This has been brewing for a while; probably since I first saw this AV Club piece reviewing Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street. For those not willing to click the link, the review, which is not that favorable, basically calls Oliver Stone a one note director:

Present the audience with the simplest, least sophisticated morality tale imaginable, then throw in a line like that, just in case the point wasn’t clear.

One little sentence, writing off the entire career of a man that has made a slew of different kinds of flicks. The problem is that if you look for simple morality tales in Stone’s career, you basically come up with two flicks: Scarface and Scarface for White People, aka Wall Street. You’re not going to convince me that unsophisticated morality tales are at the root of either Platoon or JFK, his most successfully nuanced works. The majority of his other movies are also totally clean. It would be a more accurate (but still incomplete) blanket criticism to say that predictable politics are at the heart of many Stone movies than to say morality.

But hey, why don’t we get to the heart of this matter? The only reason the AV Club gave Stone a crappy review on what is typically regarded as one of his best flicks is because the man has been a complete joke for the past several years, making the harsh review seem like the reviewer’s opinion of Stone’s modern suckiness has soiled his perception of the past successes. Although Stone hasn’t made a good movie in a decade, and although he might never again make another decent flick, these factors do not take away from the effectiveness of his accomplishments in the 80s and early 90s. Before crap like Alexander happened, I have little doubt that the AV Club would have said Wall Street was one of the most defining movies of the 80s. And there would have been an American Psycho comparison.

This gets me kind of worked up. I dig the AV Club, and I dig Stone’s good movies. This hipster hating of a movie that’s actually pretty great sets an annoying precedent where in the future I have to defend Stone in conversations against asshead Wes Anderson fans. What makes the AV Club review even worse is that the blanket statement it uses to condemn an entire career is only accurate if you look at a tiny, tiny subset of his films. Feel free to hate on the man for his modern failures, but please don’t pretend like his present day crappiness is the final form of some sort of chronic disorder that’s been present since the very beginning. Please, dumbass critics, don’t bury this guy and leave him to be rediscovered in a half century. Stone is one of the good ones. He’s just overstayed his welcome a bit.

I’ve been writing quite a bit the past two months, which is good. Since late December, I have been trying to think of ways I could shoehorn my own creative material into the blog. That way, the site has even more utility for me. It’s a great way to share my thoughts on a variety of things, and maybe, just maybe it could be used to help in my creative endeavors. I’m not really expecting a whole lot, but an update is an update.

This story began back in late December, when the incident described began, but I really didn’t start seriously kicking around a story idea until early January. The document presented here is just about the first thing I wrote concerning this story, and it is more of a proposal for a story. A kind of meandering, stream-of-consciousness type of thing where I explore the possibilities of turning an idea into a story. From here, I booted things around for a day and then started toying with outlines. Towards the end of outlining, I started work on the actual story.

Two notes to keep in mind as you read this:

1) I’ve cleaned up the document, including the removal of some pure textual junk. This has not been done out of embarrassment, but because I would like people to actually read this, and you don’t need to see me do the journaling equivalent of Godard’s bizarre sound editing in Alphaville.
2) The story has already expanded significantly on what is presented in the document. Still, nearly everything that is covered in the document happens in the story, in some form or another.

So here you go. Please excuse any writing snafus, because this is largely unfiltered:

Over the past several weeks, I have noticed a pile of newspapers gathering in front of the apartment across the hall from my own. Towards the end of the first week, the pile disappeared, though for all I know, it may have been the landlord removing clutter. Since then, the pile has reappeared, day by day, paper by paper, and it hasn’t picked itself up since. Although what my neighbors across the hall have been doing does not rank high on the list of things I do not generally give a toot about, the distraction of them moving out would have called my attention involuntarily. Adding to the mystery is that their paper delivery just started recently, as in it started exactly when they “disappeared.” Why would they begin having papers delivered just as they were (most plausible theory) going on vacation or something?

Being someone interested in fictions, my mind naturally started developing homages to Rear Window, and a few Saw-like scenarios, with someone trapped in the apartment, unable to get to the door. Of course, by this point, after more than a week, our distressed character would be dead from any number of causes.

The way the current paper pile is stacked indicates that the door has not opened since the pile started. They are sort of leaning against the door, and any movement would cause them to tumble, making it clear that, say, Dexter hasn’t been going in and out, stashing bodies in there, or using it as a base to hack up perps.

I mentioned before that the affairs of my neighbors are of little interest to me. I live where I live because of the peace and quiet and the privacy, and I do my best to maintain the status quo. With that said, when there is an incremental addition to the pile of papers on a daily basis, the mind naturally begins looking for more things that are not quite right. Like the lights are naturally never on in there. That was probably the very first investigation I made in regards to this. Every time I leave my apartment, I sneak a quick look across the hall to see if the light is on in that apartment. To me, now, it’s obvious that there’s nobody in there, and that they just went on vacation and forgot to put their new newspaper subscription on hold, but this is a case where I like to be willfully obtuse, if only because a growing stack of papers outside of an apartment that I know is currently occupied sounds like the start to a nice little story. Every day, when I walk past that pile, a new story runs through my head. Suicide? Familial murder-suicide?

