In a 1972 interview on the heels of his latest release, A Clockwork Orange , the director Stanley Kubrick said, “Man isn’t a noble savage, he’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved — that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.”
Perhaps nothing else the late director said in his 50-year-long career captures his approach to cinema and life better than this quote. In A Clockwork Orange , the custodians of law who seek to civilise the murderous youth gangs, resort to methods as barbaric as the perpetrators they seek to reform. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), an advanced alien civilisation toys with the fate of humans as we might do with our pets. The unhinged warmongers in Dr. Strangelove (1964) are driven by their sexual insecurities while in The Shining (1980), we witness the terrifying descent of a family man into homicidal frenzy.
In Kubrick’s world, man projects his hopes and aspirations on to the universe, while it remains supremely indifferent to his fate. He examines human pathologies as an entomologist might study insects under a microscope, simultaneously fascinated and repelled, without ever identifying with his subjects.
Rather than aspire towards cinematic realism — the goal of most filmmakers — Kubrick built barriers to prevent audiences from personally identifying with the world of the film. “We are not trying to photograph reality,” he said, “we are trying to photograph a photograph of reality.” Kubrick was creating a unique perspective. He was telling us, this is not our world, this is the world of the movie.
A still from ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1972).
Kubrick was fascinated with the power of images and sound to plumb the recesses of the subconscious mind. His films are loaded with hidden symbols and recurring motifs (the phallic symbols in Dr. Strangelove , the bloody elevators and ghostly twins in The Shining ) designed to trigger the subconscious even as the eye registers only the outermost layer. Dialogue is often treated as a secondary aspect of storytelling. In 2001: A Space Odyssey , for instance, he dispenses with conventional exposition, favouring long interludes free of dialogue, allowing the visuals to take on a life of their own.
He attempted every genre imaginable over the course of his career, but Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is perhaps the most overtly political and prophetic film he ever made. He understood that the most effective way to portray the paranoid delusions and insecurities that drove political brinkmanship was through the medium of satire.
Employing Freudian ideas, Kubrick conceived the film as a sexual allegory satirising cold war fears of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The eponymous Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, is a former Nazi scientist building a doomsday machine for the United States. In Kubrick’s imagination, the nuclear standoff is seen as a pubescent sexual fantasy to dominate the world though sheer libidinal prowess. The male sex drive is compared to the drive for war through recurring phallic motifs, ranging from cigars and missiles to a fuel nozzle.
A still from ‘The Shining’ (1980).
Here, sexual insecurity or “performance anxiety” is the engine that drives the quest for world domination. Women are conspicuous by their absence in this paranoid, hyper-masculine world. Instead, we see outsized male egos afflicted with penis envy, outwardly loathing but secretly attracted to each other. The Freudian allusions couldn’t be any clearer.
In the opening sequence, a B-52 bomber refuelling in mid-air is made to resemble an act of coitus while the soundtrack croons ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. This is not straightforward vanilla sex but ‘strange love’ as both aircraft symbolise giant penises.
The iconic shot of Slim Pickens riding the nuclear missile, rodeo style, to obliterate the Commie menace, ends in a mushroom cloud of orgiastic frenzy, a climax of such mammoth proportions that it marks the end of humankind, even as it fertilizes the earth for a new race to be reborn from the ashes of the old. Meanwhile, Vera Lynn croons ‘We’ll Meet Again’ on the soundtrack.
The film, released only a couple of months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, came at the cusp of a cultural watershed (moon landing, Vietnam war, Hippie counterculture, Watergate) shaking a naively innocent American public out of its stupor. As John Patterson wrote in The Guardian , “There had been nothing in comedy like Dr. Strangelove ever before. All the gods before whom the America of the stolid, paranoid 50s had genuflected — the Bomb, the Pentagon, the National Security State, the President himself, Texan masculinity and the alleged Commie menace of water-fluoridation — went into the wood-chipper and never got the same respect ever again.”
A still from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968).
With the ascension of characters like Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin and Kim Jong-un on the world stage, the outrageously farcical set-ups in Dr. Strangelove don’t seem so far-fetched any more. Tectonic upheavals in world politics, macroeconomics and technology are upending the smug certainties of the liberal order, dismembering a paradigm that everyone took for granted.
Kubrick would not be surprised at all. In fact, he would see it as an affirmation of his worldview. The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas still guide liberal thought, began The Social Contract (1762) with the famous line: “Men are born free, yet everywhere are in chains.” From here, he goes on to describe the many ways in which the shackles of civil society keep man in bondage, preventing him from attaining his natural birthright to a state of complete freedom.
Kubrick rejected the Romantic notion that man in his primal state is inherently good until “the system” makes a beast of him. As he once said, “Rousseau’s romantic fallacy, that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves and reality. This view is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads to despair.”
It may serve us well to discard illusions and embrace our true nature as inherently flawed creatures driven by lust, envy and greed. Perhaps then, we would not be discombobulated when the world as we know it unravels before our eyes.
The writer and columnist runs a vineyard, designs sustainable habitats, and makes films.
