Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange part 2

So Alex has become a murderer. That’s pretty bad. Hardly anybody likes murderers. And yet, we didn’t particularly like the woman Alex murdered — she was kind of a jerk. Mostly, the viewer at this point is caught in the grip of a seething bundle of contradictions: Alex seems pretty darn bad, but the world he lives in seems worse — one can, in a way, see Alex’s response to his world as a valid one. The world has taught him that life is a meaningless, cruel joke and nothing has any meaning, who could blame him for acting in kind?

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Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange part 1

Put most simply, A Clockwork Orange is about a viewer who gets jerked around by a movie. It is altogether fitting that it, itself, is a movie about jerking a viewer around. The protagonist of A Clockwork Orange is a young man, Alex, who wants what any young man wants — to beat, steal, rob, rape, listen to Beethoven, dodge authority and boss people around. Do we like Alex? Are we supposed to like Alex? Does Kubrick like Alex? Can one even imagine a studio in the 21st century hearing a pitch for A Clockwork Orange? “Likability” and “Relatability” are what filmmakers hear every day from studio executives, but Kubrick couldn’t be less interested. Dr. Strangelove had three sexually crippled men who want to blow up the world as its protagonists, and 2001 had a bunch of invisible aliens. And a computer. A Clockwork Orange gives us Kubrick’s most complex, most paradoxical protagonist yet.

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Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey part 3

Almost an hour into 2001, the movie starts.  We meet the narrative’s third human-or-thereabouts protagonist, Dave Bowman (although Bowman’s protagonist status doesn’t really kick in for another half-hour or so).  When people complain that 2001 is slow, or draggy, I think this, not the pace of the editing or the speed of the narrative development, are what they’re talking about.  We saw the same thing happen this summer with Inglourious Basterds, many viewers found the movie boring and without incident, not because it was but because it kept "starting over," introducing new protagonists an hour or more into the movie and asking us to invest in their stories.  The protagonists of 2001 (the human ones, not the invisible-extraterrestrials ones) never meet one another, and Bowman, the last, only has the dimmest awareness of what the hell is going on in the very last moments of the movie, and at that point the viewer is sometimes so baffled that it’s easy to miss just what Bowman’s revelation is about.

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Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey part 2

ACT I of 2001 begins with a long, dialogue-less sequence describing a day in the life of its main characters. ACT II begins similarly, but is set a few million years later. Act I’s hardscrabble hominids were hard pressed to make it through a day without being eaten, but the humans of Act II whiz through space in sophisticated machines and it’s all perfectly boring. This is the "day in the life" of modern humanity, and it’s as true today, in the real-life 2009, as it was regarding the pretend-future of 2001 — we are surrounded by the most astonishing triumphs of human ingenuity, telephones and televisions and computers and the internet, airplanes and space shuttles and electric cars, and the thing that rivets us most is the cheap drama of petty gossip. Moonwatcher had to fight over weeds and worry about leopard attacks, but the alpha-monkey of Act II, Dr. Heywood Floyd, falls asleep while zooming through space en route to the moon. The bone-to-satellite cut at the top of Act II is justly cheered, but an even better cut might have been from Moonwatcher’s bone to Floyd’s pen, drifting lazily in space while Floyd snoozes in front of his in-flight entertainment of some lame movie or other.

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Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey part 1

Viewers sometimes find 2001 to be opaque, baffling, boring, slow, tedious and pointless. I find it the opposite — it’s fascinating, suspenseful and, when one considers the wealth of narrative packed into its running time, quite fast-paced indeed, almost humorously so. What baffles people about 2001 is not in the nature or purpose of its collective scenes, but in the choices Kubrick made early on in the devising of the screenplay.

Depending on the way you approach narrative, Kubrick has done one of two extraordinary, innovative things in the narrative of 2001. One, my personal belief, is that he’s created a narrative in which the protagonist never appears. The other, a slightly more conventional way of looking at it, is that he’s created a narrative with three protagonists, three protagonists who never meet but are related thematically and whose motivations all revolve around the same item, the maguffin of the piece, the mysterious black monolith.

Here is my notion of the story of 2001:

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Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Act III

The question of Act I of Dr. Strangelove is "How could a thing like this happen?" The question of Act II is "Why would a thing like this happen?" and the question of Act III is "What if this happened?" The narrative takes us right up to the brink of unthinkability, then, rather incredibly, goes over it.

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Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Act II

One thing I neglected to mention the other day regarding Kubrick’s screenplays is his propensity for long scenes. This wonderfully cinematic director has, paradoxically, a yen for long scenes, very long in some cases, another preference he shares with Tarantino. Generally in Kubrick movies, he’ll present a long scene, and then there will be a big leap forward in time where a bunch of stuff happens we don’t see, and then there be another long scene. The most famous of these cuts is in 2001, where we jump cut a few million years from an ape using a bone as a tool to satellites orbiting in space, but they occur in most of Kubrick’s work. Act I of Dr. Strangelove has a total of eight scenes, eight (a typical screenplay would have at least twenty, and probably more) and Act II has even fewer. There are seven actual scenes, but the bulk of the act is actually two scenes broken up into six sections.

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Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Act I

Stanley Kubrick is lauded, justifiably, for his uncanny eye for composition and his chilly way of setting up a shot. But for me, Kubrick’s genius, like Tarantino’s, begins long before the cameras roll. It begins with his understanding of character and his approach to narrative, both of which were mind-bending for their times and still arresting today.

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