Entering the house of Kubrick’s obsessive, often brutal devotion to filmmaking is a trip dipped in awe and fascination.
Michael Herr pays unsentimental homage to a friend remembering the humour, the burning intelligence with the sanity of a 20th century master. By his premature end of a career that spanned Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Dr Strangelove, his legacy lives large.
KUBRICK is Michael Herr’s memoir of his nearly 20-year friendship and collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest film makers of all time. From their first meeting at an advanced screening of The Shining in 1980, Kubrick and Herr began an intensive intellectual exchange that grew into the ground breaking Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket. The book is full of personal insights and anecdotes, probing into the inner life of a man whose creative passion and powerful intellect changed film making as an art forever, and the complicated, often misunderstood man behind the art.
Said to be a hermit, he was a complete failure as a recluse. Stanley saw a lot of people, sometimes even going out to see people, but not so often.. He was a gregarious man especially over the phone, which he viewed the way Mao viewed warfare, as an instrument of a protracted offensive where control of the ground was critical and timing crucial, while time itself was meaningless, except as something to be kept on your side. Somebody who knew him, 70 years ago when he was starting out, said, “Stanley always acted like he knew something you didn’t know,” By the time time he was through having what he called ” strenuous intercourse” with you, he knew most of what you knew as well. He was called an earwig; he’d go in one ear and not come out of the other until he’d eaten clean through your head.
Stanley had views on everything, but not necessarily political. He thought the best system of government was under a benign despot. I wonder what he would have made of Trump. In Hollywood his attire was described as “Beatnik”. He loved the biz, the industry, the action he observed every day and night from his bridge; all those actors and directors and projects, all the dumb energy endlessly turning up at the studios and the PR that came with each new product; he loved being part of it from his amazing energy, and in terms of being a player, he didn’t see himself as better or worse, higher or lower, than any of them in play together, playing towards commerce and art, big expensive art and works of art for the cash register or, as the biographer recalls, art films with blockbuster pretensions. He wasn’t exactly a show person, but knew a lot about the process and protocols. He wasn’t self-absorbed, obsessive retentive, a monomaniac or more egocentric than anybody else in the industry.
It’s been said by critics that he was a misogynist, although he photographed some women beautifully: Jean Simmons in Spartacus, Sue Lyon in Lolita, Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon and judging from the 90 second trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman. His films were certainly unromantic, possibly even anti-romantic. He wouldn’t make happy love stories. Dozens of articles and few too many books considered Stanley cold. This perception devolved into cant among many critics, who called his work sterile.
He had more compartments in his head than anyone ever knew, and he would open or close them selectively to the people he was working with, or to each of his friends; the one with the money in it, the one where he kept all his toys, the one where he kept his most personal things, like his hopes and fears, that sort of thing, and whatever he loved most beside work, his family and friends, his dogs and cats. And however adroitly he manipulated the doors to those compartments- now open-now closed- essentially Kubrick was a very open guy. Still none of those compartments ever sprang open accidentally. Beyond those compartments, and governing them, was a capability to take his intelligence up or down as circumstances required, without ever being obscure or patronising, a rather beautiful quality of mind.
The flood of obituaries and “tributes” to Stanley Kubrick was overwhelming yet he was dismissed as a mechanic even though you could instantly tell it was a Kubrick movie the instant it started. He made movies of incredible purity.
