Confessional moods are coming upon me more often; I feel that I've got a lot of sins to own up for (including the sin of excessive preoccupation with the meaning of the word "sin") but I thought I'd start with something easy, something with only a little shame in it. And that's this: there was a span of years, mostly in the mid-1990s, when I thought Stanley Kubrick was the shiznit.
I got better; I watched more movies. For a time, though, it was easy to believe in the idol: Stanley Kubrick, Greatest Filmmaker of All Time, whose films were meticulous and flawlessly constructed realizations of the genius-level intellect of their auteur director. Even ostensible "mistakes" are really clever Kubrickean puzzles that only the smartest of cineastes can hope to understand.
1990s Internet culture was a promising growth medium for the Kubrick cult, which clustered around the Usenet groups alt.fan.kubrick and alt.movies.kubrick for a while before spreading onto the World Wide Web. Internet communities made it very easy to feel happy and fulfilled in such a narrow and limited pursuit as devoting oneself to a small handful of movies from a single film director who hadn't been active for years; you could talk about the same movies over and over again, every day and every week, and still feel like you were getting something new out of that repetitive experience. And for a while, I tried to be part of such a culture. (Then there was my unfortunate Internet infatuation with C. S. Lewis...that's for a different confession.)
These days I don't think so highly of Kubrick. I want more emotional depth and resonance from movies now; the chilly precision and emotional detachment of Kubrick's style now puts me off. There's not enough emotional warmth and depth to distract me from the painstaking artificiality of Kubrick's direction. But I suspect it was just the sort of filmmaking that was likely to appeal to me when I was still trying to make myself behave like a cismale STEM nerd—you could talk about technique with Kubrick, and regard the human players as being like mere props in Kubrick's cynical narratives about human arrogance and human folly.
The lack of emotional complexity to Kubrick's movies made them easier for an unhappy (and maximally dissociated) science geek to talk about. Why discuss how a film made you feel, when you can pretend to be a studious critic of camera angles and symmetrical compositions? Kubrick cult-worship practically invited its fans to speak about films in a bloodless, analytical manner, one that was easy to pass off as "intelligent" and profound, simply because it was pedantic about the minutiae of filmmaking technique. And you could judge all films by the same rule: is this non-Kubrick movie "Kubrickean" enough? "Kubrickean", of course, means "good"; not to be Kubrickean is "bad", for Stanley Kubrick supposedly perfected the art of filmmaking, making it almost like a science, ruled by objectively defined formulae. You know, like chess! And Kubrick was a chess master, too!
(Actor Tony Burton, who appears in one scene of The Shining, reputedly kicked Kubrick's butt over the board, and when I found out about that, I was so happy.)
The idolization of Kubrick as a perfect filmmaker ultimately makes it impossible to critique his movies. The premise is that every single detail of his movies is meticulously chosen and planned, each filmmaking decision a necessary component of Kubrick's grand visions. He's the high-IQ auteur who knows what he's doing; you're only supposed to work out what he meant, not criticize it. Needless to say, this way of regarding Kubrick is tantamount to deification: he's perfect and always right, not merely a god of cinema but a universal philosopher, seeing through everything and everyone. (He especially saw through Stephen King, that hack! at least, that's the Kubrick-fan opinion.)
Anyway! I repent of my former attachment to Kubrick fandom, and I'd love to see his critical reputation take a revisionist turn, i.e. I'd love to see Kubrick's fame take a severe beating.
Does anyone want to talk about just what the everloving fuck he thought he was doing with Lolita?
~Chara of Pnictogen