mentioned (though not depicted) is the one Floyd’s daughter’s baby-sitter has gone to when he calls home. Significantly, the person actually “in” the bathroom, though off-screen, is a female subordinate, the caregiver for Floyd’s child. 2001 depicts space as a homosocial realm (one made up entirely of men), where women function as serving maids and then disappear entirely. The farther we get from Earth, in fact, the more devoid of the female space becomes. There are no women on Discovery, and the star child, in fetal form, appears as though by magic. Parturition occurs with no need for woman or uterus. It appears as if Dave is born by passing through the monolith. Kubrick commented in an interview that “in telling the story [of 2001,] women didn’t seem to have a lot to do with it” and that one “obviously” is not “going to put a woman on the crew.”13 Back on Earth, it is females who inhabit the bathroom, give birth to Heywood Floyd’s child, and represent the emotional tug of home. But women, traditionally associated with blood, fluids, and waste—all that pertains to the body in Western culture—have almost no place in the stark cleanliness of space as imagined by Kubrick.
While there are no women on the Discovery, critics have frequently made allusion to HAL’s effeminacy. Although Kubrick asserted, when asked whether HAL’s “wheedling voice [indicated] an undertone of homosexuality,” that HAL was a “straight computer,” many did perceive him as gay, and I think this cannot be discounted.14 This is especially true in light of Clarke’s astonishing revelation that “Stanley … invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at ease.”15 Kubrick’s track record on the representation of homosexuality, like that of women, is somewhat problematic, and as women slowly disappear from 2001’s narrative, Dave Bowman is almost killed by a computer that comes to seem more and more like a jealous homosexual lover.
The third bathroom in 2001 is the “eighteenth-century” one that Bowman visits in the film’s final sequence. Although we never see Dave use the pristine tub or toilet or soil any of the white towels, this space is strangely emphasized. There are seven shots inside or through the doorway of the bathroom during the three minutes of the scene. One shot, where Dave looks out at his older self, who is eating, lasts a full minute. Dave enters the bathroom twice, once as the man in a spacesuit, once as the older man in a dressing gown. It is not a space inhabited by females or couples: it is a place where man confronts himself. As in Dr. Strangelove, this bathroom provides the opportunity for a character to examine himself in the mirror, to wonder about his identity and his fate. The bathroom is where Dave goes to study his aging face and to confront the next incarnation of himself. But there is something peculiar about this space, other than the underlighting from the floor and its extraordinary cleanliness. This is actually a twentieth-century bathroom and not a period one.
One could explain this fact as a plot incoherence in many ways, of course. For example, the aliens reading Dave’s memories picked up the modern bathroom style rather than one Dave may never have seen. It is possible (though unlikely) that this is simply an oversight on Kubrick’s part, amply compensated by the gorgeous and authentic period bathroom in Barry Lyndon. But the striking sense that this bathroom is out of place has greater reverberations when placed within the meaning of the scene as a whole. The bathroom’s placement in this scene juxtaposes modernity with the eighteenth century in a way that proves to be symptomatic of Kubrick’s approach to the problematic notion of progress, figured in 2001 most importantly in the figure of the star child (figures 26–30).