From cursory examinations of the mail box, the one that belongs to the paper apartment is stacked full. Now I sound like a stalker. But what if it were a murder-suicide? If those people were sufficiently disconnected from other people and/or society in general, it could be a while before anyone noticed they were even missing. Extrapolating from that, what if I died in my apartment? My communication habits are crappy enough that it would be a month or more before my family even began to suspect something was wrong. Indeed, it would probably be work that would try to track me down first, and that failing, my landlord when rent was due. So let’s say that for me, there’s a maximum of, oh, four days before my boss at work tries to find out what the heck is going on. He’d be calling my cellphone and pinging me with emails nonstop, but I think he would give me a few days before he went the direct intervention route by trying to contact my landlord. Even then, there’s probably some sort of legal writ that would prevent my landlord from immediately entering my apartment. I’d imagine there would have to be some sort of police investigation or missing persons report filed first, just so it was known that everything was being done squarely. That would probably add at least another day to my count, since my boss would definitely try to reason with my landlord before going to the police.

So I would be discovered missing relatively quickly, but only because I am employed. What if the people across the hall are so off the grid that they are living off of savings? Disconnected and unemployed, they would only be discovered when rent was due. Depending on the date the disappearance occurred, and in concordance with state laws, that means there could (under worst conditions) be 35 or 36 days before anyone even knew something was wrong. Well, that is assuming that the stink of any corpses in the apartment hadn’t yet wafted out into the hallway.

Enough rambling for now. I like the story ideas that this premise brings up. It presents a somewhat simple mystery, so there’s no worry about doing research to create a believable detective or police officer. The story, simple and kind of concepty, is reminiscent of the noirs I love. There’s a definite psychological angle that can be played (see: Polanski’s underrated The Tenant). Best of all, it’s a story that started in real life. I’ve had trouble writing pieces based off of personal experience before, mainly because I feel that it puts me in the position of caricaturing people that I used to know, and rewriting (to a degree) my personal history, which is something that I am not totally comfortable doing. Maybe one simple story loosely based off a personal experience will give me the perspective to rework other stories from my past into something readable, entertaining, and something with which i could be content.

Without giving too much of my hand away, themes for this story would be isolation and paranoia, keeping them understated is a definite priority. This is a really simple premise, with simple real world-relevant symbols (piles of papers, stuffed mail boxes, no lights), and very simple themes. There’s no issue with simple story and symbols, but the simple themes, like paranoia and isolation have the habit of becoming very overbearing very quickly, so sparsity is key here.

Depending on response, maybe I’ll share more later. I have some early outlines that are (I think) shorter than this that take the premise in various different places. At this point, I’m not quite willing to share which direction the final story has taken, so if outlines do get posted, keep in mind that nothing you are seeing is where the story is going.

One of my worst traits is my constant habit of apologizing, but sorry for another unorthodox post. Fact is my head has been in the creative space lately, and as long as that is going on, I try to avoid a significant portion of narrative media out of fear of contamination. I’m not a ripoff artist or anything, but many ripoffs happen totally subconsciously.

Just the other day I vocalized my desire to uncompromisingly love the films of Guillermo del Toro. And what happens today? It is almost officially announced that del Toro will be helming the Hobbit movies. Oh, Guillermo! Tolkien’s killed off directors of comparable quality, and aside from that, working on this garbage is nowadays the equivalent of licensed crap. Unlike Hellboy, though, Tolkien doesn’t fit your visual motif, at all.

The biggest indicator that this is artless whoring is that it’s been seen fit to split The Hobbit into two separate movies. Who thought that was a good idea? That reeks of some money-hungry executive that hadn’t even read the book, realizing that more money comes from two movies than from one.

I’m trying to think of ways to spin this that make Guillermo not look terrible. Maybe he thinks he’ll get to make his own overly indulgent personal project if he delivers the goods? That would be cool. The not-so-cool part is that at this rate, the overly indulgent personal project that is close to his heart might be a relaunch of the Inspector Gadget film franchise.

Before I get to saying the things I am out to say, let me preface this entry by saying that any mentions of frequent nightmares are not offered up as subtle hints to my Emo Darque Artiste side. When I do offer hints up about my Dark Passenger, believe you me, they won’t be subtle. Your patient here happens to have frequent nightmares because he takes a dandy supplement called DMAE, which among other things, appears to increase dream activity. I take it because, placebo or not (and note that I started taking it at a physician’s recommendation), it makes me talk more clearly—I have a slight stammering problem that sometimes embarrasses me; that feeling where you know the word is on the tip of your tongue but it is not there when you need it so you waffle like an ass. Like I am doing now. Too long, didn’t read: TVC15 has lotsa dreams. Bad dreams.

