Fearful symmetry

One of the truisms critics trot out when we want to make film sound like a noble art form is this: Film exposes the viewer to other cultures and lets us see the humanity that we share. Whenever I hear that line of reasoning or find myself using it in a moment of laziness, I like to imagine Stanley Kubrick staring at me with those penetrating eyes. To perfect the image, Kubrick should be tilting his head forward, with his eyes rolled up in the trademark pose that recurs in A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick would have had no truck with all that humanity crap. His films, some of which are showing at the Music Box this week, offer a grimmer view of what precisely we do share: savagery barely contained by rigid systems and social structures. And usually it’s hard to decide which is more horrifying.

Kubrick’s worldview may not be pleasant, but it’s remarkably consistent and brilliantly expressed across his films. Savagery and sterile structure play out their opposition most vividly in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film begins with the Dawn of Man, which is represented by the first use of a tool in a murder. The matching cut from the bone to the spaceship suggests the progress of tool-using man, but it also marks a shift from brutal chaos to the airless middle section of the film, in which the emotionally affectless HAL the computer battles the equally affectless astronauts Bowman and Poole. Murder, so violent in the first section of the film, becomes icily clinical, whether it’s the cutting of Poole’s oxygen line or the “lobotomy” of HAL. Kubrick uses the widescreen to create unsettlingly balanced compositions. Even the windows on the space station echo the widescreen frame shape, and HAL’s eye is always carefully centered, gazing out coldly at his equally cold human companions.

A Clockwork Orange envisions a more brutal and, troublingly, more recognizable future, with rape gangs wandering the night. Alex, portrayed with memorable youthful menace by Malcolm McDowell, is all id, driven by whatever urge or sensation captures his attention. It’s one of the central ironies of Anthony Burgess’s novel and Kubrick’s film that Alex derives such great pleasure from Beethoven’s music. Culture doesn’t save us from our baser selves; it just channels the same energy.

Even Barry Lyndon, perhaps Kubrick’s most under-appreciated film until Eyes Wide Shut, plays out the tension between formal structures, in this case social etiquette, and human beings’ animal drives. Once again, Kubrick casts an actor not known for his emotive and sympathetic qualities—this time Ryan O’Neal. The story could be a breezily-played rogue’s rise through the ranks, something in the spirit of Tom Jones, but Kubrick makes Barry unappealing and witless, a man who climbs by luck and his animal charm to a great position, which he squanders.

The Shining and Full Metal Jacket both tackle the question of madness, and for both films Kubrick stresses formal symmetries and uses the Steadicam to create an uncanny detached effect. Kubrick always loved a balanced composition (he started out as a photographer for Life), but he uses symmetry in an unsettling way. Take for instance the famous tracking shots that follow Danny around the halls of the Overlook Hotel on his Big Wheel. The frame is balanced even as Garrett Brown hefts the Steadicam around Danny’s circular path, with the hallway receding to a central vanishing point. Eerily balanced compositions and use of extreme, distorting focal lengths also crop up in the barracks of Full Metal Jacket, creating the same dehumanizing sense of dread. And in that fearful symmetry, Private Pyle, like Jack Torrance, goes mad. But in Kubrick’s cruel, icy world, that seems like a perfectly reasonable response.

Films by Stanley Kubrick play at the Music Box.

• More Film articles