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.