Well, this has been a little different for me, as a blog post. I thought it was an interesting little meandering, but still navel-gazing will be avoided in the future. Dreams are especially time sensitive when it comes to memory. Even many memorable dreams disappear within days (my non-expert ass attributes this to the interference theory of memory, part of which states that short term memories not deemed important get brain-shitcanned as soon as that slot on the memory queue can be filled with something more immediately necessary, like which chicken sandwich at Wendy’s is your favorite), so quick documentation is necessary. I promise to start keeping an Oprah-esque dream journal so I don’t have to subject you to this nonsense again.

Finished up with Pan’s Labyrinth in HD last night. I absolutely consumed that disc. Watched it twice, once with commentary; watched all the special features. Such a wonderful and gorgeous and dark movie–authentically dark in the way that children’s fairy tales seem when adults look back at them with a somewhat critical eye.

It’s good to have a gutsy director that knows how to put together beautiful visuals, visceral imagery, and strong stories. I’m not sure anyone else in the game today does that. I remember some Jodorowsky quote about how beautiful and terrible things go together, and del Toro might, might just epitomize that axiom.

I’d never seen the Twin Peaks pilot before. I got into the series in the late 90s when Bravo showed the series. By Bravo’s nature, it was never on consistently, so I never saw the episodes in order or anything, and I am pretty sure that most of the episodes I saw were from the second season. When the first Twin Peaks DVD set came out in like 2001, it lacked the pilot, what with it being tied up in rights hell.

I’ve kind of been meaning to do some writing on German expressionism. Fritz Lang’s silent films have made up a large portion of my film diet lately, along with the bigger Murnau movies. And I love Orson Welles and Hitchcock and noir. Stuff like Sin City and some of Tim Burton’s visuals show that the form’s influence is as alive as it has ever been. Might be worth writing about, maybe.

I’ll be providing an actual update within a week. Between holidays, holiday depression, holiday illness, and holiday orgiastic frenzies of intense capitalism, I’ve had little time to do the little things that matter, like repeatedly watching the masked ball scene of Eyes Wide Shut. Fret not, though! My keen sense of moral turpitude has been adequately exercised, and it is taking more effort than I’d like to admit to keep me from ranting endlessly about my recent viewing of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo. Heck, maybe I will do that. But for right now, I just wanted to test Hulu’s embedding feature.

For those that are not giant nerdlingers (although I’d guess this service is being advertised on television by now), Hulu is a joint effort between NBC, Fox, and some other media hobos with the purpose of delivering free, high-quality, streaming versions of their various television shows, using advertisements to keep the coffers full. So far, so good. The service works well, and the ads aren’t a pain in the ass. I think they plan on having downloadable copies of the shows in the future, but that appears to still be baking.

During a recent message board rant bemoaning the fact that the state of modern criticism (not any specific form, just criticism in general) sucks, I decided that I should put Eyes Wide Shut to the tacks fairly, since so few seem to have done so.  I’m not saying that no one has done so, but in light of the recent Kubrick HD releases, it’s far too apparent that people have generally taken the shitty criticism from the time of EWS’s release to heart permanently.

Before I get to the meat, I think it is important to note that most Kubrick movies have not been huge successes at the theatres, and only a relatively tiny subset of them won any sort of unanimous acclaim from the critics.  His early films, before he was king, seem to have done well critically, but when he got big, he was apparently either very divisive, or an easy target for bitter critics to try and earn themselves a name with via negative reviews.  I am going to assume the former, that Kubrick’s movies are divisive, because that more logically follows than assuming that critics have been bitter for the last, oh, 30 some years.  2001?  It was a hit, but not a critical success at the time of release.  A Clockwork Orange? Divisive to critics of the time, possibly due to the scandalous content.  Barry Lyndon?  Actually did decently critically, though by no means unanimous; however, it was a flop.  The Shining? Like 2001, a critical wash-up, but a commercial success.  Full Metal Jacket?  Well, this fared better critically than most of his movies; oddly enough, it’s bar none his worst movie, so I’m counting this as a hit by my math.

So looking at the pattern, my case is pretty cut and dry before I even get to talking about the movie:  the criticism is mixed, so it must be fantastic, right?  Well, that is right, but of course it is–I said it, and I am very smart and I listen to classical music.

It’s not beyond criticism, but I firmly believe that not only is this movie great, but it is among Kubrick’s very best.  The movie had a lot of hype coming out, fueled by prominent magazine covers, and then, probably the kiss of death for the movie critically, Kubrick’s death.  You see, Kubrick’s death, at the time, could be seen as poetic.  Just dying days after delivering his cut of the movie!  The film just had to be a punctuation to his life and career, and what a Romantic notion it is to believe that his last movie was going right over the grandstand!  And then the movie came out, and the critics had their eyes on the sky, looking for the grand slam, missing completely the swift double Kubrick knocked, unnoticed, between their legs.

Maybe critics missed the settings, or the genres.  You can’t really give EWS a one or two word genre.  It’s not a war movie, a horror flick, a period piece, or science fiction.  It’s not an overt satire like Strangelove, nor a weird comedy like Lolita.  It’s not really a thriller.  It’s a sort of mystery.  It’s vaguely Hitchcockian.  The one thing it definitely is, from beginning to end, is Kubrick.  There is no way you could mistake this movie for another director’s film.  From the impeccable soundtrack to the bathroom shots to the car tracking shots to the lack of dialogue, its genre, is Kubrick.