Kubrick’s use of setting—including the peculiar juxtaposition of a modern bathroom with a Louis XVI bedroom—in 2001’s penultimate scene has remained unexamined in some major critical commentaries on Kubrick. The eighteenth-century room where Dave Bowman ages, dies, and is reborn has engendered puzzlement—simply because the allusion to the period of Louis XVI is simultaneously specific (there’s no question that the furnishings are from this period) and ungrounded (no textual reason is given for identifying this period) in the film. In his excellent visual analysis of Kubrick’s films, Alexander Walker holds:
[I]t is as irrelevant to question the Louis XVI style as it is to ask why Raphael’s angels do not wear shoes. It is no use seeking rational explanations for metaphorical or allegorical situations. The process of events in the room is more important than the end products of its furnishings.16
Following Clarke’s and Kubrick’s descriptions of the room as having been reconstructed by the aliens from Bowman’s recollections, Thomas Allen Nelson describes it as representing the “ephemeral nature of Bowman’s memory” but also offers no other explanation of the setting.17
Knowledge of the broader context of Kubrick’s work tells us that the division of identity between reason and violence seen so often as characterizing his films’ protagonists finds an important touchstone in the specific historical moment of the eighteenth century. Kubrick privileges this as a period when the exquisiteness of cultural productions was most perfectly matched by the violence upon which they depended. He wanted to make a film about the life of Napoleon, a major figure of the late part of the century, and he returns to the period many times in his existing films, as a setting or reference: in the chateau location of Paths of Glory; in the “Gainsborough-like portrait” (Ciment) behind which Quilty takes refuge and dies in Lolita; in the setting of Barry Lyndon. Eighteenth-century Europe presents the machinery of culture and of the state as violence channeled directly into the production of works of art, as in Barry Lyndon, whose intoxicating surface beauty depends on ritualizing violence in the duel, in choreographed warfare, in male oppression of women, in the violent institution of aristocracy.18 Michel Ciment describes Kubrick’s ambivalent infatuation with the period:
[F]or Kubrick the eighteenth century is rotten to the core, an age awaiting its impending destruction: behind the façade of gaiety, luxury and pleasure, death and disintegration are already lurking…. The eighteenth century also saw the conjunction of reason and passion…. The perfection principle laid down by the theorists of progress anticipates the notion of the mind’s evolution to which nineteenth-century philosophers were so attached: two ideas that are closely linked in 2001. But, as 2001 and Dr. Strangelove demonstrate, pure rationality may end up as totally irrational.19
Given this context, the Louis XVI room casts the final scenes of 2001 in a rather bleak light. What, then, are we to make of Kubrick’s own comments about the genesis of the star child, who is born on the eighteenth-century bed (figures 15 and 35)? In an interview just after the film’s release, for example, Kubrick talked about the evolutionary meaning of 2001’s last scene:
In a timeless state, [Bowman’s] life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward in man’s evolutionary destiny.20
Not surprisingly, Gelmis followed suit, like many other critics, and describes the star child as evidence of a change of pace for Kubrick: “His oeuvre, with the single exception of the optimistic transfiguration in 2001, is a bleak skepticism and fatalism.”21Nelson comments:
Kubrick’s ending does not depart all that much from Clarke’s: The orbiting monolith, Bowman’s Star-Gate journey, the Ligeti “voices” within the room, the reappearance of the monolith, and Strauss’s Thus Spoke [sic] Zarathustra continue visual and aural patterns developed throughout 2001. They tell the film audience that something “magical” is happening, and that Bowman as homo sapiens is evolving toward some form of spatial/planetary consciousness.22
Kubrick, caught up in speculations about immortality, the existence of extraterrestrials, and other contemporary questions, does not hesitate in this interview to represent human evolution as a kind of progress toward a superior life form. For the most part, critics have not sought to contradict the maker of the film. But once again, placing the film in the context of Kubrick’s oeuvre may well shift our view. One wonders whether he later changed his mind about the possibility of humans attaining a kind of perfection or—more likely—did not completely understand the depth of his own pessimism while making 2001.
If the eighteenth century represents the ability of culture to cover the shadow of its own brutality with a layer of reason and decoration, then the twentieth century is the period in which the shadow reemerges. From his eighteenth-century room, Bowman is reborn to the sounds of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the signature music of the film and music that also was a signature of German fascism. Kubrick, a Jewish polymath with a razor-sharp ear for the cultural connotations of music, was surely aware of Strauss’s Nazi affiliations. Is his use of Strauss’s music a reappropriation, or is the sense of majesty imparted by the piece finally just ironic? In any event, one cannot witness the “magical” birth of the star child, to the strains of Zarathustra’s eerily beautiful fanfare, without some trepidation and, indeed, a questioning of Kubrick’s own reading of his work.23
In “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag includes 2001 as a “representative work” of fascist art—art, that is, which creates a pageant out of the spectacle of dominators and their worshipful masses.24 Robert Kolker notes that 2001 “points towards surrender to a hypnotic force and suggests that this surrender is inevitable” and that, for Kubrick, “violence must manifest itself in some form, controlled or uncontrolled”25—but he argues persuasively against the reading of the film as endorsing fascism, either in content or in its way of engaging the audience that views it. While a fascist aesthetic encourages audience passivity and plays to the yearning to yield to authority figures, whether human or extraterrestrial, Kubrick’s film “offers at least an open narrative and an intellectual space in which the viewer may consider what is going on.”26
I would say that, far from being a fascist work, 2001 comments on the potential of cultures to believe in absolutes and to give themselves over to “higher powers.” Certainly HAL, with a pride in the 9000 series’ perfection that seems almost racial, commits a kind of genocide of beings he considers both inferior and threatening. In this way, he repeats the terrible history of eugenics foisted upon the world by Social Darwinists and the fascism that followed in their wake. Certainly, a belief that the monoliths represent some alien super power, rather than symbols of our own imaginative evolution and the violence it engenders betrays our desire to create broadly the very things that we allow to turn against us—as Kubrick demonstrates in film after film.
