Kubrick's Asylum

Stanley Kubrick  populated his films with some of the most iconic, idiosyncratic - and downright crazy - villains in all of cinema. Technically, only one of his films is considered a 'true' horror film. But psychopaths and loonies run amok in nearly every movie he created, from the evil generals in 'Paths of Glory' to the deranged pedophile in 'Lolita'. Indeed, it is difficult to name a single character in any of his films who would qualify as 'normal'. Yet among his numerous studies in pathology, a select few belong in the director's very own ward for the criminally insane. This is an especially wicked bunch. Each is unique. Nothing like each other, and unlike any other characters ever to appear on screen. 

I Am Become Shiva

Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper commits perhaps the most atrocious crime ever depicted on film. He bombs civilization back to the Stone Age. In his defense, he only intended to wipe out the Soviet Union; a mere quarter of a billion people or so. But things got out of hand.

In one of the most darkly comic conceits in all of cinema, it was Ripper's impotence, which he blamed the Russkies for (robbing him of his 'vital fluids'), that provoked his nefarious deeds. 

If only he had been around today, and not fifty years ago, Viagra might have saved the world.

Artificial Insanity

When your last villain has wiped out the world, your next one is going to have to manage a heck of an encore. You can't just make him a bank robber or a mobster, after all. Yet Kubrick managed to make his next villain even more memorable than General Ripper. How did he do that? By making 'him' inhuman. Literally.

HAL 9000 seemed like such a nice computer. The kind you could trust with your life. Unfortunately, that is exactly what five astronauts did, and the results weren't pretty. It's not made clear just exactly what caused HAL to snap, but once he felt threatened (the famous lip reading sequence), he embarked upon a course of cold, calculated murder that is harrowing to witness. Lone survivor Dave's attempts to reason with HAL are as futile as Mandrake's attempts to dissuade Gen. Ripper from his plans in Dr. Strangelove. One of the most terrifying aspects of Kubrick's psychopaths is how unreachable, how drawn up within their own twisted minds, they are. Kubrick would develop this theme even more in his next film, by serving up a character who is completely free of self doubt, even when plotting the most heinous behavior.

Killing America's Favorite Song

With his next villain, Kubrick created one of, if not the, greatest antiheroes in cinema. Alex DeLarge is as evil as they come, yet his is such a looming, charismatic presence in the film (he is both its narrator and protagonist, and appears in all but one scene) that viewers, or at least many of them (myself included) develop a strange affection for him. 

In the film's most notorious scene, Kubrick continues to go even further than his previous work toward imprinting his villains on our minds and making sure they stay there. He stages Alex and his droogs' break-in of the writer's home, and the extreme nastiness that ensues, to a Broadway musical number. And not just any number, but the widely beloved 'Singin' In The Rain'. This scene is audacious on so many levels, and seems to break so many rules of propriety at the same time - and yet Alex manages to pull it off. As he does throughout the film, he throws himself into the task at hand, in this case an insanely evil song and dance routine, with such pizzazz and such flair that  one is entertained and horrified in nearly equal parts. His is the swagger of a prince, a movie star, a home run king, and there is something magnetic about that, despite the pain and suffering he leaves in his wake. 

All Work and No Play

Kubrick's only film that is placed firmly within the horror genre is his adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Shining'. With it, he served up another of his extremely deranged, and unforgettable, villains - the blocked writer and aspiring axe murderer Jack. The "Heeeere's Johnny!" scene is known to millions who have never watched the full movie. Even more have seen that face, that menacing, maniacal grin that he wears during the scene. In some ways, the character of Jack recalls the Humbert Humbert character of Kubrick's earlier film, 'Lolita', in that we watch his dementia worsen throughout the course of the film. Both characters are also writers, and both are the 'heads' of extremely dysfunctional families. It is clearly evident that insanity, and the human frailties, obsessions and insecurities that lead to it was one of the filmmaker's own, well, obsessions.

Semper Tantrum

In 'Full Metal Jacket', Kubrick presented his last iconic villain in the person of Marine Drill Sergeant Hartman. This time, the twist is that it was actually Hartman's job to be a psycho. FMJ was Kubrick's third war movie (in addition, significant portions of 'Spartacus' and 'Barry Lyndon' also involved warfare) and he used Hartman to boldly present his argument that the whole foundational enterprise of warfare - turning young human beings into vengeful vicious killers - is deeply insane. It seems that Hartman's only way of communicating is verbal abuse at high volume. We don't really need the scene where he effusively praises the marksmanship prowess of Lee Harvey Oswald to confirm that he is an insane monster; we know it from the very beginning. And yet the odd thing about that scene is that it is the only point where we couldn't just tell ourselves that the drill sergeant is merely doing his job. Maybe that's why Kubrick put it in there. He wanted to bring home the point that turning young men into cold blooded killers is not a job for sane people.