Kubrick liked to work with big themes.  Eyes Wide Shut is no different, but it doesn’t appear to be making fairly clear (but still interpretive) statements like Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, or Full Metal Jacket.  As far as meaning goes, I think it is like 2001 in meaning.  It gives you the big themes, like trust and fidelity, and it gives you a scenario, a meditation on said theme, and while everything, or most of the things, in the respective pictures seem to say something about those themes, what they actually say is left for the viewer to define and interpret themself.  You can ask ten different people to give an interpretation of 2001 and probably come up with as many different meanings.  Eyes Wide Shut is no different; I believe that it is as interpretable as 2001.

Ebert called A Clockwork Orange an ideological mess when it was first released.  I find that incredibly strange since ACO is fairly cut and dry when it comes to meaning.  If any of Kubrick’s movies can be called ideological messes, they’re 2001 and EWS.  But still, the mess label is not quite correct; both movies throw ideas related to their individual themes at you at an alarming rate, too fast to give enough time to on just one viewing, but they are intended (I believe) to stimulate thought about their stated themes, not say anything definitive like ACO and Strangelove.EWS gives us a theme of fidelity and trust.  Although those two words can be considered synonyms, there is a slight difference here.  Fidelity, as in marital or sexual fidelity, and trust, as in the trust of friendship.  Several other themes can be picked up, going into things as vague as truth and reality (much effort is put into creating a dreamlike atmosphere, and the reality of how certain events happen is sometimes, at best, obscured), but I don’t think many would disagree that the movie is mainly about fidelity and trust.

For fidelity, we have Tom and Nicole.  To put things bluntly, the events of the movie largely occur because, well, Tom Cruise is trying to cheat on his wife because she once contemplated having an affair.  Tom is tempted several times, once by a grieving woman, once by a hooker on the streets, at the weird notorious orgy, and finally by the earlier hooker’s roommate.  Each time he is interrupted before he can make his move.  At the end of the movie, he tells his wife everything that’s happened, sort of completing the “trust loop” that she began by telling him of her near infidelity.  This is oversimplifying a few things, but that’s the unbent truth of the events. For trust, we have Tom and Sydney Pollack, playing his friend Ziegler.  I only ever hear people talk about this movie being about sex and fidelity, so I don’t think many even look beyond that, but there’s a fairly significant arc between Tom and Pollack.  To the credit of other observers, I have developed this theme after several viewings, and after a fairly careful analysis of most of the scenes Sydney Pollack is in.  Bear with me a bit, because I have to lay a bit of groundwork before I get to the payoff.Tom and Pollack are friends.  At the beginning of the movie, Nicole makes a comment asking why Pollack invites the couple to his Christmas Party every year (it is clearly an upper echelon of society event), and Tom replies that it’s because he makes house calls.  Later on, when Tom privately helps an ODed attendee in Pollack’s private quarters, it becomes apparent what those “house calls” could have been.  Although we have no idea how Tom and Pollack became acquaintances in the movie (Pollack’s character is significantly older than Cruise’s), they have enough of a rapport that there is significant trust.  Pollack knows that Cruise will keep mum about his potential legal snafus, Cruise knows that he gets an invitation to a swank party (and other benefits, like lots of 25 year old scotch [very pricey!]).  Skipping the events of the masked ball (see the end of this post for a link to another page with my careful analysis of the ball), Pollack at the end of the movie tells Tom the truth; just like how Tom completes the the “trust loop” with Nicole, here Pollack seals the “trust loop” (opened when Tom rescued the ODed patron) with Tom by revealing the truth of what happened at the ball, exactly.Of course, the Pollack thing is a sort of sub-story of the main fidelity thing, but oddly enough it is more complicated to decipher, since it involves understanding exactly the events of the masked ball, which is unlikely to happen on a person’s first viewing, since they will be, uh, distracted by the scene.

Looking at what my interests are these days, I suppose it was only a matter of time, but a very funny thing happened on the bus ride home today: Me, Edward Gibbon, and Dmitri Shostakovich got it on. Okay, Gibbon was just kind of watching; I wasn’t having a very good reading on the bus day. He was sitting on my lap though, and that has to count for something.

Alright, alright, no more lurid and turgid metaphors. At least not right now. Something pretty great happened on that bus, and the crude jokes will probably end up tarnishing this whole thing.

Over the years, in both formal education and my own private education, I’ve formed my own personal little system for interpreting works. I am fairly positive that “my” system isn’t really mine, that it has its own, legitimate name, or multiple names, but I’ve managed to put the pieces together by myself, without any real outside influence, so I’m counting it as my own thing. Similarly, I am sure that some of the things I felt and thought while listening to Shostakovich’s 7th and 8th symphonies have been said elsewhere, in no doubt more expanded, educated, and elegant terms, but I reached my interpretation and meaning by myself, so I’m planting my flag on it. A good starting point for this whole piece is a brief description on the methodology I use to interpret art.