The star child is not quite an image of humanity reborn, but another version of an enclosed, contained humanity, trapped, perhaps for infinity, in the darkness of space, able only to look, wide-eyed and frightened. He—or It—is, perhaps, the lasting image of the obscene that we have been talking about. Throughout the film, humans have discarded their humanity, their emotions, and finally their reason. At the end, they have shed the very bodies that have carried them and left only a fetal trace.
I want to close this chapter by describing how Eyes Wide Shut reiterates and reverses some of 2001’s most powerful insights.
Eyes Wide Shut, with its emphasis on sterility and repetition, sustains a very different relationship to the obscene shadow of law than do most of Kubrick’s films. Like 2001, it depicts an odyssey but—at least at first glance—a personal rather than an evolutionary one. Shocked when he learns that his wife had considered having an affair with an attractive stranger—a military officer—Bill goes out to seek sexual adventure. For the most part, these adventures are more puzzling than erotic, including a failed encounter with a prostitute and culminating in Bill’s uninvited attendance at a lavish orgy. The orgy takes place in a mansion reminiscent both physically and psychologically of the one in Paths of Glory. In that eighteenth-century structure, Generals Mireau and Broulard meet over drinks to bargain away the lives of their troops, and under these same generals’ eyes the ritualistic trial of the three common soldiers takes place. The circular, chesslike patterns and wide-angle shots of Paths of Glory’s and Full Metal Jacket’s scapegoating scenes are reiterated in Eyes Wide Shut’s depiction of Bill’s “trial” for breaching the inner sanctum of the rich and powerful men who are attending the bizarrely ritualistic orgy.
Surrounded by menacing figures offended by his presence and wearing masks reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth century, Bill is redeemed in a theatrical gesture by a naked and lovely prostitute. The obscene desires and rituals of the very wealthy, the lawgivers, are revealed; Bill is cowed and returns to make peace with his wife in a mutually confessional scene. The sacrifice of the French soldiers in Paths of Glory, the carnage of the waterhole scene in 2001, the savage beating of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket—all have evolved into a gorgeously choreographed but bloodless encounter between the red-garbed judge and the humiliated young doctor.
Both the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut and the discovery of the monolith on the moon in 2001 are accompanied by eerie music written by composer György Ligeti. But compared to the monolith scene, the orgy seems curiously flat and devoid of any real mystery. The secret of the monolith is not revealed; only its result is, the voyage to “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” In Eyes Wide Shut, this paradigm has been strangely inverted. The final scene, which does not appear in the early twentieth-century novella by Austrian Arthur Schnitzler, contains Alice’s imperative that she and Bill must “fuck” as soon as possible. But more important than this resexualization of marriage (the revelation of marriage’s obscene heart) or than the obscene revelations in the mansion or in Ziegler’s bathroom and pool room is the fact that the couple and their daughter are shopping, looking at price tags, at the end of the film. The real obscenity in Kubrick’s last film is not the law’s obscene shadow, the hidden spaces of sordid desire and aggression, but the workings of the machine of capitalism itself. While Schnitzler stressed the power of repressed sexuality to disturb the workings of society, Kubrick normalizes sexuality as integral to the machinery of marriage and law. To this end, the film introduces various financial transactions absent from the novella: for Kubrick, the well-heeled young doctor is always the one to pay. Man, in Eyes Wide Shut, has evolved into homo economicus, a rational and utilitarian being who carries his reason for being in the very wallet that Bill is looking for at the beginning of the film—hence the irony of the allusions to The Wizard of Oz in the film. Bill’s “happiness” was always in his own backyard—and pocket. Despite the participation of powerful men in orgies and the blood sacrifices of young women, obscenity is no longer in the shadows. It is out there for all to see; it is money in circulation, a postmodern emptying out of the culturally meaningful narratives of the past, without any resolution of the double binds posed by patriarchy and desire in Kubrick’s earlier films. Kubrick’s ambivalence toward cultural products ends here, with a deeply unsatisfying look at human platitudes and the shallowness of marital relations—or perhaps with a nod to the small satisfaction Daddy has in finally buying the bush baby for his little girl.