There is something autobiographical about every work of art, because the act of producing art is itself autobiographical. In presenting to the world such a unique and unforgettable rogue's gallery, director Kubrick was almost certainly working through some of his own obsessions and quirks. He was a notoriously difficult person to work with - a control freak, manipulative and at times dictatorial. He was also a visionary capable of transporting us to realms that were both dizzyingly beautiful and deeply unsettling. Kubrick's Asylum is a weird and scary place. But then so is the world. And perhaps that's what he wanted to tell us.

Sade and The Body

I am troubled by movies, such as "Saw" and "Hostel", that, to me, serve no purpose other than to depict the extremes of human pain and cruelty. I confess to having never watched a film from either of those series, nor have I watched a Hannibal Lector movie, or a Chucky, Freddy Krueger or Jason movie (which, I imagine, at this point seem almost quaint in their depictions of cruelty), so it is not only what is depicted on the screen, which I haven't even seen, that disturbs me. It is the very fact that such movies exist, and that they pull in audiences. To me, they are a depraved sub-genre of moviemaking that elevates torture to their prime, even sole, raison d'etre (indeed, they have been dubbed "torture porn" and "gorno" by critics), and that bothers me. Are people really entertained by all that blood and gore? And if that is not the right word, what IS the experience that they crave, as they settle their butts into aisle seats? As to the people who make such films, why on earth do they spend precious hours of their lives depicting demoralizing, black spectacles of the last things that any of us would wish to experience, or even wish upon our worst enemies? Oh, believe me, I know the answer to my question (they DO make money after all, and frankly, how hard can they be to make? We all know what we don't wish to experience; all one has to do is pick up a camera and film that!), but is even money worth the de-humanizing that I feel must go on in the process of creating such films?

I am not arguing against the presence of violence in films. Indeed, some of my personal favorites, such as "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas", contain numerous scenes that are not for the squeamish. If push came to shove, I could probably even be called upon to defend Wes Craven's notorious, ultra-violent 70's sleeper, "Last House on the Left" ( which took its plot from Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" and borrowed heavily from Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange"). One might well ask, what's the difference? Well, in the case of LHOTL, this was an amateurish film by a freshman director, depicting amateurish villains who epitomize the dumb, self absorbed, amoral, societal outcasts we can easily imagine committing the atrocious crimes we see onscreen (and read about in the papers). They are not the incarnations of sadism one finds in slick gorno movies, creatures right out of our nightmares who are intelligent and irredeemably evil, sparing no expense to devise the most ingenious and horrific methods by which to dispense with their victims, for no other purpose than the pleasure that they get from doing so. To arrive at an understanding of the villains of the gorno movies, to place them in any sort of context, we need to go back to a French nobleman from the Age of Enlightenment whose writing was so over the top that he provides the very name for the "ism" that is out and out cruelty toward another living being.

Sade's "libertines" (one should not refer to them as  "villains", when to him they were heroes) were precisely the kind of monsters we see in todays horror movies. Smarter and more powerful than their victims, they operated without restraint, and with no other purpose than to inflict pain. In Sade's stories, the only way to escape victimhood was to allow yourself to become corrupted by your torturers, to become just as merciless and sadistic as them. These were the only triumphs he would allow in his nightmarish fables, that some would "liberate" themselves from any moral or empathetic impulses, which he insisted came from society, the real "villain" he himself was at war with. One can read Sade's stories and accept them as he intended, as all-out assaults on society and civilization, on anything that limited individuals from behaving exactly as they themselves chose to. But that would naturally lead one to ask, if people could do anything they wanted to, why would they do that? Looking deeper, I believe that one can find a more pathological motivation, one which is readily on display in today's torture porn movies as well; a deep seated hatred of the human body.

Oh, Sade loathed bodies!  He wanted them sliced, diced, beaten, pulled apart, you name it. The one thing he didn't want was for them to keep their original, native form, to be allowed to go on about their ways in peace. To him, an intact body was a challenge, perhaps even an affront, to his aesthetic. He treated them with nothing but the utmost disdain. And yet, it is telling that for all the descriptions of cruelty he filled page after feverish page with, he was particularly vicious toward the parts of the body that give birth to and nurture other bodies. Although there is no question that his writings and ideas have spiced up the sex lives of numerous couples throughout the years (and hey, whatever gets you through the night...), in the work itself sex was anything but a life affirming, life celebrating activity. Genitalia, breasts, pregnant women, and fetuses are mercilessly tortured and destroyed by Sade's libertines. The family itself is attacked viciously. In his stories, fathers rape their daughters, and corrupted daughters do unspeakable things to their mothers. The very reality of biological life seems to infuriate him.