Whether writing or film or something else, most of the things I consume are works of fiction, and the way I choose to interpret things owes a lot, maybe even everything, to this. Even most of the music I listen to is lyrical, thus presenting narratives to read. The way I consume and decode narrative works is to take them as their own product. The life of the author is generally not very important when I read things; similarly, other things that are outside the scope of the work are generally discarded. For example, unless a work presents a good reason for knowing the history of the era in which it was written, it’s not important to me. Naturally, rules like that fall to the wayside when I am dealing with just about any sort of nonfiction, but they hold true almost all the time when dealing with fiction. Any well composed fiction can very easily be taken as its own work, from Greek dramas, to Shakespeare, to today.

I know there are people that don’t jive with this school of interpretation, that the text is the entirety of the text. For example, Nabokov spoke at length about, say, things that happened after the conclusion of Pale Fire. That stuff never, ever counts, and at worst, like in Nabokov’s case above, he’s doing his work a disservice. Knowing that Nabokov tried to say something “official,” to solve some of Pale Fire’s mysteries, takes away from the power and meaning of the work. I mean, what the hell does my divergent interpretation of Pale Fire mean when I know The Man himself said it means something different? For being a master of the form, Nabokov pretty much drew a mustache on his Mona Lisa right there. But to the point, the text is the text. Feel free to read criticisms and interpretations, but I feel that sort of thing is done best after one’s own interpretation has been at least started, so not to muddy things up and keep one’s ideas as one’s own. And heck, nobody wants to encounter a Nabokov. I thought Pale Fire was a work of a genius when I read it, with multiple interpretations of depth. Then I read what Nabokov had to say, and I learned that it clearly doesn’t take a perfect genius to produce works of genius.

Recently, a number of director Stanley Kubrick’s movies were released in both of the major high definition video formats, HD-DVD and Blu Ray.  This rerelease has had me view several of his classics that I had not seen in several years, and in one case, a movie I had never seen before.  These viewings were an absolute revelation to me in a few different ways.

To get some details that apply to all of my viewings out of the way, I watched all of the movies in the Blu Ray format.  The reason I went with Blu Ray over HD-DVD is a fairly simple one:  The single HDMI port on my television is being used by my Blu Ray player, and HDMI is a nice bump in quality over component, which my HD-DVD drive is using.  I am sure the picture and sound quality is equal between both formats, but for my setup, right now, Blu Ray wins.  And in the case of these movies, the extra oomph in picture and sound was worth it.  The remastering of the movies was absolutely phenomenal; it was like watching these movies again for the first time.  Some of the best remastering I’ve ever seen.  Aside from costumes and titles and obvious dated bits, going by technical quality, any of these movies could have been made in the past decade.  Previously, the obvious iconic shots stood out, but the quality of these discs coupled with my big screen HDTV made every frame seem like a work of art.

The movies I will be discussing here are 2001: A Space Odyssey (which I had never seen before), A Clockwork Orange (which I had seen a number of times, between the ages of 14 and 16 or so), and The Shining (which I have seen many, many times).  One of the most interesting things has to do with the varying levels of experience I’ve had with each movie; each of the three, freshest to me to the most well known, felt completely new as I watched them this time.  I feel so utterly naïve for saying so, but I think the true greatness of Kubrick had actually eluded me before these revelatory viewings.

But as with many things while growing up, this elusion wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Kubrick’s movies clearly mean different things when viewed at different ages, and this is one of the indicators that confirm his status as one of the all-time greats.  In contrast, someone like Antonioni might make movies that touch on themes of similar depth to Kubrick, but watching one of his movies without a firm grasp of cinematic and storytelling language will leave one bored and in the cold.  Even without that knowledge, Kubrick’s movies are thought-provoking, and more importantly, entertaining.  Despite loving the movies of Bergman and Antonioni, it would take me a few minutes of spitting different caveats before I could call them truly entertaining on anything but a high and developed aesthetic level.  Kubrick brought depth to the table, but he also brought highly entertaining, deliciously cynical movies that were not afraid to dip into visual and storytelling “wows” that might have been written off as crass, superfluous, and ephemeral by other auteurs.  As is commonly (but largely incorrectly) said of the plays of Shakespeare, Kubrick’s movies held deep truths for those in the balcony, and cheap thrills for those on the ground.

But let’s start looking at those movies before I spit out any further laudations that might be a bit superfluous

2001: A Space Odyssey

The first movie I watched was the only one with which I had no previous viewing experience, but similar to the “have I seen this before, or have I just seen it referenced that much?” effect that one gets when watching classics by the likes of Hitchcock and Wells, it felt like I already knew the movie like the back of my hand within a few minutes.  The significant difference between this effect in 2001 and other classic movies is that 2001 felt familiar not just due to its clear, far-reaching influence on other films and television shows, but in other respects as well.