1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 70–71.
2. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 54–79.
3. For further analysis of this scene’s structural importance in Full Metal Jacket, see Susan White, “Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket,” in Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991), 204–30.
4. Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinematic Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: BFI, 2001), 143.
5. Albert Rosenfeld’s review of 2001 was, for example, entitled “Perhaps the Mysterious Monolithic Slab Is Really Moby Dick,” Life (1968), reprinted in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. Stephanie Schwam (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 166–70.
6. See Ellis Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 137–61.
7. Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 125.
8. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995).
9. Kolker, Cinema of Loneliness, 106, 119.
10. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 21.
11. Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” 144.
12. Kolker notes that “Kubrick’s men [in 2001] are … perfectly integrated into corporate technology, part of the circuitry…. The people in the film lack expression and reaction not because they are wearing masks to cover a deep and forbidding anguish…. They are merely incorporated into a ‘mission.’” (Cinema of Loneliness, 135). For a more detailed reading of the meaning of bathrooms in Kubrick’s films, see Philip Kuberski, “Plumbing the Abyss: Stanley Kubrick’s Bathrooms,” Arizona Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 139–60.
13. Kubrick quoted in Charlie Kohler, “Stanley Kubrick Raps,” East Village Eye (1968), reprinted in Schwam, The Making of 2001, 250.
14. Kubrick quoted in Stanley Kubrick Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 94. In “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” Hanson cites Don Daniel: “HAL’s faggoty TV-announcer tones and vocabulary become the disembodied voice of three centuries of scientific rationalism” (142).
15. Arthur C. Clarke, “Christmas, Shepperton,” in Schwam, The Making of 2001, 37.
16. Alexander Walker, with Sybil Taylor and Ulrich Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis (New York: Norton, 1999), 191.
17. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, rev. ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 177.
18. As Robert Kolker notes in Cinema of Loneliness, “The quiet, civilized artifice of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French art embodies a code of polite behavior in sharp contradiction to the brutal codes of military order and justice played out in Paths of Glory” (155).
19. Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair and Robert Bononno (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 64, 66, 67. The discussion of the eighteenth century here inevitably recalls Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which traces the roots of some forms of oppression to the very technological and ideological “advances” brought about by science and culture in the eighteenth century. Its scathing critique of the twentieth-century culture industry derives from the view of the Enlightenment as a failure. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
20. Kubrick quoted in Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 304.
21. Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar, 293.
22. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, 133.
23. One critic who has discussed in depth the political and social meaning of the music in 2001 is Geoffrey Cocks, who also comments on Richard Strauss’s connection to the Nazi regime. Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Lang, 2004).
24. Kolker, Cinema of Loneliness, 139, cites Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 40.
25. Kolker, Cinema of Loneliness, 143.
26. Kolker, Cinema of Loneliness, 144.
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Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. Trans. Gilbert Adair and Robert Bononno. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003.
Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Signet, 1968.
Cocks, Geoffrey. The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust. New York: Lang, 2004.
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Johnston, Ian. “Introductory Lecture on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.” January 1993. Available at http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/freud.htm.
Kael, Pauline. “Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Harper’s, February 1969. Reprinted in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. Stephanie Schwam. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kuberski, Philip. “Plumbing the Abyss: Stanley Kubrick’s Bathrooms.” Arizona Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 139–60.
Pizzato, Mark. “Beauty’s Eye: Erotic Masques of the Death Drive in Eyes Wide Shut.” In Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed. Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York: Other, 2004.
Rosenfeld, Albert. “Perhaps the Mysterious Monolithic Slab Is Really Moby Dick.” Life, 1968. Reprinted in Stephanie Schwam, ed., The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Schnitzler, Arthur. Dream Novel (Traumnovelle). In Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay. New York: Time Warner, 1999.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory. London: BFI, 2001.
———. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
———. “Superego by Default.” In The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso, 1994. 54–79.