What's going on here? In the face of such depravity, one naturally searches for answers. Even if the knowledge goes nowhere toward ending man's inhumanity to man, we strive to somehow make sense of things so dark and twisted they seem to defy explanation, for the sake of our own sanity if nothing else. My belief is that we see in Sade's writing a psychological phenomenon that has its roots in the very nature of our sentience. It is the mind's hatred of the body, because it can suffer, and take the mind along with it as it does so. 

It is hard to imagine anything more painful than being eaten alive from the hind legs forward, and yet this is a fate that befalls thousands of our fellow creatures, in forests and savannas, every day. The vast majority of human beings will come to far more benign ends, but the important distinction is that we are well aware of what could happen us, if we are not careful, or just plain unlucky. The fact is that, unlike animals, we can think about things happening to us that are every bit as frightening and unwelcome as the things that are shown in the torture movies. It is with our minds that we think about them, but it is our bodies that we imagine experiencing the suffering. We are the only species that has a distinct separation, a schism even, between mind and body. We can actually live lives, of a kind, outside our bodies. No other creature can. We can daydream, create stories, make songs, paint pictures, have sexual fantasies, relive memories vividly, conceptualize, invent, etc. We can easily imagine a life involving no body at all! Indeed, we have created science fiction stories where our minds are placed inside computers, thereby living eternal, pain-free lives. People who are stricken with cancer or other long term, debilitating and painful illnesses frequently describe themselves as "prisoners" in their bodies. What I am positing is that there is an element of human consciousness that chronically feels this way. Sade was expressing this, first and foremost, I believe, though he himself was perhaps unaware of it and presumedly would have denied it. It is ironic that he, due to his atrocious behavior as well as his writing (which outraged the Emperor Napolean), spent much of his life as a prisoner, in jails and mental asylums, creating through his mind an outward experience of the very thoughts that drove his writing. 

The mind is frightened by the amount of pain, seemingly limitless, that the body it is merged with can experience. Although our central nervous system has evolved the sensation of pain to keep us from burning or bleeding or freezing to death, this impeccable biological system renders us horrendously vulnerable. So averse to its demise is our body that it keeps pain sensations active even as we lie helpless, and crushed, under the rubble of an earthquake, or trapped inside a burning room, on the off chance that we will somehow manage to get ourselves out of our predicament. Isn't it plausible that our minds, aware of the stubbornness of the body, and its survival-at-any-cost imperative, would develop resentment against it? Why can't we shut the pain mechanism down when we want to (apparently some yogis have developed this very ability, but it takes years of rigorous training)? When there is no hope of escape? Every king, dictator, Grand Inquisitor and mafioso throughout history has exploited this "flaw" in the body's design. In fact, it is impossible to imagine the worst forms of government even existing without it, as such regimes are propped up by the fear they induce in the common folk. All of that suffering, down through the ages; no wonder the mind is pissed!

And so, the mind acts this out, through the mediums that it has developed, the "art" that is Sade's writing and today's gorno movies. Each time the mind, represented by Sade's libertines or Hannibal Lector, or any of the demonic, merciless,ingenious psychopaths who fill our screens as well as our nightmares, gleefully tortures to death somebody else's body, it has its revenge, momentarily. That's the experience viewers are after, I feel. Though I am disturbed by such movies, and by the large following they have, I ultimately see them as merely symptomatic, and don't expect them to go away. They, or some similar manifestation, will be with us so long as we have the ability to contemplate, and fear, our fate.

They Shoulda Been Contenders!

Live from The Chicago Municipal Opera House, bequeathed to the city by Charles Foster (Citizen) Kane, it's Oscar Night! Tonight is a special ceremony, wherein we honor the Best Pictures to NOT win Best Picture. At what other venue could we possibly hold this auspicious event? Citizen Kane is more than just a great film that got snubbed by the Academy. It is widely regarded as one of, if not THE, greatest motion pictures ever made. In fact, so laden with accolades is Orson Welles' groundbreaking triumph, it seems unnecessary to award it with  something as trivial as an Oscar at this point. Better perhaps to allow the film that bested it, How Green Was My Valley, that one link to immortality. Leaving "Kane" aside, let us now focus our attention on some of the other masterpieces of film that were robbed of their Art Deco paperweights. 

 

Goodfellas (1990); When The Departed won Best Picture in 2007 (it was released in 2006), most movie fans considered it to be little more than a face saving way to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to its director, Martin Scorsese. It may have been his goriest crime drama, but it was hardly his greatest picture. This is the man who gave us Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, after all. Both of those films merited an Oscar, but it is Goodfellas that must be looked upon as the master director's greatest epic. The best gangster movie ever made? With its release in 1990, it certainly muscled its way into that conversation alongside Oscar winners The Godfather Parts I and II. Goodfellas is a cinematic tour-de-force, dazzling us with one unforgettable scene, camera angle, and performance after another. Surely every movie fan has riffed on Tommy's  (played by Joe Pesci) "Funny How?" monologue at least once. So, what movie did the Academy decide to laud as the year's best in its place? Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves. While not a bad movie, Costner's politically correct Western amply demonstrates that the freshman director knew less about making grandiose, sweeping epics than Scorsese had forgotten (which would be confirmed by later Costner "epics" The Postman and Waterworld). Early in Goodfellas, when the narrator, mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), introduces us to his mentor Jimmy Conway (Robert Deniro), one of the first things he tells us is that "Jimmy loved to steal!" One cannot but wonder how Jimmy feels when the shoe is on the other foot, because he, along with his wiseguy cohorts, wuz robbed!