It’s impossible to watch this movie without thinking about David Bowie’s Space Oddity, which was, I’m sure, Mr. Bowie’s intended effect.  What I never realized before this viewing was that Space Oddity does a fairly impressive job in making one think of the movie in ways other than song title.  Kubrick has long been said to use a disconnected style, and this style is even more present in 2001 than in his other movies.  Bowie’s song shares a similar disconnected feel.  The song, again like the movie, is telling a fairly straightforward narrative, but its narrators, both ground control and Major Tom, both sound disconnected from the story, as if they are reading their lines from a script as flatly as possible.  Eventually, the song reaches a coda, and the sound of desperation is heard in the voices on both sides of the conversation.

In 2001, the disconnection is abundant.   In the opening section, “The Dawn of Man,” the prehistoric men, more simian than human, live as a tribe in a desert that reaches far and barren in all directions, empty and alone.  A bit later, the monolith, stark black and iconic in appearance appears, standing out, completely out of place.  Later on, the desolate desert is replaced by cold, slow outer space, where man is similarly alone.  A bit later, Bowman’s communications are literally disconnected.  The “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” section of the movie, in a metatextual move, leaves the viewer disconnected and momentarily (hopefully it’s momentarily!) confused.  After a movie filled with disconnection and isolation, the last scenes illustrate a sharp contrast between an elegant Victorian room and the emptiness and strangeness within it.  After so much sterile space, the coda we get is that room, and the brief star child sequence after it.

What does it all mean?  Depends on whom you ask.  It’s brilliantly constructed, and over the past few days, I’ve come up with a few interpretations of my own, and seen even more online.  It may be the most interpretable, but still entertaining and coherent, movie of all time.  It can be, as taken at face value, a story about the stages of man.  Or it can be seen as a parable about the relationship between mankind and technology, his tools.  Or it can be seen as a series of musings on man’s ambitions.  It can be taken in on a metaphysical, or even religious level, about fate, or god, and how those invisible hands guide us.  Of course, it can also just be a cool science fiction story with a trippy ending.

The movie is also clearly notable for its place in the evolution of science fiction as a form of storytelling.  It’s a bit late to the game, since key players like Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, and Kubrick’s 2001 collaborator Clarke had been hitting homers for several innings at the point of the movie’s release, but it’s clearly had as much influence in the genre as any of the writings of those authors.  Some of them had done some work in the field, but 2001 does appear to be something of a pioneer in the metaphysical school of science fiction.  Even if it didn’t invent the fields outright, it certainly raised the bar both in that field, and in making the public at large recognize science fiction as something more than flying saucer stories and cheap thrills.

The movie also has plenty of technical merit on its own.  When I was younger, I remember the Discovery Channel showing specials about how various movies did effects shots.  It was very interesting back in the days before the time computers ruled the movies.  Even after seeing many of those shows, there are still effects shots in 2001 whose execution is a total mystery to me.  If this movie were done today, they could use computers and green screens to film the elaborate shots where gravity is (quite literally) turned upside down.  Back in the 1960s?  I really have no idea.  It’s always something of a pleasure to be surprised by special effects in an older picture.

The soundtrack to the movie is as famous as anything else about it.  Kubrick would frequently use both famous and not so famous classical music in his movies, and here it works sublimely.  It’s interesting to view movies and short films from the 1960s and 70s and see things that very clearly were an inspiration on the dawn of the music video in the 80s, and such fingerprints are all over 2001.

There’s more I can talk about, even after one viewing, but I don’t want to write a million words on the first movie I watched in my little Kubrick marathon, especially a movie that so much has already been said about over the decades.  There are its “predictions,” which are probably more amazing now that some of them have come true than they were when the movie was released.  There’s the movie’s stunning economy:  absolutely everything that occurs, everything you see, everything said, means something on a heavy thematic level, no matter what your end interpretation is.  It’s like a short story—nothing here is really superfluous.  That’s an absolutely amazing achievement for a movie, and I can’t think of a feature-length picture that does anything similar.  I can’t believe this movie was critically mixed upon release.  It’s thought provoking, it’s entertaining, it looks gorgeous.  There are few other movies that have it all in the same way this one does. 

My only disappointment is that I waited this long to view it.

A Clockwork Orange

Its reputation precedes it, and for good reason.  I saw this movie for the first time when I was a younger teenager, and I believe this was the first time I had viewed it in approximately a decade.  It felt like the first time I had ever seen the movie, really.

Some people will frown at me for saying so, but the movie reminded me of Fight Club in how ripe it is for misinterpretation.  As a matter of fact, when I watched this when I was 14, I am sure I did take away the wrong message from the movie.  Much like Fight Club, A Clockwork Orange is a meditation against the things it shows on screen, but it shows them more explicitly than most movies out there, giving it a high transgression factor, something stupid teenagers love.

A Clockwork Orange is about evil and human nature, and a pretty common sense response to Skinner-esque conditioning.  As a response to Skinner, the movie (and book) tells us that conditioning might (might!) eliminate bad behavior, but when taken to extremes, it robs people of their freedom, dignity, and possibly even their ability to function normally in society.  Good satire thrives on taking stupid ideas to their logical extremes, and that’s what A Clockwork Orange does.  Alex’s behavior, pre-conditioning, is as extreme as it gets.  He’s basically a caricature of a real young man, but oddly enough, he resembles, rather closely, the common descriptions of bad young people that your parents tell you about.  When the authorities get him, they use the one and only thing he actively cares about, Beethoven, to condition him.  The conditioning gets rid of his bad behavior, but at the expense of the thing he loves most.  Having that stripped away from him, he becomes rather sensitive and affected, hurt and rejected by both his friends and family (both of whom he had burned bridges with earlier).  He’s left an easily abusable little puppy.  Eventually, one of his former victims extracts sick revenge for Alex’s previous transgressions against him.  The state already considered Alex punished, and this punishment beyond his appointed punishment (along with the threat of a changing political climate) gets the state to not only return Alex to his pre-treatment state, but also give him a cushy job.  Thus, in the end, Alex is rewarded for his bad behavior at the beginning of the movie, and all he had to go through to get there was a couple of days of mistreatment.

(The movie indicates that the conditioning took, at most, two weeks.  After the conditioning, Alex was released.  The events of the movie after his release only take place over the course of a few days—possibly only two or so.  When Alex had it bad, post-conditioning, it wasn’t for a very long time.  He really didn’t have to go through much to get his reward at the end of the movie.)

It is often pointed out that Kubrick did not have a copy of the novel with the last chapter in it.  This is only a half truth.  During the course of writing the script, he did gain access to the last chapter, but he chose not to incorporate it.  People that have read the book point out that this changes the entire theme of the book.  It does, but Kubrick’s take is superior to that of the book’s.  Kubrick’s take is cynical to the core:  Alex is rewarded for his bad behavior.  In the book, the final chapter shows Alex reevaluating his life and making a conscious decision to turn “good.”  The book’s final chapter may be more accurate to real life in that many delinquents do eventually make peace with the system and become productive citizens, but the cynical take of the movie is much more fitting considering the nature of the satire.  Conditioning, in the movie, not only nearly kills Alex, but then it ends up inadvertently rewarding his bad behavior.  In the book, it could be read that the conditioning ended up working in a very roundabout way.

In choosing to use the dialect presented in the novel, the movie makes use of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect, or Verfremdungseffektv.  This device keeps the viewer disconnected from the characters in the movie.  This serves several purposes.  It prevents the viewer from relating or identifying with the delinquent main character.  It indicates, quite clearly, that although the world presented in the movie is similar in several ways to our own, it is a different place.  It creates a bit of natural confusion, keeping the viewer at a distance so they naturally have to think harder, and concentrate on the events on screen in order to interpret and make sense of them.  The effect is employed well for all of those reasons.  It keeps the audience guessing, and in doing so it encourages viewers to think independently about the events on screen.In addition to the Beethoven pieces used in the movie, the soundtrack is also notable for its use of Moog for its synthesized score.  The Moog is often used in the score unaccompanied, or almost completely unaccompanied.  This makes the score sound somewhat sparse by today’s standards, especially today’s standards concerning synthesized music, but it fits perfectly in that A Clockwork Orange takes place in a 1970s retrofuture.  The set design also reflects this.  The movie is clearly a product of the 1970s, but it is definitely the future as envisioned in the 1970s.  Depictions of the retrofuture are always entertaining 

The Shining

For whatever reason, this HD reissue campaign has skipped over the period piece Barry Lyndon, but it picks up again with The Shining.  I have seen this movie many, many times, but much like with A Clockwork Orange, seeing it in HD was like seeing it with new eyes.  I was almost hesitant to watch this instead of moving on to Full Metal Jacket (which I have only seen once) since I had seen it so many times, but I was sort of committed to watching the movies in chronological order.  I made the right decision, though.

I forgot about those insane shots of the car riding through the mountains on the way to The Overlook.  Beautiful, beautiful shots.  I have no idea if they were any sort of technical milestone, as are the famous tracking shots in the movie, but I’ve seen little else like them in cinema of the period.  The shots show wide vistas, and they are very steady.  There’s a lot of picture, a lot of miles, going into the eyes at one time.  They are some of the first shots in the movie, and it was nice to have something that made me say wow jump at me right away, especially considering how hesitant I was to put the movie in at first.

Maybe it was watching the movie on a standard definition TV, maybe it was that so many times I’d seen this movie, it had been on broadcast, but I didn’t remember this movie being such a wonder to look at.  It probably doesn’t compare to 2001 or A Clockwork Orange, both visually perfect movies, but The Shining was definitely much, much better looking than I recall it being.  Lots of excellent close ups.  Lots of spooky, atmospheric, empty shots of that hotel.  Great split-second scare shots. 