 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Here we have a movie so unusual, so utterly unique, so creative, so visionary, so unlike any other movie ever made that it basically changed our perception of the medium. To be sure, there were "art films" before (and no doubt inspiring) 2001. But it was 2001 that first dazzled us with the technology of filmmaking, the "special effects" that opened up doors undreamed of to directors and studios. If Jaws (1975) was the movie that ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster, it was 2001 which revealed the potential of what such films could look like, and the impact that makes on an audience. You don't watch 2001, you experience it, which was exactly what director Stanley Kubrick was intending. Plot? Secondary. Performances? Who needs 'em? The best lines, every single one of them, went to the disembodied, hollow voice of a malfunctioning supercomputer. What supplanted all of that was a VISION; Kubrick was out to entertain our subconscious minds, not the part of us that decides to get up and buy some popcorn. So, what beat out this cinematic work of the finest art? Well, it wasn't even nominated (though Kubrick was nominated for, and lost, Best Director), so you could say that all the nominees did. The award went to Oliver!, but Funny Girl and The Lion in Winter were also picked as better films. HAL 9000 wasn't the only thing malfunctioning in movie-land that year, it seems.

May I have the envelope, please? We now come to my personal pick for Best Picture Not to Win Best Picture, Sunset Boulevard (1950): Director Billy Wilder was firing off on all cylinders with this masterpiece,  directed from the height of his powers. Combining black comedy and noir mystery with a subject  he knew all too well about (Hollywood, with its egos and fantasy worlds), this, among all his works, seems his most personal statement. Did Wilder see himself as the writer played by William Holden, losing his soul to the gaudy seductress Norma Desmond (played to perfection by Gloria Swanson) who represented, better than any other role in history, Tinseltown itself? When Norma haughtily proclaims, "I'm still big! It's the pictures that got smaller!", is it her ego Wilder is poking fun at, or his own? Perhaps he himself didn't know for sure, but with this claustrophobic, surreal tragi-comic nightmare, he gave Hollywood its most searing and unflinching look at itself. Nevertheless, it's hard to fault the Academy this time. "Sunset" was bested by another great movie, featuring another stellar performance by the female lead. All About Eve is perhaps Bette Davis' finest film (and performance), and unquestionably deserved its Oscar. The only problem is that Sunset Boulevard deserved it too, even more.

Clearly, the Academy has made some dumb, historically indefensible decisions. Worst Picture to Win Best Picture? Hard to be objective in such matters. Some people see art where others are left shaking their heads. Did Titanic deserve its Oscar? This movie, perhaps seen by more people in the world than any other motion picture ever made, certainly delivered the goods in terms of spectacle and scale. But with its two dimensional lovers, and one dimensional villain, it is doubtful that it will be talked about in years to come as a masterpiece. Preachy Crash is a movie whose Oscar provokes many a temper tantrum by serious movie lovers. But for me personally, the "honor" can only go to Chicago!, which won in 2003 (released in 2002). Chicago! is a soulless, unabashedly amoral piece of doo doo. In Roxie Hart (played with neither charm nor sex appeal by Renee Zellweger) Hollywood gave us perhaps its most annoying anti-heroine ever. Featuring unwatchable dance numbers (literally, because they are shot so dark or cut so rapidly), pathetic lyrics, lousy performances, and an utterly bleak and sneeringly cynical viewpoint, in its defense I can only say that  some of the costumes are nice. Kind of. But Best Picture? Fugeddaboudit!

Maybe Norma Desmond was right. The movies really did get smaller. Consider that in 1972, Cabaret, a movie musical far superior to Chicago! in every conceivable way, lost  Best Picture to an even greater film, The Godfather (consider also the competition between Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve). 2001 would never conceivably be released by a major studio in this day and age. Hollywood is in a pretty bleak state right now, content to crank out superhero movies one after the other, or gory splatter-fests, or Will Smith special effects extravaganzas - noisy movies lacking the intelligence or wit of the films mentioned above. Great movies are still being made, just not with the regularity with which they once were. They are like oases in the desert, rare respites, refreshing reminders of the possibilities of filmmaking for we, as Norma puts it, "wonderful people, out there in the dark....."