Beyond the looks, it’s also a great movie, but it’s also what I consider the first of the lesser, late period Kubrick films.  It looks better than I remembered, but it doesn’t stand up to his previous greats.  The soundtrack is again great, but not as great.  The story is spooky and its own take on the source material, but it really lacks the depth of his previous work (although for depth, it whips the pants off most horror movies).  So the movie is fantastic stuff, but when I have to make the hard decisions when ranking all these movies, it will probably be the first flick to make the bottom half of the list.  That said, I have to once again emphasize the quality of the movie.  I have seen it so many times, and I still see and recognize new things.  I feel guilty using “lesser” at all in the description of this movie, but trust me, that’s saying a lot more about the greatness of his previous movies than it is about the lack of quality present in The Shining.

A significant portion of the narrative rests on the “is this real or not?” trope that pops up semi-frequently in horror and suspense flicks.  Yes, it’s something I’d call a trope, but this is Kubrick, and he makes good use of it.  During the course of the movie’s Kubrickian slow build, what appear to be the blatantly supernatural elements spread amongst the 3 living in The Overlook, like a sort of sickness, a flu, a contagious cabin fever.  Danny has his imaginary friend, but his ominous messages towards the beginning of the movie can’t really be accepted as 100% supernatural, although the movie sure wants you to think they are.  No, it is Jack that has the initial “supernatural” encounters in camera, and over the course of the movie, they spread to Danny, and during the climax, at fever pitch, they spread to Wendy.  This makes it unclear whether there’s really a supernatural force at play,  or whether the happenings are a sort of shared delusion that started from the deeply troubled Jack.

The movie seems to enjoy giving the viewer reasons to suspect the supernatural, whether it has to do with axe murders, Indian graveyards, or the Donner party.  The fact that the movie gives you several possible explanations for supernatural activity leads me to believe the exact opposite: there are no spooks, but the characters sure think there are, and their delusions and familial issues make for damned fine entertainment.

No matter what interpretation the viewer chooses, the ending, the picture of Jack in the Gold Ballroom, works best on a metaphorical level, similar to the ending of 2001.  I find it curious that Kubrick did one movie each of the two most common kinds of genre movies, horror and scifi, and both of them have endings that work best on a metaphorical level.

I’m not going to waste words reiterating Stephen King’s horrendously wrong opinions about the movie, but I will state that I find it interesting that, once again, similar to A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick took an author’s work and turned it into something that was totally his own.  This is also a good time to point out that Kubrick made entire genres his own.  Science fiction, horror, satire, the man never worked in the same field for two movies in a row, and during this period he always totally conquered the genre he was working in.

To follow along that thought and begin wrapping things up here:  Kubrick also conquered themes.  Most great artists do their best work within a set of consistent themes.  Not so with Kubrick.  Every one of his great movies tackled a different set of ideas.  2001 did science fiction, futurism, and metaphysics.  A Clockwork Orange did good and evil, and sociology, and satire.  The Shining examined the fractured family, the ghost story, and insanity.   It’s not just these 3 movies either; they just happen to be the ones freshest in my mind.

If there were one theme shared amongst the three movies I have just gone over, it would be the disconnected feel.  Maybe it’s not an intentionally a shared theme; I get the idea that this may be a sort of side effect of Kubrick’s style, or his choice of projects.  I have spent a good number of words going over the disconnected feel of 2001, and it’s definitely thematically intentional there, or else Kubrick was emphasizing the vast visual emptiness of space and the desert a bit too much.  Although it doesn’t figure in as obviously, disconnection and the feeling of being alone are significant parts of A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining as well.

In A Clockwork Orange, there is disconnection on a character level.  Alex is disconnected from society.  Another disconnection is the viewer from the movie, by use of the alienation effect.  Through the use of the conditioning, Alex is also disconnected from his true nature.  In the end, there is an incongruence from the world depicted at the beginning of the proceedings, as society “accepts” Alex.

In The Shining, the central conceit of the movie is that the Torrances are disconnected from society.  This disconnection is in more than one way, too.  The Torrances are physically disconnected from society at The Overlook (and Jack, similar to HAL in 2001, literally disconnects the radio, their one plug into society), and they are also removed from society in general due to the cracked nature of their family.  Jack’s drinking problem has caused them to move once, and this dislocation from a (I assume) previous job and life has left the family somewhat desperate, and alone.

So that was my recent Kubrick adventure.  It’s not over yet.  I still have Full metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut to watch.  In a way, I am most excited to revisit those movies since they are frequently viewed as his worst.  I mean, maybe when I watch those movies again, now, they won’t be his worst at all.  I’ve already seen so many new things in the movies of his that I have seen before that it is also possible that those two are better than I recall.  Also, especially with Eyes Wide Shut, it is important to remember that nearly all of Kubrick’s movies received mixed critical receptions upon initial release.  Maybe the world has had time to grow into Eyes Wide Shut.  I really shouldn’t raise my expectations like that, though.

Not to sound like an advertisement, but if it weren’t for HD video, these viewings probably wouldn’t have happened.  None of these movies were on my DVD buy list because I knew they were all middling packages.  The HD reissues were hyped to heaven and they have great special features.  So this was all a case of believing the hype being a good thing.  Believe the hype, people.  If it weren’t for this somewhat arbitrary technical improvement in home entertainment, I’d probably still think that Kubrick was merely great.